Search Results for: Medium

‘I Was Interested in the People Who Are Stuck With These Memories.’

Graffiti on a wall in South Central Los Angeles, 1992. (Photo by Ted Soqui/Corbis via Getty Images)

Victoria Namkung | Longreads | October 2019 | 16 minutes (4,240 words)

On March 16, 1991, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins went to a local convenience store in South Los Angeles to buy a bottle of orange juice. Owner Soon Ja Du accused the teenage girl of shoplifting, an altercation ensued, and in a split-second captured on video, Du shot Harlins in the back of the head. She died with two dollars in her hand. A jury found Du guilty of voluntary manslaughter, but against their recommendation, the judge sentenced the Korean-born woman to a $500 fine, probation, and community service.

Harlins’ murder, which occurred two weeks after the beating of Rodney King by four LAPD officers, was a major contributing factor to the city’s 1992 uprising—LA’s deadliest year—which resulted in 63 deaths, thousands of injuries, and more than 800 million in material losses. By the end of the unrest, known as Saigu among Koreans, rioters had looted, set fire, and damaged more than 2,200 Korean-owned businesses.

Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay, based on the murder of Harlins, is an empathetic and nuanced portrayal of two southern California families forever connected by violence and tragedy. Set in present-day Los Angeles, the novel is centered on Korean American Grace Park, a naïve and dutiful daughter who lives and works in the Valley with her secret-keeping parents, and Shawn Matthews, an African American ex-con whose sister was murdered by a Korean grocery store owner.

A new shocking crime sends the Parks and Matthews on a collision course to face their shared history against the backdrop of an already tense city on the cusp of more racial violence. Taut and razor-sharp, Your House Will Pay masterfully examines themes of racism, revenge, incarceration, grief, shame, injustice, and social movements. Read more…

Unearthing the Story: An Interview with Peter Hessler

Penguin Press

In the fall of 2011, Peter Hessler arrived in Egypt, with his family — twin toddlers, and his wife, the writer Leslie Chang. The two had met in China, where Hessler first landed as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996. His first book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, details his two years teaching English. Two other books, Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China and Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, followed. After leaving China in 2007, the family settled in southwestern Colorado, where they are now based. A few years later, they decided to wipe the slate clean and move to Egypt. But just as they planning their move, the Egyptian Arab Spring started, sending the country down the chaotic path it has followed until today.

Hessler’s latest book, The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution, chronicles both the revolution itself, and the lives of the people they met during their five years in Cairo. It’s a deep look at what is, in some ways, the oldest country in the world, and it bears the hallmarks of Hessler’s work: vivid scenes, elegant narrative arcs, and a long lens that examines the links and gaps between Egypt’s troubled present and its ancient past.

Today, Hessler is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He won a National Magazine Award for his 2007 National Geographic story, “Instant Cities,” and in 2006, Oracle Bones was a National Book Award finalist. In 2011 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. After leaving Egypt, his family returned to Colorado again, before decamping this year for another stint in China, where Hessler plans to teach at Sichuan University, 20 years after he first taught at Fuling Teachers College. Frank Bures spoke to him about the value of language, learning from John McPhee, and what your garbage man can teach you.

***

Frank Bures: You built your career writing about China, but how did you start writing in the first place?

Peter Hessler: My first interest was in 10th grade. I had an English teacher in high school who thought that I had some talent at it, and encouraged me. She was the one who made me think seriously about becoming a writer. That was one of the reasons I ended up at Princeton, because they had a good creative writing program. I was encouraged there by Russell Banks, who was my teacher and a thesis advisor, and also John McPhee.

I originally was interested in fiction. I didn’t do journalism in high school, didn’t work for a paper or anything, and at Princeton I never published a word in a college publication. Later, after I took McPhee’s class, I started doing a little freelancing. In grad school overseas I started shifting towards nonfiction, partly because I couldn’t sell short stories. It was hard to publish them, whereas I could publish my travel pieces and essays and get paid for them, and that was encouraging. But I was still unsure when I joined the Peace Corps at age 27. I’d published a lot of travel pieces, but I’d never held a job in journalism, and the kind of stuff I published wasn’t enough for me to support myself.

I didn’t do journalism in high school, didn’t work for a paper or anything, and at Princeton I never published a word in a college publication.

FB: What kind of travel pieces had you done?

PH: The New York Times used to have these essays. The first one I wrote for them was about taking the Trans-Siberian train. Because after I finished grad school at Oxford I traveled for six months, and I consciously researched stories along the way, thinking that when I got home I would write pieces, and possibly write a travel book. I wrote the train essay, and just sent it to a name on the masthead at the Times, and by some miracle they read it and published it. After that I started doing some stuff for them as a freelancer.

FB: When did you start thinking about books?

PH: When I joined the Peace Corps, I wanted to learn Chinese and become a better writer. But I didn’t think I was going to write a book about that experience. I felt I was too young, and I really was. I didn’t have the maturity to write a book, nor did I really have the material at that point. But I did take a lot of notes. It was my way of processing what was going on. I would write about experiences I had, or encounters with people, things on campus, but just in a diary format. And I tracked a lot of my students’ writing because they were such beautiful writers, and I thought they were fascinating people.

Then with six months to go, we got Internet for the first time, and I got back in touch with people. If it had been any earlier, it probably would’ve been a distraction, but at that point it was good to start thinking about the future.

He said, ‘It’s there. It’s in you. You just need to do it.’

I had written to John McPhee throughout my time there, and he had written back often. But now we were on email, and I remember writing to him because I was thinking about applying for journalism jobs, and applying for an internship at Newsweek in Beijing. John wrote me a long letter, telling me: “You should write a book about Fuling.” Because he’d read these letters. He said, “It’s there. It’s in you. You just need to do it.”

That was a powerful moment, because I hadn’t thought about it. Once I got that email and started thinking, it immediately made sense. When I went back through all my notes in my diaries, I realized, “I’ve really got a lot of stuff here.” But I could also see what I needed: more detailed descriptions of the landscape, and some deeper observation of the community and of the city.

FB: Did you write the book then?

PH: No, I didn’t write the book until I left. I went back to my parents’ home in Missouri, and I decided I would take about half a year. I was 29 years old and I had never held a job. I had college debt, so I felt a lot of pressure. I was applying for journalism jobs at the same time, sending out resumes to The New York Times, Washington Post, and Time, pretty much anybody who had a China bureau, and I got form rejections across the board.

When I finished the book, I sent a resume to Amazon, because they had sent me a recruiting thing when I was in Fuling. I had no idea what it was. I guess my life could’ve been pretty different. I sent them a resume, but they never wrote back.

I was so depressed by that point. I had completely lost all perspective. I just wanted to get rid of the thing and put it behind me and do something else. After a couple weeks of this sort of thinking, I finally sent the book out to agents, and a couple of agents were interested. I went to New York and met with them, and I ended up signing with a young agent named William Clark. He sold the book to HarperCollins, and it happened very quickly. It wouldn’t be considered a big advance, but it was enough to pay off all my college loans, and suddenly I realized, “I can just go back to China on my own. I don’t need a job. I’ll just go and figure it out.” And that’s where Oracle Bones starts, in that I was just showing up, and I had a part-time assistant position at The Wall Street Journal, for $500 a month, and that gave me a base.

I was so depressed by that point. I had completely lost all perspective. I just wanted to get rid of the thing and put it behind me and do something else.

It took a while for River Town to come out, because I took a long time editing it. But there was a lot of stuff going on that year and people were starting to get interested in China. So I very quickly had a lot of work. After about a year I got a break with National Geographic and The New Yorker. I was on the ground there for just a little more than a year when I sold my first story to The New Yorker in 2000. Then a week later I sold my second story to them, and we were pretty much off and running.

FB: It was a great time to be writing about China.

PH: Yeah, I was very lucky. I was at the right place in the right time. But it did take some faith, because it was very discouraging earlier, when I was rejected for those jobs and living at my parents’ house. I didn’t grow up with any money, so I couldn’t rely on anything else. And the college debt weighed on me.

FB: Was there anything you learned from John McPhee that influenced the way you write, or think about writing?

PH: There were huge numbers of things that I learned from him. There’s technical stuff. Probably one of the best examples is a “set piece.” He’d teach us that in his course, and show us an example from his writing. It’s something, actually, that a lot of journalists don’t learn, because you only do it in long-form writing, but it makes you think differently about the structure and organization, and that was a really useful lesson to have as a young writer. The example he gave came from his Alaska book, where he’s on his trip through the Alaska back country, and they see a bear. The thing shifts to maybe 1,000 or 1,500 words about bears, and it’s no longer in his experience. It talks about the nature of bears, things they do, and their size. There’s all this, of course beautifully written, but it’s a way of getting background information in an interesting way. It also allows you to step away so the voice doesn’t get stale.

McPhee had a lot of technical lessons, but I think the most important thing was the deeper ways of thinking about writing. One of them, for me, was that you can do fascinating creative writing as a nonfiction writer. I had always been so focused on fiction that I was kind of turned off by the newspaper style of writing. My parents didn’t get The New Yorker, so I didn’t realize there were these other ways of writing nonfiction, and that it could be just as dynamic and fascinating as fiction, and just as artistic.

FB: How did you and Leslie choose Egypt?

PH: There are a couple things. We wanted something different from China. We wanted a different kind of challenge, and something that would give us a new perspective. We wanted to study a language that would be fascinating and rich. I like the idea of a place with a long history, and especially with ancient history because I like archeology. But we also needed it to be a place that would interest The New Yorker. I couldn’t go to Portugal, right? I mean, how many stories about Portugal are you going to write for The New Yorker? I had to be able to support my family.

We thought about India, but I didn’t like the way that there wasn’t one language that unified it, and it seemed like maybe it was too close to China in some sense. So we eventually settled on the Middle East. It was going to be Damascus or Cairo, because those are good places to study Arabic. We were leaning toward Damascus for a while, but once the Arab Spring started it was clear that Cairo was the place. But we’d never been there. We showed up in Cairo with these kids, and neither Leslie nor I had ever been to Egypt.


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FB: Having kids myself, I can’t imagine a move like that.

PH: When I look back, it’s totally crazy. Leslie and I, maybe we’re delusional or something, but we’re also pretty calm people. It helps, too, if you’re doing this with somebody else who’s totally on board. It was definitely a hard first year. I mean, I think the whole thing was hard, because it’s hard with little kids to do something like that, and it’s hard to be in the midst of this chaotic political period. It was very intense. But it’s an engaging place. The people are likable, even though Egypt has problems on a level that we had not experienced in China. There’s serious dysfunction in many aspects of Egyptian society. But it was a phenomenal experience, and I was also fortunate in that I did get to know individuals who brought some light to what was going on, and not just in the sense of understanding. They were engaging, positive people that I liked to spend time with. Sayyid, and Manu and Rifaat, our teacher. We loved it.

FB: What’s your feeling about the importance of learning the language of a place where you’re writing about or living?

PH: To me, it was fundamental. I’m not interested in writing in-depth about a place where I’m not at least doing my best to learn the language. In Egypt I didn’t become fluent like I was in Chinese, but I was very conversant, comfortable with somebody like Sayyid. I could spend a lot of time with him and his family and understand what’s going on, and that was really important to me.

FB: With Egyptian Arabic, what did you learn about Egypt that you wouldn’t have learned without that?

PH: There’s the deep religious nature of the language, and the impact of religion on the language itself. It’s fundamental to that language. I think that that’s pretty rare in the world. There aren’t that many cultures where you have the religion so deeply embedded in the language. It’s a huge part of what you’re saying when you’re using these terms all the time.

I had always been so focused on fiction that I was kind of turned off by the newspaper style of writing.

The language also makes you think a lot about the Pharaonic world, and the ways in which it lasted or didn’t last. There are remarkably few Pharaonic words in Egyptian Arabic. It’s quite striking. There are probably more Turkic words than there are Pharaonic words. But it’s also striking that a lot of those Pharaonic words are very foundational, like the vocabulary for agriculture has a lot of Pharaonic stuff in it, and the word for women, the word for water, the word for land, the Nile, the river. These are things that have deep roots, and those survived the adoption of Arabic.

FB: I love how in both The Buried and Oracle Bones, you’re writing about the distant past and the present, and finding connections and divergences. Do you think that was one of the reasons that you were attracted to Egypt?

PH: I definitely liked the idea of this place with an incredibly rich ancient history. I think there are always some people who say, “Well, that’s not really relevant to what’s going on today.” But I don’t believe it disappears. There are too many echoes that you can see. Also, it’s not just whether things stay the same. I’m not saying that everything is static, but more what I’m saying is that the ancient Egyptians were brilliant politicians, and a lot of what they did politically we see echoes of. For example, their use of nostalgia. Even 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, they were already writing nostalgically about the past, and the perfect political world of the past. That’s an effective political strategy. It’s what Trump does now. People do this all over the world.

FB: What’s your sense of the difference between how people in China and Egypt relate to that distant past?

PH: It was a huge difference. The Chinese are much more comfortable with it, and there are a couple reasons for this. The main one, of course, is they see their history as an unbroken line. It’s a very powerful thing to have that link. Egypt does not have that. The other huge difference is that the last Egyptian to declare himself Pharaoh was somewhere in the second century BC, and from that point until 1952. there was not a single Egyptian leader.

FB: What was the biggest challenge as a writer in Egypt?

PH: It was getting enough language, and being able to do that while the revolution was going on and while I had small children. I couldn’t study all the time the way I had in Fuling. In Egypt I was having to go report on stuff, and I had kids to take care of.

FB: In Oracle Bones you say that in writing narrative nonfiction stories, you’re collecting fragments and organizing them into stories. Some of your stories have arcs that span years. How do you know when a fragment, or something that you’ve collected, is part of that story?

PH: It’s an instinct you develop over time. It took me a while to get there, but by the time I left China I had a pretty good sense of this. When I was in Colorado, for example, and I was reporting on the uranium industry in my corner of the state, and I ran into a town where everybody was telling me to talk to the pharmacist, because he knew everything. That confused me, because why would a pharmacist be somebody who knows a lot? Then I talked to him and realized, well, there’s no medic, there’s no hospital anywhere near here, so he’s basically like a doctor.

I feel like when you start with an issue or a theme, maybe you’re dehumanizing people from the start.

He also mentioned the story of some loner in town who died and left him half a million dollars, and at that point my instinct kicked in and I thought, “There’s something going on here.” So I left him out of the uranium story, with the idea that I was going to pursue this. I didn’t know where it was going to go, but I thought there was something there. You get those instincts over years of writing stories and books. The same thing in Egypt when the garbageman, Sayyid, kept bringing me stuff from the neighborhood and he knww so much about people.

FB: Do you typically start with an idea?

PH: It’s usually either a person or a place. It’s almost never an idea. I don’t start with themes or issues. Partly that’s my instinct, but partly it’s also deliberate because I feel like when you start with an issue or a theme, maybe you’re dehumanizing people from the start. Maybe you’re fitting them into a larger narrative or idea that isn’t appropriate. So I tend to start either with a place or a person, and then the issues and the themes are secondary. They come in as I get to know the person or the place.

So I get to know Sayyid. Then I start to learn about him. Then that leads me into the informality of Cairo and the self-organization of those communities. Then it also leads me into gender relations, because I start to get to see how him and his wife interact. It leads me to issues of education, because I realize that this incredibly intelligent person is illiterate, and I get to know what his children are doing in school, and educate me in new perspectives. But it all starts with him.

FB: And now you guys are going back to China. Where are you going to be?

PH: We’re going to Chengdu. I’m going to teach for a year at Sichuan University. It’s been 20 years since I taught in Fuling.

FB: Is Chengdu near Fuling?

PH: It’s close. I wanted to teach in Fuling, but I wasn’t allowed for political reasons. I could do it in Chengdu. I’ll also be tracking down my former students and seeing what they’re up to, and revisiting Fuling.

FB: Are you going to write a sequel to River Town?

PH: I suspect some kind of follow-up book. But, I don’t know. I always wait until I’m into it before I really know what form it’s going to take. I do want to build on that experience, and I want to try to write something about how this place has changed and what it feels like on the ground, both for the people involved and for me as an observer. I’m also interested in my former students, who were a remarkable generation, because they were born around the time that Mao died, and they grew up with the changes. I’m curious to know more about their perspective on what they’ve seen and what they’ve lived through, because they’re middle-aged now.

FB: Is your plan to be there for a year?

PH: Right now, I think we’ll be there for five years. I’ll do one year of teaching, and then transition to writing full-time and reporting. Leslie is finishing her Egypt book, and then she’ll transition to writing. We also want our children to learn Chinese.

FB: How did you guys meet?

PH: I was working at The Wall Street Journal as an assistant, and she was a journalist, or a correspondent for them in China. I was the lowest guy on The Journal totem pole, and she had a real job, back in ’99. But we didn’t date then. We were in the same circle of friends, and then in 2003 we started dating.

FB: Can you say what Leslie’s Egypt book is about?

PH: It’s about women factory workers in Egypt. She reported on the factory in Alexandria. She has really good stuff, and she’s partway through it now.

FB: That will sit nicely on the shelf next to Factory Girls.

I’ve never wanted feedback from anybody while I’m writing, because I add in stuff a lot while I’m going, and I want to be the one to shape it.

PH: I think the two books will be interesting. My book and her book also will be interesting because we’re looking at Egypt from slightly different angles. There are some cross-themes, and it was fun to have these projects being researched at the same time. It helps, I think, both of us to have all these conversations while we’re doing research.

FB: Do you guys read each other’s work, like Joan Didion and John Dunne?

PH: Pretty late in the game. We don’t do it as we’re working. I’ve never wanted feedback from anybody while I’m writing, because I add in stuff a lot while I’m going, and I want to be the one to shape it. Actually, for this last book, she didn’t read it until pretty late in the process because I think she was feeling a lot of pressure for her book and trying to get it going, and I didn’t feel like I wanted to throw it on to her. She needed to focus on her thing, but I think that was a little bit of an unusual time, just part of the whole challenge of doing these projects with young children. We’re both very supportive, and it helps a lot in terms of the reporting, because each of us is learning things that help the other person.

FB: With two writers in the family, how do you balance your life and work?

PH: I guess that develops kind of naturally. It’s all we ever knew together, because both of us were writing from the time we met. The hardest thing about having two writers is probably financial, and lack of stability. Neither of us have a steady paycheck, but we had kids so late, and then both of us had the good fortune to start in China, which was a good place to get established. Though we would never write together. We have no interest in that. We are not a team of writers. It’s an individual sport, like running.

***

Frank Bures is the author of The Geography of Madness and editor of Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology. He writes about travel, culture, language, science, outdoors, narrative, and belief for publications such as Harper’sAeonLapham’s QuarterlyThe Washington Post MagazineOutside, and the Best American Travel Writing

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath

Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo-Hoo

Illustration by Ellice Weaver

Christy Lynch | Longreads | October 2019 | 17 minutes (4,584 words)

 

On my 27th birthday, I had a fever dream about Disney World. It was my third day feeling sick, and I was floating on the edge of sleep, swimming through a blur of mouse ears and castle spires. I thought I heard the clap of fireworks, and my eyes blinked against a flash of sunlight. I woke up looking around for a shower of gold sparks but saw only the crooked towers of repurposed liquor store boxes spread across my new bedroom, slicing up the morning light.

Two months earlier, my previous apartment complex went the way of New Nashville — when an investor installs energy-efficient toilets, doubles the rent, and forces out all the tenants. In the four years I’d lived in Nashville, rent across the city had exploded. Now anything comparable to my two-bedroom, no-dishwasher takeout box of an apartment cost 60 percent of my monthly take-home pay. I got a real estate agent and started looking at properties for sale on the outskirts of town.

The day before my birthday, I closed on a small condo with an HVAC unit older than I was. My real estate agent brought champagne to the title company’s office, and I signed my name to a stack of contracts until my ring finger went numb. Afterward she handed me the key to my new house, and I drove to my next appointment: the gynecologist, to find out why it burned when I peed.
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Surviving the Shattering of My Mind and My Marriage

creative commons / Pegasus Books

Andrea J. Buchanan | excerpted from The Beginning of Everything: The Year I Lost My Mind and Found Myself | Pegasus Books | October 2019 | 17 minutes (4,584 words)

 

This is what I do when I am startled, or confronted by an argument: I freeze. If I can become very still and wait it out, become invisible, then it will stop, and I will be safe.

This is not a great strategy for dealing with confrontation. And yet it is a powerful reflex, one against which I have to actively work to fight in a moment when I find myself in a combative conversation or stressful dynamic. This is why I end up staying longer than I intend to, or agreeing to things I don’t necessarily want to do, or losing an argument I should win. This is not a pattern that works in my favor in the long run.

My marriage has been a long argument, and I am perpetually freezing. It’s true that over the years I have gotten better at responding, at not holding myself so still that I can barely breathe.

And it’s true that when the argument is about something that’s not me, when it’s about the kids and what’s right for them, for instance, I am able to resist the urge to hide and instead fight on their behalf, or for what I know is the right thing. But my first instinct is always to not break, to not allow myself to shatter. And so often, against my better judgment, I agree, I soothe, I capitulate. I freeze.
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This Month In Books: ‘One Degree Is About the Uncanny’

Illustration from L'Illustration, Journal Universel, No 245, November 6, 1847. (DEA/BIBLIOTECA AMBROSIANA/Getty)

Dear Reader,

This month’s books newsletter is suspended in a state of anticipation. “Like all dissidents in this country, I went to bed expecting the ring of the doorbell at dawn,” writes jailed Turkish novelist Ahmet Altan in his clandestinely written prison memoir I Will Never See the World Again. “The thing is, I think the most endangered species on this planet at the moment is us,” warns molecatcher and memoirst Marc Hamer, author of How To Catch a Mole, in an interview with Tobias Carroll. “One degree of warming has already revealed itself … Wild variability is the new normal … One degree is about the uncanny, and the unfamiliar. If this is one degree, what will three degrees be like? Four?” wonders Holly Jean Buck in After Geoengineering, before she goes on to persuasively argue that now is the time to begin considering seemingly drastic countermeasures to climate change, such as sun-dimming aerosols. After Geoengineering, truly, is the most anticipatory book I have ever encountered: the structure of the book is, partially, a series of chose-your-own-adventure climate change scenarios, all of which strongly suggest to the reader that it is a very bad idea to hold off on geoengineering, since holding off is tantamount to leaving it in the hands of the late-game bad-future ecofascist set … who will do it, but badly.

It’s crazy, of course, to consider geoengineering; and now that I’ve considered it and decided it’s a good idea, I can’t honestly report back on whether the uncanniness of the moment has increased or decreased for me. Can it do both? “There is a personal threshold at which one loses hope: many of the climate scientists I know are there already,” Buck goes on to write. “But there’s also a societal threshold: a turning point, after which the collective discourse of ambition will slip into something else. A shift of narrative.”

And that’s really what all this end of the world stuff is, Buck explains: a narrative, badly told; a story that we are therefore misunderstanding, and thus is the source of so much of our consternation. “The definitive story of the twenty-first century, for people working to combat climate change, may be captured in one graph: the rise of greenhouse gas emissions. The line features a dramatic, tension-laden rise — and, ideally, a peak, followed by a dramatic and then gentle downslope.” The problem, in Buck’s view, is that we are imposing a familiar narrative form on this graph — “from Shakespeare to the novel to the life course, the exposition–conflict–climax–resolution–moral story arc is a classic one” — when, in fact, the hero’s journey is nothing like how the carbon emissions story will play out. Imagine a bathtub, she suggests instead; imagine it filling with water. And you begin to worry that it will overflow. You can turn the faucet off, yes; but that will not empty the bathtub. And if you can’t turn the faucet off, not now and not for a long while, then it is imperative that you begin emptying the bath tub as soon as possible.


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Everyone wants climate change to be a peak that we will conquer, when really it’s a bathtub we need to drain. Narrative is the most powerful force at work in this equation; and that’s not just the case for climate change. In her review of Rachel Cusk’s essay collection Coventry, Sarah Haas writes, “In being ejected from her family’s narrative, Cusk was subjugated, too; an act of authorship in real time that Cusk cannot separate from violence.” She then quotes Cusk: “War is a narrative: it might almost be said to embody the narrative principle itself. It is the attempt to create a story of life, to create agreement. In war there is no point of view; war is the end of point of view.”

There is a way, though, to take control of a narrative: simply pay attention to how it is wrong. “I was living outside,” explains Marc Hamer when asked how he went about independently re-inventing the ancient art of molecatching (he rejected the poisons favored by modern exterminators), “I got into a state after a quite short period of time where I just stopped trying to think about things and work things out, and just looked at what was going on around me … I went quiet, I think, and that allowed me to just look and try and understand.” After observing the moles, he was able to catch them.

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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Old Dudes On Skateboards

Photos courtesy of the author

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | October 2019 | 36 minutes (8,980 words)

 

“It’s a very fine line between presenting yourself as a true skater and hardcore and being destructive.” ─ Lance Mountain

JR, one of my oldest, dearest friends, died in December. He was 43. We grew up skating together, during that golden age when Tony Hawk, Lance Mountain, and Steve Caballero rode for Powell Peralta’s famed Bones Brigade skate team. Back in the mid-1980s, the Bones Brigade were not only discovering what these wheeled slabs of wood could do, they were releasing weird movies on VHS like The Search for Animal Chin and Future Primitive, where they skated ramps, pools, and steep roads, and clowned around. For kids like me, who didn’t relate to baseball or basketball, those movies taught us how to dress, taught us how to talk, taught us the many tricks we could do if we were willing to constantly injure ourselves practicing. My friends and I wanted to be the Bones Brigade, but most of us turned out differently.

Even though one old-school motto was “skate and destroy,” the Bones Brigade seemed kinder and gentler than most. They didn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs. Other pros did. Duane Peters, Christian Hosoi, and Jeff Grosso got lost partying. But no drug could give Lance Mountain and Tony Hawk what skating could. Vegan Mike Vallely put an elephant on his board to remind people of animals’ suffering. Rodney Mullen, essentially the inventor of street skating, spent lots of time reading in the library. Constructive rather than destructive was their identity and their art form. In hindsight, I wish we’d followed their lead sooner.

My middle-aged friends and I decided to honor our shared origins by sprinkling some of JR’s ashes at the Wedge, our old Phoenix skate spot, at the end of this summer. All my life, summer has been my favorite season. I’ve never wanted summers to end, especially this one, this way.
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‘Writing This Book Was a Weird Séance ’: An Interview With Deborah Levy

A young woman and her boyfriend speak to her mother over the Berlin wall, 1962. (Bettmann/Getty)

Tobias Carroll | Longreads | October 2019 | 10 minutes (2,536 words)

 

What makes history resonate into the present, and how does memory change that? Deborah Levy’s new novel, The Man Who Saw Everything — long-listed for the Booker Prize this year — follows a British historian named Saul Adler as he prepares for, and then embarks upon, a trip to East Germany in 1988. Whether or not his visit will be a politically compromised one is a question that Saul grapples with as he makes his way into a politically repressive — and repressed — nation. Saul also finds his own desires leading him to unexpected places, from his feelings for his estranged girlfriend in London to his growing attraction to the man he’s working with in Germany.

If this was the sum total of Levy’s novel, it would be enough for a thoughtful, challenging exploration of the personal and political — but Levy has larger goals in mind. Throughout Saul’s travels in the first half of the novel, he experiences strangely dissonant moments, places where the narrative ventures into unexpected places and suggests another dimension to the story Levy is telling. In the second half of the novel, those narrative threads pay off dramatically, creating a powerful sense of memory, history, desire, and ideology all converging on a singular point. The Man Who Saw Everything comes at a time when Levy’s work has earned an abundance of acclaim: her last two novels, Swimming Home and Hot Milk, were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and her collection Black Vodka was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Longtime readers of Levy’s work will know that she’s just as capable of voyaging into the surreal and uncanny as she is documenting the social and psychological mores of her characters. Jeff VanderMeer has hailed her early novel Beautiful Mutants for its exploration of the weird, and her memoirs Things I Don’t Want to Know and The Cost of Living each take significant narrative and structural risks that one doesn’t normally see in nonfiction. Add in her forays into the mythic and the archetypal, as in the verse work An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell, and you have a sense of a writer who’s capable of nearly anything. Read more…

Under the Knife

Margot Harris | Longreads | October 2019 | 16 minutes (3,346 words)

I was scrolling through my usual Instagram cache of impeccably staged dessert photos when I saw the cupcakes. Vulva cupcakes, decorated to celebrate a wide range of yonic beauty. With frosting. Buttercream, chocolate ganache, fondant, and raspberry-flavored labia of varying sizes, fresh from the oven. Edible pearl clitorises perched neatly at the apex. The self-proclaimed body-positive account featured whimsical tableaus: oranges, apples, cherries, and bananas were arranged in pairs to celebrate diversity in breast size and shape. Sliced papaya, honeydew melon, and grapefruit rivaled the blatancy of Georgia O’Keefe. And yet, as I searched the grid of suggestive snacks, I couldn’t find a fruit or baked good to match my own anatomy. Where were the less aesthetically-pleasing cupcakes, I wondered; the flaking coconut cake with chewed grape Laffy Taffy heaped unceremoniously on top? Was that shape so far from the norm that it couldn’t be included in a shrine to body diversity? I bit my tongue until I tasted salt. 

***

* Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

“It’s a cupcake,” my friend Chloe* hissed at me over room temperature white wine, “get a grip.” She was right, of course. Women across the country were reeling from the appointment of an all-but-certain rapist to the Supreme Court, hence our meeting at a dingy bar on a Thursday afternoon, and I was busy vocalizing my fears that my labia didn’t match ones made of buttercream. Vanity at this particular moment felt inappropriate, a glaring indication of my privilege, but days of tense political bickering and nights without sleep had eroded my filter. I was tired, tired of everything, so why not slur my wine-soaked truth to a college friend? Especially one I could always count on to redirect my priorities. But the theoretically inclusive vulva cakes, however stupid, were just another image to taunt me and shape that incessant internal monologue; I will never look normal. I gulped the rest of my wine so I could tell Chloe before the embarrassment took over. I was considering aesthetic surgery. Labiaplasty. Definition: plastic surgery performed to alter the appearance of the labia minora, usually in the form of trimming. Yes, there would be a scalpel involved. No, it wouldn’t be covered by health insurance. No, there would be no general anesthesia for the procedure. Yes, there would be sutures down there. I gripped the stem of my wine glass to steady my hands, leaving sweaty fingerprints at the base. Chloe’s eyes widened at the mention of scalpels and she almost looked sympathetic for a minute. But her eyes darted to the TV behind my head, and she finished her wine. “Well,” she said, examining her empty glass, “at least no one can accuse you of being a crazy feminist anymore.” 

***

Growing up, I was educated by the standard syllabus. Venus shaving ads, glowing from the pages of Teen Vogue, informed me that my legs were worthless unless smooth to the touch — even at the hard-to-reach spots on the knees and ankles. Laguna Beach and MTV reality shows taught me that real self-improvement took the form of spray tans and weekly pedicures. America’s Next Top Model preached the value of high cheekbones, clear skin, and expressive eyes (I couldn’t make mine smile like Tyra said, despite concerted efforts in the bathroom mirror). Romantic comedies and horror movies alike demonstrated how my breasts should be perfectly round and bounce in slow motion when running, either in soccer practice or away from serial-rapist-murderers. I took notes dutifully, rubbing tanning lotion on my raw shins and sneaking away to Victoria’s Secret with friends to buy padded bras. The ones with gel inserts for natural bounce factor. Clear skin was simply out of the question, thanks to genetics, but I owed the world my best efforts: at the recommendation of a dermatologist, I singed every oil gland on my face with UV radiation once a month. 

Where were the less aesthetically-pleasing cupcakes, I wondered; the flaking coconut cake with chewed grape Laffy Taffy heaped unceremoniously on top?

High school arrived with an even more specific mold that didn’t fit my body. Standards of beauty didn’t just apply to your legs, I deduced, but what was between them. The real truth, the one free of classroom and parental naiveté, could be found on the Internet. Meme culture arose with a vengeance, and it quickly became an easy platform to dictate the genital gold standard. The knots in my stomach turned to lead when I saw a photo of sandwich meat spilling out of a deli sub — an unnervingly familiar visual — with the caption “when she takes off her panties and you know you’ve made a huge mistake.” Porn, the primary educator of insecure and under-informed teens, confirmed my fears. I hid under a tent of blankets, an overheating laptop burning the tops of my thighs, and I researched. Sasha Grey and her PornHub contemporaries had something in common beyond their stamina, nonexistent gag reflexes, and incomprehensible enthusiasm: camera-worthy labia. Small, pink, smooth, and completely unrecognizable to me. Had those vulvas been honored in dessert-themed Instagram accounts, they could be represented with half a pink macaron. 

Once aware of my deviant labia, I took precautions. While my friends shimmied carelessly into tiny bikinis in open locker rooms, I fumbled into oversize one-pieces from the bathroom stall, carefully arranging myself so everything would stay in place. When my boyfriend tugged at the waistband of my jeans during our make-out sessions on the L-shaped couch in his basement, I immediately shut off the overhead light exposing us. He bit my lower lip and moaned into my neck, grinding into my hip bones until he came. I watched the ceiling fan circle relentlessly, feeling nothing but overexposed and dry, praying he wouldn’t reach for the light. At least I could be small and pink — worthy of his sexual enthusiasm — in the dark. 

***

In college, I began a long pattern of using my academic work to sort through my issues with inadequacy. I sat doe-eyed in freshman year sociology classes, devouring professors’ condemnation of social constructs and snapping along with my classmates at the mention of toxic masculinity. I pored gleefully over the textbook chapter defining the sexual double standard. I gasped along with my Introduction to Gender Studies class when we learned of a radical feminist theory that heterosexual sex could not truly be consensual under the current patriarchal structure of society. I felt vindicated by my selective interpretation of the texts before me — determining that my physical shortcomings weren’t my fault, but a reflection of a deeply flawed system. Most importantly, I felt, academia promised me that we could unlearn carefully cultivated notions of beauty. 

But the warped photocopies of Andrea Dworkin essays and peer-reviewed studies about the role of attractiveness in the economy hardly mattered when I looked into the lighted magnification mirror that taunted me from my dresser. There were the craters marring my forehead from years of pimple-popping. Then those deepening stretch marks creeping up my hips from 2 AM stress pizza (I never dabbed the oil off with a napkin like my roommate from the softball team). And there was the constant, lurking anxiety of knowing I wasn’t “normal.” In fact, I was grotesque — grotesque enough for a sexual partner to view fucking me as a mistake. Academia — or, more accurately, the projection of my insecurities onto my assigned readings — assured me that these features were not inherently unattractive. Distaste for them was the product of a larger system with a social, political, and economic agenda in mind. But I lay awake on my twin extra-long mattress wondering when knowing this might translate to hating my body less. 


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In an effort to avoid the disconnect, I dragged my male friends to gender studies seminars until they acknowledged the brilliance of Catharine MacKinnon. I encouraged unsuspecting students tanning on the Green to take part in the university’s nude yoga class — all about body positivity! — and huddled in the back of the studio taking attendance while a sea of sweaty, body-glittered legs spread and intertwined in front of me. I hoped they couldn’t see my fraudulence from my hideout in the corner. I wore my “feminist killjoy” tank top well into the winter months. Despite the desperation to live in perfect coherence with my newfound values, my reverence for the bodies of others never coincided with forgiveness for my own. I tutored friends in introductory gender studies and used my earnings to laser the hair off my underarms.

***

The performative feminism as a deflection from my confusion continued after college. I donned sloppily-made pussy hats to march on Washington and passively tweeted my outrage. I donated a small percentage of my paycheck every month to Planned Parenthood. I bickered valiantly with my parents over Thanksgiving dinner about body shaming. And I believed what I said. But I demanded empowerment and resistance from everyone but myself. I researched aesthetic surgeons every night before falling asleep. 

It took two years of investigating genital surgery before I made the decision. I would survey my empty apartment, nervous that invisible critics might catch me in the act, before scouring the Internet for before and after photos of trimmed and re-shaped labia. According to the photographic evidence, labia that looked like mine — protruding, asymmetrical, and discolored — could be rejuvenated to more closely resemble the fruit and candy interpretations on Instagram than the heinous deli meat memes. I imagined the sex. Wet and sticky, completely exposed with the lights on. I pictured my legs splayed apart — shamelessly, carelessly — while a nondescript face with a square jaw kissed my inner thighs and moved upward to a silky pink crevice, recognizable from any porn industry fantasy. I pictured orgasms, intense as the ones I gave myself in my empty bedroom, when I felt my heartbeat between my legs and kicked the fitted sheet off the corner of the mattress. Isn’t that what my feminist predecessors would have wanted? Well, at least the ones who believed consensual sex could exist at all. 

***

Ben and I didn’t make eye contact when I told him. We sat shoulder to shoulder on the red couch in his living room, staring at the cookie tin my grandmother gave him that he’d converted to a coffee table ashtray. We’d been dating for five months, but we didn’t trust each other. I combed through his text messages while he slept, wondering who Sarah was and if she had a flat stomach and high cheekbones. She probably liked his favorite brand of sour beer that tasted like dead Sour Patch Kids. Maybe she was someone he used to, or still did, sleep with. I wondered if he devoured every inch of her body, leaving no patch of skin unbitten, no crevice unattended to. Was he astounded by how symmetrical her breasts were or how she always looked powerful and elegant, even bent over his bed, sweat dripping down her neck? Maybe, when they were finished, he even grinned at her and told her how perfect her body was. He never said anything about mine. After sex, he’d roll over and peruse the fantasy baseball app on his phone, grinding his teeth in frustration over batting averages and shoulder injuries. I stared at the ceiling and counted the cracks in the paint so I wouldn’t slip up and ask if he’d enjoyed himself. If there was something wrong with me. 

 The tips of his ears glowed red at the word “labia” and his jaw clenched when I added the part about the surgery’s six-week recovery time, which meant no sex. I sensed him adding another tally to my invisible scoresheet, marking me down for another deviation from the confident, low-maintenance girlfriend image I’d so carefully curated on the Bumble profile he swiped. The girl in the photos had subtle purple streaks in her hair, boasted a nipple piercing, and never got jealous. She liked sex and spontaneity and wouldn’t ask how she was in bed. That’s what he was promised. How many more tallies before that girl was gone — and Ben with her? 

“Do you want to say anything?” I asked after a few minutes of icy silence.

“You should spend that money on therapy instead,” he said. 

***

The Internet offered me little validation. Reddit revealed a disappointing alliance between Incels and intersectional feminists. Granted, the two groups had markedly different concerns. Incels feared my deceiving ways — my stealthy attempt to revive the ravaged remnants of promiscuity. The self-proclaimed feminists decreed the procedure of “designer vaginas” a response to brainwashing and deeply internalized misogyny. I remembered the photocopies collecting dust in my old college folders and pictured Andrea Dworkin seizing in her grave. 

I would survey my empty apartment, nervous that invisible critics might catch me in the act, before scouring the Internet for before and after photos of trimmed and re-shaped labia.

More disturbing than the ranting of vulva purists were the articles from the experts. Gynecologists referred to labiaplasty — the world’s fastest-growing cosmetic surgery, according to one devastating headline — as a deeply disturbing trend, with procedures up 45% in 2016 alone. Some made the case that long-term effects of labia reduction surgery are “criminally under-researched” and the procedure’s existence is nothing more than a lack of consideration for the vulva as anything beyond a visual stimulant to men. One pediatrician described being “heartbroken” by the puberty-aged girls showing up to her door wanting to sever their labia. I could rationalize away misogynistic Reddit criticisms of my deception, but I didn’t enjoy the weight of responsibility for underage girls wanting to remove their organs. 

More specific googling yielded women’s magazines reminding plastic surgery skeptics that feminism is all about making your own choices now! But I perused them half-heartedly, focusing on their typos and unforgivable use of the passive voice. Hardly credible sources, I determined. I returned to my critics’ articles constantly, keeping their searing headlines open in separate tabs on my computer. Despite stumbling on an occasional article to the contrary, I deduced a general consensus among the medical and progressive communities: getting this surgery wasn’t really okay. But I wondered how many critics had the good fortune to look like the cupcakes. Or to come home to partners who could look them in the eyes after sex. Or to sit through a class or meeting without constantly visualizing the Internet-condemned roast beef spilling out between their legs. 

***

The day of my procedure, I repeated my rationale to the mirror in the bathroom of the plastic surgeon’s office. First, the half-true elevator pitch, given to the surgeon: I get uncomfortable riding a bike! I don’t want to live in physical discomfort anymore. Second, the defense: Who cares if it’s aesthetic surgery, anyway? No one else gets to have an opinion. I am in control of my body. This is what agency looks like. Third, the half-hearted reassurance: This procedure will turn out well—I picked the best surgeon in the country! No one will have to know I did it, anyway. Unless I tell them. 

The last question on the intake forms asked for an emergency contact. I left it blank. “If I die on the table, just don’t tell anyone,” I begged the nurse who returned the incomplete paperwork. 

“Make me pretty,” I slurred to Dr. Hunter as the painkillers took hold and I fumbled with the tie on my hospital gown. In my Percocet-induced clarity, I knew: I wanted to be pretty. Neat. Dainty. Worthy. Yes, I chose one side of the conflicting messages I’d been bombarded with — taunted by — my entire life. What did I have to defend? But lying on the icy, sanitized operating table, the Ativan slowing my pulse and loosening my jaw, I heard myself whisper, “Sorry.” Thanks to a shot of local anesthetic, I felt nothing during the procedure but an eerie pressure somewhere between my legs. 

The contours of the pain became much clearer on the fifty-block cab ride home, the numbing medications wearing off with each excruciating jolt of a speed bump or crunch of gravel under the tires. I tried to remember the terms I’d heard doctors use to categorize pain: burning, radiating, sharp. What words did they use for the pain of being gutted by a butcher knife, genitals first? “If you’re going to throw up, get out,” the driver warned. 

But I wondered how many critics had the good fortune to look like the cupcakes. Or to come home to partners who could look them in the eyes after sex.

Against the doctor’s advice, I peeked under the carefully-arranged bandage as soon as I arrived home. I winced at the sight of the dried blood collecting on the stitching, but amidst the carnage and swelling, I could see it. A glimpse of worthiness. 

***

I decided my penance for the surgery would have to go beyond the three-month payment plan and the tearful weekend in bed with a bag of frozen peas clamped between my thighs and a bottle of Percocet adhered to my palm. The price for my fraudulent labia, my rejection of ideology and general medical advice in pursuit of twisted perfection, would be my humiliation. I told everyone. I mentioned it offhand to classmates over Chinese food. To the pharmacist prescribing painkillers. To a Tinder date who looked like he wanted to disappear into his untouched wine. 

 “You know, you’re not required to tell everybody,” one friend told me between stale beers at his apartment when I blurted it out. “They probably don’t want to know, anyway.” But I relished the pounding in my chest, the flush in their cheeks, the darting glances to anywhere but my eyes. The palpable discomfort. This was my punishment: the distress of sitting with public culpability. 

“I didn’t know that was something you could do,” my mom said, her tone only tinged with disapproval — no more so than when I told her I would be graduating a semester late. But her mouth pinched shut the way it did when she was afraid she might blurt out an honest opinion, wrinkles collecting on her upper lip. I knew how she felt about image-conscious women. Beauty is skin deep, she’d clucked at me since the first time she caught me hovering by the flavored lip gloss in Sullivan’s Toy Store. What a waste of money and brain cells, we’d muttered with eye rolls in response to the mothers of my high school classmates who often appeared at school events with tighter faces and unassuming noses. Watching her silence, I felt it. The rush of humiliation; the heat in my face, the numbness in my toes, the quickening of my pulse. Embarrassment for talking about my vulva. Shame for being one of those women who wasn’t serious. Wasting money and brain cells. This was the shame I deserved. 

I even showed Chloe the eight sutures before they dissolved into discrete oblivion. My repentance could only be completed with total exposure. “That’s crazy,” she whispered, inspecting the stitching.

Throughout my six-week healing period, as the sutures dissolved and my own silky pink macaron anatomy took shape, I brought up the surgery constantly. Compulsively. Paying close attention to my own retelling of the story — searching for clues, but still unable to identify what embarrassed me most: that I’d been so ‘unattractive’ in the first place, that I’d gone through with the surgery, or that I was pleased with the results.

***

I had plans for the grand unveiling of my downstairs renovations. Ben was gone — after ten months of staring at our phones instead of each other, we returned college sweatshirts and shared a final beer sitting cross-legged on the floor of my apartment. I was excited for sex with someone who might approve of, or even be excited by, me. And if anyone had something to say about my body, I had a rehearsed response at my disposal: “Yeah, it’s new.” Perhaps it was the final acceptance of what I’d done, one last embarrassing step toward ownership. Toward something. And when it happened — a vague, crude observation from a graduate student who tasted like popcorn and didn’t own a bedframe — my mouth felt dry. No defiant joke or witty response. So, like many times before, I said nothing and stared at the bone-white ceiling, counting backward from one hundred.

***

Margot Harris is a writer living in Washington, D.C. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University

Editor: Carolyn Wells

I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive

Illustration by Homestead - based off photo by Klaus Vedfelt/Getty

Read ‘A World Where Mothers are Seen,’ an introduction to the Writing the Mother Wound series.

Elisabet Velasquez | Longreads | October 2019 | 11 minutes (2,943 words)

 Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

This morning my phone rings, a call from a number I do not recognize. I think it must be someone I do not know or care to speak to. People who truly know me know to text me before calling. Privileged shit.  

The phone sings itself into a siren. I give in to its urgency. My mother has changed her number again. For the fifth time this year. Her mouth is working faster than her mind. She has questions. She wants to know if she can go to court to sue the demons. This time they have gone too far. They’ve resorted to attacking her physically. They keep scratching her, and she wants them out of the house. Can she take them to court?  Maybe, she suggests, I can google it. She wants to get them in trouble somehow. Evicted, arrested? What, exactly, are her options? She asks me if this is a logical thought. If they will laugh her out of the courtroom when she arrives with bruises and scratches as her only proof of spirits. She wants me to know that she has carefully considered the thought that she may sound crazy to the world. She knows I believe her, though. I am sometimes safer than her mind. She pauses for a moment to digress. She could just go to church again and pray. She wants me to know she has exhausted all of the usual answers; the spiritual realm is failing her. There must be something in the physical realm to help her. I must know. 

I am not expecting this phone call. It is the end of the school year and I am in the middle of preparing a lengthy report that showcases all of the work I have done with my students. I pause to think about how much more I do with them than with my own family. Guilt floods my throat. I pack my shame into a swallow.

Most days I avoid my mother at all costs. I’ve spent the past 18 years dedicated to my own motherhood. At 16, I gave birth to my daughter, and four months later I was homeless. When she kicked me out of the house with a newborn, I decided it would be the last time my mother hurt me.

On the other side of the call my mother is panting. There is a race happening somewhere inside her body. All of her organs are running away from her. I think it must be exhausting to occupy her body. 

* * *

I grew up across the street from Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The park is named after a mother of three who was shot through her window in her apartment across the street from the park. The newspapers reported that she was murdered in an act of vengeance by local drug dealers. Maria and her husband were known for physically removing dealers from their block. Like most Bushwick residents in the ’90s, they were dedicated to survival.  


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The park and my mother have similar names. They are both a familiar heavy on the tongue. The “no middle ground” kind of name. The kind of name that is either embraced or discarded. This small connection to my mother always made me feel like I was the park’s daughter, too. I came to expect it to mother me in ways she did not. On the days my mother refused to hug me, my body would melt into the heat from an aluminum slide. In the summer, I entered the park’s table hockey tournaments just to see if I was better at winning something other than my mother’s affection. The park gave me moments where I was good at existing, where I was celebrated for trying. 

Everything in the hood lasts longer than it needs to. Preservation is a skill you learn when you sleep and wake up in a place that is designed to kill you. We do things environmentalists would be proud of: keep butter containers to store our food, use old clothes for rags. Even the way people love in the hood has to be sustainable. Love in the hood is a kind of loyalty to your own survival. Everyone lived by this, even Maria. Even the dealers who killed her. 

* * *

I became increasingly aware of my mother’s mental illness when I began to work in the field of mental health at the age of 22. I was part of a collaborative team that included social workers and psychiatrists. We’d conduct home visits to individuals with mental health issues who would not normally seek treatment on their own. One morning, we received a referral to evaluate a woman’s need for treatment. The referral mentioned hallucinations, both visual and auditory.

We arrived at an apartment building in the Bronx. The hallways were alive with the smell of urine and cheap cologne. The brown apartment door had a straw cross covering the peephole. We knocked with a careful hand. The intensity of the rapping is important. Too soft and you risk not being heard over the din of a New York City home: children, Caso Cerrado, Biggie Smalls or Hector Lavoe. Too loud and you’re the police or a loan shark.  

¿Quién es?” The woman we went to visit, I’ll call her Marta, wanted answers before she made a decision to open the door. We gave a brief introduction to the cross. An emaciated version of my mother slowly creaked open the door and slid her eyes through her carefully measured opening. My coworker introduced herself as someone sent to help. The great white hope. Marta dismissed her and darted her eyes my way. “I’m sorry, no hablo inglés.” My coworker flashed a knowing smile to me. The great Latin help. 

On the days my mother refused to hug me, my body would melt into the heat from an aluminum slide.

As someone whose highest degree was a GED, I had no clinical role on the team. I was a notetaker, at most. I did, however, feel a great sense of responsibility to ensure that I was careful interpreting not just language but also culture. Cultural practice is sometimes categorized incorrectly as disordered or pathological. 

We sat across from Marta on white sofa cushions kept suffocated under clear plastic.  We conducted the intake. “Do you sometimes hear voices? What do they tell you? What do you see?” Marta was religious. The answers leaking from her mouth were a familiar church to me. My mother used them. Marta’s words spilled onto my coworker’s notepad, which drowned in words like espíritus, demonio, brujería. I watched as my coworker used clinical language to help her float over what she could not make sense of. Words like: religious preoccupation, delusions, rule out paranoid schizophrenia. I was confused. Marta was Pentecostal like mami. It was not unusual for me to hear someone say that they heard the voice of God or felt or saw spirits. It was not uncommon to go to church on a Sunday and witness an exorcism. I left Marta’s house wondering if my mother was mentally ill or just a tortured Christian?

* * *

(& because you watched your mother’s hands praise the sky
you have held your god accountable for your suffering
& because you never heard I love you
it is neither a noun nor a verb but mostly a myth that you cannot trust truly exists
& because your mother’s mouth was always a grenade
you are sometimes afraid to kiss your children
& because you were always told you were wrong
you apologize for everything, even for your joy
& because no one has ever held your hand across a busy intersection
you know exactly how close you can get to death before it becomes dangerous
so close to dying
daring yourself to live.)

* * *

Sometimes I am my mother’s anger. Sometimes I am all of her monsters. I fought so hard to be nothing like her and here I am, lighting the same fire that burned me.

Growing up, my mother would often say the devil was using me. This was her way of explaining any behavior that was not agreeable to her. This was her way of justifying any reaction of hers that was abusive in nature. One Sunday, just as we were getting ready for church, my mother was ironing our church clothes. While I waited, I began clowning around with my older sister. I don’t recall what in my laugh triggered the burning or what happened moments before she pressed the iron into my arm. I do recall the moments after, the smell of melting flesh, the flap of skin hanging off my arm, the moment I first met my blood.

I fought so hard to be nothing like her and here I am, lighting the same fire that burned me.

This moment paralyzed me in such a way that I did not cry. My unemotional response to being burned with an iron made me question if I was indeed demonic. If I was used to this kind of hell. She wiped my skin off of the iron and back onto the dress as I watched the dress steam under the weight of my trauma. 

I walked solemnly to the bathroom and applied toothpaste to my open wound. I only cried when I realized I wasted the last of the toothpaste. How in the morning my skin would begin regenerating and there would be no healing for my mother’s teeth. 

* * *

Some days, I look in the mirror and search for the parts of my face that are not my mother’s madness. 

As a child, my mother’s behavior was a cruelty I learned to love. As an adult, I want to make excuses for her abuse and emotional abandonment. In my writing, I search for reasons to forgive — I need her to have a valid excuse. I need her cruelty to have a name since things with names are easier to forgive. 

At night, mami’s cruelty was transformed into a somber litany. She would kneel and pray by the edge of the bed we shared. Her prayers were a gloomy bedtime story. They were one part devotion and one part autobiographical confessional detailing her years suffering physical, sexual and emotional abuse as a child. One by one, she would list every person who had done her harm. They were sinners, she was merciful. I would listen to her ask God to forgive them until I fell asleep. 

I’d very much like to talk about forgiveness, both the burden and the gift of it. When forgiveness is the only thing that is yours, it becomes a thing to be earned. I decided my mother would have to work for my forgiveness. But there was a point in my search for healing I realized I had been hoarding forgiveness as a means to receive a kind of closeness from mami — a way to get her to need me. I was so starved of her attention that I held all of her abuse hostage and used forgiveness as a negotiation tactic. If she could just apologize, if she could just acknowledge my pain, if she could just see me, then I could forgive her and heal. My mother never has and probably never will admit to hurting us so intentionally, and after that realization, came another one. For many years, I had been conflating forgiveness with absolution. I believed granting her forgiveness meant she would be free from any wrongdoing. Unlike my mother and the abusers she prayed for, there was no mercy on my tongue for her. I held onto forgiveness because I did not feel she was deserving of any release of guilt, obligation or punishment. I only recently began to think of forgiveness as a gift to myself rather than a gift to her. I began to realize that I was deserving of all the things I did not want to give: a release of guilt, obligation, and punishment. I thought of all the ways I had already granted forgiveness to my mother through my writing. How I would carefully write about the kind parts of her, real or imagined. Or how I would write poems that were empathetic to her pain. These small acts of mercy serve as examples of forgiveness as a gift to the self; validating her humanity so that I am able to believe in my own. 

* * *

I promise myself I will give my children a life full of memories they can place in albums. I will pull them out of a dusty basement and show embarrassing pictures of them at family events like I see the white people do in the movies. I buy the new iPhone because of its camera feature. I take more pictures than I have storage for. I delete apps on my phone to make room for more pictures. I take a picture of myself. It is not beautiful; I do not share it with anyone other than my sadness. I keep it, the way I have learned to keep ugly secrets. I look older. Compared to what version of myself? I do not have baby pictures. Mami could not afford to keep buying film, or she lost them all in a fire, or she is the fire, or she did not believe in archiving struggle or poverty or children from men who did not love her.

* * *

Mami is an asylum I have escaped from. I do not visit my mother as often as a daughter should. When I do, she offers me her best chair. “Can you believe they threw this out?”  I can. The chair is tired and groans underneath the insistence of my weight. Her home is full of things other people do not want. Broken radios & black & white television sets. Bibles stuffed with yellowed bills. I remember being one of these things. Her apartment smells. There is something dead here and for once it is not me. I look alive, she says. She means that I have eaten a full meal today and she has not. It is an awful feeling.

I reek of privilege and guilt. I cannot remember the last time I was hungry and it was not a choice. She is still poor. She tells me that I look whiter than before, like a gringa, which means she thinks I am successful now. I am a new kind of poor. The kind that complains they can only afford a car or an apartment but not both. The kind that makes economic decisions in the summer around using the fan or the air conditioner. The kind that skips one bill to pay another. Still, I can buy food at the supermarket without the government’s permission. I reach in my pocket and give her a $20 bill. It is not enough. I pull out another 20. This time I am not enough. I am a daughter trying to buy my mother’s smile. It is after all why I’ve come to visit. 

There is something dead here and for once it is not me.

I want to take her picture. I want proof that she is capable of happy. I want a memory I do not have. Mami does not smile in photos. She stares at the camera or away from it. Her mouth is partly open, a paralyzed prayer. Her face is grim and curious, even bold. She dares me to document her sadness, to look at the way she lets it live on her face. How she makes a home for things people do not want. I go home and take a selfie. Another. Another. Until my mother’s face disappears. 

I had to leave my mother so that I could live.  

* * *

Being unmothered means a lifetime of caring for what does not care for you. It is a funeral procession dedicated to mourning the mother archetype. In Boricua culture, the mother is a revered saint with hands like prayer and a bitter but loving mouth. In the case that my mother’s hands were ever a prayer, I am still waiting for an answer. If her mouth ever knew love, she never gave herself permission to taste it. Some days when I look in the mirror I see her torture. It is a different kind of anguish when your own eyes haunt you. A grayscale gradient in my skin reminds me of an organ disconnected from its host.

The thing about organs that make their way out of the body intended to feed them, is that their survival depends on a very specific preservation process. Organs separated from the host body can survive for a while if they are kept chilled in a preservation solution, but they can ultimately never last for longer periods without a host.

Being unmothered is a lot like this: 

  1. The exit: leaving the body that gave you life.
  2. The winter: a chilled state of unbelonging to anything or anyone while trying to maintain your vitality.   
  3. The transplant: finding new life in other bodies.

Leaving my mother so that I could survive has meant finding a page, a lover, a friend to abide with me. When I have no one to make a home of, I am the coldest winter. I lose sleep at the thought of running out of ways to love myself. I am most times the only thing keeping me alive. A tattoo of a tree in its wintered state lives on my forearm. I have been this tree. My mother has been this tree: a stump of a woman with a barren ensemble of branches, an overgrown sapling with no fruit or leaves as evidence of its existence or value. No proof of life on the body except for the body itself. Sometimes simply the idea that I exist is enough. Other times I have to tattoo it somewhere, my arm, a blank page, the deep-inked process of self-preservation. 

* * *

Elisabet Velasquez is a Boricua Writer from Bushwick, Brooklyn. Her work has been featured in Muzzle Magazine, Winter Tangerine, Centro Voces, Latina Magazine, We Are Mitú, Tidal and more. She is a 2017 Poets House Fellow and the 2017 winner of Button Poetry Video Poetry Contest. Her work is forthcoming in Martín Espada’s anthology What Saves Us: Poems Of Empathy and Outrage In The Age Of Trump. She is currently working on her memoir. You can find more of her work on Instagram @elisabetvelasquezpoetry.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

‘A World Where Mothers Are Seen’

Photo by Javier Delgado Rosas

When my beloved brother, Juan Carlos, died in 2013, I reeled into the darkest place of my life. We’re told that when someone dies, the greatest grief is the loss. We aren’t told about the griefs that loss will uncover. For me, that grief was my antagonizing relationship with my mother, whose house I left when I was 13, never to return. My mother, who still punishes me by denying me her love whenever she doesn’t approve of a decision I make about my life, which is often. My mother, who told me when I left an abusive relationship, “Tu no pensaras vivir conmigo.” The thought of moving back in with her hadn’t crossed my mind. Still, it was devastating to learn she wouldn’t take me in—I was a newly single mom of a 1-year-old. That kind of rejection leaves you unanchored in the world. It was a longing for an anchor, a foundation, that fed my obsessive research on strained mother-daughter relationships. 

In the journey, I found there is a name for women like me — unmothered — and there is a name for the pain I carry: the mother wound. 

The mother wound is defined in various ways, depending on who you talk to. The general consensus is that the mother wound:

  • is the pain of being a woman passed down through generations of women in patriarchal cultures;
  • is the series of traumas that pass down from generation to generation that have a profound impact on our lives;
  • includes the dysfunctional coping mechanisms used to process that pain and trauma.

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Stories about fraught mother-daughter relationships have been around for thousands of years. In ancient stories, figures like Persephone and La Malinche are daughters whose transition into womanhood has been thwarted by their mothers or a person representing the mother figure. In almost every fairy tale, the heroine has no biological mother, and the lack of a mother has a significant impact on the heroine: The stepmother in Cinderella and the queen in Snow White both try to destroy the protagonist.

These stories all comment on how long and hard the road is for a woman to self-actualize. Our society is still patriarchal — it forces the role of mother on women and demands it become their sole source of identity. It demands that women deplete themselves in order to mother. There is no safe space to process the rage that often results from this kind of oppression, so it is sometimes taken out on the children, especially daughters, who may remind the mother of her unlived potential.

So much of what I encountered in my research resonated. It helped me see my mother as a woman, not just a mother. I saw a woman who had encountered and endured countless obstacles and traumas, and I began to understand that while my mother did the best she could with what she had, it was also true that the little girl I was didn’t get what she needed. The woman I am today still carries that cross. 

* * *

There were questions that remained unanswered. My mother was a brown, immigrant woman who endured the kind of extreme poverty I only saw in the Save the Children commercials of my childhood. Yes, we were poor, but I never went hungry, and I didn’t watch my little sister succumb to a curable childhood illness like my mother did. How did this shape the young woman my mother was into the mother she became? Also, the research I found was focused on white people who were cisgender and in heterosexual relationships. I wondered: How have slavery, colonialism, immigration, genocide, and racism shaped and exacerbated the mother wound for people of color and indigenous folks? How do homophobia and transphobia play a role? I turned to literature and found answers in stories by writers of color: Toni Morrison’s novels such as Beloved challenge the image of black mothers as self-sacrificing and all encompassing. Jaquira Díaz’s essays examine the impact of mental illness, white supremacy, colonialism, and drug abuse on her relationships with her mother and grandmother.  

Ultimately, I was searching for stories that could help me understand my mother and why she couldn’t and still can’t nurture me. I needed to know I wasn’t alone in my suffering and that I could survive being unmothered. I found that I can make something beautiful out of my suffering: I can create spaces like the Writing the Mother Wound movement where I help writers make art about their experiences; and I can establish relationships like this one with Longreads where I can help stories like these get published. 

In March 2019, I moderated a Writing the Mother Wound Panel at AWP19 in Portland, where writers Rene Denfeld, Jaquira Díaz, Michele Filgate, Elisabet Velasquez, and I shared our stories and upbringings. Though our experiences were different, our pain was the same. We all found ways to restore ourselves, and even take back our power, through writing and community work. Seats filled up quickly and people lined up in the back, against the walls, and spilled out into the hallway of the convention center.

What I discovered was that I was not alone and that my work was giving people permission (and I dare say, courage) to write and share their stories. Many of us are shamed into silence and discouraged from writing honestly about a relationship that has shaped us like no other. We have to talk about it and write about it. This is how we can find and make healing. This is also how we discover the many ways we have and can continue to mother ourselves, and remember that it is not only mothers who are responsible for a child’s nourishment.

Complicating the idea of motherhood can help create a world where mothers are seen first and foremost as human beings, with distinct identities and needs. When a mama is seen and supported, we all benefit. 

I’ve heard the saying time and again that the healing is in the wound. This series is evidence of those possibilities.  

* * *

Listen to Longreads Contributing Editor Danielle Jackson in conversation with series creator Vanessa Mártir on the Longreads Podcast and hear author-read excerpts from the series.

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:
‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
 Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
‘To Be Well’: An Unmothered Woman’s Search for Real Love, by Vanessa Mártir
Witness Mami Roar, by Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez
Leadership Academy, by Victor Yang
All Mom’s Friends, by Svetlana Kitto
The Coastal Shelf, by June Amelia Rose

* * *

Vanessa Mártir is a NYC based writer and educator. She is the founder of the Writing our Lives workshop.