Search Results for: Outside

The Billionaire Philanthropist

Photo: AP Images

Jacob Silverman | Longreads | March 2018 | 9 minutes (2,268 words)

 

 

During the political chaos of the last year, one American institution has emerged stronger than ever. As its revenues soared, Amazon’s stock price has steadily ascended, cresting $1,500 and beyond. Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder and CEO, has experienced what The New York Times described as “what could be the most rapid personal-wealth surge in history.” His net worth hovers somewhere around $130 billion. His 400,000 acres in land holdings — much of it in west Texas, where Blue Origin, his space company, is based — makes him the 28th largest landowner in the country, according to the magazine The Land Report. By any standard, Bezos is one of the richest people to have ever lived, while Amazon exerts an impossible-to-overstate influence on a range of fields, from retail to publishing to cloud computing. As part of the highly touted HQ2 contest, twenty North American cities — finalists winnowed from a list of hundreds of applicants — are falling over themselves to offer tax breaks and other inducements so that Amazon will choose their municipality for its next headquarters. The power of Bezos, and Amazon, seems unbridled.

Reckoning with Bezos’s influence means approaching Amazon and its “notoriously confrontational” culture, as Brad Stone described it in The Everything Store, with a critical eye. Paging through Stone’s 2013 book on the ecommerce giant and its founder, and watching the many Bezos interviews available on YouTube, yields a picture of a smart, cunning, singularly driven executive with total confidence in his vision. Amazon is run on lean budgets, almost like a startup, in an atmosphere of high expectations and continual performance assessments that cause some employees to “live in perpetual fear.” Stone explains that if you’re seeking the source of this tense, high-achieving environment, you should look to the founder: “All of this comes from Bezos himself. Amazon’s values are his business principles, molded through two decades of surviving in the thin atmosphere of low profit margins and fierce skepticism from the outside world.” Read more…

The Man in the Mirror

Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait

Alison Kinney | Longreads | March 2018 | 17 minutes (4,156 words)

 

1.

In the foreground of the early Netherlandish painting stands a couple, holding hands, amidst the comforts of their cherry-upholstered, brass chandelier-lit bedroom. The husband, Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini, raises one hand in greeting, but neither to his unnamed wife, who clasps one hand over her belly, nor to the lapdog at their feet: behind the couple, a small, wall-mounted convex mirror reflects two other men, facing the Arnolfinis in their room yet visible only in the glass. One of these men may be the artist himself, Jan van Eyck.

Like many other paintings where looking glasses, polished suits of armor, jugs, and carafes expand or shift the perspectives, The Arnolfini Portrait shows us how many people are really in the picture. Painted mirrors reflect their creators, or at least their easels, in Vermeer’s Music Lesson; in the Jabach family portrait, where Charles Le Brun paints his mirror image right into the group; and in Andrea Solario’s Head of St. John the Baptist, where the reflection of the artist’s own head gleams from the foot of the platter. Mirrors reveal the whole clientele and an acrobat’s feet in Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère; the two observers of a couple’s ring purchase in Petrus Christus’s Goldsmith in his Shop; and, regal in miniature, Philip IV and Mariana of Austria in Velázquez’s Las Meninas. Sometimes mirrors invite us to regard the artist’s reflection as our own; as John Ashbery wrote of Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,

What is novel is the extreme care in rendering
The velleities of the rounded reflecting surface
(It is the first mirror portrait),
So that you could be fooled for a moment
Before you realize the reflection
Isn’t yours.

The mirror’s revelations surprise everyone except the artist, who, in The Arnolfini Portrait, paints his signature over the mirror, like a graffito on the wall: “Johannes de eyck fuit hic 1434.” Jan was here.

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A Storyteller, Unbecoming

Painted houses in Shekhawati region, Rajasthan, India. Photo by Ahron de Leeuw (CC BY 2.0).

Namrata Poddar | Longreads | March 2018 | 14 minutes (3,636 words)

 

I remember writing workshops and story gods — firm believers in the real, in an alabaster universal and unhappy endings.

I remember hearing for the nth time from story gods: do not write about writing. I would nod. Of course. Last thing the world needed was another writer staring deep into their navel.

I remember visiting a Thai restaurant with my cousins once. They ordered jasmine rice with red, green, or Panang curry. I ordered coconut rice, as usual. A cousin snapped shut the menu and said, “You had to be different again?”

I remember writing workshops and lessons from story gods — no adjectives, no adverbs, no prepositions, no over-thinking, no over-remembering, no over-feeling, less interiority, more action, the usual elements of white male style.

I remember looking for a story goddess in workshops, one with chai skin and a foreign accent.

I remember Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, and Ernest Hemingway.

I remember Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, Raymond Carver, Raymond Carver, John Updike, and John Cheever. When it was time to be diverse, there was Grace Paley and James Baldwin. When it was time to be radical, there was Bob Dylan.

I remember growing up in a city once called Bombay and the carrot halva cake Ma had made in the shape of a human heart for my fifth birthday. I was wearing an overused Jinny & Johnny dress discarded by one of my rich cousins. I bent over the candle, squinched my eyes, and made a wish: please please please Krishna, let Mumma and Papa be here for my next birthday too.

I remember Bombay years and Papa singing, always singing aloud with whoever was playing on our red National cassette player. Unlike Ma or Didi, my older sister, I was the one to hover around him. As he ironed his cotton shirts for hours, I would sit cross-legged on the floor next to him, pored over my drawing book with Camel crayons. Once done ironing, he would introduce me to classical North Indian, to devotional and ghazal singers, to Bollywood stars. I must have been 6 or 7 then and my parents had yet to call it quits. I don’t recall every name, but I remember Ravi Shankar, Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor, Mohammed Rafi, Kishori Amonkar, Nargis, Meena Kumari. I told Papa I liked Madhubala the most — she had a Colgate smile. Nargis and Meena Kumari cried too much.

When Ma and Papa called it quits, I remember looking for another model of that red National cassette player in electronic stores for years. I never found it.

I remember looking for a story goddess in workshops, one with chai skin and a foreign accent.
 
I remember Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov, and Ernest Hemingway.

I remember summer vacations when my parents hadn’t exactly called it quits. Papa was no longer living with us in Bombay and had moved back with my grandparents in Calcutta. For several summers, we visited Papa, Dadu, and Dadi at the Poddar house in Bara Bazar. A typical May afternoon in Calcutta, thunderstorms and pounding rain, followed days of homicidal heat. Didi was busy playing Ludo with my older cousins in our room upstairs, but I wanted to watch rain fall on Bara Bazar streets. I hopped down to the gaddi on the first floor where Dadu was chitchatting with the neighbors passing by. He was perched on his rocking chair in his usual outfit — a silk beige kurta and a white muslin dhoti — with one of his English dictionaries in hand. Chambers Dictionary of Etymology was his favorite, but I don’t remember the edition he was reading that day. I pulled his kurta and dragged him to the main door so we could watch the rain. “What nice smell, Dadu!” I clutched his walking stick, as tall as me, and watched the parched street exhale fumes as if Aladdin’s lamp had been rubbed and a genie might appear any moment. Dadu removed his Gandhian glasses and inhaled theatrically. “Petrichor,” he said. When I asked him to repeat the word, he opened his dictionary and raised my index finger to a page starting with P. I stood on tiptoes to see the word clearly and nodded each time I repeated, pet-ree-chaur.

I remember standing on tiptoes to touch Papa’s sitar, enthroned above a bookshelf with locked glass doors. I’d started reciting The Daffodils from my English textbook; reading poetry in Hindi, Marathi, French, Spanish, or Creole would come later in life. Reading in my mother tongue may never happen; Marwari is a space of my heart, of family, music, dance, and a part of me wants to protect us from texts. That day, though, as I tried to reach Papa’s sitar, I remember squashing the tip of my nose against the glass door and staring at the hieroglyphics on Papa’s hardcovers — voluptuous curves in black ink extending in all directions and connected by a horizontal line.

I remember recounting the story of Romeo and Juliet to Dadi when she visited us from Calcutta to help Ma who’d taken a third job since we didn’t have Papa or his income around anymore. I must have been 8 or 9 and I parroted every word Betsy Miss taught me at school that day. “Shayspeare wrote the world’s most famous love story. The world remembers it even after 500 years.” I stood against the lime-washed wall of our one-bedroom flat in Bombay, locked my palms, and brought them closer to my chest, as we did in the elocution period at school. When I was done, Dadi continued shelling peas and discarding the pods into a circular cane basket. “Dying because you can’t live without your beloved?” She lowered her glasses and gave me the grandma look. “But that’s desperation, beta. Not love.”

I locked my palms tighter into each other. “Betsy Miss said Shayspeare wrote the most famous love story!”

I remember Bombay years and singing with my teenage sister who’d started learning French: Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Dormez-vous? I didn’t understand the language but I loved feeling my tongue around those foreign words; I enjoyed their familiar tune, too. I knew then I would learn French on growing up. What I didn’t know was how hard I’d fall in my love of the different.

I remember undergraduate years of Business School in Bombay and repeating to my uncles and aunties for the nth time that I did not want to get married to their Marwari friend’s brother’s cousin-in-law’s nephew whom they were proposing as the brightest possible future for me, a divorcee’s daughter. I did not care to pursue an MBA, IAS, IFS, CFA, or software engineering after marriage should my future husband allow me either. Instead, I wanted to pursue my love for French and an education in the Arts — now.

“MA in French literature?” one of my uncles said. “What next, M.A.D. in Swedish cake baking? Soon, you’ll go mad, child. Mad!”

“Oho, whose salvation vill your degrees achieve anyvay?” my aunt added, sipping the last of her chai.

I remember undergrad years in Bombay and my first class of Yoga — a casual curiosity, a cheap opportunity. After practicing asanas for an hour, we moved on to a lesson in meditation. I remember the boredom I felt after the first few minutes of staring into the candle’s flame, a way to steer the mind into stillness. What I didn’t know then was how hard I’d fall in my love for Yoga, a worldview rooted in union, and at the other end of my love of the different, a worldview rooted in separation.

I remember begging Brahmin professors at a university in Mumbai to let me in their Masters program in comparative literature. I remember being told that they couldn’t lower the program standards by enrolling baniya Business Majors.

“I mean, Marwaris are good at making money, but culture?” a professor said with her oxbridge drawl, stressing the “w” and “r” instead of the local pronunciation, Marvaadee.

I remember daydreaming day after day about my escape to America, the most hospitable land for immigrants (I believed media stories at that age), the best way I knew to escape a life that would be imposed on me in the name of family and love. I worked hard with my books and won a fellowship for a PhD in French in one of those private American schools that paid a stipend for summer months too.

I remember grad school years in the U.S. and white colleagues suggesting I take lessons in American English, more than once. When my brown colleague — we’ll call her Oshun — found out about this, she put her foot down for us foreign students. Over the years, Oshun taught me how books could save — and kill — but that day, she simply told our white colleague, “Will you cut the racist crap? Indian English is English.”

I remember story gods on a very long reading list whose mastery would allow me to continue a PhD in French literature — Montaigne, Racine, Rousseau, Balzac, Zola, Stendhal, Hugo, Baudelaire, Michaux, Perec, the usual suspects. I remember pleading with the one in charge to replace a few on the list with gods and goddesses closer to my home by the Arabian Sea — once an archipelago of seven islands, my home. I wanted to add black and brown writers who wrote in French. “From the Indian Ocean? Like, who?” the one in charge asked.

I remember visiting Montreal from Philadelphia over Christmas because winter break was too short and the fare to Mumbai five times higher. At the Trudeau International Airport immigration desk, the red-haired officer asked me about my student status in the U.S., then continued his interrogation in French. As he opened a fresh page to stamp my passport, he said, “You speak very good French.”

“Thanks, you too,” I replied.

He stamped my passport over a lingering silence and raised his hand to summon the next traveler.

Uprootedness felt strongest in those early immigrant years when I knew so little about walking the xenophobic labyrinths of a liberal First World.

I remember census survey forms. One day, when applying for a job, I was filling out a form online. My buddy Elijah was visiting me in Philly from London and watching a Woody Allen movie on TV. He sat on the couch beside my desk with a bag of pretzels.

“What would you pick for me, bud? Asian, Indian, Pakistani, Black, Other?” I read aloud the relevant options and didn’t need to explain how ridiculous they read.

“Caucasian,” Eli said, eyes fixed on the screen, as he popped another pretzel into his mouth. “Aren’t you guys the real Aryan deal?”

I remember the 20s and their ceaseless game of hellos and goodbyes, a game of switching homes across the planet. Dadu passed away and Papa’s singing was becoming a distant memory since I migrated to the U.S. Uprootedness felt strongest in those early immigrant years when I knew so little about walking the xenophobic labyrinths of a liberal First World. I remember a constant longing for home and seeking it in the bodies of men, hoping that lust would lead me to love and love would lead me home.

I remember landing at LAX with Philly years packed in two suitcases. I was excited about a job that would bring free weekends, warmer weather, and new people into my life. I’d said goodbye to my Philly boyfriend, and realized, as one often does after grieving via denial, that I needed to fill my weekends with something other than men. I’d been amassing volumes of personal diaries — another attempt at finding home — but I hadn’t taken my desire for creative writing seriously. Wasn’t that kind of literary life a gora luxury for those who eat, pray, love, and indulge their muse? It never occurred to me that an artist’s life could be in harmony with my life.

The new job offered me enrollment discounts so I signed up eventually for a creative writing workshop. One day, when reworking a story draft at Peet’s, I remember my fingertips tingle and a bubble of silence expand around me as it drowned rush-hour traffic outside and the barista’s calling out the names of clients awaiting their cappuccinos, Americanos, peppermint white mochas, and holiday spice lattes.

I remember a blond friend from Connecticut (or was she from New Jersey? Or Pennsylvania?) pulling me aside at a writing conference in Vermont once. “Now I know how much you love your In-dia, but can you teach me how to pronounce Amy-Tuh-Vaah Gosh? He’s my favorite writer,” she said. Her gray-eyed biracial bestie from Connecticut (or was she from New Jersey? Or Pennsylvania?) faked a cough.

I remember meeting the friends of a new date at a bar in Beverly Hills. Halloween was approaching and ideas on potential costumes for the next party were being exchanged over dirty martinis. One couple settled on Red Riding Hood and the wolf, another couple settled on cop and prisoner, and yet another, on doctor and nurse. When my date and I were quiet, the desi American lawyer, most talkative of them all, suggested we dress as Cowboy and Indian. I wanted to be liked by my date’s buddies so I decided to play sport, almost. When my date and I went to the party, the lawyer complemented the feathers on my outfit and asked me, what kind of Indian wears bindis on her forehead?

“The thoroughly confused kind.” I winked.

I remember the first visit to my ancestral house in Shekhawati region of India’s Thar desert. The blooming cacti of Southern Californian streets and those first road trips across Death Valley made me miss my grandparents and the stories of their desert past I’d grown up hearing. I remembered family lore and endless variations on how our town was founded by one ancient Poddar family, how Marwari merchants once commissioned artists to paint their homes with the latest trends in the visual arts, how Shekhawati is the world’s biggest open-air gallery.

I called my sister in Mumbai one day, booked our flights, and made my first visit to the ancestors in Ramgarh, one of the richest towns of 19th-century India, a ghost town now that trade routes had moved from the Thar desert to the Indian Ocean ports. Rumor spread fast in the small Rajasthani town that Poddar girls from Mumbai and LA were visiting.

For years, I’d not spoken to Papa. For years, I’d kept deliberate distance from Papa’s family — Dadi, Dadu, cousins, uncles, aunts — as if they were not my own. For years, I’d declared myself a nomad, uninspired by bourgeois, nationalist ideals like roots. For years, I pretended I’d no memory of the letters I wrote to Papa as a child, week after week after week: Papa please come back, Papa I miss you, Papa you promised last summer, Papa I’m still waiting, Mumma doesn’t tell me why you left, Dadi doesn’t tell me why you left too, yesterday I heard that Kishori Amonkar song on TV, today I saw Guru Dutt’s poster in a store, do you know Tina’s papa plays the sitar too?, why you left us Papa?

For years, I believed my father had read my letters, because at 7, you believe what the elders in your family tell you, and because at 7, you just goddamn believe.

Walking around Ramgarh, our tour guide showed us Poddar houses, Poddar temples, Poddar cenotaphs, all covered in some of the region’s best preserved frescoes, what pride in roots! The guide took us next to our ancestral house, the Poddar house where Dadu and Dadi regularly spent their winters. He gave us a tour: here, a flour mill made of stone in the former kitchen, there, the outer courtyard where our forefathers traded in spices, wool, and cotton with the passing caravans of the Silk Road, and out there, in the alcove, the bookkeeper’s cabin, across from the main door, so he could check out the visitors before letting them in. I was playing the fresh-off-American-Airlines tourist, taking pictures faster than I could breathe, when Didi sauntered to the gaddi’s corner and picked up a scroll with a thick bed of dust on it.

“What language is this?” my sister asked the guide as she opened the pages with a script that resembled long lists, each line ending with numbers in parentheses. I lowered my camera and walked toward the scroll. The script resembled Urdu as each line started from the right side of the page. Or did it? Neither of us could tell. Like other Bombay Marwaris from Shekhawati region, Didi and I were fluent in Hindi, Marathi, and English. We spoke Marwari with our grandparents, a pure version of Hindi, English, or Hinglish with our parents, and a creolized Bombay Hinglish between the two of us. We used to speak Bengali during our Calcutta summers in childhood too; Didi is more fluent in Indian languages as she lives in the motherland. Yet we felt no shame in not reading our mother tongue. Marwaris I know are seldom nationalistic in the same way as Europeans, Bengalis, or Marathis. As migrant desert folk, we believe in adapting wherever we are — a survival mechanism born from harsh weather and scarce resources.

“Must be Marwari, no?” I said, my desert pride shaky then.

“They call it Moody tongue,” the tour guide said. “A cryptic language written in lists. Men used them to conduct business.” When we asked questions on Moody language, the tour guide said he didn’t know the answers; his ancestors weren’t traders. On returning to America, I googled Marwari merchants from Shekhawati and Moody tongue, and didn’t find much. After a while, I willfully quit; there’s only so much I desired in my indulgence of roots.

Yet I remember that mysterious ancestral script written in lists. And upon my return to LA, I remember calling Dadi in Kolkata after over a decade. We talked nonstop for two hours.

I remember November 2016 and a sudden awakening to resistance, to the personal as political among pale American liberal artists.

I remember telling stories to my niece before she went to bed every night I saw her when I visited my family in Mumbai from California. This was my way of making up for becoming her American Masi, making up for the childhood I had missed witnessing: her first birthday, her first walk, her first haircut, her first day of school, her first prize in dance. This was my way of making up to her for the childhood I’d always wanted, one with stories told to me in bed by my parents. I would read to my niece the stories of Shiva, Uma, Laxmi, Ganesha, Arjuna, Aladdin, Ali Baba, stopping often to embellish the story with imagined details, and when my niece would fall asleep, I would whisper in her ear my favorite line from the world of stories: “Tomorrow little one, I’ll tell you a more entertaining story if the King lets me live.”

I remember November 2016 and a sudden awakening to resistance, to the personal as political among pale American liberal artists. The liberals organized conferences, workshops, retreats, seminars, symposia, colloquia, caucuses, tea clubs, Boba clubs, chai hours, coffee hours, happy hours, unhappy hours, and advertised these on social media with the image of a raised alabaster fist. The liberals loved to talk. They talked about Art, they talked about Culture, they talked about History, they talked about Science, they talked about Climate Change Capitalism Democracy Refugees Border-crossing Social Justice Gender Justice Reproductive Justice Environmental Justice, and raised their alabaster fists in the air. The liberals were angry, the liberals were earnest, the liberals were determined to make America great again through Art. Above all, the liberals were funny, always funny. And slow on irony.

I remember Bombay years, the April heat, and the anticipation of story books after final-exam days at elementary school. Ma would take me to the raddi wallah, Ramu Uncle, whose “store” across from our residential building was tucked between Good Luck, the stationery store, and Amul, the dairy store. Ma would buy fruits and vegetables from the street vendors nearby while I would sit, yoga style — as I learned to call it in America — on a heap of old newspapers, sifting my favorites from piles of used books and magazines: copies of Suppandi, Chacha Chaudhary, Tin Tin, Malory Towers, St. Clare’s. Issues of Amar Chitra Katha were always my favorite find — or did narrative drive create this memory in its need to inject order and meaning into a fragmented past?

I remember the parcel my grandma sent me from Kolkata as a housewarming gift when I moved from Los Angeles to Huntington Beach with a boyfriend I’d eventually marry — a resplendent lehenga from her wedding trousseau, covered with handmade zardosi embroidery in real silver threads that had survived decades of coastal Indian humidity; not one thread has turned dark. Gopis in different Kathak positions stand on each of the 39 pleats that frame the lehenga’s central-front pleat, where a pale-skinned Krishna stands on one knee, plays the flute, and looks deferentially at a blue-skinned Radha, his Shakti, who dances in joyous oblivion. Hindu mythology is complex and I’m learning to decode the deeper layers of meaning to this androgynous union, portrayed through a reversal of the couple’s skin color.

Each time I open the saree cover that encloses Dadi’s lehenga, the first thing I do is bury my head in it. I inhale slowly the combination of rose, naphthalene balls, and a musty, woody smell I associate with almirahs of Calcutta summers, and I hear Papa playing his sitar, I hear Calcutta rains with Dadu, I hear my Dadi’s laughter as she pickles dates after soaking them in lemon juice for days, and I remember the letter she sent with her parcel: “This one tells a love story too, beta. A story of union and non-possession that goras don’t get. But first, you learn to read.”

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Namrata Poddar writes fiction and non-fiction, and serves as Interviews Editor for Kweli, where she curates a series on Race, Power, and Storytelling. Her work has appeared in The Margins, Transition, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, and Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, among others. She holds a Ph.D. in French Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in Fiction from Bennington Writing Seminars. She has lived in different parts of the world and currently calls Huntington Beach home.

Editor: Ben Huberman

Dorm Living for Adults

AP Photo/Julie Jacobson

Instead of having to share your living room with a stranger and make small talk all those hungover mornings while brewing coffee, you can rent a private unit in a shared building from “co-living” firm Common. Marketed as a communal experience, units come with complimentary wi-fi, detergent and toilet paper, and the option to socialize with other residents or not.

At The Baffler, Zach Webb examines this concept and finds nothing redeeming about it. To him, Common exploits a generation anxious about their future prospects. Worse, these units, like so many things in our venture capital-fueled era, “reposition” occupied buildings, disrupting cities’ social fabric. And they reduce a building’s distinctive elements to a type of one-size-fits-all-West-Elm-coffee-shop aesthetic, which helps make cities at large look less like themselves and more like one anywhere America. Instead of truly creating “a commons” where people of different socioeconomic classes meet, Common begs the question: what do we want our cities to be?

In the realization of their houses, a complex network of contact and camaraderie, an entire ecosystem of social practice is displaced, its constitutive bodies dispersed to the far fringes of the city, supplanted by the inorganic experience manufactured by Common. In the former, this net is predicated on “contact” as defined by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities—the passing conversations on the sidewalk, the cup of coffee offered by a neighbor when you’re locked out, the collective monitoring of children at play, all of it undergirded by a balance of public and private life embedded in an area of socioeconomic diversity. The accumulation of these seemingly trivial moments and experiences generates, as Jacobs writes, “a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need.”

Common, for its part, excises the warmth of this community-building and retains only its atomized bits: a greeting mumbled in passing, an Instagram snapped of the local bodega cat, generating the false impression of being within and of a true neighborhood for impermanent Commoners biding out leases usually numbering in months. At Common, a Commoner’s energy is used to network with fellow Commoners of equivalent class status and material use.

Common’s expunging of tragedy from the commons thus takes with it the possibility generated by contact outside a uniform bubble. At Common, there’s just simply no need to borrow a cup of a sugar from a neighbor or fall into conversation with strangers at the laundromat.

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The Stuff That Came Between Mom and Me: A Story About Hoarding

Getty / Illustration by Katie Kosma

Susan Fekete | Longreads | March 2018 | 13 minutes (3,541 words)

 

I lived in Atlanta for six years after college. I only went back to St. Pete twice in that time, and both times I stayed with my aunt Linda.

Mom would make excuses about not having cleaned the house, not having done laundry, and therefore not having clean sheets on my bed. It made me sad, a little, because I knew they were lies. I knew her house was full.

Full — floor to ceiling, windows to walls — of stuff. Her mass of belongings included objects de art, trinkets, furniture, memorabilia, books, magazines, journals. And many cats, especially ones with extra toes. Although no one was sure anymore how many of those — or of anything else for that matter — she had.

When I visited, she came over to my aunt’s house, and we hugged and laughed and loved each other greatly and talked for hours on end. About everything.

Everything except the stuff in her house. My mother was a terrific metaphysician, passionate about the world around her and the lives of others. She was spiritual even at her darkest moments, and funny even in her greatest sorrows. She was a joy to be around, if you could avoid the stuff.
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It’s Not a Literary Renaissance When You’ve Been Telling Stories Since the Dawn of Time

AP Photo/Michael Probst

The Native literary community suffered a very public loss when author Sherman Alexie admitted to sexually harassing women. But Alexie was only one of the most visible indigenous writers. Many Native people have written strong literary work for a long time, from Leslie Marmon Silko to Joy Harjo to N. Scott Momaday. At BuzzFeed, Anne Helen Petersen reports on the new generation who is redefining indigenous literature, and how these writers are reclaiming the means of production in the form of their own creative writing programs.

Traditional MFA programs are very Eurocentric, just as American commercial publishing is Eurocentric. Native American tribes have ancient oral traditions, proving again and again that there are many ways to tell stories outside the Western tradition. Now Native American writers have the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) MFA program to provide room to create art unburdened by white aesthetic standards. Founded in 2012, two-thirds of IAIA’s faculty are indigenous, and two of its graduates, Terese Marie Mailhot and Tommy Orange, have recently published searing books that have gotten people talking. In addition to education and encouragement, the program aims to “claim visibility,” because, as the author notes, “Many people in the US have never met a Native American; they don’t see or interact with Natives in their everyday lives. Natives aren’t characters in the books and films and music and art they consume.”

“One of the reasons I wrote a polyphonic novel is that I come from a voiceless community,” Orange told me. “And in a similar way, with IAIA, I want to usher in as many new voices as possible. We’re just trying to get to the baseline of humanity, and not be a textbook image that’s remembered and spoken of in the past tense. That’s where our urgency comes from.”

For Mailhot, Orange, and so many writers I spoke to at IAIA, it’s not just about the book deals. It’s about what they call Native Excellence — and creating a path to it with its own expectations and standards, instead of relying on those established by white academia or publishing.

“I think it’s a type of arrival, when you get to make those decisions for yourself,” Mailhot said. “It’s very different for indigenous people, and black people, and people of color, because we are so often told to doubt ourselves, and our aesthetics, and what we do, simply because some of us are not traditionally taught how to write. And even if we are, we are looked at as if we don’tknow how — that we’re not authorities of our own work. And I just don’t buy it anymore.”

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Doomed in Nashville

Scott Boehm via AP

Monica Drake | Longreads | March 2018 | 19 minutes (4,778 words)

 

When my second novel came out, Chuck Palahniuk invited me, along with best-selling thriller writer and friend Chelsea Cain, to share his book tour. We’d make a joint venture of it.

Chuck is established, the author of the novel Fight Club, of course … “and 15 other books,” as he says. We’ve workshopped together for decades. A tour with Chuck would be a roving literary rave! My only hesitation? At 8 years old, my daughter was still young. She wasn’t a baby; still, I was her daily support.

Her father spent long days earning an hourly wage, leaving our house mid-morning and coming back too late to manage her life. A 40-minute commute on public transit added to his workday. He regularly stopped off at a bar before he made it all the way to the house.

When my first novel, Clown Girl, came out, she was a toddler. I’d brought her along on a homespun, couch-surfing road trip of a tour. She and I darted every which way in an old Nissan sedan, sharing bags of chips and sleeves of Oreos, driving between small towns. We met fabulous people. In other words, I juggled indie lit and parenting, and managed without childcare because as a family, we ran on a very slim budget.

Consequently? She attended 43 readings in 52 weeks, pre-kindergarten. It was boot camp; she learned to sit quietly and color while grown-ups did their thing. She learned patience.

This round, my daughter would stay with her grandmother — and she’d be fine — but still I had a clutch of apprehension. If anything were to go wrong, I’d be across the country, reading stories, tipping up a drink, laughing with strangers. The mother-guilt was thick and ready.

Hesitantly, I released myself, temporarily, from the obligations of daily parenting, and went, joining the team.
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Grown-Woman Theology

Brittney Cooper | Eloquent Rage | St. Martin’s Press | February 2018 | 15 minutes (3,982 words)

The summer before I left home for graduate school, I drove down to the rural Louisiana countryside to sit on the porch with my grandma. As I took the four steps up to the house, face scowling at the hot Louisiana sun beating down on my brow, my Gram squinted at me, called me by my nickname, and declared, “It’s time for you to start having sex!”

I’m sure my eyes bugged out of my head, as the horror dawned on me that this wasn’t going to be any old regular visit to the country. There was an accusation in her words, as though this was something my 22-year-old self should have been doing forever. For the record, I had, in fact, had a bit of sex by age 22. For my 22nd birthday, my homegirl, horrified at my post-college near-virginal status, took me to a sex shop and purchased a vibrator for me. There was a classic Black woman read in my grandmother’s words, an unspoken “If that’s true, I can’t tell.” Of course she couldn’t! I was steeped in all kinds of Christian guilt about the little bit of sex that I had had and the copious amounts of vibrating I had done. That, coupled with the asshole I chose for a first partner, meant that I wasn’t having particularly joyful or enthusiastic sex, and most times I was in sanctified denial about my desire to be sexual in the first place.

I made it onto the porch and sat down to listen to my good Christian 75-year-old grandmother, a lady given to elaborate hats and bejeweled suits on the Sundays she didn’t usher at church, extol the virtues of sex to unmarried me. “Back in my day, we did it,” she said. I squirmed. Whoever wants to know this about their grandma? “Don’t ever let anybody tell you we didn’t. We went up in the woods and did it, but we did it.” By the time I was born, Grandmama had been a widow for 10 years. She and my grandfather got married and then had their children. In the way that none of us is ever inclined to think about the sex lives of our grandparents, it never even occurred to me to ask about whether my grandmother had waited until marriage to have sex, or to consider the sexual practices of young Black folks in the 1940s.

For my Gram, access to birth control mattered greatly. She told me that she would have opted for only two children rather than the six she’d had (and raised and loved) if birth control had been widely available to Black women in the 1950s and 1960s in rural Louisiana. “But we couldn’t get the stuff,” she told me. In her own way, I think my grandmama let me know that the women’s movement was a win for Black women, too, because in the 21st century, it meant her granddaughter could have a wonderful sex life without bearing children until she chose to.

My grandmother had already developed a pragmatic blend of both feminism and Christianity that worked in the context of her life as a rural poor Southern Black woman born two years before the Great Depression. I was still far too much of a Christian zealot to be either pragmatic or feminist. My grandmother didn’t have all the language for these differing ideological positions, but she had good sense. She looked at me with those laser eyes that Black mamas use to see right through you, and commanded me to “Start having sex.” She meant real good sex. Sex that left you with telltale signs that you had been touched right and handled with care. I didn’t exude sexuality. I didn’t exude grown womanhood. I did not look like a Black girl comfortable in my own skin. Because I wasn’t.

I was trapped in a raging battle between my spirit and my flesh. The evangelical teachings of the Baptist churches in which I grew up insisted that our flesh — our bodies and their longings and impulses — were sinful, dangerous, and unhealthy. We were admonished each week to bring our unruly flesh in submission to our “spirit man.” Having heard this every Sunday of my life I did not understand how my grandmother, our beloved family matriarch, could dare advocate that I let my flesh win. Clearly, I wasn’t ready for the grown woman theology that this holy woman offered to me that day. Frankly, I thought she had gotten ahold of some terrible theology, and I was determined to live my life as a good evangelical should. I had life goals and desires for success that my provincial grandmother, who once told me to go to the local college and then “get a good clerical job,” clearly did not understand. Sex messed with your head, boys were fun, but trouble, and a baby before you wanted one, could ruin your life. This was my credo in triplicate.

Dismissing grandmother’s words was easy. I felt that my theology, informed indirectly by the advent of the “True Love Waits” purity campaigns of the 1990s, and my ability to recite by rote all the Bible verses condemning sex before marriage made my spiritual perspective more sophisticated, more informed, more correct. I had imbibed a set of social ideas about Black girlhood and womanhood rooted in the fear of being a failure and the social shame of becoming a statistic. I nearly worshipped my mother, but I didn’t want to be a teen mother as she had been. I wanted to finish college, something my birth had prevented her from doing. By the time grandmother sat me down for the talk, I was twenty-two, had completed two college degrees, and was on my way to a Ph.D. program. By local standards, I had already made it.

White privilege works by making the advantages white people have invisible while making the supposedly “poor” choices of people of color hypervisible.

There were no mission trips or classes devoted to sex ed. What my community also had was a teen pregnancy problem — it was not uncommon for Black girls to get pregnant in my middle school or my high school. I can remember only one white teen mom in high school (although I am sure there were a few others), and absolutely none in middle school. For me, the equation was simple. In communities where they talked about sexual abstinence and “waiting,” they didn’t have a teen pregnancy problem. In my community, where no such conversations were had, teen pregnancy was rampant.

These messages about success, whiteness, abstinence, and Christianity converged for me. Black kids accused me of acting white, but the white kids I knew loved Jesus (like I did), did well in school (like me), and got to have interesting discussions and experiences at church (which I didn’t). I have already mentioned the particular challenges of growing up a nerdy Black girl in a predominantly white school system. One way that I internalized white supremacy in my honors classes, which were 95 percent white and in which the kids were overwhelmingly Christian, was to associate the success I sought with the kind of whiteness and morality that shaped my classmates’ lives. White privilege works by making the advantages white people have invisible while making the supposedly “poor” choices of people of color hypervisible. For instance, on the surface, it simply looks like white people have better access to education, jobs, and housing because they make better choices or because they work harder. And, conversely, it looks like Black people have less access to these same things because they are lazy. In fact, in most opinion polls, white people believe that Black people don’t work as hard as they do. And what is perhaps most interesting is that white people believe this myth as much today as they believed it in the racially volatile 1960s.

Held up as an exceptional Black student, I was conditioned to believe in the myth of my own exceptionalism, to see other Black students’ struggles to succeed as a result of their own terrible choices. But white children in my school district weren’t inherently smarter. They were reared in homes where their parents had been college educated and where they had access to enrichment programs and private tutors. My close proximity to middle-class white youth put me in a position to culturally eavesdrop on my white friends, even though I didn’t have the experiences they had. I knew the possibilities of those experiences existed. What I learned from watching white kids who were set up to succeed while Black kids were set up to fail, even in matters of intimacy, was that sexual self-regulation was critical to my success. It took me being a grown woman to recognize all the ways that systems of white supremacy regulate our intimate lives, too.

Black girls and Black women, particularly those who have had any sustained encounter with Christianity, are often immobilized by the hyperregulation of their sexuality from both the church and the state. These messages about excessive and unregulated Black flesh that converge from both the nation-state and the church, form a double helix of sexual ideas that form the core of cultural ideas about Black sexuality. These messages constitute a critical strand in a sticky social web that immobilizes Black women caught at the intersections of race, class, gender, and lack of access to normative modes of sexual behavior. Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins refers to this sticky web as a matrix of domination, a sociological term for the way social systems of power converge to impede Black women’s agency and structural well-being. Far too often the result of trying to extract ourselves from these webs, which immobilize us until all of the life is drained from us, is that we leave critical pieces of ourselves behind. Black women are often robbed of our agency to build healthy intimate lives. These systems don’t crush every Black woman, but they do retain pieces of flesh, bone, and spirit.

When you are free enough to run away, you run. It makes no earthly sense to go back and do battle with the system for the fragments of yourself that remain. We are taught to be grateful that we “made it,” no matter what we had to leave behind.

This is why Black women’s self-help literature is obsessed with the question of “how to be whole again.”

For my grandmother, my very successful regulation of my sexual desires read like a wholly unhealthy inhabitation of my own Black woman body. I was a fully grown woman, but my theology and thought process around sex was adolescent and retrograde. Grandmama pushed me to articulate a version of my selfhood that would force me to bring my whole self to the table and prioritize my pleasure.

“Girl,” Grandmother said while gesturing mischievously toward her nether regions, “I had good stuff.” (I repeat: No one ever wants to know this about their grandmother.) She wanted me to own the fact that my “stuff” was “good stuff,” too. Grandmother’s indecent proposal constituted a critical and intimate dissent from the wholesale American demonization of Black women’s sexuality. To justify enslaving, raping, and breeding Black women and girls, white Americans created a mythos around Black women’s sexuality. They cast us as sexually insatiable, unrapeable, licentious, and dirty. Today, Black women still experience much handwringing around owning our sexuality. Calling her sexuality and her sexual body parts good in the face of these unrelenting social messages suggests that my grandmother had wrested her own sexual subjectivity from the fearsome clutches of Christianity and white supremacy. Or maybe she simply didn’t buy in all the way.

The problem is that I still inherently saw my “stuff” as bad, as the source of a temptation so mighty that it could derail my relationship with God and my life goals all at the same time. This is no way to teach sex education to teens, and it is a completely absurd way for grown-ass women to think about sex.

The politics of fear and endless rules that we use to (try to) control teenagers is unhealthy but understandable. For teens, advocating that they delay sex is ultimately about maximizing their life chances by helping them make choices that will benefit them and the future families they hope to build. We could, of course, do a better job of telling teens to do something other than wait. It turns out that my “simple equation” that abstinence would solve teen pregnancy was totally wrong. In places where abstinence is the only form of sex education, teen pregnancy rates are alarming. In places where access to contraception and proper information about birth control is available, teen pregnancy rates have decreased astronomically. What the poor Black girls in my school needed was not the True Love Waits campaign, but rather good information about sex, emotional maturity, and birth control.

Telling grown-ass women that all sex outside of marriage is an affront to God is absolutely ludicrous. Healthy consensual touch is nothing short of holy. But the indoctrination is real, especially if you are invested in being a “good girl,” especially if your goal in life is to not “repeat the cycle,” to not “become a statistic.” These are the kinds of social messages that Black women and girls get about their bodies and the potentially enormous public and personal costs of their sexuality. My mother once mentioned that when she found herself pregnant with me at age 18, at her grandmother’s insistence she had to go up in front of the church and ask for the congregation’s forgiveness for getting pregnant out of wedlock.

My grandmother had wrested her own sexual subjectivity from the fearsome clutches of Christianity and white supremacy.

Widowed at the age of 42, my grandmother chose to never remarry. She told me that same day, “I would never want to marry again, because I don’t ever want some man telling me what groceries I can and can’t buy.” That was all she said about marriage — that she understood it as men being able to dictate to women how to spend money and how to run a household. Living her own life and being able to raise at least some of her children independent of my grandfather’s influence had shown my grandmother that having a male head of household was not, in fact, desirable. In her forthright rejection of conservative evangelicalism on the matter of sex, she modeled for me that Black women had the right to dissent from theologies that didn’t serve them well. Black women had the right to a say about their finances, their bodies, the number of children they bore, and the kind of sex they wanted to have. What she offered to me that day was permission to choose for myself.

I wish I could say that I stepped off my grandmother’s porch a new woman, ready to own and explore her sexuality. But all her fussing about what I needed to be doing proved no match for the years of shaming and moral panic about sex that I experienced both inside and outside of my community. Four years after that conversation, I came home from church after a particularly guilt-compelling sermon, bagged up all my romance novels, astrology books and manuals, and my vibrator, and threw them in the dumpster. The presence of these items in my apartment were tacit licenses for me to engage and indulge in sinful living, and surely God was not pleased with that. These days, I’m sure that between peels of laughter, God is sitting somewhere, saying, “Girl, bye. I didn’t tell you to throw away all those books and that perfectly good vibrator.” Live. Learn.

What does it mean when our spiritual and theological systems impede healthy living? This is a question that Black women should begin to ask forthrightly. They should insist fervently on answers among themselves and from their spiritual leaders. We do a kind of violence to ourselves when we shut down our sexuality. It’s not so much that I should have had more sex, although I wish I had in my twenties. It’s that there are things we come to know about our bodies, our impulses, our likes, our dislikes and desires, when we fully engage the sexual part of ourselves. We go around missing critical knowledge about who we are, or might be, when we act as though sex isn’t foundational to who we are.

Also, what does it mean when our theological systems impede our access to a healthy and robust set of spiritual and political practices — practices that should give us life?

My grandmother tried to empower me to fight for my happiness by helping me to not be limited by script and convention. She modeled the ways that Black women can build a life for themselves. And sometimes that comes with a willingness to cast aside fear and say no to what others think is best for you so you can find the courage to say yes to yourself.

There are so many ways that Black women need to free themselves from the strictures of conservative Christian theology. Notice that I didn’t say to abandon Jesus and the Church if it’s important to you. I haven’t. But I’m no longer checking my thinking cap at the door.

Many Black Christian girls are seduced by white evangelicalism, because, hell, it seems to be working out so well for white people. I mean, white Jesus helps white people to win a lot. But when my grandmother showed me that I could take a different approach to my theology, that it could be a push and pull, a debate, and even an ongoing set of arguments with God, she freed me up from my investment in being a Christian Goody Two-shoes. I don’t even believe God wants that. The God of Christianity seems to love people who are engaged in all manner of scandals, affairs, and murders. But I digress. We also have an absurd theology of discrimination against LGBTQ people. And far too many churches still believe that women can’t be preachers or pastors. The thing we would all do well to remember is that conservative Christian theology was used to enslave Black people. We can use our theology to oppress people or to liberate them. That’s our choice.

We can use our theology to oppress people or to liberate them. That’s our choice.

Sometimes this means that we have to reject the kind of Christian teaching that sets up a false binary between flesh and spirit, mind and body, and sacred and secular. To be Black in the United States is to be taught our flesh is dirty and evil. A liberatory theology for us cannot set us at war with our very bodies. A liberatory theology for women cannot set us at war with the desires for touch, companionship, and connection that well up like deep springs in our spirits. When we hear about how the “heart is deceitful above all things,” which is an actual verse, it teaches us to suppress our deepest longings, to not trust our own thoughts and our own counsel. For people who have been enslaved and oppressed because of their race, or gender, or sexuality, such interpretations are dangerous.

The Bible isn’t any old regular text. It is a text endued with thousands of years of political, social, and cultural power. That means that to wrest a theology for my grown Black woman life from it, I had to bring my fully embodied, unapologetic self to it. My grandmother didn’t teach me anything about how to understand the biblical text more critically. She offered to me a fully embodied theology of grown Black womanhood that day, one with its compass set toward freedom. One in which I should embrace the fundamental goodness of all my stuff, both sexual and otherwise. I had to become a fully grown Black woman to receive it though. In my holy hubris, I had dismissed her as provincial and out-of-pocket. How did she know, in her sanctified country-ness, that sexual pleasure and the freedom to pursue it would be critical to a healthy sense of self? She modeled for me one of the core things Black church girls would do well to remember about Jesus: He fully embodies both the divine and the human. If we spent as much time thinking about how he lived as we do worshipping how he died, our faith would demand that we prioritize a better integration of flesh and spirit, of humanity and divinity, than we do.

The second thing we need to remember is this: The primarily white male theologians who created the systematic theology of evangelical Christianity were trying to make sense of a theology that fit their own lives and their own worldview. This is why so many white Christians can read the Bible and still vote Republican. Because for them, nothing about the Bible challenges the fundamental principles of white supremacy or male domination.

Interpreting the biblical text conservatively has a political function. This political function differs depending on if you’re white or Black. Conservative biblical interpretation became the hallmark of the rise of the religious right, a political force that rose in response to desegregation in the South, and Lyndon Johnson’s perceived betrayal of Southern Democrats. Conservative biblical interpretation in Black churches has conversely risen in response to the political evils engineered by the white religious right. White male Christian conservatives used conservative biblical interpretation to pioneer a religious right wing to shore up the machinations of white supremacy in government policy. Black religious conservatives adopted conservative biblical interpretation to inoculate themselves against the massive devastation of these same social policies. Although the social desires (or political goals) of these religious communities are wholly oppositional, the biblical interpretation methods are the same. Obviously, that can’t work. If Black women are honest, it hasn’t been working for us for a long time.

Perhaps it’s time for us to read some other sacred texts alongside the Bible. My grandmother’s words are a sacred text to me — a sacred text of country Black girlhood. My mother’s words are a sacred text to me — a sacred text of grown Black womanhood. The words of Sojourner Truth, and Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston, and Audre Lorde, and Patricia Hill Collins, and Anna Julia Cooper, and Beyoncé and my homegirls are all sacred texts to me. Black feminism has been a liberatory theology for me in its own right. It has made space for me to bring my spiritual self into the academy and my academic, intellectual self into the spiritual parts of my life. What Black feminism and my Grandmother have taught me is that Black women are experts on their own lives and their own well-being. Grandmama taught me that all the sacrifices I was making for middle-class aspirations weren’t entirely worth it. That if I made it but I was lonely and miserable, then that was a failure, not a win.

What I call Black feminist theology is something that can help sisters who are damn near ready to leave the church just so they can act like grown women with full sex lives in peace. My Black feminist theology is not just focused on what happens in the church, but rather is a call to those of us who are Black feminists to remember that lots of Black women are still quite religious. We need a way to reconcile our feminist politics and our spiritual lives, not only at church or mosque, but at the office, too. Even when Black people were enslaved and it was illegal for them to “read the word for themselves,” (as Black Christians love to say), they knew that God was nothing if not freedom. I believe that because of all the oppressions that we’ve experienced, Black girls have unique visions of freedom. I believe those visions are God-given, however you understand God, even if you simply worship, to paraphrase Alice Walker, the “God you found in yourself.” Freedom is my theological compass, and it never steers me wrong.

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From Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper. Copyright 2018 by the author. Reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Press.

The Invisible Lives of Young Women With Chronic Illnesses

Michele Lent Hirsch

Jessica Gross | Longreads | March 2018 | 18 minutes (4,580 words)

When Michele Lent Hirsch was growing up, she was hardly ever sick. In college, she had to have hip surgery; by her mid-20s, she had also been diagnosed with idiopathic anaphylaxis, thyroid cancer, and Lyme disease. In the midst of these issues, her father, who’d had multiple sclerosis, ended his own life. Now in her 30s, Hirsch has had years of experience moving through the world as a chronically ill young woman. In her new book, Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine, she interweaves personal experience and reporting to examine, through the lens of chronic illness, issues that she believes all women face.

Hirsch and I are friends—we get together every few months to talk about writing and our lives (she’s a poet, too)—and yet I didn’t know the depth of her experience until I read her thoughtful, complicated, and beautifully written book. I think that’s part of her point: to bring these under-discussed experiences into the light. We met at a restaurant in the West Village and spoke about how chronic illness throws issues of being young and female into sharper relief, how illness intersects with not only gender and age but also sexuality and race, and how, in the midst of these deeply challenging experiences, there is a basic need for empathy.

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I imagine it was an intense decision to write publicly about your experience of illness. Can you talk about deciding to write the book?

I’d had this idea for an embarrassing number of years before I acted on it. I’d had hip surgery, I’d had anaphylaxis that almost killed me, but it wasn’t until I got cancer that I started to think, “This is a very particular experience that I’m having.”

I was diagnosed with cancer in 2011, right before my 26th birthday. Originally, I wanted to write an essay about the particulars of being young, female and sick and all the ways that illness bumped up against what was already difficult about being a young woman in the world. I mentioned it to a friend who was an editor and a writer, and she said, “That sounds bigger than an essay. That sounds like a whole book.” I thank her in the back of the book, because she was right.

For a few years, I didn’t believe her. I think that’s because so many women don’t talk about this stuff with each other, so you could be friends with someone and not even know that they have a chronic illness. But over the next few years, I started to see how often it just came up at parties or in conversation with a stranger or a friend of a friend. I began to realize that not only was this bigger than an essay, it was also way bigger than my experience. So at some point I said to my friend, “You’re right, it’s a book.” It is this vicious cycle: If you keep thinking you’re the only one, then you’re not going to share your experience, and then no one shares it, and then we’re all living in these weird, sad little silos. Read more…

How to Write a Memoir While Grieving

Illustration by Katie Kosma

Nicole Chung | Longreads | March 2018 | 11 minutes (2,845 words)

I am writing a book my father will never see. Not in its entirety, not out in the world. He got through about half of my first draft, my mother said, or maybe a little bit more, sometimes using a magnifying glass to read the manuscript I’d sent in 12-point double-spaced Times. When I heard this, I berated myself — I should have thought of that; I should have sent a larger-print version. “Honey, it wouldn’t have mattered,” Mom said. “He had to use the magnifying glass for all his reading, even the bigger type.”

Why didn’t I know that? Because I was far away, across the country. Because he didn’t read books on the too-rare occasions when we were together; he was focused on spending time with me. Because, while I asked about his health all the time, I never asked, specifically, how does he read these days? One more thing I hadn’t known about my father. One more thing to reproach myself for.

He did read part of my book. I think about that every day. He and my mom would sometimes read it aloud, together, chapter by chapter, working their way through it in the evenings after she got home from work. When my dad died suddenly, six days into the new year, they were still several chapters from the end.

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