Search Results for: Space

The Slow Regard of a Difficult Past

In this harrowing and brave essay at LitHub, Brandon Taylor examines his relationship with his his abusive mother, a woman who suffered her own trauma and begat that trauma within her family. He considers the fiction in the space between truth, memoir, and reality, and how when love turns to fear, emotional and physical violence is often the result.

What is love if you get it secondhand? Is it a fact or merely a detail?

I am more comfortable in fiction than in nonfiction. In fiction, you get to decide what is real and not real, what is true and not true, which details are facts and which are mere detail. In fiction, I am the discerning eye, the single source of truth. But when I tried to write about my mother, all my stories were flat. I couldn’t move her into fictional language, it seemed. Indeed, my journals about the days she died are full of details about the weather and the feeling that a chasm had opened up in me. I was trying in those early days to pin something down, to assemble a body of details that might give me some hint or clue of how to go on. I also felt that I had no right to feel that way, so sad about her, after all the hateful things I’d thought about her or been subjected to by her hands.

The thing that kept me from writing about her, about grief, in fiction was that I lacked genuine, human feeling for my mother. Or, no, that’s not true exactly. What I lacked was empathy for her. I was so interested in my own feelings about her that I couldn’t leave room for her feelings or for what she wanted out of life. I couldn’t leave a space for her to be a person. I think, ultimately, other people aren’t real to us until they’re suffering or gone. That’s when the imagination begins to work, trying to sort things out, trying to get them right, to understand them. I couldn’t write fiction because I hadn’t yet mastered my own feelings. I couldn’t write fiction because I had not yet come to understand her or what her life had meant to her. I was solipsistic and righteous in my anger, my fear, my sadness. I missed all of the eerie symmetries between us—her trauma, my trauma, her rape, my rape, her anger, my anger. It’s not that I came to love her really. But I did learn to extend to her the same grace that my friends extended to me. That’s one of the beautiful things about writing, the way we learn about others and what that tells us about ourselves.

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A Thereness Beneath the Thereness: A Jonathan Gold Reading List

Jonathan Gold poses for a portrait during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images)

For the past four decades, Jonathan Gold tirelessly catalogued the ebb and flow of cuisine in Los Angeles, and in the process, became known as the “food writing poet” of the city. That poet, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this past month, died last week at the age of 57. In his New York Times obituary Ruth Reichl, who published Gold in Gourmet magazine, said of the writer-critic,

Before Tony Bourdain, before reality TV and ‘Parts Unknown’ and people really being into ethnic food in a serious way, it was Jonathan who got it, completely. He really got that food was a gateway into the people, and that food could really define a community. He was really writing about the people more than the food.

According to David Chang, no one knew more about Korean cuisine than Gold, and the critic, whose career began as a music journalist, became the foremost expert on the various regions of the world. Some opine his speciality was Mexican and Central American cooking, having eaten at every pupuseria, taco stand, and restaurant along the 15.5 mile stretch of Pico Boulevard. But really, Gold’s expertise wasn’t limited by borders. Read more…

The Unbearable Blandness of Water

a woman with shoulder-length brown hair and a red jack holds a goblet of water in front of her face
Water Judge Karen Cara at the 2011 Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting. (AP Photo/The Journal, Chris Jackson)

Dave Stroup didn’t just attend the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting, aka the Academy Awards of Water, he became a certified water-taster and judge. At Eater, he tells us all about the experience of trying to judge a substance whose main characteristics are colorlessness, odorlessness, and tastelessness — and about the lengths water companies go to in the effort to distinguish their tasteless product from their competitors’.

There are no big brands at the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting — no Dasani, FIJI, Evian, or Deer Park. The waters that compete tend to be local, niche, or super-high-end (think small-batch or mail-order only). There are four different categories, three of which are bottled — non-carbonated, purified, and sparkling — and municipal water. The bottled waters include all sorts, from ancient springs to waters that make claims of being specially pH-balanced or oxygen-rich. Alongside more typical fare, such as Hope Natural Spring Water from Virginia and even Berkeley Springs’ own purified drinking water, there’s Frequency H2O, from Australia, which is described by its manufacturer as “a synthesis of wisdom and evolution” that is “alive with the pulsations of the Universe” after being “put through a 2-stage kinetic energy process and infused at 528Hz, the Solfeggio frequency of LOVE.” Svalbarði’s Polar Iceberg water costs about $80 for a 750-milliliter bottle and literally comes from a melting iceberg off the Norwegian island of Svalbard.

Of course, it’s not all pontificating about the mouthfeel subtleties of expensive glacier water. There’s also space to discuss global water challenges. Well… sort of.

It’s probably not surprising that the seminar portion of the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting is so lightly attended. No one wants to be told the grim truth that much of the world, even here in the United States, lacks access to clean water, or of a Mad Max future with nations fighting wars over it. At least, no one wants to hear it in a hotel ballroom, next to an elaborate display of thousands of dollars of fancy bottles evoking the image of pure, flowing water.

Next year I’ll be entering water bottled from my very own kitchen sink; it’s municipal Roman water, and if you close your eyes you can just pick up a whiff of imperial ambition in the nose.

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The Toxic Legacy of Building 606

AP Photo/Eric Risberg

Between poisoned groundwater and heavy metals in the air, sometimes it seems that we’ll all eventually be living on a Superfund site. For The San Francisco Chronicle, Cynthia Dizikes and Jason Fagone report on San Francisco’s Superfund site, Hunters Point, and how the city and Navy knowingly leased office space on contaminated land.

The former shipyard on San Francisco Bay was once a major Naval facility, but its soil contains radioactive material from Atomic tests. The cleanup was expensive and ongoing. The shipyard did have one valuable asset, space, which is rare in the Bay Area, and the city wanted to capitalize on it. Police officers rented rooms in Building 606. No one told them that their new office stood on the site of a former contaminated laundry facility. Instead, officials dismissed the officers’ concerns as paranoid, until the police developed rashes and cancerous lumps. So how did these toxins get here?

On July 25, 1946, off Bikini Atoll, a set of small islands in the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. military performed one of the most dramatic atomic tests of the 20th century, known as Shot Baker. A large bomb was detonated underwater. The ocean heaved. In “a giant and unprecedented spectacle,” as one military account later described it, a million tons of water spurted up in a great white column a mile high, spreading into an incandescent dome of toxic moisture.

At the dawn of the Cold War, the military wanted to know how ships and people would be damaged by the deadly and long-lasting radioactive poisons spread by nuclear explosions. So they brought nearly 100 “target” ships to Bikini, some loaded with live pigs and sheep, and set off two atomic bombs at close range, the second of which was Baker.

The scale of destruction surprised the military. After the tests, the military didn’t know how to clean the ships of radiation, so they brought them to Hunters Point for decontamination and built the radioactive laundry to clean sailors’ clothing.

The 1940s and ’50s were a more lenient era, safetywise. Navy records describe the shipyard’s first radiological safety section as a “small band” of junior officers with equipment consisting “of one coffee pot and six Geiger counters, only two of which worked.” To illuminate the dials of instruments and base signage, the Navy used glowing paint made of radium-226, a powerful radiation emitter that decays into radon gas. Spills of radioactive materials were not uncommon. At the Radioactive Laundry, each wash cycle could flush more than 100 gallons of wastewater through the pipes and drains, potentially leaking into the soil.

The work left behind unknown quantities of what the Navy calls “radionuclides of concern,” everything from the radium in the dials to the components of atomic fallout and science experiments, including cesium-137, which emits harmful beta and gamma rays, and strontium-90, which mimics calcium and damages bone marrow, potentially leading to cancer.

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Seeing Private Everyman

Life Magazine March 16, 1942, courtesy the author / Nevin Ruttanaboonta, Unsplash

Steve Edwards | Longreads | July 2018 | 16 minutes (4,482 words)

When my wife was first pregnant with our son, it startled me to think that the life we were living before his arrival would be a mystery to him, part of some dim and distant past. All he would have were our stories. And because we lived far from our respective families, stories would be almost all he would have of them, too. It may have been first-time father jitters, but it felt important that he know something of his people and what we were all about. Or maybe I just imagined him a captive audience to whom I could tell stories my wife had already heard a thousand times.

My family’s big story was my grandfather’s brush with fame in Life magazine. During World War II and beyond, he was Life’s Private Everyman — Charles E. Teed of Effingham, Illinois, a figure meant to typify selectees in the war effort. On March 16, 1942, he graced the cover and was profiled in a long feature article. In 1961, he appeared alongside the 20th century’s most notable celebrities in Life’s 25th-anniversary issue. There’s Marilyn Monroe on one page. There’s Granddad on another. By Life’s estimation, “victory over the common enemy” depended upon Granddad and men like him, and whether, when the time came — in a line paraphrased from War and Peace — they shouted “‘Hurrah!’ or “‘We are lost!’” I was 10 when he died. Nearly everything I know about his life, I learned from the magazine.

I remember the night a copy of that magazine was brought to the dinner table. The dishes had all been swept away and it was placed before me. I was instructed in the careful turning of its pages so as not to rip them.

At first, I didn’t understand. The Granddad I knew, then in his late 50s and early 60s, wasn’t anybody famous. He shot pool, taught us pinochle, and took us fishing. He worked in a factory and often came home exhausted at night. “I’m sorry, honey,” he’d sometimes say to my brother and me when requests to shoot pool came down in the after-dinner hours, “I’m too tired.” But there he was on the cover, a skinny John Wayne.

He’d been photographed from below, solitary, outlined only in sky, his eyes set on something in the middle distance. He wore a field jacket and gloves. The bayonet on his rifle stabbed into a corner of the frame. In the photographs inside the magazine, he looked like one of my miniature plastic Army men come to life. He sprinted through the woods out on maneuvers; scrubbed canvas puttees and cartridge belts; swept up on KP. And there were other pictures, earlier ones, which my great-grandmother had supplied from home: Granddad at 6 in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, and later, in the backyard, playing Cowboys and Indians. In a picture of his sixth grade class, he stood in the back row, smiling and self-possessed, described by Life as the “tallest and best-looking boy” of the bunch. And how proud he seemed at 16 and already 6-foot-2, dressed in his Sunday finest — a white collar shirt, a pair of high-waisted slacks cinched tight by a belt — on a front-porch step beside his grinning and equally handsome 6-foot-6 father.

It was a revelation to see him so young. It was a revelation, too, to imagine that people all around the country — millions of them — had looked upon these same images. When his issue first hit newsstands, Pearl Harbor had happened but we were still several months away from any major land battle. It was a time of deep uncertainty. The lives of those willing to sacrifice themselves for the country were stories yet to be written.

It was a time of deep uncertainty. The lives of those willing to sacrifice themselves for the country were stories yet to be written.

For reasons even he never knew, Life chose Granddad to represent those possibilities. Maybe it was his good looks. Maybe he was just in the right place at the right time. Regardless, there he was, an icon of the everyman.

Hope writ large.

After that night at the dinner table, I don’t think I ever looked at him the same. Though my understanding of the war was incomplete, only a child’s understanding, I felt great pride that he had been someone our country turned to for hope. And I knew that appearing on the cover of Life meant he was anything but ordinary. And if the magazine changed the way I saw him, it also changed the way I saw myself. Maybe there was something brave in me. Maybe I could give people hope. The feeling was that Granddad mattered, and that I could matter, too. And if I could pass along anything to my son, it would be that.

* * *

So much of what we think we know about each other — even the people we love — is predicated on what we don’t know. Or can’t know. Or what is kept from us as children for our own good. On nights Granddad wasn’t too tired for a game of pool, I remember watching him hover silent as a shark around the table in his basement, chalking his cue and lining up shot after shot and slamming them home. Other nights he’d pull out his projector and show clips of 8 mm film he’d taken at the go-kart races at the fairgrounds, or some scene from a fishing trip out at Lake Sara. In my earliest memories, it’s the 4th of July and I’m sitting atop an old-fashioned oak-barrel ice cream maker while he turns the crank. Around us are friends and family with sweating cans of Coors, talking and laughing and telling stories, their enormous Oldsmobiles and Buicks parked at odd angles down the street. I remember his gentleness in those moments, the care he took teaching me how to hold a pool cue, how to aim and think about angles when making a bank shot. The only time I ever heard an edge creep into his voice was a night the news showed images of the famine in Ethiopia. Granny saw the children’s bloated stomachs and got a pained looked on her face and told him to turn it off. “This is what’s happening,” he hissed. “You have to look.”

From my vantage as a 43-year-old looking back, I’m tempted to say that the news footage triggered the PTSD from which he must surely have suffered. Something in how he scowled at the television so intently — his laser-like focus on it — betrayed a nervous system that had trained itself to be ever-vigilant for signs of trauma.


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Against the innocence of my childhood memories, it takes an act of imagination to consider the scope and severity of the suffering Granddad endured. The picture of his father and him so proud on that porch step was taken around 1936, in the heart of the Great Depression. A little over three years later, his father — a workman for the Illinois Central Railroad — was hit and killed by a freight train, his lanky 6-foot-6 frame severed at the waist. Granddad had just graduated high school, his whole future ahead of him.

In their profile, Life rendered his father’s death as part of Granddad’s backstory, a detail that testified to the humanity of ordinary selectees and that celebrated the American ethos of overcoming adversity by reinventing yourself. His father’s death wasn’t a tragedy but an opportunity. With an insurance payout and a settlement from the railroad, Granddad and my great-grandmother started a restaurant in downtown Effingham called the Heart Café. He put in grueling 17-hour days, bussing tables, manning the cash register, sweeping up. And it was at the Heart Café, in the depths of his loss, that he met Violet Kincaid — Granny — a dark-haired young woman from a nearby farm who took a waitress job. In a story my mother says isn’t true, or maybe only half true, Life wrote that Granny dropped a tray of dirty dishes on her first day: “Teed helped her pick up the pieces, they looked into each other’s eyes and it was all over for Teed.” Six weeks later they got engaged, and not long after, in July 1941, he was drafted into the army.

There is an almost irresistible romance to his story — from its tragic beginnings, to his sudden fame on the cover of Life, to the fear of death in battle that must have hovered in his mind like an ungraspable wisp of steam.

And those starkly beautiful black-and-white Life photographs only served to amplify the drama and spectacle.

But the reality of war was that in the course of his 27 months as a combat soldier in the infantry, Granddad had seen “a lot of things die.” That’s how he described it to Life editors in an interview for the 25th-anniversary issue in 1961. In Morocco, he’d stormed the docks at Safi under sniper fire, and later marched 250 miles across the desert to Port Lyautey. In Sicily, he led pack mules up mountains so steep the mules sometimes fell off. Outside St. Lô, France — a city Allied bombs reduced to rubble — he was shot in the chest and crawled under an apple tree to die. Luckily for him (and me) a field guide found him.

He told Life he remembered thinking that “the orchard and the clouds were the last things [he] was going to see.”

Instead he spent the next two years in a hospital. In his absence from Effingham, The Heart went under and so his first job upon arriving home was racking billiards at a bar. He and Granny saved up and started a ma-and-pop grocery, only to see it run out of business when national chains swooped in. He taught himself TV repair, started a shop out of his home. When that was no longer profitable he took a line job at a factory.

All his life he worked and scraped by and found a way to provide. He answered his country’s call for sacrifice and never quit on his family and embodied every bit of the rugged selflessness of a John Wayne war flick. His private life, however, would have been more morally complicated. No matter how selflessly he gave himself after the war, he still had to live with the things he’d done to survive it. And as such, despite millions of people having come to know him from his photographs in Life, he may have felt invisible.

And as such, despite millions of people having come to know him from his photographs in Life, he may have felt invisible.

In a 1943 column about how war changed soldiers like Granddad, who’d spent years on the front lines, the famous World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote that: “The most vivid change is the casual and workshop manner in which they now talk about killing. They have made the psychological transition from the normal belief that taking human life is sinful, over to a new professional outlook where killing is a craft. To them now there is nothing morally wrong about killing. In fact it is an admirable thing.” I don’t believe — can’t believe — becoming a professional at killing is something any veteran walks away from easily or without harm. I think Granddad would have wanted to protect us, his family, from the trauma he knew. He would have wanted to protect himself from the pain of our knowing. But how often the dead, friend and enemy alike, must have sat in the room with us, their ghosts crowding the card table while we bid for trump in games of pinochle. While 8 mm films flickered on a screen in the basement. While I sat atop an ice cream maker and Granddad turned the crank some long-lost 4th of July.

I remember one night — it must have been a year or two before he died — he came into my bedroom with a gift. It was a small framed black-and-white picture of him at 16. In the photograph his hair was slick and black, his cheeks tinted a rosy pink. He held out the picture and said he thought I might like to have it for my desk.

Something about the moment overwhelmed me. I didn’t know what to make of such a gift. And I refused to accept it.

He nodded and quietly left, taking the picture with him. The next morning I had a change of heart and tried to tell him I wanted it after all but the words failed me. He packed the picture into his suitcase. I never saw it again.

In the hard light of morning, maybe giving me a picture of himself felt too much like vanity. Maybe he realized that his memories from 16 — before his father was killed, before the war came along and changed everything — would be lost on an ’80s kid like me. There is no salvaging the past, no storing it up in someone else for safe keeping. Maybe a man who killed in war in order to live should have known better than to be sentimental. But I think about what it says about his heart, and maybe all hearts, that he wanted me to know him. That after years of hard knocks, some part of him remained tender enough to be hurt by a child.

One thing I’ve learned as a writer is that the stories inside us — especially the ones that hurt — have to come out. Whatever the cost of telling them, the cost of holding onto them is greater. As such, I think the courage it took Granddad to go to war had a twin in the courage it took him to examine his life afterward, and to offer its fractures for the world to see. When Life contacted him in 1960, wanting to catch up with “Private Everyman” for the magazine’s 25th-anniversary special double issue, he could have said no. Instead, he agreed to be photographed over the course of a whirlwind two-week trip that took him from Effingham to Fort Bragg, Normandy, Casablanca, Palermo, New York City, and back — the places the war had taken him 15 years before. Life billed the story “an adventure in time as well as a journey through space.”

On each leg of the trip, elaborate “re-creation” photos — pictures meant to invoke Granddad’s experiences in the war — were staged. In one shot, taken in France, he and some soldiers from a nearby Army post flank a crack-filled farmhouse, rifles drawn. In another, in the mountains of Sicily, he squats beside a pack mule, the white slash of a cigarette in his mouth. Alongside the “re-creation” shots are shots of the man he’d become — the 40-year-old husband and father hammering a sign for his TV repair shop in the front yard; the laconic veteran reading names on the white stone crosses in the cemetery at Omaha Beach.

In one man lived the other.

Of all the images of Granddad to have appeared in Life, the shots from November 1960 are the most personally affecting to me. For one, he looks more like the man I remember from when I was kid. For another, there’s something in his countenance — a flintiness and melancholy — that suggests an incalculable depth of hurt.

It’s there, too, in the quotes Life editors lifted from their interview with him to serve as captions for the pictures. Under the shot of the crack-filled farmhouse in France, Granddad says: You never could tell about those broken-up farmyard buildings in Normandy. You could be running into a sniper there or a booby trap or, on the other hand, you might get real lucky and find a keg of Calvados. I guess there’s only one thing you can say about war after you get to know something about it, and that is it’s rough. The circumspection and carefulness of his talk — and the euphemism of war as “rough” — speaks to the unspeakable.

And to that I would only add that photographs like Granddad’s, in simultaneously concealing as much as they reveal, testify to a fundamental truth of being human: We live by illusions. We curate our lives like stories in a magazine.

Some part of me has always been drawn to hidden truths. Like a kid turning over a rock, I’m curious about what’s underneath the tidy and convenient narratives we create to smooth over the chaos of life. Staged to suggest Granddad’s memories of war, those “re-creation” shots fascinate me. They are conspicuously absent of blood and suffering and death. The stink of human misery doesn’t rise off the page like black smoke. At the same time, however, could even the most graphic of photographs capture that? And confronted with the true horrors of war, who could stand to look at them? Not the readers of Life, I don’t suppose. For them — and for me — the suggestion of war is as far as we can go. The rest is a journey of the imagination. “To take a photograph,” writes Susan Sontag in On Photography, “is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” And to that I would only add that photographs like Granddad’s, in simultaneously concealing as much as they reveal, testify to a fundamental truth of being human: We live by illusions. We curate our lives like stories in a magazine.

* * *

The photographer who accompanied Granddad on that 1960 “adventure in time” was a man named Leonard McCombe. Other Life photographers of the era — Frank Capra, Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith — enjoy more name recognition, but McCombe’s photographs are every bit as incisive and iconic. He was born on the Isle of Mann, and at 19 had been embedded as a photographer with British troops in Normandy not far from where Granddad was shot. The trip was something of a return for him, too.

Several years ago, I had a brief email exchange with McCombe. He had retired from photography and now owned an apple orchard on Long Island. Having heard from an online connection that I was looking for information about his trip with Granddad, he wrote to me out of the blue:

Dear Mr. Edwards,

I am now in my late eighties, and I don’t do any interviews. My memory is not perfect, but I could answer a few questions by email. I was sent by the editors of Life about fifty years ago to do a story on your grandfather. My job was to get a picture story and I did not make any notes. Remembrance of the past was the theme of the story.

Sincerely,
Leonard McCombe

I wrote back immediately, saying I was simply curious what he might remember and whether he had any stories to share. Two weeks later, a page of McCombe’s remembrances arrived via email. He remembered Granddad’s backstory of growing up poor during the Depression, and losing his dad; starting a restaurant with my great-grandmother; and meeting a “pretty waitress” (Granny) and getting married quick. He remembered that “one thing [Granddad] liked in the army was marching with the band,” because “he felt for the first time like one of the boys.” He told me about shots he’d made in Effingham, and how from there they traveled to Fort Bragg and Normandy, where Granddad had landed at Utah Beach on D-Day Plus 4. “Chuck remembered fighting in the hedgerows,” McCombe wrote, “and securing abandoned farmhouses with landmines going off, booby-traps, and snipers in the orchards.” After Normandy it was on to Morocco and to Sicily, where McCombe said he made his best shots — photographs of Granddad in “the high mountains with mules carrying munitions and food supplies to the troops.”

I read and reread the email, savoring even the smallest fragments of story. Like the day they had lunch with an innkeeper at the Lyon D’Or, a small hotel in Bayeux, and listened as she told about being awoken in the night during the initial D-Day bombardment. Or how, during one of the “re-creation” photo sessions, the local soldiers they brought in had set off so many smoke bombs McCombe feared a visit from the police.

The stories McCombe shared brought the trip to life in a way the photographs alone couldn’t. Beneath the images’ glossy surfaces were the sacrifices he and Granddad had made to get them. The conscious choice to look.

In one sliver of a story, McCombe mentioned that their flight from Paris to Casablanca had been full of German tourists. The irony wasn’t lost on me. In the days prior, Granddad had been photographed wandering Utah Beach looking at remnants of the big German guns that fired upon him. He stood in an orchard like the one where a sniper put a bullet in his chest. Only 15 years had passed since he’d crawled under that apple tree to die. No time at all. The voices of those German tourists must have chilled his blood.

Life wrote that for Granddad “the slow summoning up of memory was always a poignant experience, sometimes tender, often painful. … Most of those who were there with him are long since vanished into the past.” And now that he has long since vanished, I marvel at his willingness to participate in that summoning.

What compelled him to do it? Did he want to test himself? Did he feel some kind of obligation to Life’s readership?

I can only speculate about his motivations. I know as much about Granddad’s private thoughts and feelings as I do about the circumstances that landed him on the cover of Life in the first place. But against everything I can’t know stands a simple fact: He was there. One of the first “re-creation” photographs of the trip — a shot that never made it into the magazine but that I discovered years later in an online archive — boldly underscores the seriousness of his commitment. In the picture, a group of men at the railroad yards stand over a body that’s been covered by a blanket. One man has his hand on his head as though in shock. The image is composed so that a nearby freighter’s boxcars crowd out the entire right side of the frame. Foregrounded on the left and taking up nearly as much space, his back to the camera, Granddad looks on. He’s dressed in clothes he might have worn at 19 — a denim jacket, a wool cap with earflaps. He and Leonard McCombe, on maybe the first day of their trip around the world and back, had staged the scene of his father’s tragic death. When I look at the picture, I don’t see the picture. I smell pitch oozing from railroad ties. I feel the heat and rumble of the freighter’s big engine. No one else could have known what he felt standing there. Maybe that was reason enough to want to tell the story.

In 1944, after he’d been shot, Granddad thought the last things he was going to see were the clouds and the sky. Forty years later, dying of lung cancer in the Veterans’ Administration hospital in Danville, Illinois, the thought became a kind of wish. After chemo and surgery, talk had turned to him coming home. Granny bought a chair and a beach umbrella so he could sit in the backyard and listen to birds and watch the clouds. I imagined him getting better, stronger, putting on weight, not coughing anymore, his hair growing back, his arm around my shoulders some afternoon at Lake Shelbyville fishing for black crappie. But the night he got the all clear, the relief was too much. Instead of coming home, he died in his sleep.

At 10 years old, nothing had ever scared me as much as walking into his hospital room and seeing him so frail. My brother and I stood by his bed, stunned, just looking at him and trying not to cry. He slowly pulled the oxygen tube from his nostrils and put a thumb over the vents and beckoned my brother to come close.

When my brother leaned in, Granddad lifted his thumb from the tube and blasted him in the face with the cold air.

Or I should say he tried to blast him with cold air. His movements were too slow and shaky to really make it happen. And my brother only pretended to be surprised. But that was Granddad — he didn’t want us to be afraid.

The better story from his last days was one I learned later, secondhand from my mother. Upon Granddad’s arrival at the VA, word somehow got out that Private Everyman, the soldier featured in those old Life magazines, had been admitted. In their wheelchairs and hospital gowns, people began stopping by to pay their respects. They struck up conversations with him in the day room and on the elevator. They remembered him.

According to my mother, Granddad delighted in being recognized. She said that when they all got to talking he was like a king holding court. These years later it strikes me that in Granddad’s photographs in Life, his fellow vets had seen themselves, their triumphs and struggles. They had felt acknowledged by the witness he bore. And it occurs to me, too, that in chatting him up in the VA and telling him their stories from the war years, they acknowledged him. The tremendous gift of that stops me cold. No one in the world escapes from trauma and tragedy — it’s coming for us all. But in sharing our stories, we can see and be seen.

My son is nearly nine now, around the age I was when I first read about Granddad in Life. He likes legends of knights and castles and dragons. Lately he’s been putting together the story of how his mom and I met, and coming to terms with the puzzling fact that we were once children ourselves. One of these nights, after we’ve finished dinner and cleaned up the dishes, I’ll bring out one of Granddad’s copies of Life and instruct him in the careful turning of its pages. I’ll tell him everything I can about the people in the pictures. I’ll try to answer any question that might spring to mind — about the war, or why people are always fighting. I don’t know what it will mean to him, if anything. Maybe for him the story will be how meaningful it all was to me. Or maybe it will blur and fade, one more dog-eared photograph waiting to be discovered in memory’s dusty attic. Anything is possible. We live in a little town in Massachusetts, surrounded by orchards like the one in France where Granddad nearly died. Someday years from now my son may even realize why, when we’re out driving, I always point out pretty clouds in the sky.

***

Steve Edwards is author of Breaking into the Backcountry, a memoir of his time as the caretaker of a wilderness homestead in southern Oregon. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and son.

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Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel

How to Stay Married After Your Baby is Born, or, I’m not Divorced Yet

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Laura June | Now My Heart is Full | July 2018 | 12 minutes (3,056 words)

It’s incredibly weird to write a book about your child and not write about your marriage, when you’re definitely married. My daughter Zelda definitely has a dad, his name is Josh, and he’s my husband. He is absolutely not thirty-three Chihuahuas stacked in a trench coat. I assure you he is 100 percent real.

But I committed quite early, in the days of writing essays for public consumption about my life with my daughter, to not really saying anything about my marriage, simply because Josh, as a somewhat public person in his life as an editor and writer himself, never “signed up” for my project. He could have chosen to write about his experiences of fatherhood, but he didn’t. I’m sure his version would be much different than mine.

And there was something too dear and near to me in the thought of writing honestly about my relationship.

But also: I don’t remember that much of him in the first year. I have to try really hard to pull up memories of him sometimes, as if there was a finite amount of space inside me then for storing things.

I know this is more my failing than his absence. It was motherhood-induced myopia, where all I could or would see was myself and my daughter and the various threads that tied us back and forth to each other. It was selfishness personified, a biological reaction. Taking care of a child is so hard, so time consuming: it made sense that our emotions and needs would consume me and that in turn, three years later I would have a blank space for a lot of where Josh should be.

But also: I did spend much of my time with Zelda alone. The weekends were family time, and they were necessarily less stressful, simply because there were two sets of hands, two people to manage the packing up and the setting off. We were happy some days and miserable others. But most of the time he wasn’t physically around. He was just getting mean, panicked, desperate, or even angry texts from me. It’s not that he didn’t suffer the emotional drain that comes with first-time parenthood, but he did experience a lot of it only secondhand.

And even though I did decide to leave him out of my writing largely, I feel I need to say something. I owe it to myself to be honest about how awful that first part of it really was.
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Mind the Dog’s Feet

Associated Press, Cam Barker / Getty, Themba Hadebe / AP, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Chibundu Onuzo | Longreads | July 2018 | 17 minutes (4,340 words)

 

The invitation was for a literary festival in Durban. I had never heard of Durban. Only Johannesburg and Cape Town, but I knew South Africa like I knew my grandfather who died before I was born. If he walked into a room, I would recognize his voice and the cut of his suit from the stories my mother had told me.

I knew Mandela for the icon that he was. His image dangling from a leather chain. Mandela on a flag, fluttering. Mandela on a T-shirt, stretched across two pectorals. The man smiled and his eyes disappeared behind the smile. His teeth looked strong. Twenty-seven years without a dentist. A miracle.

I knew something of the struggle against apartheid. Growing up, our video collection was small. We watched Sarafina and Sister Act 2 until the images were blurred by gray static. Whoopi Goldberg played the lead in both movies, cast twice as an inspirational teacher. Sarafina was grimmer than the second Sister Act but only by a few shades. An African township versus an American inner city. Either way, almost everyone was musical and black.

I knew a few South Africans. After I’d moved to England, I met them in London. They were young, white, healthy, educated, and in exile from black South Africa. They couldn’t get jobs in their country. They couldn’t get the jobs they felt they deserved. For some, scions of wealthy land-owning or mine-owning families, their stay in England was to gain “international exposure” in a multinational company, to mark time before they took over the family business. For others, their exile was permanent. There was no place for them in a South Africa, where they would no longer automatically be at the front of the queue. Any bad news from home was met with a sort of schadenfreude. It was proof that they had been right to leave. The country was going to the dogs under black rule.

I was hostile when I met these white South Africans. It wasn’t my land, but it was my struggle, as it was the struggle of the thousands of black Africans who had donated financially to the anti-apartheid cause. The grievance was ours.

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Confessions of An Unredeemed Fan

Shirlaine Forrest / Getty

Leslie Jamison | Tin House | Spring 2017 | 18 minutes (4,943 words)

Amy Winehouse’s last big concert was in Belgrade, a month before she died. This was June of 2011. Billed as the beginning of her comeback tour, the gig turned into one of her most infamous train wrecks: when she came on stage, she was drunk beyond the point of making sense, beyond the point of standing — tripping and crouching, sitting down to take off her shoes, leaning into her bass guitarist and holding his hand. The crowd started heckling her early and didn’t let up. “Sing!” they shouted. “Sing! Sing!”

Her eyes were as large as a child’s, as if she’d been dropped into a life she had no idea how to live. Her life had been unmanageable for years. But the thing was, she had all this management: a promoter, a producer, a father. She was asleep when they put her on the plane to Serbia. She slept for the whole flight, woke up to her own life, and heard: Sing! Her fans loved her as long as she gave them what they needed — as long as she broke down so they could watch, as long as she picked herself back up again so she could give them her voice. Her backup guys in their orange suits didn’t know what to do with her.

The footage of Belgrade is nearly impossible to believe, but there it is, happening over and over again, as many times as you want to click the YouTube refresh button. Amy stumbles along in her tiny yellow dress with ragged stripes of black, a bruised banana. When she falls off an amp, her drummer’s smile stretches into something more like a grimace. Is this an oh-those-self-destructive-music-legends-how-they-fuck-up moment or an actually-this-woman-is-basically-committing-suicide-right-in-front-of-you moment? He isn’t sure what face to make. The public didn’t know what face to make for years. “She’s shit-faced,” says a voice on the YouTube video. “She doesn’t know where she is.” And then: “Look at her. Look at her.” At a certain point, her face changes. She’s not confused anymore, or scared. She’s smirking. Her smirk seems to say, I’m done with this. She throws the mic. Someone hands her another. One voice cries out: “Sing or give me my money back!”


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She finally does sing, her voice barely audible above her music — above the song she’d written to turn her heartbreak into something beautiful, something profitable, your love goes and my love grows, the music that had turned her into a tabloid sensation it never seemed like she wanted to be. At a certain point, her voice is no longer audible above the noise of the crowd, the sounds of their frustration and desire, their voices reminding her of the words to her own song.

* * *

The public loved to see Amy fucking up. They loved to hate her, loved to judge her, loved to feel bad for her. They loved to relate to her, whatever the terms of that relation, because it brought them closer to her, and what they wanted most was access. The public loved to watch her falling apart. The darkness inside her was always spilling out. They got more of it than they wanted: She couldn’t sing for them in Belgrade. She couldn’t stay alive for them in London.

The public loved to see Amy fucking up. They loved to hate her, loved to judge her, loved to feel bad for her.

At a concert on the Isle of Wight, where she slurred her mumbled words behind a wheel bearing the title HMS Winehouse, she sang “Rehab,” her unrepentant rallying cry, and drank from a plastic cup of wine held close to her mouth. She had to choose between drinking and singing — moment by moment, on a physical, literal level: she couldn’t do both at once. She was already drunk. At the end of the song, she threw the cup and an arc of booze sprayed across the stage, streaking it like paint. No, no, no, she sang. She wouldn’t go to rehab. Instead, she was doing this.

There are thousands of comments on her YouTube clips, full of taffy strands of pity: It’s really sad to see a human being like this. Or else harsh strokes of judgment: She is the definition of trash, nice voice or not! She is a disgrace to music and all the hard-working musicians around the globe. Fifty years after the emergence of Morton Jellinek’s disease model of alcoholism, people are still trying to figure out if it’s a sickness or a sin: Addiction = retardation . . . the crowd was right to boo her . . . So many people dream of being a Singer and being on stage and Amy just threw it all away.

Someone else: I see someone with a broken heart.

After Belgrade, one newscaster wondered: “Why do they keep putting her on stage? Surely they know she has a problem.” Another said: “This was supposed to be a comeback. And she TOTALLY. BLEW. IT.”

Something about her addiction made people angry. But that anger wasn’t simple. The woman who wrote, Amy just threw it all away, had a story of her own: As for accidentally OD’ing that’s bullshit. My dad didn’t have a fucking accident when he overdosed on heroin . . . Me and my brothers just stood and watched as the paramedics revived him. Someone else just had a question: Does she want to go back to rehab now ;P

* * *

The soap opera version of the story went something like this: Amy’s drinking got out of control after a breakup with Blake, her no-good junkie boyfriend, and then her friends tried to make her go to rehab. She said, no, no, no, and then she wrote an album that blew up, fueled by the anthem of her refusal to get better. Her career went through the stratosphere and Blake fought to get her back. They were madly in love. They got married in Miami, and hugely addicted to crack back home in London. At the peak of her use, she was spending £16,000 a week on hard drugs.

After Amy almost overdosed, her friends and family staged an intervention at a Four Seasons in Hampshire. The doctor said if she had another seizure, she’d die. But she went on her US tour anyway. She and Blake kept doing drugs together till he went to prison. She won five Grammys but she wasn’t allowed to attend the ceremony because of all the drugs. In her acceptance speech — delivered at a club in London, where she was watching from afar — she said: “For my Blake, my Blake incarcerated.”

A YouTube video from six months after Blake’s incarceration shows Amy high on crack, playing with a bunch of newborn mice. Watching it is like falling into some one else’s terrible dream. “This one has a message for Blake,” Amy says, holding one of the wriggling furless mice on her finger. She gives us a squeaky mouse-voice, pleading: “Blake, please don’t divorce me.” The mouse-voice says: “I’m only a day old but I know what love is.”

Even after Amy finally stopped the hard drugs, she kept drinking. She and Blake got divorced, mouse pleas notwithstanding. She kept drinking, and kept singing, but never made another record. She stopped drinking, kept drinking, stopped drinking, kept drinking — until her body finally just gave up. When she died, her blood alcohol content was over .4 percent, five times the legal limit for drunk driving. The coroner ruled it “death by misadventure.”

* * *

The paparazzi loved Amy. They couldn’t get enough of her. They loved her beauty. They loved its blemishing even more. They didn’t just want her beehive hair; they wanted it ratty. They didn’t just want her eyeliner cat’s-eyes; they wanted them smeared. Their photos tried to zoom in on her cuts and bruises; the damage from her crack binges and booze benders. Little wounds were like openings in the tent flaps of her privacy. The camera got close on her wet flesh as if it were trying to get inside the wounds themselves, the closest thing to fucking that a camera could manage. The paparazzi wanted to get right into her bloodstream.

Amy once said to her husband: I want to feel what you feel. And that’s what the public wanted from her — to know what she felt, to get under her skin. But also they wanted to jump away again, hide under the safe cover of irony: What crawled into her hair and died there? one comedian wanted to know. She looks like a campaign poster for neglected horses. Her broke-down addict self was irritating. It was so fucking sad. OMG, it was funny.

Her addiction kept delivering physical evidence of her vulnerability, her bruises and her gashes and her emaciated body, and comedians kept delivering jokes so everyone could metabolize the horror of what was happening, like a five-year-long video of someone slowly dying in public. One paparazzi photographer took a photo of her getting into a car and started snapping shots closer and closer on her crotch, then posted these photos as proof that she was wearing diapers — that she’d started wearing them because she couldn’t control her bodily functions. It was unending, our collective fascination with the self-inflicted weakness of a beautiful woman.

Why were we obsessed with her anti-rehab anthem? It’s a great song, straight-up and flat-out, jaunty and sublime, Amy’s singular voice all acrobatic and vaulting and rich, like vinyl and leather; the chorus blunt and surprising, full of defiance where you might expect to find the keeling croon of self-pity. The song finds hope and energy in its own rhythms. It’s not interested in self-care. The no, no, no of refusing rehab echoes another kind of assertion: Yes I been black, but when I come back, you’ll know, know, know. No turns into know: resistance becomes knowledge. This isn’t just refusal; it’s a declaration of presence.

It was unending, our collective fascination with the self-inflicted weakness of a beautiful woman.

The unrepentant junkie had been a beloved figure for a long time, an unleashed alternative to the good little sober boy. William Burroughs’s 1953 cult classic, Junkie, was subtitled Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict. It offered an appealing antidote to the bow-tied conversion narrative.

During the same decade, just as federal legislation against “narcotic addicts” was growing more draconian — mandating minimum sentences and constructing the addict as villain — people created another vision of the addict in stark opposition to these moralizing measures: someone who wasn’t apologizing for anything, who was spinning something defiant or even beautiful from the darkness of their compulsion. Elizabeth Hardwick loved to imagine that Billie Holiday faced the wreckage of her life with unrepentant grandeur. She admired Holiday’s “luminous self-destruction,” and her refusal to play nice: “there did not seem to be any pleading need to quit, to modify.” But that was its own myth; Holiday tried to kick her habit many times.

Perhaps with Amy, decades later, it was liberating to see someone who didn’t want to get better; who seemed to say, Fuck it, let’s DRINK. Let’s roll the foil and smoke. If Amy was an unredeemed addict, then “Rehab” was her battle cry: She sang it over and over and over again. She sang it and stumbled; she sang it and drank; she sang it and spilled her wine. She tripped over her sky-scraper heels. “I’m not gonna spend ten weeks,” she sang. “Have everyone think I’m on the mend.”

It was exciting to hear her resist the solace of mending and its easy answers, to hear her reject gift-wrapped redemption, refuse to give it to us — the public act of recuperating pain by performing its transcendence. She refused to get better.

But maybe “unrepentant” wasn’t an alternative to the fantasy of conversion so much as another flavor of fantasy. Maybe fuck it was a fantasy. Maybe our collective vision of her alchemy — ache altered into chorus — depended on a myth that wasn’t quite true. As the poet John Berryman put it, even he had to fight the “delusion that my art depended on my drinking.” That delusion was what he had to break, he felt, if he ever wanted to get sober.

Amy launched her career on refusing rehab, but she actually went to rehab four times. On a home video from her first stint at an island rehab mansion called the Causeway Retreat, Blake taunts her to sing a revised version of “Rehab.” Can she still sing, no, no, no, now that she’s actually in treatment? Will she have to sing, yes?

Amy launched her career on refusing rehab, but she actually went to rehab four times.

But she doesn’t seem particularly drawn to the joke. She tells him: “I don’t mind it here, actually.”

* * *

Amy Winehouse was born in London in September of 1983, three months after I was born across an ocean. When she was twenty-seven, she died from too much booze in her blood. When I was twenty-seven, I gave up booze entirely. Maybe these correspondences are part of the reason I grew so obsessed with her life, and with the possibility of what her life might have looked like sober. Or maybe these correspondences are just the little pieces of her I’d like to claim for myself. People love claiming little pieces of Amy for themselves: “Everyone wanted a piece of her,” said her friend Nick, her first manager.

By the time I found myself wanting a piece of Amy, in memoriam, I’d been sober for years. But I could still remember what it had felt like to be unsober — gloriously, unapologetically unsober: drinking whiskey by a bonfire, feeling the sluice of heat down my throat, its rhyme with the flames at my fingertips. I remembered how drinking felt like constant apology; how a blackout could drop inside your life like hostile terrain, behind enemy lines, and how getting drunk also felt absolutely necessary, the only horizon of relief — like the perspective point in a painting, the crucial pivot everything else referred to. I remembered how the prospect of sobriety seemed like unrelenting gray, after luminous, disjunctive nights — a bleak horizon, a shirt washed so many times it had lost all its color. What could the straight line of on the mend hold that might rival the dark, sparkling sweep of falling apart?

* * *

When I imagined sobriety, before I got sober, I imagined The Shining: Jack Nicholson playing a writer white-knuckling his way through bitter sobriety in an empty mountain resort — the opposite of rehab, solitary confinement instead of company — or else a rehab full of ghosts. He spent his days punching a single sentence into his typewriter, over and over: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

On the night she won five Grammys, Amy told one of her best friends: “Jules, this is so boring without drugs.”

Part of me wants to tell her: You were wrong. It wasn’t boring without drugs. You just needed to learn how to live sober. Part of me wants to tell her about church basements and evening coffee dates in diners, about the primal thrill of sitting across from someone who has felt some version of what you’ve felt — the fear of boredom, the urge to flee pain, or dissolve self, or permit self — and hear them say it out loud, how liberating that feels, in recovery, resonance not as easy moral or redemption but as a sense of outward possibility, drawing a door on something that looked like a wall.

That is part of me. Another part of me knows I’m drawn to watching her destroy herself. In one short story about an alcoholic going to rehab, Raymond Carver writes: “Part of me wanted help. But there was another part.”

This was the other part: drugs and booze were part of why Amy’s life was so interesting, to me and to everyone. They were part of why we wanted to keep getting closer, wanted to bring our magnifying glasses and our microscopes, our telephoto lenses, to give ourselves a better view of her heartbreak.

Even the title of Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary about her life confesses our collective desire for proximity: just Amy. As if we all knew her; or could still get to know her, even after she was dead, maybe because she had died. As if she were still available to us; as if she had ever been. Amy. It’s ridiculous I call her that. But I find it hard to call her anything else. The film summons the fantasy of intimacy but also ironizes it. It’s full of paparazzi shouting: “Amy! Amy! Amy!” like the chorus to another song.

Off their tongues, in their mouths, her first name doesn’t summon intimacy but its distortion; not private relation but its violation. “Cheer up, Amy!” one tabloid guy calls out, after she shoves a few of his colleagues out of the way. Then a year later, when her body is being carried out of her Camden mansion, a voice says, “Rest in peace, Amy,” a perfect stranger, still on a first-name basis.

* * *

Every story about a dead girl needs a villain, and Amy dangles a few suspects: Maybe her promoter killed her by keeping the machinery of her fame running even when her body was getting crushed by it. Maybe her father killed her by not giving her the love she needed when she was young. Maybe her husband killed her by giving her the thing that numbed the pain her father had already caused, and by causing even more pain that needed numbing.

The film offers Amy as victim-addict and Blake as villain-addict: the woman who got sucked into crack; the man who dragged her into its thrall. We don’t have to reconcile these types: addict as victim; addict as villain. We’re allowed to project them across two conveniently discrete human bodies.

When the documentary shows Blake coming back into Amy’s life, after her album about their breakup made her a star, it visually frames his return as a literal emergence from darkness: he materializes from a dark doorway across a series of paparazzi shots. He’s like a demon, ready to take her back: Back to Black. A doctor who consulted with both of them said: “It was a common case of one person having a situation that was very beneficial to his using . . . not wanting the other person to get better for fear of losing the gravy train.”

Of Amy, the doctor said simply: “She was a very vulnerable woman.”

Amy’s addiction meant she was vulnerable, while Blake’s addiction meant he preyed on someone vulnerable. Amy needed to be protected; Blake needed to be protected from. But Blake needed crack for reasons of his own: “It literally eradicates any kind of negative feeling,” he said once. This was a man who had tried to slit his wrists as a boy, at the age of nine. Was that not vulnerability as well?

* * *

Really the film’s greatest villain is celebrity itself: we killed her. Celebrity was an ally to Amy’s addiction, and an enemy to her art. It kept her in gigs rather than in the studio. Kapadia’s documentary has an uneasy relationship to the paparazzi it documents. They are its villains — all menace and flash, shutters like staccato gunfire — but also its collaborators. The film is built largely from their footage. At one point we see Amy closing a curtain; gazing out her window warily, protecting herself from view. But we can only witness that violation because the violation gave us a record of her resistance.

Celebrity was an ally to Amy’s addiction, and an enemy to her art.

The film critiques the paparazzi’s hunger for access, but also raises the stakes on this hunger — effectively, implicitly — by promising to take us deeper inside Amy’s wounds than the paparazzi ever did. By showing the harsh glare and invasive constancy of paparazzi as one kind of access, heartless and shallow, the film invites us to think of its exploration as another kind of access entirely, full of depth and compassion. We want to feel better about our hunger, but it’s still hunger: We’re still after her, still sniffing the trail of her blood. We still just want in.

Or I should say: I wanted in. I’m not pleased or proud — but there it was, that desire. Winehouse’s life was gone, Amy’s life was gone, and that only made me want to get deeper inside what her life had been. My own drunk life was gone and sometimes I wanted to get back inside it, too. Sometimes I didn’t feel done with it. When I saw ten empty champagne flutes in front of her on a tabletop in St. Lucia, I felt sad for her, and I felt shame — shame at my own desire for proximity — and I also felt thirsty. Even the empty vodka bottles cluttering her home; all of it made me remember that old fuck it feeling. She’d followed it somewhere else.

When I watched the public obsession on film, an endless fuel driving the celebrity that killed her, their eager hands buying the magazines the paparazzi peppered with their eager angles, I hated that public. I also knew I was part of it. The fact of the film itself was almost sickening: we had outlived her, and we were still obsessed with her.

At one point, the film gives us the photo collage of a bender, after Amy’s first stint in rehab: her face darkened by smeared mascara, Blake’s whole face covered in streaks of blood; his arms in bandages, holding his cigarettes; her ballet flats covered in splotches of red. He’d cut himself with a bottle and she had to do it, too, because she wanted to feel whatever he felt, and we want to see the blood on her, so we can feel what she felt, too, or convince ourselves we’ve gotten close.

The film describes the bathroom at her recording studio after she’d covered it with her own vomit; the white towels darkened by mascara where she’d wiped her face. The film narrates these details while showing a video of Amy playing guitar in the studio: she is binging on booze and purging beauty, still metabolizing the pain, still turning it into song.

It was uncomfortable to watch the film because it was exposing a fixation and exploiting it at once. I cried when I watched it, and I wanted it to end. Then I wanted to watch it from the beginning, so I could cry again. I watched the end of the film at least twenty times, the haunting piano composition that plays as her corpse is carried from her house to a private ambulance in the street, as a doctor’s voice speculates that years of starving and purging and drinking “just made her heart stop.” I watched mourners gathering awkwardly in the street, after her funeral service: a man in a kippah standing with his head bowed in grief, one hand to his face; her mother using a cane to get into her car. I thought: Who filmed this private grief? I thought: Who am I, watching it?

“I died a hundred times,” Amy sings in one of her torch songs, and I kept hitting rewind — to watch her die again.

* * *

“This isn’t Amy,” her mother said in 2007. “It’s as if her whole life’s turned into a stage performance.” Amy always had a sense of humor about the dark silhouette she cast, the ways in which she had become an archetype. When the Guardian asked, “What keeps you awake at night?” She said: “Being sober.” She was self-aware about her “issues” and their public performance. “What is your most unappealing habit?” she was asked once. She said: “Being an abusive drunk.”

She seemed to get a kick out of performing a kind of ironized self-destruction, spelling Blake’s name on her stomach with a shard of glass while Terry Richardson snapped photographs. She called it “chickenscratch on her tummy,” but it wasn’t just performance. She’d really cut herself for years. Her arms were covered with scars.

She seemed to get a kick out of performing a kind of ironized self-destruction

Mos Def remembers watching Amy smoke crack one night and thinking: This is someone who is trying to disappear. Near the end, her doctor asked her: “Do you want to die?” She said: “No, I don’t want to die.” Her bodyguard said she didn’t want to do that final gig in Belgrade: “Can’t go anywhere. Can’t hide anywhere. She needed an escape.” He said, “Then the drinking . . . Escape route, innit?”

* * *

When I watched Amy change across the course of the documentary, watched her body shrink across the years, I felt as if I were watching the disappearance Mos Def described her craving. She went from a voluptuous girl to an emaciated creature; from plump to skeletal. Her beehive got so huge. Her body got so tiny.

Her tiny body was part of the outsized myth, too, our collective awe at how the force of her voice — and the chaos of her her feverish dysfunction — was somehow held by the slip and twigs of her body. Her Rolling Stone cover profile started with her size: “Alongside the world’s tallest free-standing tower, one of the world’s tiniest pop stars is crouched next to a garbage pail, collecting a pile of eyeliner pencils and mascara tubes between her hands.” It’s all there: She was tiny. She was obsessed with her own beauty. She was close to the garbage.

In that profile, she says she wanted a different kind of life: “I know I’m talented, but I wasn’t put here to sing. I was put here to be a wife and a mom and to look after my family. She told one newspaper she wanted to be remembered as genuine.

Billie Holiday may have been beloved for what Hardwick called “the sheer enormity of her vices. . . the outrageousness of them,” but she had other dreams: She wanted to buy a farm in the country and take in orphans. She once tried to adopt a child in Boston, but the judge wouldn’t let her because of her drug record. Hardwick loved the absence of “any pleading need to quit, to modify” in Holiday, and admired that she spoke with “cold anger” of “various cures that had been forced upon her. But Holiday wasn’t entirely resistant to quitting or to cures. Her anger was directed at the particular kind of “cure” that involved arrest and incarceration, persecution at the hands of federal agents. As a black woman, her addiction made her more vulnerable to being treated as a criminal: she spent nearly a year in a West Virginia prison, and died handcuffed to her hospital bed. She hated that cure, but as for the junk itself? She tried to quit over and over again. To her pianist she said: “Carl, don’t you ever use this shit! It’s no good for you! Stay away from it! You don’t want to end up like me!”

* * *

If Amy had gone to rehab that first time, we might have never gotten Back to Black, but I wonder what we would have gotten instead. I would have loved to hear her sing sober. Not just two weeks sober, but three years sober, twenty years sober. “She had the complete gift,” Tony Bennett once said of her. “If she had lived, I would have said, ‘Life teaches you, really, how to live it; if you live long enough.’”

I never lived Amy’s life and she never lived mine, but I know that when I see her on that stage in Belgrade, as if she’s been air-dropped into a moment she can’t possibly fathom, I think of coming out of a blackout into the strange new world of a Mexican bathroom stall, or a dirt basement, wearing handcuffs, tasting gin and citrus, or some breezeless bedroom where it was easier to let a man finish fucking me than it was to stop him.

I know that when I watch Amy stumbling across that stage in Belgrade, and finally squatting there — still and quiet, smiling — just waiting for something to happen or something to stop happening, I feel less that I know what is happening in her and more that her eyes know something that happened in me. I feel sad she didn’t get years of ordinary coffee dates and people saying, I get that, that she was doomed to her singularity and her vodka-thinned blood and all her drunken stumbling under the broken tower of her beehive, hair like a pagoda on her head and her body barely holding the weight — until it wasn’t, until it couldn’t any longer.

* * *

“Confessions of an Unredeemed Fan” by Leslie Jamison. Copyright © 2017 Leslie Jamison, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

Leslie Jamison teaches at the Columbia University MFA program, where she directs the nonfiction concentration and leads the Marian House Project. Her latest book, The Recovering, was published in April 2018. She’s also written a novel, The Gin Closet, and a collection of essays, The Empathy Exams. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer.

Understanding Adrian Piper’s Probing Body of Work

Adrian Piper. Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features. 1981. Pencil on paper. 10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.3 cm). The Eileen Harris Norton Collection © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin

New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) is showing a retrospective of the work of Berlin-based, American-born philosopher and artist Adrian Piper. “A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965-2016” is the museum’s largest exhibition of works by a living artist in its history. Piper’s video, installation, drawings, photography, and performances transformed the field of conceptual art — a field in which the concepts behind the art are more important than its physical objects  — by making space for subjectivity, context, and reflection. Her work confronts themes and theories of race, gender, privilege, space, and time with rigor and humor, inviting strict attention and engagement from its audience.

A number of esteemed critics have written up the show: Stories from Jillian Steinhauer, Antwaun Sargent, Jessica Lanay, and an exploratory profile by Thomas Chatterton Williams are all necessary reading. Earlier this month, the New York Times published an extended interview with Piper in order to “fill in the gaps” of existing coverage and consider her artistic practice and work in philosophy cohesively. Not only does the interview lend insight into Piper’s practice and its underpinnings, but in it, she offers a roadmap, a way of morally weighing the conversations and reckonings on race, gender, and power that are currently underway.

L.O.B.: You also demonstrate how philosophical controversies that lit up the 18th century are still burning strong today — as so many protest movements are also showing us, including Black Lives Matter. What strategies, if any, could that movement take away from your writings?

A.P.: My work in philosophy does not presume to tell anyone what to do. It addresses the foundations of ethics — metaethics — rather than normative ethics. So it does not prescribe any particular strategies for action to anyone. These can be meaningfully formulated only by those who are directly involved in and therefore maximally well informed about the circumstances under which action is required.

However, perhaps my work can offer a way of understanding what is at stake in the Black Lives Matter movement that may be of use. The basic argument of “Rationality and the Structure of the Self is organized around the distinction between egocentric and transpersonal rationality. Transpersonal rationality consists in hard-wired cognitive dispositions that define us as human beings: to consistency, coherence, impartiality, impersonality, intellectual discrimination, foresight, deliberation, self-reflection and self-control. Egocentric rationality consists in placing these dispositions in the service of satisfying our personal desires and advancing our self-interest.

It is easy to conceive the Black Lives Matter movement as merely advancing the self-interest of African-Americans in surviving and flourishing within a society whose self-interest is systemically opposed to this. This reduces the impetus for protest to a conflict of interests between those who join or support this movement and those who resist it — as though all that were at stake were whether or not police are justified in being so terrified of an African-American teenager that shooting him in the back is a defensible preventive measure. To conceive the issue merely in these terms turns it into a contest as to whose interests are to prevail — those who see trigger-happy police as protecting their interests or those who see them as sabotaging theirs. This view of the situation lends itself to the conclusion that the United States is still fighting the same race war it was in 1860.

There is a lot of truth to this view. But it ignores the fact that the Black Lives Matter movement is not fighting merely to protect and advance the interests of African-Americans. It is fighting to cultivate a fundamental level of humanity in all Americans. The transpersonally rational dispositions I’ve listed constitute the ancient foundation of the historically recent idea of a universal human right that extends basic freedoms, responsibilities, rights and resources to every human being, regardless of their interests — not merely to those whom the police are personally inclined to protect. That African-Americans have survived and flourished for 400 years by resisting an environment devoted to dehumanizing them demonstrates quite conclusively how highly their capacities for transpersonal rationality are developed. The statement that black lives matter is a reminder to those whose perpetuation of that environment has effectively dehumanized them to develop those capacities just as highly; i.e. that their own humanity also matters.

L.O.B.: You’ve said that an epistemic skepticism drives your work. Could you elaborate?

A.P.: As an attitude rather than a philosophical position, epistemic skepticism consists in always second-guessing your own judgments — about yourself, other people and situations; always monitoring those judgments to make sure you’re seeing clearly, have the facts right, aren’t making any unfounded inferences or deceiving yourself, etc. Women are particularly skilled at this because their judgment, credibility and authority start to come under attack during puberty, as part of the process of gender socialization. They are made to feel uncertain about themselves, their place in society and their right to their own opinions. If that socialization doesn’t work, they can’t be made to obey, to defer and to depend on others to make important decisions for them. Obviously this is a horrible, misogynistic practice, now known as “gaslighting” after the 1944 George Cukor film. But the benefit is precisely this self-critical attitude — of careful review of and reflection on the adequacy of one’s own thought processes.

This attitude actually does put into concrete practice the philosophical position of epistemic skepticism that has a very long and honorable history going back to Descartes and even further back to Socrates. It has had a very beneficial effect on my work in philosophy because my judgment, my credibility and my authority to make philosophical pronouncements started coming under attack from the moment I entered the professional part of the discipline. The challenges, slights and attempts at intimidation were unremitting. In part, I have the self-confidence my parents gave me to thank for surviving them. But there is no doubt in my mind that this female reflex of self-doubt and self-criticism also had a lot to do with it. I don’t deceive myself into believing that all of my philosophical views are right. But thanks to that reflex, they are well grounded.

Adrian Piper’s MoMA exhibition runs through this Sunday, July 22.

Read the interview

 

We Have Always Lived in the House

Spiffy J / Getty

Victoria Comella | Longreads | July 2018 | 16 minutes (3,784 words)

 

It was a good house, the one where we lived together as a family. It was — still is — a white colonial with black shutters in Loudonville, New York, a small suburban hamlet just outside Albany. Built in the 1920s, it was old but solid with a strong foundation and sturdy walls that housed a perfectly wonderful childhood. I was happy there with my parents and my older sister, and we did what most families do in their houses: We built memories. We built them not knowing at the time they would become memories. That someday in the not-too-distant future we’d look back on those times in the house and wonder where it all went. Wonder who we were in that house, and if those people living that life could have in fact been us.

But it was us. In that house.

And the house would be the last place I’d see my mother alive.

***

A week before I left the house, set to head east to Boston to start my freshman year at Northeastern University, the twin towers fell 150 miles south of where I was standing. The floodgates opened then as I hovered on the brink of adulthood, and in rushed the awareness of just how rocky the terrain of life outside the house could be. How big the world was but also how untenable, how volatile, and how those strong, sturdy walls I had been so desperate to break free of as a teenager were also, perhaps, more important than I’d thought.

During college I would move into three different apartments — Back Bay to Allston then back again. I would see the depression of an entire city the day after the Red Sox lost the 2003 American League Championship Series against the Yankees, and I would be there the following year to watch the city break an 86-year curse to win the World Series before graduating eight months later. In January 2006, I left Boston for New York City after having landed a dream publishing job as a publicity assistant at Penguin. I slept on the floor in an apartment in Williamsburg — before Williamsburg was cool — that belonged to two friends who were in a band. We’d brush our teeth in the kitchen because the bathroom didn’t have a sink.

Everything I had was in a duffel bag. It wasn’t home, but it was New York and it was where my stuff was.

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