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This Month In Books: ‘This Is Really Not What I Want To Be Reading’

Jon Tyson / Unsplash

Dear Reader,

I spent a while thinking about what the theme of this month’s books newsletter ought to be. Should it be state censorship, like the kind experienced by both Denis Diderot, the French philosopher, and Mikhail Sholokhov, the Soviet Nobel Laureate? Or, should it be (apropos of nothing, of course) all the scammers that popped up this month in our books coverage, like … well, also like Diderot (defrauder of priests) and Sholokhov (plagiarist)? (For an account of Diderot’s youthful pastime of scamming priests, I’ll have to refer you to the book itself — sadly, our excerpt doesn’t cover that side of him.) Then I realized the theme couldn’t be more obvious if it was lying face down on my coffee table, propped open like that (and ruining the spine) in order to save my page — books! The books this month are all about books!

For instance, starting with our two bad boys Diderot and Sholokhov: As Andrew Curran tells it in his new biography The Art of Thinking Freely, Diderot, along with his Enlightenment pals, wrote/edited the massive multi-volume Encyclopédie as, basically, a prank on the theocratic regime they lived under; the encyclopedia format, especially the radical potential of — I kid you not — cross-references, allowed the authors to subtlety undermine notions of absolute and divine authority. Meanwhile, as you can read in Brian J. Boeck’s biography Stalin’s Scribe, Sholokhov wrote/plagiarized a massive multi-volume novel, And Quietly Flows the Don — a genuine masterpiece — that he couldn’t finish for years. The main problem, other than a lack of additional material to plagiarize, was that if he had finished the book during the Terror, and all the characters hadn’t convincingly turned into Communists by the end, then Stalin would certainly have killed him. So, better to wait it out.

A little closer to our own time, in a conversation with interviewer Adam Morgan about Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the first installment in his own massive multi-volume endeavor, Marlon James points to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series as a book that “continues to rule his life.” Gormenghast, says James, taught him “how the fantastical grows up,” and paved a path forward for his latest project, a literary fantasy epic based in African mythologies and histories. David Treuer, in the prologue to his new history of Native America since the Wounded Knee Massacre, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, points to a book that “ruled his life” in a very different way: Treuer explains that his own book was conceived of as a “counternarrative” to Dee Brown’s classic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. When he read Brown’s book in college, Treuer says he had felt deep “dismay” at the fact that “Brown’s narrative relied on — and revived — the same old sad story of the ‘dead Indian’” (as in, spiritually and culturally dead, as well as having suffered through many massacres and tragedies) and invoked the squalor of the reservations. Treuer felt compelled to present an alternate narrative, “to communicate what it was that [he] loved” about his home and his history, to change what had so alienated him as a young Native reader of Brown’s book.


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On the other hand, when beginning work on her latest novel, Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli tells interviewer Lily Meyer that she didn’t have a book in mind with which hers could be set in conversation, or which had laid a path that hers could follow. So, being a self-described “documenter” — as opposed to a fabulist, who could sit down in a “vacuum” and invent — she needed to hunt for one:

I read tangentially, obliquely, not reading about the child refugee crisis or even the crisis in migration from Syria. I read Marcel Schwob’s The Children’s Crusade. I read about orphan trains, ships during slavery, lots of historical documents, and just archive, archive, archive. Then I read a book called The Gates of Paradise, written by Jerzy Andrzejewski and translated by Sergio Pitol, and I thought, This is exactly it. This is the way in.

Luiselli describes the ephemeral euphoria of finding The Gates of Paradise, which was a kind of moment every reader knows well, the kind we’re always aching to hit on again — that realization that you’ve finally found the book you want to be reading:

It’s so hard to find a book that you absolutely want to read in that moment. I begin a lot of books and then realize, This is really not what I want to be reading. Not the atmosphere, not the tone, not the voice. I don’t want to be in this world. When you find one that is exactly what you want to be reading, it’s like a miracle of some sort.

Devi S. Laskar wrote her new novel, The Atlas of Reds and Blues, in dialogue with yet another type of book — neither one that has been haunting her since young adulthood, nor one recently discovered after a long search, but one that is irrevocably lost. Years ago, her finished novel disappeared when her home was raided by law enforcement and her laptop seized as evidence. Her new novel is born of Laskar’s efforts to come to terms with the grief of that bereavement, and move past it, finding new ways to carry the work forward:

I started writing this story back in 2004, and then I was relying heavily on my previous experiences as a reporter, trying to be factually accurate. By the time I returned to this story about a decade later, I had hard choices to make because of what had happened, how I’d lost most of my work [in the raid]. First I had to come to terms that I’d probably never see my laptop again. Once I got through that… I jettisoned a lot of the facts that I’d previously held dear. I took a lot of similar “beats” or inflection points in the story and I made them composite, basing them on several people’s experiences, not just my own. I am not the narrator.

The loss of the first draft changed the structure and perspective of the final work. It’s as if reality inside the books shifts with all our troubles and griefs here on the outside. It reminds me of Edward Gorey, and his protestations to a long-ago interviewer. As Bridey Heing writes in her review of Mark Dery’s new biography of Gorey, Born To Be Posthumous:

When questioned on whether or not his books are a reflection of reality or fantasy, Gorey responded, “No one ever lets me explain what I mean about the reality of my books! Everyone always thinks, ‘Isn’t that amusing that this is his idea of reality!’”

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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Versage

Bénédicte Kurzen and Noor

Allyn Gaestel, Photos by Bénédicte Kurzen / Noor | Nataal | February 2019 | 16 minutes (4,113 words)

If you look closely you’ll notice
That the pattern on this soft broadcloth shirt
Is made of working man’s blood
And praying folks’ tears.

If you look closer you’ll notice
That this pattern resembles
Tenement row houses, project high rises,
Cell block tiers,
Discontinued stretches of elevated train tracks,
Slave ship gullies, acres of tombstones.

If you look closer, you’ll notice
That this fabric has been carefully blended
With an advanced new age polymer
To make the fabric lightweight
Weatherproof, and durable.

All this to give some sort of posture and dignity
To a broken body that is a host for scars.

— From ‘Soldier’s Dream’ by YASIIN BEY

Lagos

I took a photograph on election day in 2015. It was golden hour. I was new in town. Though I had a writing fellowship that had nothing to do with electoral politics, I was a recovering news journalist. So I registered with the electoral commission and got my press pass and badge and drove around the ghostly streets of Lagos with some local reporters. It was largely an exercise in futility. I felt adrift. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. The story I wrote rambles about the stories people tell. My fellowship editor thought it was useless.

But, driving home, I shot this photograph. In it, a teenager is crossing the road. We are in the neighbourhood of Ebute Metta, and he is wearing the most beautiful hoodie, covered in a twirling, swirling motif. He stares at me through glinting shades. Between the patterned sweatshirt and his shorts — also printed black and white but in a different design — he has layered a striped shirt. He stands in front of the Wasimi Community Mosque, a burnt-red building in the 1970s tropical modernist concrete that blankets much of mainland Lagos. Round concrete circles are embedded like a screen for privacy and ventilation at the top corner of the building. The pattern looks classically Lagosian now, but an architect once told me those cutout blocks were imported from Israel.

Photographs flatten reality. They squash three dimensions into two, and turn bodies and buildings into patterns and shapes. They still the world; they solidify a moment. You can breathe with a photograph, though the instant captured was briefer than your exhale. I was driving when I shot this, and my subject was walking; its stillness is stolen. And yet this split second is layered with everything inside the photograph and also everything ephemeral emanating from the image: emotion, history, foreshadowing. The photograph illustrates an obsession I had not yet noted; a string to a web I had yet to pull and untangle.

I liked it when I shot it. I thought: this looks like Lagos. (And I find Lagos beautiful.)

I later became transfixed by both this swirling pattern and by the thought, “This looks like Lagos.”

I saw the pattern everywhere. I took buses around town, little orbs bouncing through the city filled with uncountable lives, personalities, roles, all squished hip to hip on wooden benches. The clothes people wear express just a fragment of their personas. Sometimes it’s obligatory — white garments for Aladura churchgoers, pleated burgundy skirts for school — and sometimes it’s more loosely prescribed: suits and heels for office workers, individual designs in matching aso-ebi for weddings. But there is also a wide range of freedom both within and beyond this criteria, and cosmopolitan Lagosians are unrelentingly expressive and well-dressed. The sweatshirt in the photograph is of a style worn mostly by the young, fly dreamers of Lagos’ lower social strata — street hawkers, bus conductors, entrepreneurs with many hyphens: real estate agent-used car salesman-blogger of a fictional Yoruba playboy in Dubai. I came to call this style, and the concepts it encompasses, “Versage”. Read more…

The New Scabs: Stars Who Cross the Picket Line

Invision / AP, Matt Rourke / AP, MediaPunch / AP

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | February 2019 | 10 minutes (2,439 words)

“Maroon 5 is just Red Hot Chili Peppers for virgins.” “This is the Fyre Festival of halftime shows.” “Anyone else think Adam Levine looks like an Ed Hardy T-shirt?” The Super Bowl halftime show was worth it for the social media stream it kicked off; otherwise, it was notable only for the fact that Maroon 5 (along with Big Boi and Travis Scott) turned up at all when so many others (Rihanna and Pink and Cardi B) turned the gig down. “I got to sacrifice a lot of money to perform,” Cardi B said. “But there’s a man who sacrificed his job for us, so we got to stand behind him.” Though she ended up appearing in a Pepsi commercial anyway, Cardi’s heart seemed to be in the right place, which is to say the place where protesting injustice is an obligation rather than a choice (of her other appearances around the Super Bowl, she said, “if the NFL could benefit off from us, then I’m going to benefit off y’all”). The man she was referring to was, of course, quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who took a knee in 2016 during the national anthem to protest systemic oppression in America and has gone unsigned since opting out of his contract. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” the ex-San Francisco 49er said. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way.”
Read more…

Writing for the Movies: A Letter from Hollywood, 1962

AP Photo

Daniel Fuchs | The Golden West | Black Sparrow Books | May 2005 | 42 minutes (8,396 words)

 

Dear Editors:

Thank you for your kind letter and compliments. Yes, your hunch was right, I would like very much to tell about the problems and values I’ve encountered, writing for the movies all these years. I’m so slow in replying to you because I thought it would be a pleasant gesture—in return for your warm letter—to send you the completed essay. But it’s taken me longer than I thought it would. I’ve always been impressed by the sure, brimming conviction of people who attack Hollywood, and this even though they may never have been inside the business and so haven’t had the chance of knowing how really onerous and exacerbat­ing the conditions are. But for me the subject is more disturbing, or else it is that I like to let my mind wander and that I start from a different bias, or maybe I’ve just been here too long.

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Behind the Writing: On Research

Type by Katie Kosma

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | February 2019 | 29 minutes (7,983 words)

In December, I turned in the first draft of my second book. I assumed that when I finished it, I would stand up and scream. Actually scream “YES!” followed by a stream of sundry obscenities, then collapse on the floor and make my husband take a picture for Instagram.

Instead, I was in a quiet back room of Hillman Library, on the University of Pittsburgh campus, drinking a 99¢ mug of coffee, googling Erich Fromm quotes, when I suddenly realized I was done, and I just sat there mildly stupefied, then caught the bus and went home. It was an appropriate end to a writing process that felt a lot less like glorious creation and a lot more like survival and persistence: just getting through one day, one page to the next, trying to keep the pyramid of information, ideas, and sentences from collapsing into a wet heap. It sucked, but in the way most serious creative endeavors suck, with a lining of deep gratification that afterward allows one to pretend that it was all in the service of a mystical something and not really, at base, insane.

It was an appropriate end to a writing process that felt a lot less like glorious creation and a lot more like survival and persistence: just getting through one day, one page to the next, trying to keep the pyramid of information, ideas, and sentences from collapsing into a wet heap.

What made this second book so difficult was research: not the process of doing it, not compiling and organizing it, but the quandary of how to make it creative. How to write a book that felt like it spoke to huge questions — the meaning of life, what matters and why, all the things one gets misty-eyed about around a bonfire — via gobs of information.

Read more…

Every Day I Write the Book

Santiago Felipe / Getty

Michael Musto | Longreads | February 2019 | 8 minutes (2,035 words)

Like a really good book, life has given me way more chapters than I ever expected. Alas, I couldn’t have predicted that as an Italian-American kid growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in the 1960s. It was a time of hippie-dippie love and peace — which I read about and saw constantly on TV — though those warm and rosy feelings were apparently reserved only for the young; older people were considered business suited, untrustworthy, corrupt, and pretty much doomed. At the local movie theater, I had the misfortune of catching the 1968 youth exploitation drama Wild In The Streets, in which anyone over 30 was forcibly retired and those over 35 were rounded up for re-learning camps. Seeing this flick at an impressionable age, I wasn’t worldly enough to reject its ideas or realize it was a youth fantasy as perpetuated by the suits. I thought it was a true harbinger of things to come and was horrified by every melodramatic moment. The movie haunted my adolescence, and I went to school sensing that hitting 30 was going to mean the end of meaningfulness, so I’d better live and achieve to the max until I was ready to be carted away.

Listen to Michael Musto read “Every Day I Write the Book” on the Longreads Podcast.

Well, I’m 63 and not only not retired or in an internment camp, but I’m actually doing pretty well. I have a weekly column on a popular site called NewNowNext.com, I get freelance offers (like this one), and I’m asked to appear on TV and in documentaries to give my opinions on various pop cultural topics through the years. What’s more, having produced four books, I’m often asked by agents and publishers to crank out some more. Shady Pines is not beckoning me in the least — but I wish I’d have anticipated that fact, not only as a kid, but in my late 20s, when I thought I had already peaked as a writer. Yes, I felt like a has-been at 28!
Read more…

What Gwyneth Paltrow and Great Expectations Taught Me about the Male Gaze

Illustration by Wenjia Tang

Sara Petersen | Longreads | February 2019 | 15 minutes (4,273 words)

I was 17 when I watched Gwyneth Paltrow bend her knee gently toward Ethan Hawke’s stooped figure in Alfonso Cuaron’s 1998 film adaptation of Great Expectations. In the gloom of a suburban Massachusetts movie theatre, I watched, my body stiff, my fingers gripping the red plush seat, as Hawke’s hand moved slowly up her leg. I watched as Paltrow’s lovely head tilted back in pleasure. I had never been kissed and I wasn’t entirely sure what Hawke’s hand was doing beneath the layers of Paltrow’s mint-green tulle prom dress, but that seemed beside the point. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her face. Her face, which seemed to exist only to be seen.

In the film, the kneecap scene begins with Estella discovering Finn’s portrait of her hanging on his bedroom wall. She stares at the painting with dispassionate eyes before turning and saying to him, “I don’t wear my hair like that anymore.”

“You should,” he replies.

“Do you like it that way?” Her voice purrs and a ghost of a smile twitches at the corners of her lips. It’s clear she is turned on by looking at herself through his eyes.

“What else do you like?” she asks, as she moves closer to his seated form before sliding her golden leg toward him.

As his hand moves toward her white cotton underwear, her lips part with what must be ecstasy; the angular planes of her face glow. The scene ends with Estella leaning down toward Finn in a gesture of kindness which seems to cost her nothing. She offers her mouth to Finn’s, which is hanging open with stupid, raw desire. Just as he relaxes into the realization that his fantasy is becoming real, just as he moves more confidently toward her and reaches for the ends of her brittle blond hair, Estella suddenly stands up, her body iron-straight and leaves the room. Her eyes are calm and cold and she is in complete control.

***

At 17, I had fresh-bud boobs, a little-girl tummy, and hard bumps of cystic acne dotting my chin. I had participated in the pageantry of “going out with” a few boys, and I was just beginning to discover what it meant to feel wanted, just beginning to confuse being wanted with having power. My boyfriend-in-name-only gave me a grubby hemp necklace festooned with a soon-to-tarnish silver sun, and after watching Great Expectations, I spent countless hours in bed, fingering the rays of that little sun, wondering if he saw me as golden, as light, as beautiful. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Estella came along at just the right — or ultimately wrong — time in my development.


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Watching Estella use her body to gain control made me curious about desire, made me think about the male gaze before I knew what the male gaze was. Estella enchanted me with her stony perfection, her utter lack of awkwardness or apology, her total command of her audience. I never wondered what she wanted, which of course, was entirely the point. For me, at gangly and insecure 17, Estella was the pinnacle, the holy grail of what any woman might ever hope to be: a gorgeous object of desire.

In her 1998 review of Great Expectations for the New York Times, Janet Maslin writes, “Ms. Paltrow does turn herself into the elegant object of desire that the story requires. Her presence is as coolly striking as her role (in Mitch Glazer’s screenplay) is underwritten. Incidentally, this is one more film in which the heroine’s posing nude for an artist is supposed to make her more fully defined.” At 17, I didn’t read the New York Times, and even if I had, I think Maslin’s critique would only have fanned the flames of my craving to be seen as worth seeing. In high school, it’s every awkward girl’s dream to be thought of as “coolly striking.”

When I recall the movie scenes that lodged themselves into my still pliable, tender subconscious, it’s the kneecap scene first and foremost. But there’s also the penultimate scene in which Finn paints naked Estella in a frenzy of both erotic and artistic ecstasy. She takes off her clothes before uttering her first and final line in the scene: “So do you want me sitting or standing?”

The rest of the scene consists of her languidly moving throughout a New York City loft as Finn frenetically splashes paint across countless canvases, so entranced is he by the glory of Estella’s flesh. And of course, like any good movie that fetishizes unhealthy attachments, there’s the kissing-in-the-rain scene. In other words, the scenes that mattered to me were the scenes in which Estella is devoid of any active purpose or agency; the scenes that mattered were the scenes in which Estella passively submitted to Finn’s desperate eyes.

Maybe it was Finn’s desperation (and, transmuted through the male gaze through which I viewed Estella), my own, that muddled me into imagining Estella the central focus of the film. I didn’t know that Finn is supposed to be the subject of Great Expectations. Feminism existed only as a sterile word in a paragraph about suffragettes in my history textbook and I did not have the tools to view Estella as what she is: an empty shell crafted for male consumption, even demonized as a femme fatale. I did not know that there were limited roles for women — domestic goddess or dangerous sexual minx, or perhaps worst of all, pitiful spinster — and that Estella represented not rosy possibility but a narrow and reductive scope of female representation. Anne Bancroft’s Miss Dinsmoor (Miss Havisham in the novel) tried to show me what happened when a woman defied patriarchal norms, but I was too enthralled by the shiny object of Estella that I didn’t pay attention. Grotesque in clownish makeup and abject in her heartbreak, I saw Miss Dinsmoor through the male gaze, and by that I mean, I saw her as disgusting, a wreck of thwarted desire I longed to look away from.

I did not know that there were limited roles for women — domestic goddess or dangerous sexual minx, or perhaps worst of all, pitiful spinster — and that Estella represented not rosy possibility but a narrow and reductive scope of female representation.

I relegated Miss Dinsmoor to the back of my mind where she belonged, and focused my ambitions on becoming an “elegant object of desire.” Estella never seemed flustered, upset, or awkward, her role as object seemed peaceful and complete. Maybe if I could define myself through and for someone else’s eyes, a man’s eyes, I wouldn’t have to do the work of defining myself for myself.

***

At college in Boston, my breasts became more than buds, and I began dressing to showcase that fact, tagging along with girlfriends to stores in Downtown Crossing to buy all-important “clubbing clothes.” In my case, this meant a pair of boot-cut pleather pants and a triangle top in flimsy polyester zebra print. I wore my new clothes with a combination of curiosity and entirely feigned confidence until it became clear that boys were starting to look.

I watched boys watch me, and the hunger etched into Ethan Hawke’s face flashed across my brain. At frat parties in Allston, or in the bottom bunk of extra-long twins, I became intoxicated by the reflection of myself I had become increasingly adept at invoking in boys’ eyes. I would stand tall and hold my head high on my neck and envision Paltrow’s knee moving slowly toward Hawke’s open hand. I would remember the delicate hooks of her collarbones. Estella doesn’t seem to want anything from Finn. From anyone. In a critical piece about the male gaze in both the novel and the film adaptation, Michael K. Johnson writes, “Pip [or Finn] is blind to any desire on Estella’s part, for if Estella desires, she begins to emerge as a subject rather than an object, and thereby would destabilize Pip’s construction of himself as the hero of his romantic quest.” I thought the not caring and not wanting was the magic that locked people in, allowed a person to bask in the warmth of being seen as something the seer wants. I didn’t imagine Estella’s lack of desire meant that she could never flourish as anything more than a foil to a man’s story.

I finally read Great Expectations around the time I met the perfect test subject for my performance of Estella cool — a boy in a band. By then, I had so internalized Paltrow’s slight underbite, her weightless body, her chilly power, that it was difficult to imagine Estella in heavy petticoats. Miss Havisham’s death by flaming bridal dress failed to make an impression.

The boy in the band scorned me as being a dumb blond at our first meeting (I called him aloof, to which he responded, “I’m surprised you even know what that means”), and his slouchy disinterest was the ultimate aphrodisiac. The first time we slept together, he told me he was in way over his head, and I thought about Finn’s bottomless desire for Estella. The more I projected Estella onto my face, my body, the more the boy in the band wanted me. He hovered his body over mine, and I thought about Paltrow’s lifted chin as she pushes Hawke’s hand between her legs.

The boy in the band fucked me with an urgency that made me dizzy, made me forget the inner trapping of my mind, made me exist only within my body. The force of his desire was all I wanted, needed. His desire was enough for us both — his desire fueled mine. Being wanted like that made everything simple, made my insecurities melt away, made my doubts about myself and what I wanted from life drift into the ether. His desire for my body filled me to the brim, leaving no room for anything else, and that feeling — of being enough because of being wanted — that feeling was calm, was rest. It felt like power.

I never orgasmed with him, but when I was alone in the dark, I pictured myself through his eyes and did.

Maybe if I could define myself through and for someone else’s eyes, a man’s eyes, I wouldn’t have to do the work of defining myself for myself.

When the boy in the band teetered toward indifference, I conjured Estella, thought of her hard icy heart, which was so desirable, so beautiful, and I worked harder on freezing my own soft, warm places. When he didn’t call me, I didn’t call him to complain. I made plans with girlfriends and drank too much until he finally did. When I could no longer locate the image of me reflected in his eyes — the me as he wanted me — I withdrew until the image returned. When we went out together, I collected the stares of other men and boys as if they were a currency I could use to pay my way into the band boy’s heart. When I did these things, I saw that my instincts were right. His desire returned and it filled me up. I told myself we were in love, remembering how Finn and Estella made love look like pain. I remembered their tortured kiss in the rain and committed to making a success of star-crossed love because surely difficult endeavors were worth pursuing. The boy in the band never painted a picture of me like Finn did for Estella, but I vowed to keep us together until he wrote a song instead.

It was all perfect until I made the mistake of thinking maybe the boy in the band wanted the real me, not the veneer I had worked so hard to create. It was perfect until the person who wanted things, needed things — the person that was me — reared her ugly head and scared him off.

I started to ask for things. Things like dinner, double dates with friends, cozy sleepovers planned in advance. Too much. Most of the time, I subsumed my desires to be alone with him and forced myself to be easy, cool, to go with his flow, despite the fact that I was not truly a chill person, that I hated not knowing where I would sleep on a given night. I paid too much for blond highlights that made me look like I had been out in the sun, because the version of me he liked was naturally beautiful without trying. I would sit in the corner of his apartment wearing a mustard-colored vintage sweater because I thought it made me look bohemian, watching him watch a movie I didn’t want to watch with his best friend and bandmate, and the more they enjoyed the movie, the more they enjoyed each other, the more I hated him, his friend, and their easy comradery. The more I hated myself for failing to keep him interested in me.

I went to great lengths to hold his attention. The summer of my 23rd year, I traveled to Vermont to play a coquettish 1940s secretary at a summer stock theatre. When the show closed, a girlfriend and I snuck into the women’s dressing room, where I donned my Marilyn Monroe platinum wig and stripped down to fishnets and a black bra. Steph snapped photos of me, making sure they were optimally sexy. When I developed the black-and-white disposable-camera film, I analyzed each photo carefully, before selecting the ones in which I looked most assured of whoever it was I was pretending to be and pasted them into one of those artsy books girls in their twenties make for their boyfriends who are in bands. Cleverly, I thought, I developed a narrative to accompany the photos. Alongside a photo of me perched above an ironing board, cold iron in hand, my ass jutting out against my black American Eagle underwear, I wrote, “She can be clean.” Alongside a photo of me peering over my shoulder with empty eyes and faux nonchalance, a la Estella, I wrote, “She can be cold.” And alongside a photo of me sitting on the floor cross-legged, my boobs out and slightly saggy, the perky wig tossed to the side, I wrote, “She can be yours.” This last photo felt like a risk, felt like honesty. It was a photo of the me I wanted him to want.

It’s not that these tricks failed to ignite his desire, it’s that I became increasingly resentful of the need to conjure tricks at all. The longer we were together, the harder it was for me to be someone else, and the more I resented him for finding that someone else more appealing than me. As much as I tried to remember the power of Estella, my frosty mask started to itch. The injustice of the whole venture began to preoccupy me. I had groomed my body according to his desires; molded my tastes, my attitude, my clothing to what I thought were his wants. I had done everything Estella taught me would work. But it wasn’t working. There was a flaw in the equation, and I had no choice but to assume the flaw was me. I thought something about the authentic me must’ve been marring my performance. Something about me wasn’t enough. My suppressed desire to be wanted as myself started to turn the real me into something dangerously near combustion.

Miss Havisham died wearing a flaming wedding dress. She died in a blaze of frustrated desire and unrealized potential.

On a raw, drizzly night in November, he texted saying he was in the middle of a jam session and couldn’t make it to my apartment. He was supposed to sleep over, fuck me, then hold me. When I couldn’t make him come to me, something fell apart inside, and it was with equal parts relief and horror, that my whole explosive self came screaming to the surface. Banging my palms against the glossy white of the painted bricks in the tiny Beacon Hill bedroom I shared with my sister, I shrieked and felt validated when my vocal chords felt like they were choking me. I craved that sense of stillness that only his body wanting mine could give me. Without it, I felt empty, felt missing. I think now I had allowed his desire to sweep away the rest of me, so when the desire disappeared, so did I. Unmoored.

Everything was perfect until my pesky subjecthood tried to claw its way free from objectification.

My inability to make him do what I wanted in this one small moment brought the reality of my failure crashing home. I had spent countless months putting all my energy into cultivating what I thought was power only to find it was ultimately meaningless, that my “power” had only ever been submission, that desire could only be fleeting, and this realization shook me to the core. I knew I wasn’t a true Estella, but I had lived for so long in her skin, I still wasn’t clear who the real me was. I just knew she was angry, I just knew she wanted to be seen. Because without someone looking, I felt invisible.

Behind the tears, behind the desperation, I probably imagined a camera documenting the whole thing.

My sister didn’t know what to do with me, so she called my parents, who threatened to call an ambulance if I didn’t stop saying I wanted to hurt myself. Which I did want. Not seriously, but just enough for my external pain to match my internal pain. The blissfully unyielding white walls of the Beacon Hill apartment bruised my knuckles and substantiated the howling void inside of me. The pain made me feel grounded.

The boy in the band broke up with me soon after, and a therapist prescribed me something akin to horse tranquilizers should I find myself gripped by another panic attack, which is what the therapist called the flood of feeling that had deluged me on that chilly November night. The pills came in handy once the boy in the band took me back.

Feminist scholar Hilary Schor says this about Great Expectations: “Pip’s authorship is so strong as to make Estella’s story almost disappear, to make Estella almost disappear.” For me, watching Great Expectations at 17 did more than that, it halted a burgeoning self from appearing in the first place.

The irony is no longer lost on me that I spent the remainder of my twenties as a struggling actor determined to be seen without fully knowing or even asking myself what it was I wanted to be seen as or for. I continued to seek validation from men and eventually stumbled across a guy who wasn’t in a band, a guy who wanted to move in together and get a puppy. It was the first relationship in which I felt comfortable to be my ugliest, most basic self. I felt no compunction about wearing a shapeless pair of flannel PJ pants I’d had since high school around him, and this committed relationship felt so good, so restful, so much easier than waiting in open-call lines, so much easier than sending out another slew of headshots, so much easier than asking myself if I really even wanted to be an actress in the first place, and this sense of ease made me think that I had finally figured out what I wanted. I wanted to get married and have kids.

After struggling for so long to find myself, I was relieved that motherhood had found me.

As a mother, I would no longer need to worry about being sexually desirable, about being who someone else wanted me to be, about being “successful.” My nagging fear of purposelessness would disappear, the repressed anxiety that whispered about lack of motivation or ambition or direction would cease interrupting my sleep. I could be earnest and boring and comfortable. I could devote myself fully to a new life, an endeavor so worthy that it couldn’t fail to fill me with joy and satisfaction. As a mother, I wouldn’t need to schmooze or hone my craft or have any craft at all. I would just need to love and be loved. Most importantly, I would care so much about this new little person, that I could stop worrying about myself.

So it was with a heartbreaking sort of recklessness and desperation that I threw myself into wifehood and motherhood as the conclusive panacea to a lack of self-knowledge.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that motherhood did not provide a smooth path to selfhood, but rather made me seriously engage with the work of finding myself for the first time. My body, which used to feel like a magical vessel with which I could choose my own adventure, was stripped down to its most grimly physiological purpose. And the new baby, whose desire for me was insatiable, didn’t care if I was cool, didn’t care if my pores were big or small, didn’t care about me at all, the real me or otherwise.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that motherhood did not provide a smooth path to selfhood, but rather made me seriously engage with the work of finding myself for the first time.

Estella had taught me that to be wanted was everything, and being wanted had gotten me a husband, which had, in turn gotten me a baby. Of course, I had deliberately sought these things for myself, but while cluster feeding my newborn throughout the night, tears moved silently down my face, I felt like this life had been done to me. So blindly had I ridden the roller coaster of objectification, I forgot to ever ask myself, “What do you want?”

I spent the days following my first child’s birth waiting in vain to feel an overwhelming sense of rightness. I held him against me and waited for some sort of feeling that this was always what I wanted, always what I was meant to do, to descend upon me and quiet the voices within that kept persisting in wanting, wanting, wanting. I wiped away spit-up, ran the dishwasher, sat in a circle of smiling adults singing songs about animals, and ached with loneliness. I came to realize that motherhood can never fill an empty person up. On the contrary, motherhood can sweep an empty person away entirely.

Motherhood taught me about feminism with a force that took my breath away, and the ramshackle self I had cobbled together through the eyes of others came tumbling down in the darkness of postpartum depression. I’ve since read and thought a lot about postpartum depression, and while of course, women undergo vast physical and hormonal changes following the creation and birth of a human being that impact their mental health, I have some of my own theories about why some of us are more prone to that particular blackness than others.

Historically, the world has not cared about what women want. The world has only very recently offered this question to women. The world has only very recently thought to ask women whether or not they want marriage. Children. And even though the questions have slowly started to seep into some girls’ lives, many other girls, myself included, were (and still are) raised breathing the air of a male world, a world in which women’s most valuable currency is her ability to be what a man wants, is her ability to starve her own selfhood for the sake of someone else’s.

Historically, the world has not cared about what women want. The world has only very recently offered this question to women.

And for me, motherhood, was the culmination of disillusionment. Especially at the beginning, motherhood takes, takes, takes. And if the new mother’s foundation is a simulacrum, the baby soon takes so much that nothing much is left. To enter into motherhood, a job defined by self-sacrifice, without a strong sense of self in place, is a dangerous venture. Postpartum depression was a brutal teacher who made me realize that figuring out who I was and what I wanted was no longer a luxury, it was critical to me putting one foot in front of the other.

***

After hours of nonsleep, the sun glared through my curtains, and I peeled myself from the breast milk–soaked sheets and limped to the bathroom, where I confronted the mirror. There was no one else left to look at me, no one else that could make me feel seen. I would have to look at myself. My face was gaunt, my skin wan, my eyes heavily shadowed in a shade of exhausted purple, and I saw an abject figure looking back at me. I remembered Miss Havisham.

At 37, I still occasionally think of Paltrow’s slender kneecap emerging from the folds of mint tulle when I enter a dark bar and scan the male faces. Old habits.

After hours of nonsleep, the sun glared through my curtains, and I peeled myself from the breast milk–soaked sheets and limped to the bathroom, where I confronted the mirror. There was no one else left to look at me, no one else that could make me feel seen. I would have to look at myself.

I think of another moment more often — a moment I’ve never seen — the moment after Estella leaves the room. Does she even exist? At 17, I didn’t wonder about Estella’s desires. I do now.

Estella was never asked what she wanted. Miss Havisham raised her to break hearts, to wreak revenge for Miss Havisham’s own broken heart. And lest we judge Miss Havisham too harshly, she had every reason to suppose that living a life free from personal desire would be less tortuous for a woman than risking making one’s true desires known. Miss Havisham desired love from a man; she wanted a man’s love to complete her, and when that didn’t happen, she didn’t know how to complete herself.

And what do I want? I want to have been asked the question in the first place. And I want to use my bitterly earned knowledge to ensure my own daughter knows that asking herself that question should always be her first priority. I want to live the rest of my life giving voice to my anger that she still lives in a world in which she must prioritize her desires, because there’s no guarantee anyone else will. I want to live each day as a continued effort to listen to myself, to fill myself up.

***

Sara’s essays about feminism, motherhood, and the performance of femininity have appeared in The Rumpus, Catapult, Ploughshares, Vox, The Lily, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She’s working on a collection.

Editor: Krista Stevens

Fact checker: Ethan Chiel

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

The Paths of Rhythm

Pfife, Q-Tip, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest in the recording studio in New York City on September 10, 1991. Michael Ochs Archives / Getty

Hanif Abdurraqib Go Ahead in the Rain | University of Texas Press | February 2019 | 17 minutes (3,425 words)

 

In the beginning, from somewhere south of anywhere I come from, lips pressed the edge of a horn, and a horn was blown. In the beginning before the beginning, there were drums, and hymns, and a people carried here from another here, and a language stripped and a new one learned, with the songs to go with it. When slaves were carried to America, stolen from places like West Africa and the greater Congo River, with them came a musical tradition. The tradition, generally rooted in one-line melodies and call-and-response, existed to allow the rhythms within the music to reflect African speech patterns—in part so that everyone who had a voice could join in on the music making, which made music a community act instead of an exclusive one.

Once in America, where the slaves were sent to work in America’s South, this ethos was blended with the harmonic style of the Baptist church. Black slaves learned hymns, blended them with their own musical stylings that had been passed down through generations, and thus, the spiritual was born. In the early nineteenth century, free black musicians began picking up and playing European stringed instruments, particularly violin. It started as a joke—to mimic European dance music during black cakewalk dances.

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The Cabin

Photos courtesy of the author / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Lavinia Spalding | Longreads | January 2019 | 13 minutes (3,805 words)

 

The old rancher stood on the porch of my log cabin, shuffling his boots. Then he lowered the rim of his cowboy hat, squinted, and delivered the news I’d been dreading — the news that had probably been inevitable from the start.

Though I say the cabin was mine, I should confess it was really his. The rancher’s. Still, I felt possessive. I’d lived there only months, but I loved the wide covered porch where I’d hung my rope hammock, bought for 20 bucks in Mexico. I loved the woodstove and my nascent ability to make a half-decent fire on a chilly night. I loved the view from my picture window, past bright green fields and golden sandstone mesas, all the way to a distant blue triangle of mountain. A herd of deer grazed insouciantly in my yard each evening, a chorus of coyotes sang late at night. I loved everything about my cabin — especially what it represented: something that had eluded me my entire adult life. Read more…

How Diderot’s Encyclopedia Challenged the King

The encyclopedists meet at Diderot's home. Hulton Archive / Getty

Andrew Curran | an excerpt adapted from Diderot: The Art of Thinking Freely | Other Press | January 2019 | 19 minutes (5,105 words)

Denis Diderot’s incarceration at Vincennes took place exactly halfway through his seventy years on earth. Prison became the dramatic pause that gave shape and meaning to both sides of his life. Before prison, Diderot had been a journeyman translator, the editor of an unpublished encyclopedia, and a relatively unknown author of clandestine works of heterodoxy; on the day that he walked out of Vincennes, he was forever branded as one of the most dangerous evangelists of freethinking and atheism in the country.

During Diderot’s three-month imprisonment, his jailer the Count d’Argenson and the count’s brother the marquis had looked on with amusement while this “insolent” philosophe had bowed and scraped before the authority of the state. In a diary entry from October 1749, the marquis related with glee how his brother the count had supposedly broken Diderot’s will. Solitary confinement and the prospect of a cold winter had succeeded where the police’s warnings had failed; in the end, the once-cheeky writer had not only begged for forgiveness, but his “weak mind,” “damaged imagination,” and “senseless brilliance” had been subdued. Diderot’s days as a writer of “entertaining but amoral books,” it seemed, were over. Read more…