Search Results for: Spin

The Last Resort

Illustration by Xenia Latii

Lindsay Gellman | LongreadsMarch 2018 | 23 minutes (5,754 words)

Read the story in German

Soon after Kate Colgan’s mother, Janet, awoke from surgery in a hospital near Manchester, U.K., last summer, she made a simple request of her daughter: “Get me to Germany.”

So Kate, then 25, fitted the family sedan with a roof rack and piled it with luggage. She arranged for her mother’s voluntary discharge from the hospital, against doctors’ wishes, and eased her from a wheelchair into the car’s passenger seat. Kate’s then-fiancé Chad drove them, along with the couple’s infant daughter, some 16 hours straight to a private treatment clinic on the outskirts of Dornstetten, a quiet medieval town in southern Germany.

Janet was diagnosed with metastatic stomach cancer in September 2016, when she was 54 years old. British doctors with the National Health Service gave her up to a year to live and offered only palliative care with chemotherapy.

Choosing palliative care felt to Kate like giving up. She scoured the web for other options for her mother, and came across the Hallwang Private Oncology Clinic, a for-profit institution that operates outside of the strictly regulated German hospital system. The Hallwang Clinic has emerged in recent years as the highest profile of a bevy of cancer clinics to gain traction in Germany. It markets itself as a luxury spa of sorts, touting its individualized treatments, pastoral setting in southern Germany’s Black Forest, and delicately plated dining-room meals.

The clinic’s online testimonials looked promising, so the Colgans inquired about treatment. After reviewing Janet’s medical records, a Hallwang Clinic doctor told the Colgans a cocktail of experimental drugs not widely available elsewhere could mean eventual remission for Janet. But the price would be staggering — more than $120,000. The clinic does not accept insurance and typically requires an 80% deposit before treatment can begin.

A chance at remission seemed worth a try — at any cost.

Read more…

Death Rattle: The Body’s Betrayals

Transi tomb, Lula Tahula

Ellen-Wayland Smith | Longreads | March 2018 | 15 minutes (4,127 words)

One morning about a year ago I was sleeping on the sofa in my parents’ apartment when I was woken by the sound of my father dying in the next room.

At first I couldn’t tell what the noise was, or even locate where it was coming from. It was a ragged, scraping sound, like metal being pulled through tightly-packed glass. Then it shifted: like someone breathing in a viscous liquid in greedy gulps, aspirating yogurt. When I realized the noises were coming from my father’s throat, I froze.

According to the hospice manual I had scanned the night before, “death rattle” refers to the sound produced by “the pooling of secretions” in the throat after the body loses its ability to cough them up. “The air passing through the mucus causes this sound,” the booklet instructed me matter-of-factly. This symptom is listed under the rubric “When Death is Near.” Family members of the dying person frequently find this noise upsetting, according to the medical literature. Hospice workers recommend an anti-secretion medicine to dry up the mucous: one syringe-full against the gum.

We had had almost no time to prepare. A mere ten days earlier, my father had gone in to his doctor’s office to pick up the results of a routine scan, which turned out not to be routine at all: stage four pancreatic cancer. His physician, an old family friend, almost teared up when he delivered the news. “It is very difficult for me to say this to you,” he’d begun, gingerly. “Not as difficult as it is for me to hear it,” my father responded. He was 81 but looked much younger: six-foot-two, straight as a poker, salt-and-pepper hair and beard. After a bout with polio when he was 14, he’d never been sick a day in his life. We thought he was invincible.
Read more…

The Island that Disappeared

A remote corner of the island of Providencia, Colombia. (Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images)

Tom Feiling | The Island that Disappeared | Melville House | March 2018 | 10 minutes (2,711 words)

“Tank’s empty,” said the attendant at the island’s only gas station, who I found dozing in a hammock strung up between the pumps. It wasn’t a problem, he assured me — any cargo ship leaving San Andres for Providence knew to bring gas. One would be arriving the following day — probably. I used the little fuel I had left to scooter back to Town for something to eat. I found nothing open bar a white-tiled, fluorescent-lit box opposite the mayor’s office, where I bought a hot dog bursting with salty, molten fat and topped with broken crisps. There were a few more options for the handful of Colombian tourists staying in the chalets at Freshwater Bay, but they weren’t cheap.

The following morning I headed to what looked to be the most popular of the three little supermarkets in Town for a look around. The wooden shelves were laden with tins of spaghetti and meatballs from Ohio, pork and beans from Medellin, tomatoes from Nebraska, and Spam from Brazil. In the vegetable aisle were some pitifully shriveled onions, garlic, and red peppers, which had been flown in from Costa Rica, and some Chilean apples. The only things that hadn’t been imported were the shelves, which had been coated in thick layers of gloss paint to keep the termites at bay. Read more…

‘Forgive Yourself. And Forgive Me.’

Uncle Lee, photo courtesy the author

Alice Driver | Longreads | March 2018 | 10 minutes (2,574 words)

“I didn’t choose. I walked backwards till it came around front.” — Uncle Lee

I sipped my Uncle Lee’s favorite gin martini made bitter with the taste of three pearly onions at The Alley Cantina in Taos, New Mexico. The mother of my long-lost cousin Julianne stepped up to the microphone in front of the gathered crowd and told the story of their brief love affair and how Lee “loved women.” I’ve never been to a funeral like the ones on TV where you go to a cemetery and cry while watching a casket go into the ground. My family does these storytelling gatherings with food and drink, and we bask in the memory of the ones we loved in sharp and detailed pain and glory.

I didn’t know that Julianne existed until I was in my 20s. My Uncle Lee, who died at 73, was a tall willowy, half-bent figure who had two sons and a daughter. As a young man, he had survived several diving accidents, which according to another uncle, Larry, left him a little bit crooked in posture. Uncle Lee disclosed Julianne’s existence to some of the family over the years, but that news reached me late. It hit me like a wave rolling me under the currents — took my breath away — because she had my green eyes, and the tall, lean Driver build. In another universe, she could have been my sister. We had followed parallel tracks, both spending much of our 20s living and working in Latin America. She eventually settled in Bolivia, married, and had a daughter.

At my Uncle Lee’s memorial, Julianne read a letter she had written to her 22-month-old daughter about Lee, who she came to know as her biological father when she was a teenager. Before his death, he had traveled to Bolivia to spend time with her, and she held close those memories of getting to know him as a father. Tears ran down my face and into my bourbon and ginger ale as I watched Julianne read from her journal. Following Julianne, a woman got up and told the story of my Uncle Lee making the French doors for her house. He was a fine woodworker specializing in spiral staircases. Before sitting down, she said, “We weren’t lovers.”
Read more…

Welcome to the Center of the Universe

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Shannon Stirone | LongreadsMarch 2018 | 22 minutes (5,546 words)

The power has just gone out in mission control. I look to Jim McClure, operations manager at the Space Flight Operations Facility, and he assures me that everything is fine. A power outage like this hasn’t happened at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in nearly eight years, and while it’s only been out for a few seconds, the Deep Space Network is disconnected and NASA has temporarily lost contact with Cassini, the nearly 20-year-old space probe in orbit around Saturn, as well as all spacecraft beyond the moon.

We’re standing in JPL’s mission control, known simply as the Dark Room to those who work here. Five men and women are glued to their screens, the artificial pink-and-white glow highlighting their faces. I’ve been here twice before, but I have never seen this many people running the consoles. The operators are calm and hyper-focused despite the unexpected hiccup, both hands typing, eyes darting at one another’s screens.

While the quiet panic plays out, I walk over to a sunken plaque in the middle of the room that glows with blue neon lights: the center of the universe. Above it is a large metal coin embossed with the images of three spacecraft and a DSN antenna, below is JPL’s motto, “Dare Mighty Things.” Teddy Roosevelt offered these words during an 1899 speech in approbation of the virtues of a “strenuous life” and they are now synonymous with the risks taken when it comes to spaceflight. “Far better is it to dare mighty things,” he said, “to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure…than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

I catch a bit of conversation. “Are you having any luck over there?” the data controller asks the person sitting at the Tracking Support Specialist desk. “Not yet.” Above the consoles near the ceiling are six large television screens that curve around the room. Usually, these screens stream real-time telemetry from dishes around the world and are labeled with the name of the spacecraft they’re talking to. Right now, most of them are blacked out. The only active monitors display images of celebrities who’ve visited JPL: Matt Damon in the Mars Yard, William Shatner giving the Vulcan salute. Read more…

The Quest for the Collision Zone: An Arctic Expedition

Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images

William E. Glassley | Excerpt adapted from A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice | Bellevue Literary Press | February 2018| 18 minutes (4,848 words)

* * *

Erosion always wins.

The vanished mountains we envisioned were simple possibilities, tentative interpretations of passages written subtly in the obtuse patterns and features of Greenland’s rocks.

The patterns match those seen in the Alps and the Himalayas — zones that seemed to be huge thrust faults, folds of immense proportion, metamorphism at extreme conditions. Through the inspired power of analogy, my colleagues Kai Sørensen, John Korstgård, their coworkers, and those who had come before them had surmised that the Greenland landscape was an old ancestor, a forerunner of the young mountain systems that today so dramatically exalt Earth’s skin. But the Greenland ancestors are long gone, erased by the incessant hunger of flowing water, blowing wind, and grinding ice to achieve a form of topographic equality between sea and land. Erosion always wins.

The first clear hint of those lost mountains had come years earlier. Just after World War II, the Geological Survey of Greenland (GGU) was founded in Denmark. Through its offices, a small group of geologists, including Arne Noe-Nygaard and Hans Ramberg, began the first systematic study of the west coast of Greenland, sailing along the complex coastline in motorized sailing vessels strengthened to resist collisions with ice. They found a two-hundred-mile-wide belt of rock that seemed to preserve evidence of multiple complex episodes of protracted and intense deformation. Cutting through this region were several distinct zones, each zone a few miles to tens of miles wide, in which the rocks were steeply inclined and consistently aligned in the same direction.

For some years, the significance of the zones of aligned rocks remained obscure, their tectonic significance unknown. But by the late 1960s and early 1970s it had been suggested by Arthur Escher and Juan Watterson, among others, that these zones contained rocks that had been severely sheared into steeply inclined parallel sheets and layers. The individual zones were eventually called shear zones.

* * *

New story lines emerge.

Geology is not generally considered an enterprise rich with drama. Rocks stolidly await inspection, slowly providing, through insightful consideration, a glacially paced story of incremental change. But there are occasions when perspectives are radically altered, new story lines emerge, and the field is caught by surprise.

In 1987, such a change shook the world of Greenland geology. Although it played out subtly, the consequences for all involved were profound. Feiko Kalsbeek, Bob Pidgeon, and Paul Taylor reported finding along the northern limits of the mobile belt, near the inland ice, remnants of the same type of rocks as those found today in the Andes and the Sierra Nevada range in California. Although nearly 2,000 million years older, those rocks were evidence that what is happening in the Andes today had happened in Greenland.

In the case of the Andes, the continent of South America moves west, riding over the floor of the Pacific Ocean and pushing it hundreds of miles below the surface. Plunging into the incandescent heat of Earth’s interior, generating massively destructive earthquakes, the ocean floor partially melts, giving rise to bodies of molten rock that slowly make their way back to the surface. The volcanoes of the Andes and the mountainous spine they decorate are the result of that process. If the analogy was accurate, somewhere hidden within Greenland’s Nagssugtoqidian mobile belt there should be evidence of a vanished Pacific, but no evidence of such a thing had yet been found.

Kalsbeek and his coworkers acknowledged the enigma, and suggested the ocean may have been swallowed in the collision of two small continents. Such a concept had the power to explain the significance of the mobile belt and the major fault zones in it — the structures reflected the massive deformation expected as a result of two continents colliding head-on. But the evidence for where the actual collision zone might have been was very sparse — there was no good way to identify where the rocks from the old southern continent ended and the rocks of the northern continent began. Compounding the uncertainty was the underlying debate of whether plate tectonics even functioned that long ago.

The areas where John and Kai and their colleagues had worked were central to answering those questions.

* * *

An expedition for their own vindication.

The evidence John and Kai had developed suggested that the collision zone, which would have required exactly the same kind of massive movement and deformation they described, might be within the areas they had worked. Those who study the history of Earth are few, and the areas involved are vast. Knowledge is sparse. Given the immensity of the terrains the continents cover, those dedicated to unraveling the story of evolving landscapes devote their lives to finding the nuance and subtlety held within a specific setting. Some spend their lives immersed in the history of the Alpine system, climbing and hiking through those beautiful mountains. Some are owned by the Himalayas, or by the vast openness of the Canadian shield. For John, Kai, and me, it is Greenland.

Inevitably, commitment to place becomes personal — our identity is affected by the time we spend walking the fragment of Earth that has captivated us. The chosen place permeates being — terrain embeds itself under fingernails, tangles in hair, makes skin bleed and scars the heart and mind. Every thought, conscious and not, becomes riddled by knowledge derived through wandering there; remembered vistas from that world unexpectedly insinuate themselves at random times and in unanticipated ways, forcing an acceptance of a link between what we experienced there and what is lived in the moment here. We are composed of where we have been and what we have seen. John and Kai were part of a pioneering generation that helped refine Greenland’s history. They and their colleagues described in detail the characteristics that defined the “mobile” part of that land — the folds and sheared layers, the discontinuities and disrupted features. Over the years, they mapped major tectonic elements, documenting evidence for miles of displacement along several of the shear zones.

They published respected papers in scientific journals, and were recognized authorities because of their work. They knew that land better than anyone. But in the late 1990s their reputation as field geologists and scientists was challenged by a paper that said, in essence, the work they had done was deeply flawed.

The paper asserted that Kai and John, among others, had made basic and fundamental mistakes reading the rocks. The new publication stated that the NSSZ showed very little evidence of significant movement. It said that in a collective misinterpretation an essentially trivial feature had mistakenly been given major tectonic significance. The words “shear zone” were removed from maps in the paper and replaced with “straight belt.”

Science is a messy business; everything we know is, at best, a simplification of what is real and is therefore inherently flawed. As a consequence, everything we do ultimately requires corrections, implying that nothing published is completely right. It is every scientist’s expectation that whatever he or she publishes will be improved upon by others, who will provide more nuanced and detailed observations that address questions about the world. Indeed, it is an honor to be a building block in an ongoing refinement of the story of how a landscape has evolved. But in the case of the paper I was reading, it was difficult to escape the fact that Kai and John’s work had been summarily dismissed.

Iceberg off the west coast of Greenland

Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images

About halfway through reading the paper, I stopped to ask them if they agreed with what it was saying, that they had been wrong about how they had interpreted the geology.

“Of course not!” was the answer. At first, they spoke with disciplined calm. But quickly, with increasing emotion, they signaled numerous inconsistencies and errors in the paper, fundamental mistakes and misinterpretations that exceeded what the paper itself had, inaccurately, called to task. But only those intimately familiar with the real rocks would ever know.

Consequently, as things stood in the international scientific world, the work Kai and John had published was implicitly worthless and could be seen as one more example, among thousands, of failed scientific ideas. When I had finished reading the paper and began discussing with Kai and John the scientific conundrum we were in, I realized the devastation and angst they must have felt.

Being the rigorous scientists they were, they framed the argument for our little expedition as a data-gathering effort to resolve the conflict. At the time they invited me, they had said the purpose of the expedition was to pursue unanswered questions. There was no doubt that was, in fact, the underlying justification for the work. But I also realized this was, in part, an expedition for their own vindication.

* * *

Our own manufactured carnival.

Even though the sun blazed in a deep blue sky, the air temperature was close to freezing. Kai and I sat in the bow, huddled against the wind as the Zodiac sped down Arfersiorfik Fjord. I pulled the hood of my anorak over my head and put on gloves. Water splayed off to the sides in fragments of refracted sunlight, decorating the mirrorlike water surface. The outboard roared. John had the throttle wide open. We were headed for the northern boundary of the Nordre Strømfjord shear zone, which had been approximately mapped many years ago. Very little detailed work had been done there, mainly because it was so remote and difficult to get to. On our maps, the edge of the zone was confidently drawn in black ink, but we knew that no one had actually been there.

We sought that tectonic landmark as a reference point, a location where the fabric and grain of the rock could be seen and felt. We were searching for something that could be quantified and analyzed, something that would establish metrics for later measurements and comparisons. In order to be able to recognize severely, as opposed to minimally, sheared rock, we needed a baseline.

The three of us gazed down the fjord as we flew across the translucent water. Despite the roar of the outboard, we were enthralled by the beauty of the place — the hills rolling gently to the sea, the flower-chocked rivulets cascading down the bedrock, the stillness of the scenery. With some effort, we tried to focus our attention on the rock wall to our south, with its extensive exposure of folded and sheared gneisses.

Unexpectedly, as we watched the steep walls of the southern fjord edge, something shifted far to the west, down the fjord and miles away. I turned my head to get a better look, but at first all I felt was confusion. Initially, I thought the distorted landscape I was seeing was due to my eyes watering in the cold wind, but after rubbing them I realized something extraordinary was dancing along the horizon.

The land on the north side of the fjord was broad and rolling. Soft ridges sloped down to the water in a subtle cascade of rocky knolls and tundra pockets. It was a landscape that invited daydreaming. In the early-morning sun, the scene looked almost pastoral.

But farther down the fjord, a thick horizontal blade of sharp turquoise blue cut across the land, as though a giant painter had saturated a brush and slashed the ground with it. The blue was brilliant and intense, a pure distillation of color. It seemed to stretch hundreds of feet into the air and was painted across the land for miles. Within that absolutely horizontal turquoise stripe floated vertical columns of white, gray, tan, and green, looking for all the world like skyscrapers in a city miles away — a shimmering blue Oz resting on the frigid waters of the fjord. Toward the north and east, the blue trailed out into a needle-thin line that vanished at a piercing point sharper than the edge of a razor blade, ending in the middle of the rolling hills.

Iceberg off west coast of Greenland

Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images

We all saw it. As we cruised, we watched immense rock masses from the rolling land split off and drift into the blue blade, becoming the skyscrapers that floated in the air. The size of the masses was staggering, seemingly miles wide and hundreds of feet high. As they drifted slowly out into the fjord, they changed form, shifting from angular columns to smoothed elongations filled with textures and patterns, never resolving into a constant shape, and then slowly vanished — evaporating as though consisting of nothing more than mist. Eventually, the effect was too stupefying. John throttled down the motor, the bow dropped, the roar of the engine stopped, and we drifted with the tide.

We sat silently for minutes, watching the fata morgana while the Zodiac slowly turned and drifted in the gentle current.

A nearby island only a few hundred yards away subtly entered the scene. The knob was a small rocky knoll, covered with mosses, shrubs, and lichen. On our maps, it was an ink dot so tiny, it wouldn’t be noticed unless one were looking for it. As our line of sight shifted to the point where the small island came between us and the mirage, regret began to well up at the thought of losing that magnificent show.

Without preamble, and with extraordinary understatement, the distant blue line slowly sliced across the small island. The effect played out with such surgical precision that the inconsistencies between expectations and experience took a moment to register. Emphatically, right in front of us, the little island was divided into an upper and lower half, sandwiching a thin brilliant turquoise layer.

I struggled to accept what my eyes were seeing. The implication was obvious and inescapable: What had seemed so immense and distant, miles down the fjord, was little more than a pencil-thin, trivial mirage barely an arm’s reach away, hovering in the air like a butterfly before my nose, somewhere between our little rubber boat and the small rocky knob of an island.

In that moment, what we knew to be true because we had seen it in the company of others, suddenly became unequivocally false, for all of us. But we did not have the luxury of time to resolve the contradiction. A distant destination waited, offering an opportunity to collect desperately needed data, and the afternoon winds would surely come up, making it difficult to get back to camp. Without discussion, John started the outboard and we continued on.

As our vantage point changed and we rounded the little island, the mirage returned, immense, awe-inspiring, silent. It stayed with us for ten minutes more, then slowly melted away into the thin air.

Cold dense air, chilled by the frigid fjord water, had refracted light, bending it into a vision. Light is a malleable thing, warped and distorted by well-known effects, conditioned by a broad range of circumstances. What we are able to sense, which is less than one billionth of a billionth of the electromagnetic spectrum, is affected by the sensitivities of the organs our bodies use to detect it, and the narrow range of physical conditions within which we wander. Despite the richness and beauty of the things we can perceive, we remain profoundly impoverished by the limitations of our genetically constrained bodies and the space through which they move. What we see of the world is our own manufactured carnival — the mysterious unknown within which that carnival resides beckons through mirages, silences, and misunderstood truths, forever beyond our grasp.

* * *

We were historians, trying to read ancient texts written in a language we barely knew.

The question of what had happened within the Nordre Strømfjord shear zone nearly two billion years ago danced through every waking moment. Was there a place, somewhere along the ground we walked, that was the first point of contact where continents had collided? What would be the sign? Or was the vision of entangled landmasses a flawed story, a misinterpretation of history? Regardless, how did the shear zones fit either tale? The trip to the northern edge of the shear zone had added more observations and hard data but lacked sufficient context to inspire imagining.

For relief from the wondering, we would occasionally take a short stroll together around the hillocks and along the beaches near camp. These were casual and slow hikes, a chance to talk and look at things in an unhurried way. Anything we found could easily be revisited, so we took with us only hammers and hand lenses and notebooks, the minimum equipment necessary to descend below the surface if that seemed necessary.

One particular day, not long after setting up camp, we headed west along the shoreline in the late afternoon. There was a mile of land we had not seen, and we thought this would be a good way to familiarize ourselves with details and patterns.

Almost immediately, John discovered a spectacular example of what we came to call “pencil gneiss.” The rock was the same type of igneous rock that had inspired Kalsbeek and his coworkers to propose the idea of a collision zone, or “suture,” between continents, but there, where John stood, the delicate textures that form in slowly cooling magmatic bodies had been smeared into pencil-like forms, stretched and elongated. Individual crystals that normally were equant and half an inch in size had been strung out like taut pieces of string into thin lines several feet long, each precisely parallel to all those around it — a metaphorical pencil in the gneiss. That was graphic proof of extreme shearing. We took pictures, made notes, and placed another imagined factual stake in the ground. The immediate question now became whether or not such features were throughout the shear zone, or simply local and thus not of regional significance. We walked on, amazed, wondering what would be around the next headland.

A few hundred yards farther along the shore, we came upon a bizarre little cliff face. Hazy, dark lines patterned the surface, looking much like a pile of slightly deflated and sagging soccer balls stacked one upon another. We pored over every inch of the outcrop, struggling to piece together a picture of what we could not quite make sense of. We debated options and argued, running through every idea we could dredge from our experiences. What repeatedly came to mind was a jumble of tears, caught in the instant they were shed, as though Earth had wept from some unseen eye.

GettyImages-630805559.jpg

Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images

Grudgingly, we agreed the most likely answer was that we were looking at a deformed slice, perhaps 150 feet long and 50 feet wide, of a type of volcanic rock called pillow basalt, which forms when lava erupts under the oceans. Unlike the rocks surrounding them, which preserved evidence of complex histories with multiple episodes of folding and shearing, the pillow basalts had a very simple history: They had erupted onto the floor of some ancient sea and then been metamorphosed and simply folded once. That slice of rock was a lens encased in the much more intensely deformed shear zone gneisses and schists. The contrast with the surrounding rocks was dramatically obvious.

If that interpretation were true, the implications were staggering. Ocean basins the size of the Mediterranean or Atlantic commonly separate continents. If the continents are approaching each other, the ocean floor between them is consumed along the boundary that will eventually become the collision zone when the continents run into each other. Such collisions grind on for tens of millions of years, slowly exuding sheared, twisted, and recrystallized rock that had once been the sediments and volcanic pillow basalts of the seabed. It is from such “root” zones that Alpine-like mountain systems emerge. If that folded pile of pillow basalts we had just found was, indeed, all that was left of some long-vanished ocean basin, we had found the suture. That thin remnant slice was all that remained of what once had been a sea probably thousands of miles wide. Could it possibly be that we had stumbled upon the long-sought ocean that, fifteen years earlier, Kalsbeek and his colleagues had postulated might have existed there?

The excitement over that discovery was tempered by a healthy skepticism. Each of us had the experience of interpreting a fact or observation as evidence for some grandiose concept, only to see it crushed under the weight of more data and observations. We held little confidence that one outcrop would be the cornerstone piece of evidence supporting the ocean-floor idea, but neither did we dismiss it as meaningless.

Several days later, along the same trend and a mile west, we came upon another small slice of rock that showed exactly the same simple history preserved in the pillow basalts. It was a different rock type, though, called peridotite. Peridotites are the source rocks from which basaltic lavas are generated, and the rock type we were seeing was precisely what geologists associate with lavas erupted on the ocean floor.

Although it was seeming to be more likely that we had stumbled upon the true collision zone, two outcroppings of rocks are insufficient evidence to allow much certainty for such an imaginative leap. The history of a mountain system is a long story, told in many chapters. An outcrop is, at best, a paragraph in a chapter. We were historians, trying to read ancient texts written in a language we barely knew. But something was being revealed that had not been seen before. There had been tremendous deformation and movement within this zone, part of it involving the consumption of an entire ocean basin. It now seemed, between the pencil gneisses and these two new outcrops, that John and Kai would be vindicated.

The satisfaction Kai and John felt was obvious but muted. They remained thoughtful in how they analyzed everything we observed, but the edge was off. We found many more examples of the pencil gneisses along the trace of where the shear zone should be, providing irrefutable proof that intense deformation was distributed all along it. But the two slices of what might be ocean floor within the same belt of rocks made the story much more complex.

The data we had collected were increasingly supporting the notion that the region preserved a record of intense deformation, as John and Kai and others had originally argued. The pencil gneisses John had first found in that one outcrop near camp and which were irrefutable evidence of extraordinary shearing at high temperatures, turned out to be a common feature for miles along the shear zone. Thin lenses of pillow basalts and ultramafics, too, were likely proof that hundreds or thousands of miles of ancient ocean floor had been dismembered and sliced, a process requiring staggering amounts of displacement and deformation. And all this was localized within the shear zone.

* * *

I feel as though I am in the presence of unencumbered, spontaneous artistry.

We round several small points of land and cross small embayments, looking for outcrops with enough exposure to let us prowl through their history. We are moving through a world barely touched by science; only the vaguest idea exists of what might be here.

Then, fifty yards away and across a small bay, we spy bare rock running from the water’s edge to an eroding cover of tundra about one hundred feet inland. Quickly, we land and head to the outcropping rock, intrigued and excited.

Exposed in that lithic fringe is a pattern so striking, our eyes wander back and forth over it, as we exclaim repeatedly how incredible it is. Bands of pink, white, gray, tan, and black, some no more than a fraction of an inch wide, some several feet thick, draw the eye along stretched-out, languid, folded forms, flowing as though the bedrock had once been as soft as butter. I feel as though I am in the presence of unencumbered, spontaneous artistry, a place where some creative genius has found its rhythm and manically painted from inspired passions, using fluid rock as its medium. Every step we take is a halting one, each new square foot possessing a different form or pattern of colors. We crawl on hands and knees, trying to grasp the significance and history of that place. From a scientific point of view, it is a treasure. From an aesthetic point of view, it is a masterpiece. Our quantitative world has seamlessly become enmeshed with an ethereal realm, dissolving into a Dalíesque fluidity. What we are doing no longer has boundaries; everything the mind can embrace is present here.

We did not know at the time that those are the oldest rocks in the region, remnants of some of the most ancient continents on Earth. It took many months of work back in our laboratories to discover that they were formed more than 3 billion, 300 million years ago. They preserved evidence of the existence of an ocean basin billions of years old, when life was only single-celled and free-floating and what little land existed was adrift with blown sand and utterly barren. It was an ocean vastly older than the one associated with the building of the mountains we had come to study. Black layers had once been molten rock, injected into the sediments of those old seas, probably long after the water had been squeezed from them and their crystalline form changed. Deeply buried, heated, and compressed, the entire sequence was later folded and refolded, deformed and intruded during some unknown mountain-building events spanning hundreds of millions of years. Eventually, sometime in the last few tens of millions of years, they had made it back to the surface, shoreline to a new ocean, supporting our boots while waiting for another transformation. It was, in fact, the northern limit of the zone we were looking for. It was the very edge of one of the continents involved in the collision.

* * *

Part of the story had been completely missed.

After our third expedition, it was unequivocal that the shear zone was a scar, slashed across the northern edge of the collision terrain as a last act, a tectonic finale in a mountain-building drama. That scar was what the early researchers had claimed it was — a zone of major movement. Kai and John’s work was correct and the region reverted to the term they had used for it years before — “shear zone” replaced the “straight belt” moniker on later editions of geological maps and in publications.

But buried in the crystalline record, frozen in the minerals of a few rocks from small, scattered localities, was evidence that these rocks had descended into earth before the collision of continents began. That part of the story had been completely missed. Uncertainty had changed in form but not magnitude — new questions now had to be addressed.

Snowfield, Ilulissat Icefjord, Ilulissat

Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images

Only a handful of places around the world had histories of so-called ultrahighpressure metamorphism — metamorphism under conditions where pressures were more than 400,000 pounds per square inch, a state that is achieved in the earth only at depths beyond sixty miles. The evidence in all those other locations came from ancient subduction zones. In every instance, those subduction zones marked locations where continents had collided and were thus consistent with the history that was suggested as a possibility in our study area in Greenland.

But none of those other sites was older than 900 million years.

The singed-hair rock that we examined with microscopes and discovered was filled with garnets and olivines and spinels contained a startling history of burial at a depth of at least forty miles, an HP metamorphic environment. Up to that time, none of us had imagined that any of the rocks in this region had traveled more than fifteen miles down. We wrote reports and published papers and looked at more samples in the basement archives of Aarhus University, seeking confirmation that such rocks were not enigmatic anomalies.

For months, we examined thousands of samples that had been collected over decades by a small cohort of faculty and students working on master’s and doctoral degrees on Greenland geology. Out of all those samples, we found two that preserved evidence of the same very deep burial. The samples came from sites tens of miles farther to the west of where we had been working, but along the same belt of unusual rocks, and along the northern edge of the Nordre Strømfjord shear zone. The samples from both of those sites had identical characteristics. One sample, ironically, had been collected by Kai when he and Fleming Mengel, a student of his, had worked in the region nearly forty years before. Kai didn’t remember collecting it. The other sample came from a site near Giesecke Sø and had been studied in the late 1960s by Steen Platou, who was working on a graduate degree at the time. Those samples became the core of a small collection that proved that fragments of the region had, indeed, been pushed to extraordinary pressures, surviving a round-trip circuit to depths greater than 150 miles.

Prior to these discoveries, no direct evidence existed that such plate tectonic-driven processes occurred any further back in time than 900 million years ago. These samples pushed that age limit back to at least 2,000 million years.

Moreover, they are the oldest known record of an entire terrain on the surface of the world that had descended to such depths.

* * *

William E. Glassley is a geologist at the University of California, Davis, and an emeritus researcher at Aarhus University, Denmark, focusing on the evolution of continents and the processes that energize them. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

Excerpt from Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice. Copyright © 2018 by William E. Glassley. Published by Bellevue Literary Press: www.blpress.org. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

The Man in the Mirror

Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait

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

 

1.

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

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

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

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

Read more…

Emotional Preparedness for a Dying Planet

AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano

People can argue about climate change all they want, but the science is in: the planet is warming, and the ice caps are melting. That’s a bitter pill to swallow, especially if you’re young and imagined a nice long life like your parents had, or if you just brought a child into this increasingly heated world.

Loss involves mourning. At LitHub, poet Sue Sinclair charts her own movement from denial to grief, and she examines what it means to mourn for a planet instead of one life. As a poet, she looks to poetry for insight — how it can, in her words, “help me to shift out of denial, and how it may support me as I move deeper into the work of mourning.”

Denial, in any case, might show that I’m on the threshold of mourning, just overwhelmed by it . . . which could mean that I’ve crossed into it without knowing. For although there are myriad theories about how mourning is experienced, and certainly people mourn differently, denial is often an early stage. So as a denier who glimpses grief, I may be on my way to a richer, more painful engagement with the dying world—which I both want and don’t want. I want it for the reasons I’ve given already—I want to feel integrated as a person and wholly engaged by my environment. But I also want it for moral reasons. Philosopher Simone Weil has written that “to know that this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists as much as I do—that is enough, the rest follows of itself.” Weil’s point is that actually, vividly grasping the reality of another being leads straight into a moral relationship of care. That’s one reason I want to step further out of denial. Then there’s Lesley Head’s argument that truly grieving climate change, and the selves that will be stripped from us in the process, can free up emotional energy to be invested in more creative ways. “Bearing our grief will not necessarily stave off catastrophe, but it will give us a better chance of effective action,” she writes. What exactly constitutes effective action will vary depending on the situation: it could involve a variety of actions aimed at stopping or even reversing climate change; it could also be a matter of keeping vigil and offering to our human as well as our animal, vegetable, and mineral companions what palliative care is possible now that global warming is underway.

We need to think about what vigil and palliative care might look like, for these are becoming increasingly necessary forms of action. Head notices that “we are systematically excluding the more extreme parts of future projections from our consideration, just because they are so difficult.” She suggests that some of our preparatory efforts “must go into emotional preparedness for things that may be extremely unpleasant.”

Read the story

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

Getty / Illustration by Katie Kosma

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

 

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

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

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

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

Everything except the stuff in her house. My mother was a terrific metaphysician, passionate about the world around her and the lives of others. She was spiritual even at her darkest moments, and funny even in her greatest sorrows. She was a joy to be around, if you could avoid the stuff.
Read more…

The Truth About Writing Fiction From Your Life

Elisa Albert and Emily Gould talk with Longreads Essays Editor Sari Botton about the decisions involved in writing fiction with autobiographical underpinnings at Rough Draft Bar & Books in Kingston, NY on Sunday, February 11th, 2018.

Sari Botton | Longreads | March 2018 | 17 minutes (4300 words)

I’ve been working on a few different book projects for years — okay, decades — without yet publishing. There are many, many reasons it’s been taking me so long, but one of them is that I keep vacillating between memoir and fiction.

In the early 90s I dabbled in MFA programs, focusing on fiction. What I began writing in those days was somewhat based on my own experiences, yet also very made-up.

Then in the mid-90s, after I dropped out of two different programs in succession, books like Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss and Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club appeared and sparked a memoir boom. As a reader I became a nonfiction junkie. As a writer, I switched gears, started publishing personal essays…and then spent a lot of time freaking out about upsetting people by writing the truth — or my version of it, anyway.

These days I go back and forth, working on both memoir and somewhat autobiographical fiction, and spend a lot of time debating the merits of each with other writers.

On Sunday, February 11th, I turned to two of my favorite authors, Elisa Albert and Emily Gould, for their take on this. I sat down with them at Rough Draft Bar and Books in Kingston, New York, for a conversation ranging from the choices around writing fiction with autobiographical underpinnings, to the differences — mechanically-speaking and otherwise — between memoir and “autofiction.”

This interview was edited for brevity and clarity. Below you can listen to the audio — including Albert reading a passage from After Birth, and Gould reading a passage from Friendship, plus a Q&A with the audience.

* * *

Sari Botton: Elsewhere, both of you have talked a lot about, and written about, writing fiction from your life. I’ve been intrigued, and I thought that other people would want to hear about this too. So, is there a difference in your mind, either one of you, between straight up fiction and fiction that does have autobiographical elements, and what would be the difference?

Elisa Albert: We could do like a one word answer on the count of three, yes, or no. I don’t think there’s a difference. I think it’s like a spectrum, you know? Like a continuum, if you will. We are all bound by the limits of consciousness such as it is. Unless we alter our consciousness, but even altered consciousness is consciousness. It exists, you know? I mean, I can’t get into the physics too deeply, but even if you set something on Mars, you’re still coming from what you have to bring to bear, which is your consciousness. So, is that always necessarily autobiographical? No. But it does come from you. Or the one you, the eternal you, the shared collective you.

Emily Gould: Elisa and I obviously don’t write books that are set on Mars or in 18th century Scotland. No aliens are going to show up at the temp agency where Bev [a character in Friendship] is going to have her interview. There are no fantastical imaginative elements. But that also doesn’t mean that we didn’t make this stuff up. This book is actually so made up. And it’s actually really frustrating sometimes when people are like, “Oh, so what was it like for you when …” [name of my best friend] “decided to have a baby after getting pregnant after a one night stand?” And I’m like, “I don’t know, because that didn’t happen in my actual life.”

At the same time I want credit for being such an imaginative person, but then I look at any individual page of this book, and I’m like, well, yes, I did eat at that restaurant, and have basically that exact same interaction. But you know, then it became fictionalized. And we both have also written a lot of nonfiction, and think there is a shining line in my mind between the two forms.

Botton: You’ve both also written a fair amount of essay and memoir, and so people recognize certain things from your lives, which they can project on to your books, saying it’s totally just your life. But now you’re calling it a novel.

Albert: Change the names and there you go.

Botton: Right, exactly. But a lot of other novelists choose to completely invent worlds and that’s not what you’re doing, so it’s an interesting choice. Emily, I read something that you wrote about where the choice started. That you were having a hard time after writing a memoir, And the Heart Says Whatever. That after that you were having a hard time writing in the first person. Do you want to talk a little bit about that shift?

Gould: Oh sure. Yeah. In order to trick myself into being able to write again at all after the, sort of, critical and interpersonal disaster that was the reception to my first book, I sort of just started writing in the third person as an exercise even though I was still basically writing memoiristically. And then very gradually that became something other than memoir. It just started as a sort of thought exercise, and now this is something that I tell my students.

I’m teaching fiction now, and students come to me all the time and say things like, “I’m just so sick of myself. I’m sick of my perspective. I’m sick of all of my thoughts about everything. I’m sick of my themes. All of my fellow people in this workshop have heard the same story from me a thousand times already, and they’re sick of my shtick too. What can I do to break out of the aspects of me that I’m so bored with?” And I just tell them, “You’re stuck with you. I’m sorry.” They haven’t perfected head transplants yet, so we’re all stuck with ourselves.

But what you can do is just shift your lens. Try a new form even if it’s something that you’re really bad at. Draw a comic book even if you can’t draw at all. Switch point of view, like I did. Write a song or a poem about the stuff that you usually write about instead of just doing whatever it is that you usually do. It sounds so goofy, and 101, but it really works. You can pull the wool over your own eyes. You really can lie to yourself and trick your brain.

Even if you set something on Mars, you’re still coming from what you have to bring to bear, which is your consciousness. So, is that always necessarily autobiographical? No. But it does come from you. — Elisa Albert

Botton: So once you start writing about yourself, or write your story in the third person … although, Elisa, After Birth is in the first person, right?

Albert: Yeah. Because my first novel was in the third person, and I found it was the same thing anyway. Everybody still was kind of like, Oh, well, it’s just you, obviously.

Gould: Which is so weird because you didn’t die of brain cancer.

Albert: Right, I know. The narrator of my first book dies of a brain tumor at the end of the book, so I don’t know how that could be autobiographical. I mean, I think ultimately it’s a compliment. It has to be a compliment, you know? Because what people are saying when they’re sort of assuming those things or projecting, or whatever, is that you have created a world that is so visceral and immediate and convincing that oh, of course it’s you. You know? So you’ve done what you set out to do then. I mean, I wouldn’t want to write a book where people reading it would think, like, geez, this shit’s totally invented. You know?

And the other thing is a novel, anything you write, but a novel especially, just the scope of it, it has to be an obsession. So even if you’re obsessed with 17th century Germany, that’s your obsession, and there are deep-rooted ways in which that’s very autobiographical even though obviously you weren’t there in your current form. So whatever it is, it has to be an obsession. You can’t spend years working on something if you’re not obsessed. So even if it’s not about you, it is encompassing your deep need to think about, look at, explore something.

Botton: So then once you’ve started writing, either in the third or first person — but deciding that it’s fiction — how do you then take the elements of your life and make them into something that isn’t your life? That becomes another story, more than just your life? How do you make that leap? Or does it start with, like, I have this particular story I want to tell?

Albert: Lorrie Moore said in her amazing story, “How to Become a Writer,” which is in the second person, and is very autobiographical, that “it’s like recombinant DNA.” You change one little strand of something, and then watch how that ripples out. Then it’s a very different story suddenly. I like to use things from my own life that I’m not interested in inventing. I’m not interested in inventing an origin story. Like, the thing I’m working on now. It’s a girl from LA. I grew up in LA. I’m not interested in inventing a different origin story. That’s now where my obsession lies, so I’m going to use that. I don’t give a shit.

So that’s autobiographical. I mean, this person is not like me in many, many other ways, but I know that origin story, so I can make use of it. It would be wasteful otherwise. I would be wasting my energy. I’d be reinventing the wheel. I have a pretty deep identification as somebody who was raised in a really religious household. I’m not interested in reinventing that at this point. That’s not what I’m looking at. So that’s a given. I’m going to use that. That’s there. I’m fluent in that, you know?

Botton: That frees you, then, to create the other aspects of the story.

Albert: The things I’m kind of obsessed with looking at or turning over or flipping around or inverting or whatever, that’s what I’m going to spend these years doing. And I don’t have to then waste my energy on the other elements because, you know, maybe in a different book those elements might need tweaking, but yeah. It’s like butterfly wings, right? Like, tsunami on the other side of the globe because, like, one little movement here.

The narrator of After Birth — her mother is dead. My mother’s not dead. She has an unnecessary surgical birth that was like super inhumane and traumatic. That didn’t happen to me. She’s an academic. I’m not an academic. Whatever. But, see, then we get into this weird thing where I’m like, see! Whatever.

Elisa and I obviously don’t write books that are set on Mars or in 18th century Scotland. There are no fantastical imaginative elements. But that also doesn’t mean that we didn’t make this stuff up. ‘Friendship’ is actually so made up. — Emily Gould

Gould: I’m sure this is something that you guys definitely all already thought about before, but I find myself thinking about writing fiction sometimes in terms of almost like method acting a little bit. Like, you can take an emotional experience that you’ve had and transmute it into another form. I’ve never experienced a shattering romantic betrayal, which is one of the things that I write about in Friendship. Yet. But I have experienced betrayal on a deep level in a relationship, but just not, like fucking someone else. You know?

So I was able to use that emotional experience and turn it into something else, the same way that I imagine actors do. I don’t know. I’m a terrible actress, so I actually don’t know how that works. But that’s what people talk about in “The Actor Prepares,” which I totally read in drama class.

Botton: That’s so funny. An article came up in my world today, in my social media world, with a title like “Apply acting techniques to your writing.”

Albert: People come at me sometimes, like about opinions spewed by the character, and they really want to fight me about it, and it’s like, dude, you’re not going to go after Al Pacino for his mafia activities. Like, get your shit straight, okay? This is like a role, this is a performance, okay?

Botton: That’s a good way of putting it. When I emailed you guys and was asking like, “Are we talking about autofiction?” Emily, you were like, “Well, I don’t write autofiction.” And then Chloe Caldwell [who had to bow out of the event] was like, “I write autofiction.” It’s a really hard thing to get a handle on. What exactly is autofiction? Emily, I know that you’re a big fan of Chris Kraus, and her stuff kind of falls into that category, maybe? So I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about what it is and why it isn’t what you’re doing.

Gould:  Well, I mean, the most straightforward, I think, contemporary example of autofiction that probably the most people in this room have read, just based on the bestseller list is Knausgård. Has anyone read any of those My Struggles? All of the struggles? Yeah, there were a lot of them. But what he does, I think, is — it’s just this amazingly super detailed tracking the movements of his own consciousness thing, but filling in the gaps in his memory with imaginative detail, I assume, and that’s what makes it a novel rather than a diary. So, for example, there’s a famous scene at the end of the first My Struggle volume that’s just this virtuosic scene where he is cleaning out his disaster alcoholic, hoarder, dead father’s house for days on end. Just like, you’re there. You are in the house, smelling the smells, moving the specific objects from room to room with him, like almost in real time, for as long as it takes. That, to me, is autofiction. That form. And that’s just so, so different from what either of us have done, even though we have written about characters who are our same ages who have our same hair colors.

Botton: I was also thinking about Lisa Halliday’s new book, Asymmetry.

Gould: Ooh, yeah, that one’s good.

Botton: It’s about a relationship with a Philip Roth-like character. That’s part of it. And the author did have a relationship with Philip Roth, and she was interviewed in the Times and she talks about how she uses the basic details from her life to just kind of set up the universe, and then she makes a story and works from there.

Albert: Well, then there’s the idea that, is there such a thing as nonfiction? You know, its arguable. Even if you’re trying to write a memoir, somebody else who was there might have a very different memoir.

Gould: I think there are formal distinctions that we just have to make. It’s like the difference between painting oils or painting watercolors or something? And for some reason that’s really important to me to draw those distinctions. And I also have incredibly strong feelings about “nonfiction” that is written without faith, you know? Like A Million Little Pieces-style stuff. That bugs me.

I like to use things from my own life that I’m not interested in inventing. I’m not interested in inventing an origin story. Like, the thing I’m working on now. It’s a girl from LA. I grew up in LA. I’m not interested in inventing a different origin story. — Elisa Albert

Albert: Well that was written as a novel.

Gould: Oh, but published as a memoir.

Albert: Right.

Gould: So then we’re also talking about market forces and marketing categories informing what gets called fiction and what gets nonfiction. But we don’t have to bring commerce into this room tonight.

Albert: Let’s not bring the market into this.

Gould: We can just keep this in the lofty realm of art for now.

Albert: But you know that old line about how if you say it’s a memoir, they’ll say you made it all up, and if you say it’s fiction, they’ll say every word is true.

Botton: I was just going to say that. Yeah, so then why does somebody write autofiction as opposed to a memoir? It’s so close.

Gould: It’s not. It’s totally different!

Botton: It is? Okay.

Gould: Yeah, like a memoir has all these imaginative story elements and structures, and autofiction is really about living inside someone else’s mind, no matter how boring it gets there. It’s really trying to just transport you into someone else’s consciousness, which to me is like a super fascinating, trippy experience.

Albert: Done well, it’s, like, the best.

Gould: It’s transcendent when it’s done well. When it’s done badly, of course, it’s as boring as being someone boring is. And that’s just a world away from what we do as memoirists. Which is so much to do with eliding the boring part of the story and getting into the propulsive part of the narrative. That’s the craft of memoir. Sorry that I’m like, Duh, Sari.

Botton: That’s okay. I’m here to learn. But I have writers in my studio who talk to me all the time about what to do with what their writing. They are writing stuff that feels like memoir, but they want to explore different outcomes. I’ve been sharing Michelle Tea’s The Black Wave with people. There’s magical realism in there. I just love the way she goes from stuff that is so recognizable to, like, she’s just out there in another world. And so, I can never specifically know what is the best way for anybody to go, and this is kind of what this conversation came out of. I’m really trying to always get a handle on what are the differences. And I guess for different writers, it’s different things.

In order to trick myself into being able to write again at all after the, sort of, critical and interpersonal disaster that was the reception to my first book, I sort of just started writing in the third person as an exercise even though I was still basically writing memoiristically. And then very gradually that became something other than memoir. — Emily Gould

Once upon a time, everything was called a novel. There wasn’t the memoir category, and people wrote stories from their lives and called them novels, and so it got more confusing actually when the memoir genre got added. But I think for you, you’re very clearly writing fiction.

Albert: Well, I think I’d be out of material pretty quick. I mean, stories from our lives can be really interesting, and many of us have lived intense lives, but there’s only so much of it. Whereas, if you’re willing to sort of go off on little digressions and make up little details and see how that spins out, and bring your perspective to bear on things that are not your experience. Or try to inhabit somebody else’s perspective on something that maybe you have experienced, you have endless material. Then there’s just no end to it.

I think I would get bored. I mean, I write nonfiction sometimes, but it’s not as fun for me. It’s like a good muscle to exercise, but it’s like that playfulness, that kind of mischievous kind like, what can happen? What could I get away with? What if I push it this way?

Gould: Whereas, I feel like actually for me, nonfiction is where I started, and it’s my comfort zone, and fiction is a lot harder, and it comes a lot less easily. It is this arduous process whereas, it just is easier to come up with a halfway decent first draft of something memoiristic for me, at least. Whereas to come up with a halfway decent first draft of something fictional is just … My shitty first drafts of fiction are like so shitty. I think also there’s the hard, cold, horrible reality that just because something comes more easily to you doesn’t meant it’s good. God, that’s sad.

Botton: I mostly write nonfiction, memoir, essay. But I dabble in fiction. I started graduate school to write fiction. I published one short story on a website, which had autobiographical underpinnings, but also a lot of made up shit. But I started writing something like a year ago, and I was having so much fun doing it, but when I went back to it, I had to keep reminding myself — and it was also based on a character similar to me — but I had to keep reminding myself of the rules of this universe that this person lives in. That this person’s boyfriend is 18 years older and Italian. Having to orient myself again and again in this fictional world, I find hard. That doesn’t mean, though, that it isn’t something worth putting more time and effort toward and trying harder at, but for me it’s like a harder exercise to remember the rules of the universe I’ve created. Do you ever run into that?

Albert: Sometimes. I mean, like, plot mostly. Just to be like, okay, this happened, this happened. I can sort of hang out in a voice for a long time, but then to just keep the facts straight. But that’s administrative stuff, you know? A couple index cards.

Gould: Yeah. Those aren’t structural things, so if you’re thinking of it like a physical project? Like if you’re building something, that’s more like — the rules of the universe stuff you can always straighten out at the end in the same way that if you’re renovating a house, you can fix up the door frames and the windows. I don’t know anything about this metaphor.

Albert: It’s like curtains.

Gould: I’m going to stop. Yeah, it’s like you’re going to put in furniture and decorate and the wall paper and stuff, and that’s like the fun stuff that you do at the end. Also, copy editors will do some of it for you. And good line editors. Friendship was written a long time ago in my life, and I had never been pregnant. And now I’ve been pregnant a bunch, and I think the character who gets pregnant in Friendship was pregnant in the first draft, like the draft that sold, for like 11 months. Like an elephant. And no one caught it. A copy editor caught it. It was like, oops. And all I had to do was change some details about the weather, and it was fine, you know?

But that’s the kind of thing that — if you get bogged down in that stuff in the first draft, you’re going to prevent yourself from ever moving forward.

People come at me sometimes, like about opinions spewed by the character, and they really want to fight me about it, and it’s like, dude, you’re not going to go after Al Pacino for his mafia activities. Like, get your shit straight, okay? This is like a role, this is a performance, okay? — Elisa Albert

Botton: One of my obsessions that I’ve written a lot about, and interviewed people a lot about, and I’ve interviewed both of you about, is people getting pissed off at you for what you’ve written that has to do with them. And sometimes, when I’m working on memoir and afraid of people being mad at me, I think, All right, I’m just going to change my name. That’s one solution. The other is, All right, I’m totally going to fictionalize, and it will be more fun. But they’re still going to recognize themselves. Is this something that you run into or care about, or does fiction solve that?

Albert: I don’t think fiction solves it. People just tend to then pick out people who are not remotely related to them and be offended by stuff that they’re imagining might have something to do with them. I don’t tend to have a lot of people in my life who I need to protect that way. That’s been a long process, but I find it useful to have pretty honest relationships so that anyone I actually have in my life is a) not somebody I’m going to feel the need to fucking burn in literature, and b) not somebody who’s going to come at what I’m doing with a narcissistic vengeance. But that takes time, and not everybody has the luxury of narrowing down their intimate circle in such a way. But it’s served me pretty well so far.

Botton: I think, Emily, you’ve had a different experience, at least with memoir, yeah.

Gould: Well, yeah, there are definitely sacrifices involved in being honest always, for anyone. Not just writers, I think. And like Elisa, I think the list of people whose opinions I give a fuck about at all has been winnowed down over the course of my life from like, you know when I was in my 20s, it was like everyone. And now it’s just people I care about. So yeah, I think this has always been really hard for me, and it continues to be hard for me. I definitely don’t have all the answers about it at all, but like the tattoo on Sari’s arm says, there comes a point when it becomes harder for the flower to stay in the bud than it is to bloom. I’m paraphrasing her tattoo badly, sorry.

So, it’s like you choose between two different kinds of pain, right? It’s like the pain of keeping whatever it is inside versus the pain that you’re going contend with when you have to deal with the consequences of having written your story. And it’s a personal choice.

Botton: Incidentally, Emily was my tattoula. You know, like a doula. She went with me. She brought me gluten-free cookies so I wouldn’t faint.

Gould: It’s really important to eat before and after you get a tattoo.

Botton: And for those of you who can’t see, my tattoo, I recently learned, does not quote who I thought it did. So, yes. It’s that quote that you see on mugs and candles. “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Usually it says it’s by Anaïs Nin, and it is very much not, which is fine.

Albert: Are you going to edit it on the tattoo?

Botton: I didn’t attribute.

Albert: Oh.

Botton: It’s actually a woman [a playwright now] who was a publicist in California for an adult ed college in the 70s. She’d put that on a press release to encourage adults to go back to school. So, go back to school. That’s what we’re doing here. Yeah, so. I still like it.

Gould:  Me too. It’s great!

Botton:  It’s a good one, right?

Gould Yeah.

Botton: And then I got cherry blossoms on my other arm, so we’re all blossomed out here. I actually interviewed that woman. One of these days I’ll write about it…

Audio:

* * *

Elisa Albert is the author of After Birth, The Book of Dahlia, and How This Night is Different, and the editor of the anthology Freud’s Blind Spot. She has taught at Columbia’s School of the Arts, The College of Saint Rose, and is currently Visiting Writer at Bennington College.  She lives in upstate New York with her family.

Emily Gould is the author of And The Heart Says Whatever, Friendship, and the forthcoming Perfect Tunes. With Ruth Curry, she runs Emily Books, which sells and publishes books by women as an imprint of Coffee House Press. She is a contributor to Bookforum and The Cut. She teaches writing in New York City, where she lives with her family.

Sari Botton is the Essays Editor for Longreads. She edited the anthologies Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving NY  and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for NY.

Recording by Brian Macaluso of Clandestine Productions. Event sponsored by Kingston Writers’ Studio.