Search Results for: Spin

How I Got My Shrink Back

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Susan Shapiro | Longreads | February 2020 | 28 minutes (7,036 words)

Rushing to see him that Friday evening in August, I turned the corner and was shocked to catch Haley leaving his brownstone. What the hell was she doing here? I prayed my eyes were wrong and it was another tall redhead, not my favorite student. Inching closer, I saw it definitely was her — in skinny jeans, heels and a pink blouse, her unmistakable auburn hair flapping down her back as she flounced away. I froze, so crushed I couldn’t breathe.

Darting inside, I shrieked, “I just saw Haley walk out of here. You lied to me!”

“I never lied to you,” he insisted, quickly closing his door.

“Don’t tell me you’re sleeping with her?”

“Of course not.” He looked horrified.

He wasn’t my lover, cheating with a younger woman. He was the long-term therapist who’d saved me from decades of drugs, alcohol, and self-destruction. I couldn’t believe that right before our session, Dr. Winters had met with my protégée, whom I’d loved like a daughter. For the past three years, she’d sat in my classroom, living room, beside me at literary events, and speed walking around the park. She was the only person I’d ever asked him not to see, and vice versa. I felt betrayed from both sides.

Earlier that day, Haley had emailed to see if I’d recommend my gynecologist, housekeeper and literary agency. “Want my husband too?” I’d joked. In the spring, when I’d first sensed she was ransacking my address book and life, I’d asked Dr. Winters about the eerie All About Eve aura.

“She sounds nuts,” he’d said.

“That’s your clinical assessment?” I asked, adding “Don’t be flippant. She’s important to me.”

He’d sworn he wouldn’t treat her, laughing off my paranoia.

Now I could barely speak as I realized she’d broken her vow. And he’d let her in, giving her the slot directly before mine, then ran late, as if he wanted me to catch her. Perched at the edge of his leather couch, I imagined Haley sitting right where I was, leaning on the embroidered cushions, spilling secrets she’d previously shared only with me to my confidante. His plush work space morphed from my safest haven for 15 years into the creepy crawly Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

“Then why was she here?” I couldn’t process her so out of context.

“That woman is not my patient,” he insisted.

His technical wordplay sounded like Bill denying Monica. I craved a drink, joint, and cigarette.
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A Survey of My Right Arm

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Ge Gao The Threepenny Review | Fall 2019 | 15 minutes (3,057 words)

 

Last summer, I woke up one morning to find my right hand couldn’t grab the doorknob to turn it open. The next thing I knew was that no matter how many times I shook it, it remained numb. Soon, on a hot June night, a furtive pain traveled from my right elbow to my palm, back and forth, through and through, like a fractious child jumping between hopscotch courts with his full body gravity, determined and ferocious.

I am a Chinese woman. Two things I am good at are self-diagnosing and self-preservation. I went to a Chinese massage place the next morning. The lady there told me it was “tennis elbow.” Which seemed funny and unfair to me: I had never played tennis in my life. When I was eighteen and dreamed about my future self wearing a short white tennis skirt, running in a blue court, I signed up for a tennis class—and quit after the first session. My skinny right arm was not capable of holding a 9.4-ounce tennis racquet against a spinning ball. The lady at the massage place first used her arm, then her feet to dissolve the knots on my forearm. A day later, small black and blue bruises on my right arm left a message—there was pain; there was suffering. I consciously wore long sleeves to cover it up, afraid of being misunderstood as a domestic violence victim. But I would roll my sleeve up when I met my friends for coffee. It was show and tell: my pain needed to be noticeable to others as well.

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If Miscarriage is So Normal, Why Doesn’t Anybody Talk About It?

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Anna Lea Hand | Longreads | March 2020 | 28 minutes (6,996 words)

 

PART 1: If It’s So Normal, Why Aren’t People Talking About It?

The entire time I am pregnant, the entire three-and-a-half months, Jamie and I tell no one about it except for a couple people out of necessity. I tell no one because that’s what I’m supposed to do, and, honestly, because I didn’t want to be seen as a pregnant person and have people put their expectations on me, their joy on me, their definitions of how I must and should be feeling on me. I figure that for thousands of years people have been getting pregnant, and though this is certainly miraculous and empowering, I don’t need the Hallmark congratulations, not even from friends and family I trust and love. The entire time I am pregnant I watch and feel how my body is changing and feel normal. The entire time I am pregnant I know that a miscarriage could happen, and feel normal about that too, because I know that people have them. The trouble is that no one talks about them beyond repeating what they’ve been told, “Miscarriages are so common,” and none of this information tells me what it’s like to experience one. So here I am, pregnant, feeling how my body is transforming, and feeling equally light over the normalcy of a possible miscarriage, and heavy under the weight of what to expect.

And then it happens. Late on a Wednesday night I start to feel heavy, deep cramping and a heat and loosening near my cervix, a feeling similar to right before I get my period. Even though I’ve made it beyond the traditional 12-week-you’re-in-the-clear zone, I know something is not sitting right. I wake up at 3:00am Thursday morning and google “signs of a miscarriage,” and end up on Mayo Clinic’s website. I am bleeding a little, but I’m still unclear about what I’m experiencing. I call the obstetrics department of the hospital first thing in the morning and say, “I think I’m having a miscarriage,” and because I haven’t started my prenatal care with them, they ask me who has confirmed that I am pregnant as if I’m making things up. I am insulted that they think I don’t know my own body. They hesitantly agree to see me and tell me where to go. Already I feel like a problem. Already I feel out of place.
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Apocalypse Now? Now? How About Now?

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For Harper’s Magazine, Lauren Groff attends Prepper Camp hoping to learn useful, climate-friendly survival tactics to help herself and others to weather the aftermath of hurricane season in Florida. While she encounters the expected — gun enthusiasts, fear of the “other,” and a fair bit of snake oil — she also realizes that she has a lot more in common with her “prepper brethren” than she first thought.

Perhaps I should have expected to feel wildly out of place at Prepper Camp. I am a vegetarian agnostic feminist in a creative field who sits to the left of most American socialists: I want immediate and radical action to halt climate change; Medicare and free public higher education for all; abortion pills offered for pennies in pharmacies and gas stations; the eradication of billionaires; the destruction of capitalism; and the rocketing of all the planet’s firearms into the sun.

And yet I am also, in the darkest corners of my heart, a doomsday prepper myself.

It should not have been a surprise to me—though it was—how rarely actual facts were invoked at Prepper Camp: instead I had heard a great deal of fear mitigated by practical-seeming ideas, lots of baseless venom spat in the direction of imagined liberals, but almost no science to give weight to any assertions, no analysis of the larger state of the world, no evidence of statistical knowledge. Survivalists had revealed themselves to be romantics. Prepper Camp was a castle built on emotion: fear of the inchoate other was so great that the survivalists felt justified in being prepared to kill other humans to protect their material goods.

But then I saw, to my horror, an uglier truth: that I was no better than my prepper brethren. And that because of my hypocrisy, I was probably even worse.

Perhaps doomsday libertarians do secretly long for a chance to rid the earth of people who threaten their supremacy; but there is something equally anarchic in me that longs for society to break so that we can rebuild it to be kinder, more generous, more equitable. Deep down, perhaps I am a prepper because I believe that the only way we are going to pry the world’s wealth out of the greedy, grasping hands of the billionaires who are willfully killing the environment is through a total collapse of the status quo. Perhaps I am a prepper because I have had enough: I am goddamn ready for the guillotines.

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“What Do I Know To Be True?”: Emma Copley Eisenberg on Truth in Nonfiction, Writing Trauma, and The Dead Girl Newsroom

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Jacqueline Alnes | Longreads | February 2020 | 21 minutes (5,966 words)

 
Am I a journalist?” I found myself asking Emma Copley Eisenberg. On a sunny day in mid-October, Eisenberg sat adjacent to me at the dining room table in her West Philadelphia home, a spread of sliced tomatoes, chicken, and perfectly steamed asparagus she prepared on a plate between us. I am certainly not a journalist in any meaningful sense of the word — outside of an MFA in creative nonfiction, during which I learned to conduct research, I have no formal schooling or training — but Emma and I are both infatuated with the boundaries between subject and writer, research and lived experience, and how we classify it all. How does who we are and our own lived experiences affect the types of research we reach for? Is there such a thing as objectivity, or do we land closer to the truth if we expose our own flaws and biases and complicated histories on the page? And what is truth, after all? 

Eisenberg, in her debut book, The Third Rainbow Girl, wrestles meaningfully with these questions and many others. Though her book is marketed as true crime, and though a major thread within the narrative is the murder of Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero, two women on their way to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering, Eisenberg undermines many features of the subgenre by centering place as a major subject. Her descriptions of Pocahontas County, both in memoir sections, in which Eisenberg relays her time living in Appalachia, and reported sections, in which Eisenberg offers insight into the ways in which the murders of Durian and Santomero brought to the surface harmful stereotypes perpetuated against the region, complicate perceptions rather than flatten them into any packageable or easy narrative. In prose that brims with empathy, and through research that illuminates narratives that have long been hidden by problematic representation, Eisenberg exposes the kinds of fictions we tell ourselves often enough that we believe them to be true.  

During the course of our sprawling conversation, one punctuated only by friendly interruptions from a gray house cat named Gabriel, Eisenberg and I talked about what it means to seek truth in nonfiction, and how writing the personal can allow for more complicated realities to emerge; how undermining conventions of genre can impact the way a book is both marketed and read; and what it means to find clarity — or at least community — while writing into murky, and often traumatizing subject matter.  Read more…

House of the Century

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Daisy Alioto | Longreads | February 2020 | 16 minutes (3,903 words)

“A house is the physical manifestation of the ego”

Aline Kominsky-Crumb, “My Very Own Dream House”

I. Security

I have always harbored suspicions about fire escape windows. When my mother was living in Boston in the 80s, her TV set sat across from the window that opened onto her fire escape. One night she woke up to a hairy leg entering the window and screamed loudly enough to wake her neighbors and scare away the television thief. An acquaintance who lives in Park Slope listened to an intruder pop the glass out of her fire escape window and watched their iPhone light sweep closer to the bedroom as she silently tried to shake her boyfriend awake. After an eternity, he sprung up and chased the intruder out with a hockey stick.

My boyfriend does not harbor suspicions about fire escape windows, so when he moved to a one bedroom apartment, security considerations became my own research project. The acquaintance in Park Slope sent a link to a $20 window alarm on Amazon. I watched a short video about the installation process and began to read the reviews. The top review was 5/5 stars, written by Mary in Florida and it broke my heart more than any thief ever could.

She writes that she debated buying a door alarm but never did, despite the fact that the rest of the house was baby proofed for two children under two years old. One day, after feeding a bird outside, the younger one slipped back out without her noticing — probably to chase the bird, she says. In a few minutes she sensed the lack of noise in the house, the too quietness. She found him in the pond across the street and he died the next day.

The review continues. “I am a good mom,” she writes, listing the other ways she baby-proofed the home. “I am a good mom.” I’ve forgotten why I’ve come to Amazon. Maybe this is someone’s idea of a sick joke, a manufacturer’s enthusiastic review of their own product gone too far but no… with a little Googling, I find Mary and the local reporting on the tragedy.

I want to reach through my screen and hold Mary. To tell her yes, you are a good mom. It’s not your fault that doors open and babies look at birds. Of course you are a good mother, there’s just so much that can go wrong with a home.

According to Robert Lee’s A Treatise On Hysteria (1871), Greek physician Aretaeus was one of the first thinkers to link hysteria to the female body. “In the middle of the flanks of a woman lies the womb, a female viscus closely resembling an animal.” The womb wanders the body, leaving a slew of undesirable symptoms in its wake. “On the whole it is like an animal within an animal,” Aretaeus writes.
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The Danger of Befriending Celebrities

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Michael Musto | Longreads | February 2020 | 8 minutes (2,000 words)

Meryl Streep doesn’t call me every week to go bowling. In fact, she doesn’t call me at all. And that’s a good thing. I honestly can’t recommend becoming friends with celebrities, especially if you’re a long running journalist like I am. It simply will not lead to a Hollywood ending.

As appealing as they are, celebrities are used to being the center of attention, so you’d have to subvert your ego and go into full-blown ass-kiss mode in order to even be vaguely tolerable to them. Stars live for the spotlight, and in many cases, it’s all about them, even when they pretend it’s about you. (And I like things to be about me, thank you.) What’s more, as a journalist, I’d be blurring all sorts of lines and throwing away objectivity in order to snuggle up to my famous “friends.” And they’d only be nice in return because I’m press — and/or an ass kisser — so they’d have to feign some kind of kinship while pretending that all of my hideously annoying quirks are absolutely adorable. Yes, they’d be good at acting the part, but it’s so much better for both parties to just avoid this potential landmine and don’t go there. Don’t call me, Meryl! Don’t even text!
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American Dirt: A Bridge to Nowhere

Flatiron Books / Illustration by Katie Kosma

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | February 2020 | 20 minutes (5,591 words)

I first heard about American Dirt from Myriam Gurba’s scathing critique of the novel on Tropics of Meta. Her take immediately made sense, and it jolted me. Back in graduate school, I — a white, American woman — had written a novel about Mexico. I had lived there with my husband, Jorge, who is from Oaxaca, for five years. Many of our friends are Mexican; my extended family is Mexican. I speak fluent Spanish. I normally write nonfiction, and this was the only piece of fiction I had ever felt pulled to write. It was about a pregnant 17-year-old Oaxacan woman who adopts a dog. Yes. Really. I very briefly flirted with the idea of trying to publish it and was told that no one would want to read a novel that featured a Mexican protagonist — could I find a way to make the main character American?

Later, as I worked on a nonfiction book about return migration to Oaxaca, I received the same response: Could I make an American — myself, possibly, or a “young girl” living in Mexico — the main character, instead of this 35-year-old indigenous man who’d moved from L.A. back to his tiny village in the Sierra? That book didn’t sell. I was too scared to send out the novel, and I still am. As a nonfiction writer I can position myself, inquire about the limits of my understanding, push on them by asking questions. Writing fiction, one is fully laying claim to a world.

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‘I Want Every Sentence To Be Doing Work’: An Interview with Miranda Popkey

Moon on the sea.

Zan Romanoff | Longreads | February 2020 | 17 minutes (4,459 words)

 

“What I’m trying to say,” the narrator explains midway through Miranda Popkey’s debut novel, Topics of Conversation, “the theorem that must be accepted as a premise if any of my behavior is going to make sense, is that I have been, that I continue to be, best at being a vessel for the desire of others.”

Indeed, this nameless narrator spends much of the novel relating other people’s stories about their lives: repeating a conversation with a friend’s mother about an affair she had in her 20s, or describing a YouTube video of a woman recounting a party at which she almost witnessed the writer Norman Mailer stabbing his wife. (The stabbing is real; the video, fictional.)

But she also, more and less incidentally, reveals herself as her own life unfolds in short story-like sections that cover the period from 2000 to 2017: her ambivalence about all of the stories she’s hearing, and the way that they shape her actions and her perception of her self.

I’ve known Miranda since we were teenagers: we met in a dining hall our freshman year of college. (Ask her about it, she loves to tell this story, which begins with me being unable to work a hot water dispenser.) Over the course of the fifteen years we’ve known each other, we’ve talked endlessly about the topics her novel covers: about narrative and its pitfalls, desire and its darknesses, whether it’s possible to ever really be sure of what you feel, or think, or want. So of course I had to get her on the record for Longreads, to talk to her about how all of that talking — with me and with everyone else in her life — had finally led her to this book. Read more…

The Early Years of Elif Batuman’s Interest in Russian Authors

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What if author Leo Tolstoy was murdered? Consider the evidence: late in life, the great Russian author started ending his daily journal entries with the phrase “If I am alive.” He and his wife, Countess Sophia Andreyevna Tolstaya, fought so much he wrote his novella The Kreutzer Sonata about a husband who murdered his wife. (Granted, Tolstoy did give her his diaries, which detailed his sexual escapades, including the fact that he’d a child with a serf who lived on their property.) He had an associate who was trying to get control of the copyrights to his early manuscripts. Tolstoy’s wife made a strange statement on her deathbed. These are the puzzle pieces that a young Stanford student named Elif Batuman used to investigate the circumstances of Tolstoy’s death.

Before Batuman started writing for The New Yorker, she harbored a profound interest in the famed Russian author. At Granta, Batuman recounts her wild academic goose chase and how it led her to the ranks of other Tolstoyans at the International Tolstoy Conference in Russia. The four days she spent wearing sweatpants and flip-flops after her luggage got lost en route to Russia is the tip of the iceberg. This piece is a comic examination of both a subculture and of the depths of her own youthful imagination, which became her first book, The Possessed, about the people obsessed with Russia’s great authors.

The morning panel was devoted to comparisons of Tolstoy and Rousseau. I tried to pay attention, but I couldn’t stop thinking about snakes. Perhaps Tolstoy had been killed by some kind of venom?

‘The French critic Roland Barthes has said that the least productive subject in literary criticism is the dialogue between authors,’ began the second speaker. ‘Nonetheless, today I am going to talk about Tolstoy and Rousseau.’

I remembered a Sherlock Holmes story in which an heiress in Surrey is found in the throes of a fatal conniption, gasping, ‘It was the band! The speckled band!’ Dr. Watson assumes that she was killed by a band of Gypsies who were camping on the property, and who wore polka-dotted kerchiefs. But Watson is wrong. The heiress’s words actually referred to the rare spotted Indian adder introduced into her bedroom through a ventilation shaft by her wicked stepfather.

The heiress’s dying words, ‘the speckled band,’ represent one of the early instances of the ‘clue’ in detective fiction. Often, a clue is a signifier with multiple significations: a band of Gypsies, a handkerchief, an adder. But if the ‘speckled band’ is a clue, I wondered drowsily, what is the snake? There was a loud noise and I jerked upright. The Tolstoy scholars were applauding. The second speaker had finished her talk and was pushing the microphone along the conference table to her neighbor.

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