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25 Movies and the Magazine Stories That Inspired Them

Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez on the set of 'Hustlers' in New York City. (Photo by Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

As more publications pursue blockbuster stories with film and television potential, producers in Hollywood and the magazine industry are taking their inspiration from successful article-to-film adaptations of the past that have achieved box office success.

Here are 25 gold-standard film adaptations of magazine articles, published over the course of half a century as cover stories, features, or breaking news, as well as direct links to read all 25 stories online.

Legacy magazines with well-known print editions dominate this list, as do the nonfiction writers that legacy magazines accept and champion. Many of these writers’ names will be familiar to readers, as will the majority of the magazines and films themselves, in many cases because celebrated journalists inspired these major motion pictures at the peak of their careers as writers and reporters. Name recognition in one industry reinforces name recognition in another, and — despite the incredible diversity of feature-length nonfiction being published today by new voices most mainstream audiences have yet to discover — institutional support still tends to elevate known veterans.

While the talents of all of the writers on this list are undeniable, there are also well-documented structural biases that account for why so many of the writers represented here are overwhelmingly male, white, or Susan Orlean. These stories belong on any narrative nonfiction syllabus on their own merit, but I hope these samples are still just the beginning, and that new filmmakers and magazine writers can start to work together far more often on a greater breadth of material, with sufficient editorial guidance and studio backing to support them.

This list is by no means exhaustive. I’ve limited this roundup to favor adaptations (loosely defined) based primarily on magazine-style features, including only a couple of films based on award-winning newspaper investigations. The list of new film and television adaptations based on popular books or podcasts, let alone reporting that has helped support the explosion in streaming documentary formats, would run even longer.

It takes time, access, imagination, and resources to be able to realize ambitious true stories like these in their original form as narrative magazine features. It would be a welcome change to see greater diversity in the production pipeline in the coming years: in the subjects of narrative stories, in the publications considered for exclusive source material, in the creative teams that are given studio support, in the agencies brokering deals, in the awards and recognition that elevate new work, and in the storytellers who are given the resources to write long.

Writers are the lifeblood of all of these industries, and will always play a pivotal role in any production that is based on a true story.

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A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

Based on Can You Say…Hero? by Tom Junod (Esquire, 1998)

Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn’t want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, “The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is, Tom. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can’t help it.”

Hustlers (2019)

Based on The Hustlers at Scores by Jessica Pressler (The Cut, 2015)

While evolutionary theory and The Bachelor would suggest that a room full of women hoping to attract the attention of a few men would be cutthroat-competitive, it’s actually better for strippers to work together, because while most men might be able keep their wits, and their wallets, around one scantily clad, sweet-smelling sylph, they tend to lose their grip around three or four. Which is why at Hustler, as elsewhere, the dancers worked in groups.

Beautiful Boy (2018)

Based on My Addicted Son by David Sheff (The New York Times Magazine, 2005)

Nick now claims that he was searching for methamphetamine for his entire life, and when he tried it for the first time, as he says, “That was that.” It would have been no easier to see him strung out on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a methamphetamine addict comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality. In an interview, Stephan Jenkins, the singer in the band Third Eye Blind, said that methamphetamine makes you feel “bright and shiny.” It also makes you paranoid, incoherent and both destructive and pathetically and relentlessly self-destructive. Then you will do unconscionable things in order to feel bright and shiny again. Nick had always been a sensitive, sagacious, joyful and exceptionally bright child, but on meth he became unrecognizable.

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Welcome to Hive

William Gottlieb / Getty, Universal Records, Michael Ochs Archives / Getty, Epic Records

“I was happy when I saw my dance all over,” Jalaiah Harmon, 14-year old dancer, choreographer, and creator of the Renegade dance told Taylor Lorenz of the New York Times. Last fall, the suburban Atlanta teen, trained in all the classical forms, took to her bedroom and created movement to accompany the stuttering 808s of “Lottery,” a single by Atlanta hip hop artist K Camp. Its lyrics and sonics describe a flamboyant kind of self-possession. Harmon recorded the moves on her phone, uploaded her recording to the social video app Funimate, and then to Instagram. The dance went viral when TikTok influencers recorded and uploaded themselves doing it, buoyed by the attention of celebrities like Lizzo and Kourtney Kardashian. Harmon — young, Black, female and Southern — was rarely named or linked to in the frenzy. But Black Twitter intervened, and by the following winter, she would be. Harmon performed centerstage with cheerleaders at February’s NBA All Star game, and publicly, K Camp thanked her for making his song “the biggest in the world.”

In the early days of rock and roll, according to Ann Powers, “Girls ran the fan clubs, bought the records and the magazines, filled the concert halls.” Harmon’s creative brilliance, an extension of the girl-fueled heritage of popular music, is also a reminder of all the credit we have yet to give.

Women are underrepresented, missing, even, in many areas of influence and power in the music industry — as journalists, songwriters, producers, and executives. But they’ve long been the quiet center of music culture, keeping it vital. This is especially true of Black teenage girls and femme people, whose tastes and creative responses to what they love shape and originate many trends. You don’t get Beatlemania without teenage girls, or Sam Cooke without swooning adolescents like my mother, who remembers slow dancing to “You Send Me” at junior high school dances and blue light parties with Blue Magic crooning from the speakers. My memories of our household of women thrum. The TV, brown and boxy, atop a shelf of vinyl, taller than me by miles, playing “Freeway of Love” — the pink Cadillac, Ms. Franklin’s short cut and stonewash denim an everlasting, glamorous imprint. My teenage sister’s blouse with lace and ruffles and her feathered curls bouncing to the first saxophone notes of “The Glamorous Life.” My mother and her marcel irons in the bathroom mirror singing “You Bring Me Joy.” These women make the music I love, live. They help me remember that despite the dominance of male critics and tastemakers in the mainstream press, teenage girls — in hallways between classes, scrolling on their phones, making up dances in their rooms — are shaping what’s next.

Welcome to Hive, a new Longreads series about women and the music that has influenced them. The pieces in Hive live in the gap between the swarm or hive — the crowd of girls and femmes who form the base of pop trends — and the critical male voice that has shaped the “formal,” “legitimate” interpretation of music culture. The essays embrace fandom and rigor in equal parts, considering both as conduits for creativity. “Strange things happen when an artist is moved to a new depth by another,” writes contributor DJ Lynnée Denise, in her forthcoming essay about Southern crunk funk artist Joi. In this series, each contributor trusts their tastes and thinks with and through the music to tell a story of unexpected connections and embodied intellectualism.

Hive is inspired by: the Beyhive; the family of women who shaped my tastes; zines from the ‘90’s; viral Vines, the hustle, mashed potato, and dab; epistolary essays; Tumlbr; group texts; the voice of Alice Smith; and each contributor’s voice and experience.

“I wanted to be less peripheral to the things I poured my attention into,” writes contributor Eryn Loeb, in an upcoming essay about how creating a zine in her local scene as a young girl shaped her as a grown woman writer and critic. I imagine the Hive essayists writing to their teen selves, to each other, and maybe to you, reminding us that we’re all already in the center.

Also in Hive:
Welcome to Hive: Series Introduction by Danielle A. Jackson
Miami: A Beginning, by Jessica Lynne
On Watching Boys Play Music, by Eryn Loeb
Funk Lessons in Sonic Solitude, by DJ Lynnée Denise

Sight and Insight

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Liane Kupferberg Carter | Longreads | February 2020 | 16 minutes (4,092 words)

I was born with strabismus, an imbalance in the muscles that position the eyes. Strabismus: from the Greek strabismós, meaning “to squint.” People sometimes call it cross-eyed, wall-eyed, or lazy-eyed.

I was still a toddler when my mother started taking me to doctors. They prescribed drops, eye exercises, and, eventually, glasses when I was 4. Mom chose blue and white striped cat eye frames for me. “These are adorable,” she said. If she said they were pretty, I assumed they must be. I wasn’t sure I wanted to wear them. But my mother wore glasses too, and I wanted to please her.

When the glasses didn’t help enough, the doctor instructed her to put a patch over one lens to force my weaker right eye to work better. That afternoon I went down the street to play with the neighborhood kids. There was a new girl with them. She asked, “Why are you wearing that patch?”

“I’m a pirate,” I said.

“That’s stupid,” she replied. “Girls can’t be pirates. You look ugly.”

I pushed her. She tumbled back onto the lawn and started to wail. A door flew open, and an enormous dog bounded at me, nipping and snapping. Frantic, I tried to get away, but a woman who must have been the girl’s mother grabbed me, her nails digging into my shoulder. She wrenched my arm behind my back and hissed in my ear, “Who’s your mother? You’re a very bad little girl.”

Sobbing and ashamed, I stumbled down the sidewalk, desperate for my mom. By the time I burst through the back door I was panting. Mom looked angry. The scary lady must have telephoned. “You know better than that,” Mom scolded. “I’m disappointed in your behavior.”

I was awash in incoherent misery. Why wasn’t she taking my side?

But I knew. It was because I was bad. An ugly, bad girl.
Read more…

House of the Century

Illustration by Homestead Studio

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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Carly Rae Jepsen’s Exhilarating, Emotionally Intelligent Pop Music

Michael Tullberg / Getty

Rachel Vorona Cote | Longreads | February 2020 | 12 minutes (3,333 words)

 

Every now and then, in one of her music videos or during a heady, live performance, singer Carly Rae Jepsen will close her eyes, raise her hands above her head, and sway her hips. It’s not choreographed, or at least it doesn’t appear to be. Instead of crisp synchronicity, Jepsen opts for fluid, extemporaneous groove. She is singing to us and moving with us — until those fleeting moments between verses or at song’s end, when she seems to have retreated, not out of reach, but rather into a full-bodied state of emotive receptivity. In this brimful pause, she is both steward and beneficiary, theorist and pupil, basking in the superabundant, prismatic feelings her music elicits.

It might not seem especially illuminating to say that Jepsen’s pop repertoire lays bare the complexity of human emotions. All music does this, although with varying degrees of nuance and success, and one could say the same about every other art form, too. But over the course of Jepsen’s 12-year career, her evocation of big tricky feelings has shifted into something of an intentional artistic inquiry. She is fascinated by the vast, labyrinthine topic of human sentiment, so much so that she organized her 2015 album — the aptly titled Emotion — around it, although her exploration is by no means circumscribed to that particular release. From the time she released her first album, the oft-forgotten Tug of War, in 2008, Jepsen’s music has thrummed with idiosyncrasies. She expresses the extraordinary and the tragic within the day-to-day, whether her premise is unrequited love for someone she knew would never be interested in her (“Your Type”), toying with an illicit sexual fling (“This Kiss”), or solicitude about her emotional intensity and its impact on her relationship (“Too Much”). Any event, especially a romantic one, holds the possibility for maximalist sentiment: Jepsen roams these vistas of the heart, shepherding those of us whose thick, cumbersome emotions render us lonely and overwhelmed.

Read more…

The Danger of Befriending Celebrities

Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

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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Regarding the Pain of Oprah

KMazur / Getty, Photo Illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 |  8 minutes (2,233 words)

On the cover of Susan Sontag’s 2003 book-length essay Regarding the Pain of Others, her last publication before her death, is a Goya print from his graphic 19th-century series The Disasters of War. It shows a reclining soldier passively taking in a dead man hanging from a tree, a body in a row of indistinguishable dangling bodies. Its pain — and the indifference with which that pain can be met — is the perfect illustration of Sontag’s book, which was her response to the query, “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” She questioned whether the representation of suffering has any hand in ending it. “For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war,” Sontag writes. 

Is that why American Dirt, a sensationalized, stereotype-ridden piece of telenovela exploitation written by a self-identified white (later Puerto Rican–grandmother identified) woman, was met with a seven-figure deal and trumpeted by a publishing industry — Oprah’s Book Club most notably — that ignores countless Latinx stories? Is that why On the Record, a documentary initially backed by Oprah about various women accusing Def Jam cofounder Russell Simmons of sexual misconduct, premiered at Sundance when so many other films about women’s oppression have not? Both of these works have been held up in the tradition of pain iconography and as part of a wider culture that both defers to and is let off the hook by Oprah, its designated high priestess of compassion. An indigent black girl from the rural South, she was an exemplar of one of the most neglected demographics in America. That this capitalist society made her a billionaire for inspiring a cultural bloodletting has immunized it from the sort of criticism levied when white men like Jerry Springer (or white women like Gwyneth Paltrow) do the same thing. 

But the merciless critique Oprah has received both for her support of American Dirt and lack of support for On the Record points to a framework that simultaneously benefits her and uses her as a shield. This empathetic entrepreneur’s predictably myopic choices — just like her acolytes’, from Dr. Phil to Reese Witherspoon — may not serve the majority, but they do serve the system that lets her take the fall for its larger failures of representation. Oprah is one of the most salient testaments to capitalism. 

***

 

“People want to weep,” Sontag writes. “Pathos, in the form of a narrative, does not wear out.” She may have been referencing war photography, but the sentiment applies to all narrative forms of suffering, which “are more than reminders of death, of failure, of victimization. They invoke the miracle of survival.” This almost superhuman transcendence of misfortune, this ability to raise yourself out of your primordial pain toward the heavens, is the prototype for the American Dream. It is also the perfect paean to plutocracy. Oprah is the prime example: teen mom, child sex abuse, teen pregnancy, drug use. While working her way toward a journalism career, she was told early on that she was too emotional while anchoring the news. It was here that she found a gaping hole in the market: Oprah turned her “failure” into a touchy-feely talk show, eventually netting herself a cult of personality and an empire approaching $3 billion. Her triumph over her past imbued her with the authority to turn beleaguered strangers’ private torment into public good and served as testament to a hierarchy of success founded on flagellation. “There is nothing greater than the spirit within you to overcome,” she said on The Oprah Winfrey Show. “You and God can conquer this,” conquering here implying profiting. She was proof that it worked. Oprah may not think you are responsible for your own misery, but she does believe you are responsible for flipping your misfortune, just like she did. As she told a women’s economic conference in 1989, “There’s a condition that comes with being and doing all you can: you first have to know who you are before you can do that.”  

Her suffering was transformative, a brand of anguish Sontag defines in her book with an unintentionally spot-on characterization of how Oprah, who referred to her talk show as her “ministry,” secularized (and capitalized on) a pious approach to hardship. “It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation,” Sontag wrote. The people Oprah chose to interview (Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston), the books she chose to plug (Toni Morrison, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces), and the films she chose to produce (Beloved, Precious) — all followed this same general trajectory from trauma to some semblance of deliverance, hewing with her own personal experience. They also served to convince the most downtrodden members of the population that the system was only failing to work for them because they failed to plumb their own souls deeply enough. If capitalism was unprofitable for them, it’s because they weren’t doing the work — not in the industrious sense, but in the therapeutic one.

Oprah’s recent projects fall well within that tradition, including On the Record, the Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering documentary she was executive producing for Apple TV+ (it will now air on HBO Max), which centered around a group of women accusing Russell Simmons of sexual abuse. (He has been accused by at least a dozen women in total and denies all the charges.) The question is why this high-profile film by multiple-award winning filmmakers that already had a distributor was playing at a highly sought-after festival, when a struggling independent film could have used that rare opening to seek distribution? Instead, the news out of Sundance focused on whether Oprah, who pulled out of the film at the last minute over creative differences, was siding with Simmons or not — whether she was betraying not only her own race, but her own brand (the enabling of struggling black women to claim their due). “In my opinion, there is more work to be done on the film to illuminate the full scope of what the victims endured,” she said in a statement. This reads to me as uncomfortably on brand, Oprah squeezing as much as possible out of a desperate situation — particularly if it’s at the expense of another capitalist success story, in Simmons’s case — to get maximum returns. But this isn’t all down to her own prurience. It’s the industry around her (including Apple) that encourages her to do this, that pays her excessively for it — the same industry that doesn’t even consider the marginalized stories that do not comply with those standards (standards upheld by a black woman, remember).

Having said all of that, it is also a function of technology that our culture expects us to bleed out to survive. The more intimate media becomes, Sontag argued, the further our shock threshold moves. “The real thing may not be fearsome enough,” she wrote, “and therefore needs to be enhanced or reenacted more convincingly.” This is where you get a situation like Jeanine Cummins’s “trauma pornAmerican Dirt, the latest Oprah’s Book Club pick, about a Mexican migrant fleeing a drug cartel across the border with her son. “I’m interested in characters who suffer inconceivable hardship,” Cummins writes in her author’s note, “in people who manage to triumph over extraordinary trauma.” It was a direct dial to Oprah, and in particularly unfortunate timing, she expressed her support for this hyperbolic yarn about a fictional woman of color’s pain on the same CBS morning show in which she discussed pulling her support from a documentary full of actual women of colors’ pain. In a video posted on Twitter, Oprah held up the Cummins book, with its cover of watercolor birds and barbed wire, and gushed: “I was opened. I was shook up. It woke me up. And I feel that everybody who reads this book is actually going to be immersed in the experience of what it means to be a migrant on the run for freedom.” Her description reminded me of Sontag’s portrayal of graphic battle imagery: “Stop this, it urges. But it also exclaims, What a spectacle!” American Dirt was another in Oprah’s Apple streaming projects, part of her ambition to make “the world’s largest book club,” and it showed a level of outdated hubris that was revisited tenfold upon her mentions.

While the flesh-and-blood migrants who are dying at the border have not been much of a priority to the world of capitalist enterprise, the literary industry’s corner offices have been effusive in their tone-deaf praise for American Dirt, which last year celebrated its release with — no shit — barbed twig centerpieces. The hypocrisy was too much for the Latinx community (and social media) to bear. They balked at a non-Mexican woman who claimed her husband was undocumented (he’s Irish) and painted her nails with her book cover (more barbed wire) being edified for a cheap piece of Mexican cultural appropriation, while their own perhaps less uplifting (see less white) stories were serially overlooked — Oprah’s Book Club has never chosen a Mexican author. “The clumsy, ill-conceived rollout of American Dirt illustrates how broken the system is,” wrote Mexican American author and translator David Bowles in a heavily circulated New York Times op-ed, “how myopic it is to hype one book at the expense of others and how unethical it is to allow a gatekeeper like Oprah’s Book Club to wield such power.” He pointed out that a bestseller doesn’t just happen; it’s deliberately made by big publishers sinking money into its promotion and rallying press and booksellers around it. One book’s immoderate gain is then every other book’s loss: For three months in the wake of Oprah’s book announcements, other books’ sales plummet. This is a clear impoverishment of culture, but, more importantly, it limits the dissemination of ideas that do not serve big business’ hierarchical ideals. Trauma is valued as long as it’s sanctioned by the small number of powerful people who maintain an overwhelming amount of sway over the capitalist system they uphold. The voices that are ultimately projected are their own, serving their interests and no one else’s. As Drew Dixon, the woman at the center of the Simmons doc, said, echoing Bowles: “Oprah Winfrey shouldn’t get to decide for the whole rest of the world.” More importantly, the machine that created her shouldn’t get to either. 

***

“So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering,” Sontag writes at the end of her book. “Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.” In the case of Oprah, it proclaims hers while hiding the main accomplices. Once among America’s most oppressed populations, her triumph is not only immune to interrogation, so is American plutocracy for having anointed her as its apostle. Oprah gamed the system that once neglected her, and her success lends it a veneer of progress and perpetuates it into the future. With her accumulated power, she shifted taboos and secured the first black American president approximately 1 million votes. But Oprah’s $2.7 billion net worth, her $25 million private jet, her empire — none of these are incidental. They are emblems of a world which has traded millions of people’s poverty for a handful of people’s riches, millions of perspectives for one authority. Oprah may still be full of good intentions, but good intentions are no longer as significant as actions, and every one of us is now accountable — and not just for ourselves. It is not enough anymore to ask people to lift themselves by their bootstraps now that people are aware that those straps are all rigged to snap.

In the midst of American Dirt landing at No. 1 on the Times bestseller list, its publisher acknowledged mistakes but also announced its epic book tour, the one which elbowed out so many other more worthy books and authors, was being canceled over safety concerns. The move proved that Flatiron — also publisher of five Oprah books — fundamentally buys into the notion that when the country’s marginalized populations interrupt the capitalist machinery, it’s a risk to the country itself. The Hispanic Caucus has since requested a meeting with the Association of American Publishers. Bowles, meanwhile, praised the director of a border library — Kate Horan of Texas’s McAllen Public Library — for declining to be part of a pilot partnership with Oprah’s Book Club. Sontag writes that a transformative approach to suffering like Oprah’s is “a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed.” But Horan’s response to the question “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” is neither Oprah’s nor the opposite — it is to reject the war itself. Oprah serves up war stories to the system that is responsible for them — her response is to meet suffering with suffering. The Latinx community sees the paradox even if Oprah, in her prism of privilege, cannot. “We’ll never meekly submit our stories, our pain, our dignity,” writes Bowles, “to the ever-grinding wheels of the hit-making machine.”

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

All Mom’s Friends

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Svetlana Kitto | Longreads | February 2020 | 6 minutes (1,503 words)

Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

My parents sat us down on the edge of their bed to tell us they were separating. There was a shimmering hologram sticker of blond-haired and blue-eyed Jesus in a white robe on the door of my dad’s bedside table. I had put my fingers over it many times, trying to take Jesus into my heart like I had seen on TV. Everything I knew about America I learned from TV. Please make sure my mom and dad don’t die before I wake up. Please make sure I don’t get kidnapped like the kid on Growing Pains. Thank you, Jesus. My dad also had pictures of Hindu gods all over the house and a small Buddha statue on top of his dresser, but there was nothing about them on TV. My mom was Latvian and Jewish, but none of that was on our walls. She deferred to my dad’s New Age Englishness, and that was that.

While my parents talked to us, holding our hands and being uncharacteristically gentle, my sister cried, and I felt something inside me warm up. I stared at my mom’s pink suede and snakeskin heels on the shoe rack at the foot of the bed. She didn’t wear them anymore because they “destroyed” her back. I wanted her to wear them so badly! I didn’t want them to hurt her back and I didn’t understand how a back could hurt. My dad’s back had a hurt too, both of them had “bad backs.” I thought this had to do with them being more like old people than young because of all the drugs they had used before getting sober when I was 5. I didn’t understand that my mom was really young. She was a really young person who wanted to be with her friends. 


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After my parents separated, my mother moved my sister and me into a tiny one-bedroom on Laurel Avenue in West Hollywood. Down on Sunset Boulevard there was the Laugh Factory and Greenblatt’s Deli and the Coconut Teaser, a place for grown-ups I knew. What did grown-ups do in places? Up the street the other way was Fountain Avenue and the mouth of Laurel Canyon where I went to elementary school, just on top of the hill. After school, I rode my bike up and down our block, and one day, on the corner of Fountain and Laurel, I had my first existential crisis. I looked up at the sky and thought, overwhelmed and slightly horrified: I am me. I was 9. 

It was a Los Angeles childhood so a lot of our time was spent in the car — a beat-up gold Corolla with a Die Yuppie Scum bumper sticker on the back. My grandmother had given my mother the car to help her start her new life, separate from my father. If it was hot, the windows would be rolled down and the AC on. My mom would either be smoking or rolling a cigarette, which she could do with one hand. We would drive all over Hollywood running errands and visiting her friends, many of them sober, some of them still using, almost all of them gay men. All the first people I loved outside of my family were gay men. 

My mom’s best friend, Al Babayan, was the first person close to us to go. He was Armenian and had spent most of his childhood in Glendale in Los Angeles. He had slept with Stephan, who everyone knew had HIV. Al loved the Smiths; he was very sensitive. The first thing he would do when he visited us was check on our German shepherd Maya and make sure she had water. 

* * *

I was very concerned about my mom’s romantic life. On the phone I would hear her say, “I’m just so fucking lonely.” I’d seen her break down in traffic, in the gold Corolla. “Your fucking father. Your fucking selfish father.” And it was true that my dad seemed to be fine, as the months went by piling on the girlfriends who looked nothing like my blond Jewish Latvian mother — women with names like Theresa Sullivan, Shannon O’Donoghue.

All the first people I loved outside of my family were gay men.

Still, I couldn’t understand my mom’s loneliness because she had so many friends and so many people who loved her and, as a result, loved her girls. Eeda and her girls had many places to go on the weekend. In the summer, my mom’s friend Tracy invited us to swim at her parent’s mansion in Santa Monica Canyon. It belonged to Tracy’s mother, who was the famous Hollywood actress Jean Simmons. She was never there when we were so we could play hide-and-seek in all the bedrooms and eat Chicken McNuggets by the pool.  

All of my mom’s friends had a different car to ride around the city in, looking out for meters that had leftover money in them, windows down and air-conditioning on at the same time, music blaring. If it wasn’t classical music, it was Massive Attack or Prince, whom my mom and her friends loved the most. He can play every instrument, Mom said. They were the same age. He’s a genius. You can’t tell if he’s gay or straight and it doesn’t matter, she said. Everyone wants to have sex with Prince. I would rewind the tape to play “Little Red Corvette,” “Kiss,” “I Would Die 4 U” over and over, and we would all sing. I’m not a woman / I’m not a man / I am something that you’ll never understand.

One day, my mom and I were driving to our bank in West Hollywood when I had a brilliant idea.

“Mom!” I said. “Why don’t you just be with a gay man? There are so many that you like!”

My mom paused. “Sleeping with a gay man would be like blowing your brains out with a shotgun right now,” she said gravely into the rearview mirror, shifting the car into park.

* * *

The year Ryan White died, my mother moved us to a new apartment in a gated community called Park LaBrea. She had been promoted at the production house, and we were driving around in a newly leased Volkswagen convertible. Now, Tim or Tracy or Joelle would pile into the car and we would drive to the beach with the top down and the AC on. Al came over to our new place once before he died. He and my mom got into a fight. She knew he had fixed by the burn mark he left on the toilet. “No junkie wants to be told they can’t use,” she said. I remember going to see him in hospice care in Studio City. My sister cried and I thought about our dog, Maya. I wanted to cry so my mom knew I cared.

There was Daniel, whose rich parents bought him a house in Laurel Canyon with a beautiful pool that was like a dark lagoon with jets that pumped warm water. My mom had told me that Daniel’s parents bought him lots of things because they felt guilty, because they had never accepted their gay son and now he was going to die. Daniel’s skin was pocked, which I associated with his HIV, but I later learned they were actually acne scars. Daniel took lots of pictures of Eeda and her beautiful daughters by the pool and told me I looked like a Pre-Raphaelite painting. 

There were people who were friends of both my parents. Tim McGowan was one, and with him my mother’s relationship was a little rockier, probably because it was too much based in a shared bitterness toward my father. There was Bruce Almeda, a pastry chef from the South who called my dad Ma Bell because he was always on the phone. There was my dad’s friend Jimmy Drinkovitch who planned to commit suicide before he got really sick. He made a promise to his lover that if he killed himself he would tell him first so that they could go together. But in the end he didn’t tell him.

With the deaths of Al and Daniel, my mom had lost her two closest friends. When she was working as an editor on the movie Mo’ Money, she met a successful music supervisor, who was also her boss. She wasn’t interested in him at first. But he wouldn’t leave her alone, she said. And eventually: He has nice calves, and he’s nothing like your father. He wanted her to quit her job and let him take care of all of us. Soon we were living with him and his two sons in a big house that wasn’t ours in Santa Monica. My mom started drinking again in secret. I was a teenager so I wasn’t paying attention to her anymore. I started drinking too.

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
‘To Be Well’: An Unmothered Daughter’s Search for Love, by Vanessa Mártir
Witness Mami Roar, by Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez
Leadership Academy, by Victor Yang

* * *

Svetlana Kitto is a writer and oral historian in NYC. Her writing has been featured in The Cut, Hyperallergic, New York Times, Guernica, and VICE. She’s currently working on a novel called Purvs, which means “swamp” in Latvian and is the name of the country’s first gay club.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Behind the Scenes at Rotten Tomatoes

Longreads Pick

Despite certain criticisms people lobby against the film and TV rating website, one thing Rotten Tomatoes does well is help you get away from its website and get you in front of a good movie as quickly as possible.

Source: Wired
Published: Jan 21, 2020
Length: 14 minutes (3,530 words)

Waiting for Alice

Jasmin Merden / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Leslie Kendall Dye | Longreads | January, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,577 words)

Alice is destroying my marriage. It began unexpectedly and accelerated quickly, and now we’re in the thick of a potentially ruinous interpersonal struggle. Kerry (my husband) sees it as a contest between my passion and his pragmatism. I do too, but not in a bad way. I look at it this way: Our marriage is like a seesaw, which fulfills its function by rocking back and forth. Alice, at the moment, is the teeter point. As such, she’s complicated. She is also the most gorgeous creature who ever lived.

Alice has curly hair, the color of oatmeal. Mornings she can be found basking in the sunlight that floods the two front rooms of our apartment, either on my daughter Lydia’s bed or on the living room carpet. In summer, the ash tree blooms and fills the windows, and our city apartment looks like a country house. Alice looks like a duchess, curled on the hearth. She knows that at 5 p.m., when I bring my radio into the kitchen and start making dinner, Lydia will be home soon. Our front door is thin enough that we hear everything in the outside hall — goodnight kisses, lovers’ spats, newspapers landing at our neighbors’ front doors. We are one floor above the lobby, and Alice’s ears flatten against her head when the downstairs doors squeak. Lydia often pauses in the vestibule between the first and second door to inspect the packages that the postman has dropped. Alice holds her breath in that pause, listening for what comes next, which is Lydia banging up the stairs to our door. She is a small child, but very bangy; each step announcing her after-school weariness. Alice, having been trained not to bark, stands at our door with barely constrained poise. She quivers. When the knob turns, she backs up, paws the ground, and emits a single yip. Lydia’s backpack crashes to the ground — it gets heavier every year — and the rituals of reunion commence. Alice licks Lydia’s face, Lydia massages Alice’s ears. Alice turns in circles, Lydia says, “OK, Alice, OK! ” She picks her up and cradles her, rubs Alice’s nose with her own. Lydia’s father comes up the stairs. Lydia gets Alice’s leash. When the three of them return from the park, we will eat.

People often make fun of small dogs like Alice. She is a teacup toy poodle, she is under 10 pounds, and people say, “That dog is the size of a rat.” Yes, I want to say, and you are the size of a Great Dane. So what? In an interview, President Obama once said something unkind about “little yappy” dogs and Michelle shut him down. All dogs are dogs. All dogs look silly and mournful when wet; all dogs have urgent ears. A small dog is as likely to sniff or cuddle or growl or bark as a large one. Across all breeds, there is a common dogness. People think big dogs express salt-of-the-earthness in their owners, something that speaks of mud and skinned knees and free-range parenting. They think little dogs, on the other hand, reveal their owners to be tacky, or frivolous, or worst of all girly, as if delicacy is the province of only one gender. Alice feels no pressure though; she doesn’t care how she looks. She can be both graceful and awkward. She is ethereal when she lifts her paw; she is clumsy when she roots in the wastebasket. When we catch her, she looks up, her jaws clenched around a tissue stained with lipstick or an emptied bag of kettle corn. “Drop it, Alice,” we say. She narrows her eyes. “Alice, drop it.” She places her treasure on the floor, as though it were a wounded sparrow. Then she slinks away, a little angry. Alice also likes to chew toes; she stations herself at the foot of the bed while we watch TV. She brings her kibble from the kitchen to the dining room table, eating it from the floor while we eat. She will lick the inside of your nose if you let her. She is a dog’s dog. She’s a little girl’s dog. She is our dog.


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For my husband, the problems with Alice are many. She is expensive and she requires too many walks — Kerry, being the most responsible member of the household ends up taking her for most of them. She wrecks midday carnal relations. She stares. When we lock her out, she whines at the bedroom door. Someday she may get sick, so sick that we can’t afford her care, and it will be two — three if you count Alice — against one, in favor of deepening our debt to save her. Kerry would of course want to save Alice, but Kerry also wants to pay our rent. Alice annoys approximately one half of the 12 or so tenants in the building — the French woman who receives right-wing mail and the guy who works out of his home as a medium are most likely the ones who have called management about her paws skidding on the hardwood floor at all hours. The gray-haired couple upstairs barely tolerates children; potentially incontinent creatures don’t mix with carpeted hallways. Our downstairs neighbor does like Alice, as does her cat Bubby, who glides up the stairs routinely to request stomach rubs from Lydia. When Alice came, Bubby knew he’d better make friends with her. We don’t know how the FBI agent on the fourth floor feels, because that’s her job.

She will lick the inside of your nose if you let her. She is a dog’s dog. She’s a little girl’s dog. She is our dog.

Kerry fears neighborly rage, our one-year lease, and NYC’s scarcity of affordable housing. Kerry is cautious, Kerry is careful, Kerry is against extra spending, which is something Lydia and I are very much for. Lydia and I like new paperbacks and take-out burritos and postcards from the museum gift shop. We like bringing flowers when we visit friends, and chocolate, too, and tea. We are not good with margins and austerity, though when we got Alice we promised to be better. I have taken on more work and Alice doesn’t eat the finest dog food or anything. We frequently have scrambled eggs for dinner. Still, Kerry worries.

For Lydia and me, there is only one problem with Alice: She doesn’t exist. Actually, she might, but if she does, we don’t know her yet. We might have seen her picture online, at one of the rescue sites we frequent, but maybe none of those dogs was Alice.

The other night, we fought over Alice. Lydia, to my pride and shame, moderated. “I understand how Daddy feels, because you told him Alice wouldn’t be for a while, and then you and I started in right away. I understand how Mommy feels, because Daddy can never be persuaded of anything, and it’s not like we can compromise and get only half a dog.”

In our wedding vows, Kerry promised we could get a dog. “Two dogs, we’ll have to talk about,” he added, meaning one dog was OK, I reminded him.

“I didn’t know about the wedding vow, Daddy,” Lydia said.

Kerry looked abashed. But then he said: “Someone has to worry about the routine responsibilities. Mommy does housework on impulse, whereas Daddy does all the scheduled events, like laundry. I don’t want to be the dog walker because I am the only one who can keep a schedule.”

“Won’t Alice ever pee on impulse?” Lydia asked.

“You’re not helping,” I said.

Alice has become a dark cloud for Kerry, a constant pre-ulcerous stomachache. He never used to worry about our desire to get a dog because there’s a big clause in our lease: NO DOGS. It’s on a separate page. NO DOGS gets its own page, stapled at the back.

But two weeks ago, Lydia asked me to ask, just to be sure. Kerry said good, that will be an end to it. I wrote to building management. They wrote back the following:

“Dogs are decided on a case-by-case basis. Tell us your plan and we’ll let you know.”

I started in my chair. For so long, we had sighed and complained to our friends: “Our building won’t allow dogs. We want one so badly!” Now, it was a case-by-case decision and suddenly, Alice appeared. Kerry’s face clouded, his shoulders tensed. “Don’t tell Lydia right away,” he pleaded. I told him I wouldn’t, I understood the pressures of a dog, I was not as gung ho as he thought, I wanted to be measured, to wait until we had more security, to wait until Lydia could walk a dog by herself. I thought I meant it. I did mean it. But Alice kept looking at me. She looked at me from my lap, and she looked out from Lydia’s arms where the two of them lay snuggled on a Saturday, sleeping in. She looked at Kerry too, with love in her eyes, teaching him how to love her back. She looked at me so much that I gave in and began looking too, not just at her, but for her.

Here’s why.

Last year Lydia’s first grade class did a months-long unit on families. The three of us almost ended up in therapy as a result. All the kids brought their parents and their siblings on their presentation days. Baby brothers crawled on the floor in diapers, big sisters described middle school. Lydia came home scowling. “Angela doesn’t have siblings,” I said. “Neither does Riley.” It was no use. It seemed that all other only children went on lots of vacations or were devoted to sports that kept them busy or lived in high-rises with lots of other kids who came over all the time to watch movies. I stopped reading books to Lydia that had siblings in them. Meet the Austins, Cheaper by the Dozen, The Saturdays, all these large-family books disappeared into my closet.

It festered through winter. I explained to Lydia again why she is an only child. Mommy suffered a near psychotic depression during pregnancy, we can’t afford a second child if we want to stay in Manhattan, or if she wants to go to a weekly ballet class, or for us to replace her shoes as her feet grow. The choice to have one child makes sense.

I asked other parents of onlies how they handled the pleading; most people said that it hadn’t come up, that their onlies liked their situation just fine. Meanwhile, my daughter had mastered pathos at a Dickensian level. The vortex of her longing sucked up small pleasures, blotted out the sun, made me ache for a pregnancy that I knew could do me in. With sudden clarity, I realized I was a failure at homemaking, for what is a home without lots and lots and lots of kids? There had to be noise and crashes at unexpected times, and club meetings on the stairs, and walking a scrappy little sister to school. My life was a sham, it was not full, it was a cruelty inflicted on my one precious child. I began taking antidepressants.


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Eventually, winter let up. Lydia attended dance camp and learned inappropriate songs. Friends slept over. They built forts and they fought and out of sight things crashed to the floor. We had dinner parties and the house got messy. I worked to keep our apartment as full and gay as possible. It became a habit. We became hosts. We threw a Christmas party and a New Year’s dinner. Then I googled successful only children. Daniel Radcliffe is an only child. So too, Cary Grant and Carol Burnett. I felt better, even triumphant.

In The Woman Upstairs, Claire Messud writes about how a family of three never looks like a real family when they sit down to dinner. When I read that, I recognized the sentiment, and I felt worse.

Then, on a bus one spring day last year, I sat next to a woman who was holding a black poodle on her lap. She massaged the dog’s head with her thumb. We got to talking. I told her my child loved dogs, and I wanted to get her one. The woman replied that her daughter was an only child, and the dog was the best compensation she could think of. Indeed, she said, the dog had worked wonders.

In the play The Member of the Wedding, there is this line, distilled and poignant. Lonely Frankie says it about Janis and Jarvis, her brother and soon-to-be sister-in-law. “They are the we of me.” The three of us are already three, but a vision flared: Alice could make us three even more of a “we.”

Kerry said the other night that he married me partly because I don’t think things through and I married him partly because he does. He was angry that I had told Lydia the building said “maybe.” I had promised to keep it under my hat. I was angry because he doesn’t understand how much we need Alice. He said: “I thought you were a grown-up.” I said: “I thought you loved me.”

The three of us are already three, but a vision flared: Alice could make us three even more of a ‘we.’

I do wonder if I should have my head examined. Alice is obviously something more than a dog to me, she is some sort of promise, some dream deferred onto which I can project realization. She is the anti-lonely, the kinetic and frenetic to energize the quiet world of three, she is also peace at bedtime, Lydia maybe falling asleep at a normal hour. There is a time in life when our parents shape and define it, they set the terms of what is both normal and possible. Alice is a way to expand my powers, to convince myself that I can stretch our universe, place one more star inside its boundaries. I remind Kerry we could not afford Lydia, either. I remind him how much we had to adjust to walking her in the park, too. He reminds me that dogs and people are not the same, and I shoot back that that’s the point — we are not making another baby, we are merely adopting a dog. There is always a counterresponse; it is a fight between two equally sane points of view. That’s why Alice is pushing us apart. To Kerry, she’s the sword of Damocles. To me, she’s the final click on the lamp’s dial, the one that brings us to the brightest wattage possible for our home. We are both right. The domestic seesaw rocks.

For as long as I’ve known him, Kerry’s had a plan. He runs the numbers, he thinks ahead. Where we’ll eat dinner and what time the movie is playing and whether the bus or the subway will be faster today. He uses calendars and maps and software. He is calm and efficient and brainy. He has tried to teach me to stick to a plan, too, with some success. I, in turn, have coaxed him to surrender, to trust that even unpredictable pleasures can be counted on: I am forever changing the plan, but I am always here. Little dogs yip and run around in circles and confuse the situation of your life. But they also build their world around you, and if you can endure the noise and motion, you get all those lovely kisses. To me, this is the perfect plan, the stable and the kinetic, forever in pursuit of each other. That’s us. That’s family. That’s Alice.

* * *

Leslie Kendall Dye is a writer and actress in New York City. Her work has appeared at The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, Vela, Electric Literature, SELF, The LA Review of Books, and others. She is at work on a memoir about mothers, daughters, drugs, and show business.

* * *

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross