Search Results for: The Believer

Going the Distance: A Reading List on Running

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As the sun washes the sky pastel, my feet clip in an even rhythm down the street and my breath settles into a ragged cadence. Swallows dart out from beneath a bridge, swooping through the new morning. When my Garmin lights, notifying me of a mile, I press forward. As the time stretches on, the sear in my hamstrings heightens and my lungs seek air. Hunting down the same elusive times I do nearly every morning, I run until I hit the six-mile mark where I ease up, allowing my legs to rest.

When I return from my runs, I record the distance and splits from each individual mile. I have been doing so for 13 years. When I line my records up on the floor, a profile of my former self takes shape. When I was merely 13, for example, I recorded that I started running at 7:11 AM, and ran eight miles in 59:21, averaging a pace of 7:25. My records sometimes list complaints: “Legs felt like bricks,” “legs hurt,” “windy,” or “toe bled a lot,” and still the mileage remains consistent with my training plan, the splits even.

There is a theme in my journals — and in my daily pursuit of distance — of the identity I’ve found in running, one that thrives on equal parts pleasure and pain. Running requires diligence that often borders on obsession, and, in chasing faster times and longer distances, I perpetually push my body to the brink of what is possible, until I teeter on the precipice of harm.

I used to find community in my high school team, and, for a short time, as a Division I athlete, but now alone, I find solace in several exceptional essays that open conversations about the limits of the body, of developing an identity through running, and, mostly, why any of us run in the first place.

1. “Running Towards My Father” (Devin Kelly, LitHub, June 2017)

Devin Kelly opens his essay with a description of his father, who is out for his daily three-mile run.

When he runs, my father’s breathing hustles to a rhythmic grunt punctuated by each footfall, accompanied by the swish of his nylon jacket. I have never seen my father bend or stretch. Before he runs, he takes off the clothes he does not need and begins, simply, as if a bird did not have to flap a feather before flying.

Kelly deftly weaves together his father’s running habit with his own pursuit of long distances, exploring failure, connections between running and writing, our identity as “creatures of longing,” and accepting pain, describing the sensation of “knowing how to dance along the thin line that is where your mind meets your body, about listening and being generous to yourself, about adjusting and re-adjusting, about, like so much else, trust.”

2. “How Running Ruined my Relationship, Killed My Faith…and Saved My Life” (Allison Stockman, Narratively, April 2018)

Allison Stockman, at 15, meets her first boyfriend who, while running, “had transformed from a skinny, seemingly weak, invisible kid to a lithe, powerful athlete who ran with the joy and abandon of Pheidippides and the irresistible style and charisma of Prefontaine.” So begins their romance, one complicated by her Mormon faith.

I had to explain that, as a true believer and follower of the faith, I was 100 percent committed to: no drinking, no smoking, no coffee, no tea, church for three hours every Sunday, and, of course, no premarital sex.

Throughout this essay, one that opens with a doctor prescribing Prozac and a 20-minute daily run in an in-patient psych ward, Stockman makes clear the ways that religion, running, and identity are linked in complicated — and often heartbreaking — ways. Running becomes both a lifeline and a metaphor, a way of making sense of an arduous personal transformation.

I knew I had to find some way to will myself back out there, even if there wasn’t a heaven anymore, no finish line to cross, no reward to be won from all that self-denial and sacrifice to live a “good” life.

3. “This Man Expects to Run a 2:50 in the Boston Marathon on Monday” (Lindsay Crouse, The New York Times, April 12, 2018)

Tim Don, at 40, had spent the majority of his life pursuing excellence as a competitive athlete, which not only gave him sponsorships and a career, but also much of his identity. When he was hit by a car during a pre-race bike ride, he suffered a hangman’s fracture, breaking his C2 vertebrae. Immobile and in pain, he made it clear that “a return to competition was his only option.”

In this harrowing story, Lindsay Crouse chronicles Don’s will to not only run the Boston Marathon, but run it in under 2:50. In order to reach the starting line, Don’s doctors equip him with a halo device, one in which titanium pins are screwed directly into the skull. Don’s story is one that raises questions about how far a person can — and should — go to pursue a sport:

Is his drive to compete again — the same drive that enabled him to record the world’s fastest time in one of the world’s most grueling races — fueling an incredible comeback? Or is he risking his health in pursuit of athletic feats that may no longer be attainable?

4. Amelia Boone is Stronger Than Ever (as told to Marissa Stephenson, Runner’s World, June 19, 2018)

Amelia Boone, who won the “World’s Toughest Mudder — a 24-hour nonstop obstacle course race – in 2012, 2014, and 2015,” was known as the “Queen of Pain” in endurance running for pushing the limits of bodily discomfort, course difficulty, and distance. There seemed to be no end to what Boone could accomplish with what she describes as a vicious internal pressure to never let herself fail:

I felt so much external pressure to keep winning. You have to keep winning, Amelia. You have to keep winning. What happens when you don’t win anymore? I felt like I had to put on this persona: Amelia’s a badass. Amelia will power through. This was an image I lived in for years, and it never felt comfortable to me.

After suffering a femur fracture, Boone attempts to return to competition by cross-training with unmatched intensity. But instead of finding herself back on the starting line, she ends up with a stress fracture in the base of her spine, and is finally forced to reconcile the disparity between the voice in her head telling her to chase perfection and the limits of her body. In this candid, moving essay, she addresses the importance of dismantling her own veneer of perfection to find true, lasting strength.

5. A Marathon, a Goal Time, the Sublime, and a Wolf (Jeanne Mack, Medium, November 2017)

Jeanne Mack, in an essay chronicling her training for the New York City Marathon, articulates the way in which long distance running asks us to press against the borders of everything we believe possible.

In literature, the concept of the sublime is something equally beautiful and terrifying; it is awe-filling. It’s something so great, infinite, or obscure that it’s inconceivable. This fall, that, for me, described the marathon distance. It towered somewhere in the sky, above anything else I’d tried to accomplish before.

Mack, who trains mostly in solitude, explores the tension between the recommended splits she hits during training and the inherent knowledge of her own potential. In isolation, she proves her strength time and time again to herself, communing with her body and the world around her during runs. Always, even in light of too-quick splits or a wayward GPS, she finds a way to surge toward her goals, what she terms “the edge of the sublime.”

6. The Immortal Horizon (Leslie Jamison, The Believer, May 2011)

Set at the Barkley Marathons, a race notorious for its difficult terrain, length, and mysterious entry procedures, Leslie Jamison illuminates how myths and stories are created while asking, why do we run? Jamison explores obsession, redemption, control, willpower, and pain, circling the idea of long distance running as if she was a hawk, wheeling closer and closer to the heart of the sport as this eleven-part essay progresses.

The persistence of “why” is the point: the elusive horizon of an unanswerable question, the conceptual equivalent of an un-runnable race.

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir of running and illness.

Confessions of An Unredeemed Fan

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

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

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

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


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

* * *

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

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

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

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

Someone else: I see someone with a broken heart.

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

Drowning In a River of Murky Thought

Rebecca Droke/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via AP

Sometimes our minds play tricks on us. We fixate on mistakes. We justify indulging cravings we can’t control. We think we hear the baby crying, but it’s just the breeze.

At The Believer, Barrett Swanson examines how he got lost in a maze of conspiratorial thinking after his high school friend Luke drowned in the Mississippi River. An accidental death seemed too unlikely a scenario to believe, but questioning that explanation opened grieving locals up to the possibility that predatory forces lurked around their town. Swanson was still mourning his friend while earning a PhD, and his academic training and solitary hours soon had him clinging to unnerving explanations and theories culled online. He had to examine his own mind to move through the paranoia and properly grieve.

When you’re supposed to be working on your dissertation—its own arduous search for meaning—your days are a wilderness: unscheduled, improvised, free. You can spend whole afternoons trawling Instagram or binge-watching prestige television. In my case, entire days were lost to conjectures about Luke’s death. For hours on end I would watch clips of Larry King Live, Anderson Cooper 360, and Geraldo Rivera, all of which featured interviews with Detectives Gannon and Duarte, who often mentioned Luke by name. On After Hours AM, a true-crime podcast whose aesthetic could be described as Dude, Where’s My Car? meets Unsolved Mysteries, a retired FBI agent named John DeSouza maintained that the Smiley Face Killers were a cult of psychopaths who drowned alpha males as sacrificial offerings to the ancient dark gods Moloch and Baal. This is how my days passed: afternoons spent in the echo chamber of television and the thickets of comment-board conspiracy, evenings dedicated to The Archaeology of Knowledge and Simulacra and Simulation. Flipping through my course texts at night, I often highlighted any passage that seemed even tangentially related to my headspace. “In a life we are surrounded by death,” Wittgenstein writes. “So too in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.”

Curiously, the amateur sleuths I encountered on the internet often deployed the same literary frameworks that guided my seminar on critical theory. Several Footprints at the River’s Edge commenters riffed on nautical folklore, suggesting that perhaps, like the sirens who tempted Odysseus, covens of attractive females were luring victims to the rivers. One East Coast gumshoe, posting under the screen name Undead Molly, offered a Marxist interpretation: a mob of blue-collar workers, resentful of rich college students, was carrying out the drownings as an act of class warfare. One company in particular had come under Undead Molly’s suspicions: a manufacturing outfit called Trane Heating & Cooling, whose headquarters were based in La Crosse, where six of the bodies, including Luke’s, had been found. “Trane technicians travel in vans,” Molly wrote, “and have access to substances which could stun a healthy young man into unconsciousness.”

Read the story

It’s a Wonderful World: The Remaking of California Agriculture

(Trent Davis Bailey/California Sunday)

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | February 2017 | 15 minutes (4,100 words)

The February issue of The California Sunday Magazine devoted its feature well to a single piece, 20 years in the making. Mark Arax, a native of California’s San Joaquin Valley and the son of a grape grower in Fresno, has spent the last several decades working on a story about billionaires Lynda and Stuart Resnick, who transformed an agricultural desert into a cornucopia of pistachios, pomegranates, and oranges — cleverly marketed as “Cuties” and “Halos” by their business, The Wonderful Company. In just a few decades, the Resnicks rebranded of San Joaquin Valley agriculture, and the impoverished community of Lost Hills, in their image, despite never having farmed a day in their lives. Arax is writing a book about water wars in California that will be published by Knopf.

***

Aaron Gilbreath: You said you carried around notes about Stewart Resnick for nearly two decades. How did you first hear about him?

Mark Arax: When I was writing The King of California, about J.G. Boswell in the Tulare Lake Basin, I started hearing about this guy from Beverly Hills who had bought a bunch of farmland. This was around the late 1990s. People mentioned this guy in the next basin over who was attempting to be the new King of California. Boswell grew up in the San Joaquin Valley; this other guy came from the East Coast. I did a piece on Resnick’s capture of the Kern Water Bank right toward the tail end of finishing the Boswell book. That was twenty years after he’d arrived. This land is so big, so vast, that these stories go undetected for years and years.

AG: One of the strangest things about Resnick and Boswell is how they really wanted to remain invisible. You kept knocking on doors trying to get interviews. Resnick declined multiple times and finally agreed to sit down with you in 2008 because he wanted a book about himself. Then he lost interest.

MA: Today the Resnicks have a PR office that’s a million-dollar-plus operation. In 2008, they didn’t have anybody. You had to call the attorney, then the secretary would hang up the phone and the attorney would just say “No comment.” It was really secretive, but I was used to that. The Boswell family saying was “As long as the whale never surfaces, it’s never harpooned.” That’s the way these guys operated. Obviously, persistence paid off in getting Boswell to talk, so I figured the same thing would happen with Resnick.

AG: Even though you chipped away at Boswell to make that whale surface, did you just assume that Resnick’s story would take a long time? Did you ever think it wouldn’t come together?

MA: I told Resnick’s story in pieces as I got it. In 2003, I got the piece about the Kern Water Bank without his cooperation. I gathered some more notes, some more string as we call it, and did that piece in the opening of my third book West of West. I have this scene with Resnick in his mansion, so I started playing with that whole thing. It’s almost like a first stab at a painting. Then I decided for this new book that I had to tell as much of his whole story that I could, and that’s when I went back into it. Each time I’ve gone in and taken something out, written about it, and this was the time that I decided to do the definitive Resnick chapter, which became the magazine piece.

AG: So you’ve been working with this material for years.

MA: And the virtue of that is you get to see how a story and operation evolves. It’s been almost 20 years — had I done this piece back in the early 2000s, there would have been no philanthropy to write about, they weren’t doing that kind of philanthropy in Lost Hills yet. Writing about the Resnicks now, you see how they evolved as people, how their farming evolved, how Lost Hills and their engagement with the community evolved.

AG: That philanthropy is a huge part of your California Sunday piece. To me, it’s one of the most interesting things about their business, because as consumers we don’t often think about farmers as philanthropists. Yet the Resnicks have such keen marketing instincts that their philanthropy is designed to both indoctrinate their workers and to show the world that they’re a good company, growing healthy food and treating their employees well. Have you ever encountered any other farming company that does that sort of thing?

MA: Most of the big farmers that live in the Valley don’t actually reside in their communities. A lot of them live in Fresno and farm outside of town, and their idea of philanthropy is giving to the Valley Children’s Hospital or Fresno State Bulldogs, or maybe giving back to a university they attended, like Cal Poly. They rarely give back to the little rural towns they farm in, so very little of their philanthropy affects the Mexican farm worker. Boswell took the town of Corcoran as his company town: He built the football stadium and social services, senior citizen and community centers, but the level of philanthropy the Resnicks practice is unprecedented in American agriculture. You can’t help but be dazzled by it, but it also raises some disturbing questions.

You use the word “indoctrinate.” I never used that, but that’s actually a good word because the Resnicks are really trying to change everything, right down to the habits of the Mexican farmworker, including what they eat. It crosses over into a kind of a social engineering that raises troubling questions. They’re not just writing checks; Lynda Resnick is also running and helping design their charter schools’ educational programs. She’s working with doctors and dieticians to design their weight loss and exercise programs. That level of involvement is a very different kind of hands-on philanthropy.

AG: What do you think about the Resnick’s philanthropy and level of engagement signals about the future of the agriculture in the West? It’s strange to think of these white, rich, Whole Foods-types pushing their dietary values and philosophy on immigrant communities.

MA: It’s almost like Lynda Resnick wants to change the microbial content in their stomachs. Before the farmworkers eat lunch at the company restaurant, she encourages the workers to drink this little concoction she’s made from apple cider vinegar, turmeric, ginger and mandarin juice. All the times I’ve been in the restaurant I never saw any workers partake of this concoction, but that’s what she’s pushing. I drank it. It was nice. Apple cider vinegar is good for your stomach and all that, but when you read about that level of involvement, you’re very conflicted about all of this.

The level of philanthropy the Resnicks practice is unprecedented in American agriculture. You can’t help but be dazzled by it.

Lost Hills is now the ultimate company town; everything is branded. You see this incredible five-acre park with a playground with water fountains where kids can play. The Resnicks built soccer fields with artificial turf and lighting. The park itself is named the Wonderful Park. If you look at the ‘o’ on the ‘wonderful,’ it’s the same heart-shaped ‘o’ that stamps the Resnick’s brand of pomegranate juice, so that makes it a little creepy.

AG: It seems like Orwellian brainwashing. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, the word “wonderful” everywhere.

MA: That’s Lynda, she brands everything. She even changed the company name: It wasn’t enough that it was called Paramount, that’s a pretty grand name right there, it had to become The Wonderful Company. I think that’s the kind of nth degree of marketing that raises troubling questions.

AG: With Wonderful, it seems like she’s really trying to get into consumers’ heads, to make them think that this company, not just these products, is wonderful. Despite being born in the Valley, you did such a great job presenting the Resnicks’ complex story fairly, in a way that didn’t present an unjustified bias, and let readers draw their own conclusions.

MA: They’re tackling diabetes and obesity, and you can’t help but applaud those efforts. There’s what I call a tussle inside my head, between the skeptic and the believer, and I think that held through throughout the story is a need to constantly try to look at this through both of those sensibilities

They don’t know their own motives. When you ask them how this all began and why it began so late, the Resnicks talk about a lecture they attended in Aspen, where Harvard Professor Sandel comes out to talk about the moral obligations of wealth. Then they get in the car and look at each other and say, “Are we doing enough?” They decided that they were not. And yet, when they decided to jump in, they jumped in in a way that’s never been done in agriculture in the United States, certainly not in California.

AG: In the piece, you describe how the Bruce Springsteen played a show in Fresno, and how nobody at the concert put any money in the piggy bank he left at the front of the stage for the people who work the fields. Springsteen was so shocked he asked you, “What kind of place is this?” Do landowners care more about Mexican-American workers than they used to?

MA: In between songs at that concert, Springsteen talked about what motivated a particular song or where it came from, and some of the people in the audience got so upset that they walked out and demanded their money back. I’m not sure he understood the kind of place he was coming to, where there was this almost self-hatred about needing to rely on that labor.

It’s a really complex psychology, where you have to go into the rural heart of Mexico to pull your workforce, you’re dependent on these people, and yet you sort of hate yourself for being dependent on them, and there’s a certain hatred of them too, for them making you feel that shame. I’m not a psychologist, but there is something deeply broken psychically about this place, and I try to get at that in this California Sunday piece a little bit. The Springsteen anecdote helped me do that.

AG: The story also implied the way growers who rely on Mexican-American labor are people who would rather physically separate themselves from the workforce, so they don’t have to feel those bad feelings. And yet, Lynda Resnick engages them directly.

MA: What the farmer has done is put the labor contractor between him and the labor, to give himself that psychological distance. What Lynda Resnick is doing is getting intimately involved in their workers’ lives, breaking past that barrier. In my story, when she’s on stage talking to farmers about what they’re doing, there’s a real discomfort on the part of these farmers who are listening, because she’s challenging the whole way that they’d gone about this, challenging this relationship where they increasingly distance themselves, and don’t live in those farm communities, don’t deal with their own labor.

AG: Do you feel like the Resnicks might signal some sort of larger change in Valley agriculture?

MA: This place has been resistant to change for about a century and a half, so I don’t see that relationship changing. I see increasing mechanization replacing the usual farm labor, and that’s one of the reasons that these farmers are switching to growing nuts. Nuts are obviously high-dollar crops, but they can also be done with machines. What I see is the farmer now replacing human labor with mechanical labor. Ultimately they’re going to continue to dodge that issue and keep that distance between them and their workers.

You’re dependent on these people, and yet you sort of hate yourself for being dependent on them. There’s a certain hatred of them too, for them making you feel that shame.

AG: What happens to these workers who are living in shacks in Lost Hills? These good hard-working people who have families and ambitions and debts to coyotes? What do they do when mechanization replaces them?

MA:. You’ll still have the great fields that need to be handpicked, and you’ll still have citrus that’ll need to be handpicked, but mechanization is going to shrink the workforce. These folks will continue to work in kitchens, they’re going to work in the hotels, they’re going to be tending peoples’ front yards and backyards, but I think that is going to be a fundamental shift. I don’t see them discovering their labor in the way that the Resnicks have.

AG: Let’s talk about the scale of the landscape. J.G. Boswell and Resnick are superlative landowners. To me, the Valley itself is a land of superlatives, yet somehow you shrunk this land’s complexity down to two very condensed paragraphs early in the piece, setting the scene for people who don’t know this region.

MA: It’s almost taken me thirty years of writing and researching this place to do those two paragraphs in that kind of big distilled way. I found studies that said that the leveling of land that took place here, the alteration, was unprecedented in human history. This Valley is one of the most altered landscapes in human history. So how do you tell that in two paragraphs? That was the challenge there.

AG: Having explored this Valley a lot in the last twenty years, I could sense that this was the kind of introduction that only somebody who’s been working and living in this land for their whole lives could do this well. You set the stage as only a lifer could.

MA:. In each of my books, I try to reckon with the land, to describe it. I’ve described it from the vantage of the pass called the Grapevine, that last mountain road that divides L.A. from the Valley; I’ve called that a kind of a Mason-Dixon line, with the sprawl of L.A. giving way to the sprawl of the farmlands. I’ve told it from other vantages, and each time it’s gotten a little more precise and a little better, but this one certainly was a kind of telling that took a lot of years to try to nail down.

AG: One of the other things you did was demystify the invisible, misunderstood mechanics of Valley agriculture. In your piece, you say “I pity the outsider trying to make sense of” California’s Central Valley. What do you think mystifies outsiders most about this place?

MA: There’s a tendency to paint it broadly. The Central Valley is two valleys: It’s the San Joaquin Valley and the Sacramento Valley, and they are very different. They have different relationships to water. The Sacramento River up north is a big, badass river. It flows. It still floods Our five rivers down here have been tamed. They follow the demands of agriculture.

The San Joaquin Valley’s water isn’t inside our rivers anymore. It’s inside the irrigation canals that take from those rivers, so it’s two different valleys. When you look at the San Joaquin Valley itself, there are three different Valleys within the San Joaquin Valley. There’s an east side that couldn’t be more different than the west side. Then there’s a middle center Valley that is different than the other two. They look different. The farms are vast on the west side, smaller in the center. Then there are communities on the east side and the center of the Valley, and no substantial communities in the west side. Making sense of this place is about being true to what this place is, and so much of those differences have to do with the relationship to water, how easy is it to access. Do you have to pump? Is there an extraction model at the heart of the agriculture, or is there a more sustainable model? That question has created different communities, different Valleys, inside the San Joaquin Valley.

AG: My sense is that few outsiders see any of that.

MA: I know it’s hard to see it. We’re all dumb to our place. John Keats talked about how we’re in these hallways between these chambers, and we’ve just left one where it’s pretty dark, we’re moving into another chamber where there’s a little more light, and we’re starting to understand our existence and who we are, and then we understand our place. The problem today is that so many folks are fixated on themselves, trying to understand themselves and their own internal journeys, that they don’t have any space leftover to really understand their place, and this is a big, big place.

I was dumb to this place at age fifteen, sixteen, literally. My family was living in town, and there these ditches that are shunting water from one side of the Valley to the other, and they’re just part of the landscape. We don’t even think where’s that water going? Who’s it going to? The only time you thought about an irrigation ditch was when some kid drowns in it during summer, so there’s a dumbness to place. Part of why I came back is to try to figure out this place. A lot of the big, great stories of migrations in America played out on this land.

AG: In your California Sunday story you mention how you “never stopped to wonder: How much was magic? How much was plunder?” Moving away helped you see the place more clearly.

We’re all dumb to our place. We don’t even think, where’s that water going? Who’s it going to?

MA: I left for a good ten or twelve years, came back, and that helped. As a writer, I moved from the state’s center where I grew up, to this new book, where I take on the entire kind of state of California, looking at how the bending of water created the state, so I worked my way from the middle outward. Then I came back in the middle because 80 percent of California’s water is used by agriculture, so I don’t apologize for telling the story of the farmer. I mean, can you own 25,000 acres and be a family farmer? It seems an absurd notion. Folks in San Francisco just can’t wrap their heads around that. But then when you go out with one of these farmers onto his land and his children are working it too, it’s a little harder to demonized that guy. What I’m trying to do is play with those notions of what a corporate farm is. What’s a mega-farm? What’s an absentee landowner? What’s a family farmer?

AG: This is where marketing like the Resnick’s really comes in to play. Branding helps manipulate the public’s perception of farms, farm values, family values.

MA: Yeah, that’s right.

AG: Despite how many urban Californians might love fancy meals and farmer’s markets, there seems to be a lot of animosity about the water farmers use outside of the cities.

MA: Oh, it got really ugly this last time. Los Angeles turned on the Valley, turned on the almond. The almond became the demon. They started doing these graphics, showing how many gallons it takes to make a single nut. These are absurd because it takes water to grow food, so there’s a real disconnect that allowed L.A., and in some degree San Francisco, to demonize the farmers here. Some of that is justified because what’s happened is that Valley farmland has gone from the best land to some of the worst land, and the greed of agriculture to grow and keep growing. When it’s a human body, we call that growth something else and try to arrest it with chemicals. Ours is kind of reverse: we use the chemicals to make it grow bigger. It’s a weird little metaphor for cancer.

AG: One of the things about the Valley that is so obviously staggering is how flat and how big it is. Visitors see the surface. It’s overwhelming what goes on out there. It’s hard to comprehend how deep a 2,500 foot well really is. But that’s as important as what’s happening above ground, maybe even more important now that people are pumping so much ancient water out of these shrinking aquifers. As a writer, how do you get people to understand what is happening at that depth underground?

MA: In the new book I have a chapter called “Sinking.” It takes the reader into this whole subsidence phenomenon, the science of it, how it happens, the pumping and sinking of the land. You’re right. You think, well, the crops are on the surface, but so much of the drama is playing out 2,000 feet below ground. To see a rig set up and drilling for water ─ it reminds me of the Texas oil fields. It’s that deep. These are million-dollar holes they’re digging.

AG: What do you think about this idea that water represents the next gold – not just a gold rush, but the source of riches, collapse, and wars, like petroleum?

MA: It is, and one of the things I do in the book is trace back the entire history of our bending of water, to show that the mining of gold was really the mining of water. The hydraulics of the system that we’re using today to move water up and down the state was developed during the Gold Rush. The first ditches, the web of ditches, that were built in California, were built during the Gold Rush, and where they couldn’t carve ditches into the land, they built these wooden irrigation ditches, called flumes, to move water across canyons. That extraction started very early on, and it just kept increasing in magnitude, moving up in degrees.

AG: It’s a really disturbing irony that, now that the Gold Rush is over, the same water that extracted gold could be worth more than gold.

MA: I mean, it’s going to get that way. Farming here is problematic, with the need to import labor, the need to import water from northern rivers, the chemical applications – oh, and they’re calling this place Parkinson’s Alley because there are so many cases of Parkinson’s Disease that can be traced back to pesticides and herbicides. And yet, as problematic as farming is, if you lived here all or most of your life, you don’t want to see that farmland turn into suburbia. You don’t want to see another Los Angeles or San Fernando Valley here. Ultimately what you fear is that the water is going to be worth so much, that the farmers are going to strip the water from the land and sell it to developers, so these rivers of agriculture that have been rivers of agriculture for more than a century are going to turn into these rivers of suburbia, and to me, that suburbanization is going to be the ultimate tragedy.

If this place ultimately gets paved over, I don’t know if it will be missed or not. The disconnect between people and the land, and the eater and his or her food, is so great, who knows if they’ll ever miss it?

AG: So is there a solution outside of market economics, like planting crops that can deal with salty soil, less water, less irrigation? Is there hope that the rural Valley won’t become more suburban?

MA: I have hope in this new Groundwater Sustainability Act we finally passed. California is the last state to allow the unregulated drilling of wells. For all of our progressiveness, California was the last state to regulate groundwater extraction. Well now that we’ve regulated groundwater, you’re going to see the issue of sustainable yield drive groundwater use. Meaning, how much can you take out of the ground and then have that water be replenished by snowmelt? That alone will probably idle a million and a half acres of Valley farmland. It’ll get it back to more a sustainable system.

We ended up taking a 100 percent of the rivers. We should have probably taken 60 to 70 percent of the rivers for agriculture and left the other 40 percent for the environment. We would have had fewer crop gluts, fewer surpluses. We would have farmed only the best land instead of now farming some of the worst land. That’s what we’re going to have to legislate ourselves back to, and if California can ever put together these urban growth boundaries, where you draw lines around cities the way Portland drew a line around itself, and you say Okay, this is the city, this is farmland, and you don’t violate that land, then that’s the way you can really develop a farm belt here that really makes sense: smaller, smarter.

AG: Talking about the aesthetic qualities of the Valley, there’s another aspect of the great loss of California to rampant suburbanization: irreplaceable local beauty. Do you as a resident feel that Californians always undervalued this region, that one day maybe they’ll recognize its beauty?

MA: It’s a kind of ugly beauty. The San Joaquin Valley doesn’t please the eyes like Napa and Sonoma, and so much of it is industrialized, but there are parts when you drive to the east side, in particular, the citrus belt, that are gorgeous. The citrus belt sits right there at the foot of the Sierra. When you go through parts of the Valley’s center and see these 40-acre vineyards, and the vines are all twisted and gnarled and have moss growing on them — there is a beauty there. You have to go looking for the little bits. It’s not so obvious. If this place ultimately gets paved over, I don’t know if it will be missed or not. The disconnect between people and the land, and the eater and his or her food, is so great, who knows if they’ll ever miss it?

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Old military binoculars with reflection on black background.
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This week, we’re sharing stories from Ronan Farrow, Diana Nyad, Rachel Monroe, Ross Andersen, and Teresa Mathew.

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Wherever You Go, There You Are. Charles Manson is There, Too.

Manson Family members Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van go to court in 1970. (AP Photo)

In an essay at The Believer, Rachel Monroe lets us tag along as she hangs out with the Manson Bloggers — yes, there are people who blog about Charles Manson —  as they gossip about Manson-adjacent people and look for relics. There’s not much new going on with Manson and his followers, most have either died or are still in jail, so the bloggers look for updates on anyone who had any association with the Family.

These photographs would look banal to the uninitiated: a grandmotherly type on a bench, clutching a water bottle; a short woman standing on the beach, flanked by three young men—her sons? These people are infamous not because they’ve killed anyone—they haven’t—but because when they were fourteen or nineteen or twenty-three, they had the bad luck or bad taste to befriend some people who did.

In the intervening four decades, some of these ex–Manson Family members changed their names or became born-again—whatever it took to distance themselves from their turbulent, murder-adjacent youths. Sometimes these people write angry emails to the Manson Bloggers, asking for their photos to be taken down. It’s easy to imagine them looking back at their former selves, shaking their heads, and thinking, That person isn’t me anymore. But the Manson Family Blog is always there to remind them: yes, yes it is.

Monroe’s piece isn’t just about the Manson Family or those who still obsess about him; it’s about whether we ever truly escape ourselves. Do we carry pieces of our younger selves with us, even as we grow and change? Monroe thinks that maybe we do, and maybe that’s a little bit of a miracle — even when those pieces include teenage Manson fandom.

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The Mastery and Magic of Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah

Toni Morrison dancing at a disco party in New York City in 1974. "She wasn’t born Toni Morrison. She had to become that person," writes Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah in her 2015 New York Times Magazine cover story on the author. (Photo by Waring Abbott/Getty Images)

Cashawn Thompson created the hashtag #BlackGirlsAreMagic on Twitter in 2013 to draw attention to the accomplishments and resilience of black women in the public eye like Michelle Obama. With T-shirts, tote bags, videos, and news headlines, #BlackGirlMagic soon went viral. Like “(To Be) Young, Gifted, and Black,” a song written by Nina Simone, and “Black Lives Matter,” the affirmation “Black Girls Are Magic” creates positive associations with blackness and reconstitutes its possibilities. “Say it loud!” James Brown sang in his 1968 song “I’m Black and I’m Proud.” In other words, let us not cower — let us like ourselves.

Affirmations like #BlackGirlMagic are important corrective tools, especially now, with a president in office who weaponizes language to stir up policies that are hurtful for communities of color. Still, I worry that a focus on black women’s extraordinariness obscures the unfairness of what we overcome. I wonder if, along with a litany of archetypes that have lingered in the public imagination, #BlackGirlMagic fortifies an idea that black women can endure anything, that we don’t need protecting.

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Follow the Oil Trail and You’ll Find the Girls

Photo property of Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs.

Riayn Spaero | Longreads | March 2017 | 14 minutes (2,400 words)

 

Duluth, Minnesota was dank and barren. Ice and mounted snow covered Lake Superior, save for scattered pools of howling waves. I picked this time because the ships weren’t in and wouldn’t be for several weeks. It was, for the moment, safe to stand by that great lake and speak on the silent affliction it routinely ushers to Duluth’s shores—the very same affliction that will spread across four states and infect each Dakota Access Pipeline construction site. I was there to meet Sarah Curtiss, an esteemed Anishinaabe activist at Men As Peacemakers, who’d agreed to an on-camera interview to discuss the predatory violence on this lake and other locations throughout Indian Country, such as oil fields and pipeline camps, that threaten the lives and bodies of Indigenous women on a daily basis. She wasn’t my first documentary interview on this subject, yet my hair raised in anticipation of absorbing more horrific accounts and the immense responsibility of honoring her every word.

Curtiss shook my hand and sighed. Her exhale eased my nerves. “You wouldn’t believe some of the questions I’ve been asked,” she said. “I once had this woman, a reporter, say ‘Are you sure? Are you sure you’re Indian?’”

Curtiss is astute, so I would not put it past her to pop this icebreaker as a litmus quiz for non-people of color documentarians (or journalists), but for me that morning it was an invitation to an honest interview built on trust in our convergent, but different, American experiences as “other.” Her last name, Curtiss, her milk complexion and loose auburn curls were more Anglo than Disney’s Pocahontas, but questioning her blood quantum never crossed my mind. How could it? Being of color, I’d long resigned myself to what most American minorities from families spanning the skin color spectrum know: If one of the three race-defining elements (skin color, features, hair texture) is off stereotype, “Are you sure?” or “What else are you?” looms over every discussion with the uninitiated. But, Curtiss and I were initiated.

We met on a February morning as if we were sorority sisters from distant chapters executing an exclusive greeting in the form of her sigh that said, Thank God I don’t have to explain myself to you. It was unexpected, but I was grateful. We discussed her advocacy in the fight against the epidemic of missing, murdered, and trafficked Indigenous women plaguing North America; the crisis that led her to divulge, “I do not go a month without someone I have a personal connection to passing away.” More specifically, she spoke of her prominent role combating trafficking on Lake Superior ships that pass through Minnesota’s Duluth Port—the reason for my sojourn to the frigid Midwest.

On a 17-degree day with sharp winds blistering her hands and cheeks, Curtiss stood beside the great lake that keeps sweeping away her stolen sisters. She detailed injustices against many Native women who live unrecognized lives, invisible to all but those who mean them harm—demeaning, brutal harm—and introduced me to invisibility as a handicap, rather than a privilege of gods. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2016: Essays & Criticism

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in essays and criticism.

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Kiese Laymon
A Professor of English and Creative Writing at University of Mississippi, and author of forthcoming memoir, Heavy.

Chicago State of Mind (Derrick Harriell, LA Review of Books)

Derrick Harriell wrote a piece on Chicago State that challenged my understanding of what’s possible with form and content in the long lyric essay. The piece narrativizes educational place and the journey of learning in a beautiful black place that’s trying to survive.


Mira Ptacin
Writer whose work has appeared in NPR, New York Magazine, Guernica, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Tin House, The Rumpus, and more. Author of the memoir Poor Your Soul, and teacher of memoir to women at the Maine Correctional Center.

On Domestic Disobedience (A.N. Devers, The New Republic)

I nominate this sharp-eyed and insightful piece not only because it brilliantly gave us a taste of Claire-Louise Bennett’s collection, but it gives it its proper place in the family tree of nature-writers by blowing “nature-dude” writing out of the water. Devers shows readers how important and triumphantly Bennett’s penmanship is, even in its simplicity: how even writing about the goings-on in the microcosm of a kitchen can dip into great depths to the mind and soul.


Tobias Carroll
Freelance writer, managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn, and author of the books Reel and Transitory.

Advanced Search (Franceska Rouzard, Real Life Magazine)

The right essay can turn an object or memory that I’d previously found mundane into the stuff of gripping narrative. Such is the case here, as Rouzard’s essay opens with descriptions of AOL dial-up in the mid-1990s before segueing into a capsule history of social media, and then extending into broader questions of identity and the sacred. It neatly parallels its author’s life with broader societal questions, keeping the two in perfect balance, and leaving me with a greater sense of both–I can’t ask a great essay to do more than that.


Sara Benincasa
Screenwriter, comedian, and writer, whose books include Agorafabulous, Great, DC Trip, and Real Artists Have Day Jobs.

Southern Fried Pride: What Hattiesburg’s First Pride Means in the Deep South (Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, Medium)

The Reverend Jasmine Beach-Ferrara of the United Church of Christ is a wife, a mother, a lesbian, a former college professor (I took her class at Warren Wilson College), and the executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality. In this piece, Jasmine takes a road trip across the Deep South to visit Hattiesburg, Mississippi on the occasion of its very first Pride parade. People like Jasmine do the work that all Americans need, whether they accept it or not. In her peaceful, dignified but impassioned manner, she fights for equality for all Americans. That she happens to be a damn fine storyteller is just icing on the deep-fried cake.

More Than Coffee: New York’s Vanishing Diner Culture (George Blecher, The New York Times)

George Blecher paints a wonderful portrait of the diner he loves the most. He also gives a great bit of history about the rise of the diner in New York City. I grew up in New Jersey, which has its own brilliant and thriving diner culture but I lived in New York for many years. The old diner joints there are just as important as George says. Here in my newer home in Los Angeles, a city I love, I’ve got a few diners I can depend on: in Silverlake, Sunset Junction Coffee Shop; in Los Feliz, House of Pies; and more scattered around town. And in Manhattan, at 100th and Broadway, George has the Metro – for now.


Emily Gould
Half of the Coffee House Press imprint and e-bookstore Emily Books, and the author, most recently, of the novel Friendship.

H.: On Heroin and Harm Reduction (Sarah Resnick, n+1)

This year I started teaching writing workshop classes for the first time, and a lot of students want to learn how to do exactly what Sarah Resnick does here–and so do I! Addressed to a relative with a longstanding heroin habit, as well as a host of other problems, Resnick’s essay goes down several different paths, ultimately illuminating a lot of what’s circuitous and maddening about addiction and recovery as they’re currently understood in America, and how harm reduction programs work. The essay’s idiosyncratic, personal approach makes it more convincing than a straightforward argument for a new understanding of addiction could be. Reading it is memorable the way an experience is.

Perhaps Having Kids Saves You From Mourning the Person you Might Have Been (Laura Hazard Owen, Medium and tinyletter)

Owen publishes her essays about parenthood via newsletter as well as on Medium. She’s a journalist with expertise in publishing, tech and the business of journalism, and she brings the same kind of skepticism about received wisdom and eye for detail to her observations about children and parenting culture as she does to her other work. In this one, she takes on the hardest question of all — whether having children could be a mistake, whether parents can allow themselves to think it might have been. She writes about ambition so well. I will always remember the line here about lying on a couch reading in a beautiful house.


Porochista Khakpour
Author of the forthcoming memoir, Sick (Harper Perennial, August 2017) and the novels The Last Illusion, and Sons & Other Flammable Objects, whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bookforum, Elle, Spin, Slate, and many other publications around the world.

The Weight of James Arthur Baldwin (Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Buzzfeed)

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah has become my favorite writer of my generation since I first read her writing about Dave Chappelle in The Believer several years ago (it was a National Magazine Award finalist, collected in The Best American Nonrequired Reading as well as The Believer’s anthology Read Harder). Since then I’ve been a fan of every piece of hers and this chronicle of traveling to the home of James Baldwin in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France is no exception. (It’s a highlight of what I consider one of the best books of the year, the Jesmyn Ward-edited The First This Time). Ghansah writes about Baldwin from all different angles and with every emotion, braided with her own issues of identity. The result is a hard, rough, beautiful diamond of piece, pushed to brilliance from considerable pressure. Ghansah is perhaps one of the only writers we have today who can live up to Baldwin in so many shades of style and substance.

Who are All the Trump Supporters? (George Saunders, The New Yorker)

Saunders has always been one of my favorite writers–it’s physically impossible for me to not read a piece by him–but this classic from last summer will be surely studied for decades if not centuries in the future. Trump and his supporters are a perfect match for Saunders, who although a liberal, often sketches the America Trump supporters know well in his fiction. The trademark Saundersian dark absurdism is a perfect fit for taking to the campaign trail and interviewing Trump supporters at rallies in Arizona, Wisconsin and California. The result is as funny as it frightening. It’s doubly a punch in the gut to read it now that Trump is, somehow, our president-elect.”Although, to me, Trump seems the very opposite of a guardian angel, I thank him for this: I’ve never before imagined America as fragile, as an experiment that could, within my very lifetime, fail,” Saunders writes, and ends almost prophetically: “But I imagine it that way now.”


Emily Perper
Emily Perper is a writer, bookseller and contributing editor at Longreads. In addition to word-work, they’re on the board of The Frederick Center, which provides resources for queer people in central Maryland.

My Son, the Prince of Fashion (Michael Chabon, GQ)

Both of my “best of” personal essay nominations concern the reaches and limits of parenthood. At GQ, novelist Michael Chabon writes about his trip to Paris Men’s Fashion Week, where his young son, 13-year-old Abe, catches a glimpse of his future and yearns after his tribe. I’d never presume to understand the intricacies of childrearing, but Chabon treats his son with a blend of kindness and respect we’d all do well to emulate with the young folks in our own lives–taking their desires, ideas and motivations seriously, and fostering their artistic instincts. And Chabon is simply an excellent writer, blending gentle self-deprecation with astute observation. He doesn’t need paragraphs of adjectives to transport the reader to the studios and runways of Paris. You are there, sweating in the French summer. You are there, checking out the throngs of stylish young men loitering outside shows. And you there, beaming (Guardedly! Be cool!) at your son, when he recognizes and is recognized.

Mother, Writer, Monster, Maid (Rufi Thorpe, Vela)

Novelist Rufi Thorpe upends traditional discourse around the ponderous/condescending/exhausting query, “Can women have it all?” Instead, she makes a distinction between the selfishness of the artist’s way and motherhood’s requisite selflessness. Beyond her powerful and honest observations, the energy behind her language is distinct and exciting; it’s why I’ll read anything she writes. When I read the line “Children are a hinge that only bends one way,” I gasped.


Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Story Wrangler, WordPress.com and Longreads

Champagne in the Cellar (John Temple, The Atlantic)

During the Second World War, John Temple’s parents hid in a basement in Budapest with a French doctor, underneath a home that German soldiers had made their headquarters. After they separated from the doctor, they never reconnected. For the next 70 years, they wondered what had happened to this man who saved their lives. After his parents’ death, Temple turns to the internet to search for this man, known to him only as Dr. Lanusse. This is a touching story about history, family, memory, and — ultimately — a lasting bond between two families, connected by extraordinary circumstances. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2015: Under-Recognized Stories

We asked all of our contributors to Longreads Best of 2015 to tell us about a story they felt deserved more recognition in 2015. Here they are. Read more…