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New York Times Writer Jenna Wortham: My Top Longreads of 2011

Jenna Wortham is a technology reporter at The New York Times. In her spare time she makes zines and stalks former America’s Next Top Model contestants in Brooklyn. She can be found on Twitter and Tumblr.

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SO many of my favorites have already been called out—Mindy Kaling’s “Flick Chicks,” Dan P. Lee’s “Travis the Menace” and John Jeremiah Sullivan’s everything, plus Doree flagged that amazing Kolker piece and Michelle laid claim to Paul Ford’s staggering essay on IVF. But these are the stories that I sent to my Kindle and the links that recurred with the most frequency in my drafts/Gchats folders on Gmail, so I think it’s safe to say that they are my top picks of 2011.

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• Ashlee Vance, “This Tech Bubble is Different.” (Businessweek, April 14, 2011)

A cutting, high-level look at the current boomlet in the tech biz—the kind that makes you kick yourself till the end for not being smart enough to have pitched it yourself. Ashlee takes a step back from the funding frenzy, sky-high valuations and feverish IPO rumors to examine the current ad-think consuming the tech world. He asks, what if instead of focusing on getting people to click on ads, buy group coupons and digital goods for their virtual farms, our engineers and entrepreneurs were trying to solve big problems in health and science?

• Lev Grossman, “The Boy Who Lived Forever.” (Time, July 7, 2011) 

I adored this piece because it shed light on a very particular corner of the Web—fanfic—without falling into the clichéd trap of portraying the more obscure recesses of the Internet as a place only inhabited by cr33p3rs and neckbeards. Instead, Lev lightly celebrates the creativity of the subculture and the communities and alternative realities people craft around their favorite characters and books.

• Jessica Pressler, “A Holly Golightly for the Stripper-Embezzlement Age.” (New York Magazine, Sept 18, 2011)

I couldn’t get enough of the vivid, and at times lurid, details in this profile of Diane Passage, Ken Starr’s fourth wife. I mean, this phrase alone: “when she laughs, her grapefruit-tree physique bounces merrily,” hooked me, line and sinker. Plus who doesn’t love a sordid glimpse into an underbelly, especially one in New York? The sharp observations and imagery from the first few grafs make you feel like a fly on the wall of a party you didn’t want to go to in the first place but can’t wait to see how it all shakes out.

• David Kushner, “Murder by Text.” (Vanity Fair, November 27, 2011)

A heartbreaking read about the gruesome murder of a 18-year-old girl named Kim Proctor and the two teenaged boys who killed her and then bragged about it on World of Warcraft, which ultimately led to their arrest. Kusher smartly weaves the role of technology and the concept of (im)permanence online into the piece for a compelling narrative.

• Jose Antonio Vargas, “My Life As an Undocumented Immigrant.” (The New York Times, June 22, 2011)

I thought this was one of the most important pieces published this year, along with “The Life of Illegal Immigrant Farmers,” for giving the touchy subject of immigration a living, breathing human face. I read this stunning graf at least a half dozen times:

“And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.”

Honorable Mention:

While I was waiting for my copy of Sullivan’s Pulphead to be delivered, I stumbled across the work of Matt Bell, and immediately devoured two of his Kindle shorts—“A Tree or a Person or a Wall” and “A Long Walk, With Only Chalk to Mark the Way” and could not put them down. For such a stark, minimalist writer, his pieces are so evocative and rich with imagery that its hard not to be sucked into them almost immediately.

I also thought that this year brought out some hilarious and clever writing that touched on the way we consume and use technology and how it’s shaping our interactions, culture and lives.

Here’s a quick n’ dirty rundown of a few faves:

• Katie Heaney, “Reading Between the Texts” (The Hairpin, June 16, 2011)

• Leigh Alexander, “Five Emotions Invented By The Internet” (Thought

Catalog, January 12, 2011)

• Frank Smith, “Will the Real Frank Smith Please Stand Up” (The Morning

News, March 25, 2011)

Clive Thompson, “On Secret Messages in the Digital Age” (Wired

magazine, Jan 31, 2011)

Jonah Lehrer, “How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity Effect.”

(Wired.com, October 2011)

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Rolling Stone's Doree Shafrir: My Top Longreads of 2011

Doree Shafrir is an editor at Rolling Stone, where she hangs out with the Misfits on a regular basis. She can also be found at doree.tumblr.com.

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When I went back into my Kindle and my Twitter and Tumblr and email and all the other places where I noted or saved especially noteworthy stories from the past year, I found that many of them fell into certain categories. And so, here they are. (There are more than five stories, just because.)

TRUE CRIME

One of the best true crime pieces of the past year was that David Grann lawyer-in-Guatemala story, but everyone has already said that, so I am going to go with Robert Kolker’s “A Serial Killer in Common,” which is the devastating, horrifying story about the Long Island serial killer and the families of the women who were killed. Also, it’s not exactly true crime in the traditional sense of the term, but Kathy Dobie’s GQ story, “The Girl from Trails End,” about the 11-year-old girl in Texas who was gang-raped, repeatedly, was another really excellent crime-related story. Also, I would like someone to write a longer story about Aaron Bassler, the guy who killed two people in California and then went on the run in Mendocino County for a month before he was killed by police.

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

I didn’t make a “trend piece” category because, ugh, but two stories from the past year that I thought really captured Our Moment were Molly Lambert’s “In Which We Teach You How to Be a Woman in a Boys’ Club” and Caroline Bankoff’s “On GChat”. Molly’s piece was so, so smart, and very true, and had lots of good advice, including to only apologize if you truly fucked up, and then only apologize once. Also, this part: “The only men who are turned off by ambition and success are men that are insecure about their own talents and success or lack thereof. You don’t really want to know those guys anyway, because they suck and they will constantly attempt to undermine you, and even if you are secure enough in yourself not to care it’s still really fucking annoying.” And technically, I first encountered Caroline’s piece at a reading in 2010, but since it wasn’t published for public consumption until 2011 (on Thought Catalog) I am counting it. It is a wonderful encapsulation of the ways technology has changed the ways that we interact with each other.

ADVICE

The Ask a Dude column in the Hairpin is the best advice column ever to exist in the world, if you are a woman in your 20s or 30s who is trying to navigate THIS THING CALLED LIFE, which, yes! It was really hard to pick a favorite, because they are all cocktails of good, which is how I once heard an editor at the magazine I work for describe a story. But I think perhaps “Questionably Tattooed Manchildren and Uses for Old Jars” is one of the Dude’s best, because it offers advice like this to a woman who is worried she is a drunken slut: “If all was right, there’d be a country & western singer named Tammy with a hit named ‘A Whiskey Dick or Two,’ but here we are, in a world where a woman calls herself a slut for sleeping with a number of partners that she’s not ashamed of and then apologizes for it to feminists. I don’t think I even understand where that puts us. Somewhere not good, I believe.”

THE CELEBRITY PROFILE

A bunch of people who’ve submitted these Longreads things have said that they deliberately didn’t put any of their friends on their lists, but I am going to break that non-rule because fuck it, my friends are good writers! Take, for example, this profile of Channing Tatum—“The Full Tatum”—that Jessica Pressler wrote for GQ. It is a really good celebrity profile. It is even a narrative, which most celebrity profiles are not, they are just, like, “It is 87 degrees in Los Angeles and Kim Kardashian is lying on a chaise longue by the pool at the Chateau Marmont, her white string bikini showing off her perfectly tanned, perfectly toned, perfectly I-survived-Kris-Humphries body, and she is very deliberately not eating the house salad that she so carefully ordered—’No olives, two tablespoons of walnuts and the dressing on the side’—20 minutes before,” and you’re like, TELL ME SOMETHING I DON’T KNOW. (That lede could also work with Denise Richards/Charlie Sheen, or Demi Moore/Ashton Kutcher, or Katie Holmes/Tom Cruise in 3 years. It’s all yours!) My other favorite celebrity profile from the past year was Lizzie Widdicombe’s “You Belong With Me,” a profile of Taylor Swift. She had so many great little details in there, including that Taylor’s father Scott wears tasseled loafers.

THE PERSONAL ESSAY

Pressler snaked me by choosing John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Peyton’s Place,” which is this amazing piece about living in the house where they filmed One Tree Hill, so I am going to choose this weird, wonderful three-part thing that Clancy Martin wrote for the Paris Review about trying to get to New York to see Christian Marclay’s The Clock exhibit. It contains this paragraph:

“It’s starting to rain, I’m ten miles from home and I already recognize how eccentric, how unstable, how woebegone, how doomed this plan is; the roar of the highway is an echo of my sure failure, and I’m thinking about the trucker who’s too wise to take the little baby in Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” when I hear, incredibly, like a promise from God—there will be many of these in the next twenty-four hours, but I don’t know it yet—the elongated throaty syllables of Lou Reed coming from an amiable-looking white truck with wide mirrors coming off its nose and bumpers that give it a kind of Disney Cars effect. In the movie, the trucks are always the good guys. And, better still, a middle-aged black man with a potbelly is pumping diesel into it, listening to one of the most white-boy songs of all time.”

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See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >

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Featured Longreader: Writer Elmo Keep. See her story picks from Wired, Foreign Policy, The Hairpin and more on her #longreads page.

Featured Longreader: Writer Elmo Keep. See her story picks from Wired, Foreign Policy, The Hairpin and more on her #longreads page.

Checking in on the Masculinity Crisis

Richard T Nowitz / Getty

Kelli María Korducki | Longreads | December 2019 | 14 minutes (3,786 words)

 

Not long ago, I noticed a woman reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life at my Manhattan yoga studio as we both waited for our Ashtanga class to begin. The sight took me aback. Despite the 2018 book’s many weeks as a nonfiction bestseller, I’d somehow never considered that the scope of Peterson’s audience might extend beyond sulky white men who like to outsource their thinking. That it might include women with the disposable income and leisure time to spend their Saturday afternoons doing sun salutations, whose lives probably look a lot like mine.

Peterson, a once-unassuming psychology professor at my Canadian alma mater (I’d never heard of him during the years we were both there), has emerged in the last few years as a puzzling figurehead among men’s rights aficionados and self-help enthusiasts alike. Wielding a trademark pastiche of literary references and cherry-picked sociological data points, his writing and, to a greater extent, public lectures broadcast via YouTube deliver what is, for many in this age of ‘toxic masculinity’ and #MeToo, a reassuring story: that men are natural rulers, white privilege is a farce, and if millennial men would just make their beds and assume their kingdoms, we’d all be better off.

Peterson speaks to a constellation of loosely connected concerns that have, in the last several years, dominated popular discourse on where boys and men fit into a society in which gender norms play less and less of a role in determining how people fit together. Conversations about rape culture and damaging gender constructs take place alongside global reports of female students outperforming their male classmates. We hear of a workforce that, at least in theory, rewards the “soft skills” women are purportedly socialized to possess. Meanwhile names like “Dylann Roof” and “Elliot Rodger” have become shorthand for an epidemic of male isolation and rage. A New York Times story that followed shortly after the deadly February 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, included the observation that “about the only thing” nearly all U.S. mass shooters have in common “is that they are men.” Read more…

Fashions Fade, But Fleabag Is Forever

Steve Schofield, Amazon / Illustration by Homestead

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | June 2019 | 8 minutes (2,150 words)

This is a love story. A dangerously elegant woman (noble stock) in lips the color of a dying rose (not a lipstick, but a blend of oils, waxes, and pigments based on MAC’s Dare You), hair a roaring bob, a cigarette perched on her Erté fingers, stands pensively against a brick wall (real?), the burnished light (not real?) casting the kind of shadow that fills in the blanks — and the cleavage. This is Fleabag (of the Amazon series of the same name, written by and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge), taking a breather behind a restaurant during a fraught family dinner, a fourth-wall-demolishing millennial café owner who could pass for a femme fatale in a film noir. A big part of that latter fantasy is the navy blue jumpsuit she’s wearing (Love, $50), or, more accurately, embodying. The keyhole at the front is more like a door ajar, two strips of material like curtains begging to be parted while threatening to close. Her shoulders jut out, her back is exposed — this is as naked as chic is allowed to be. It is a sleeveless, backless, armless, chestless (well, sort of) number that requires legs for days. To wear it the way Fleabag does, you basically need to be Fleabag, which means you basically need to be Waller-Bridge, whose androgyny (she dressed as a boy when she was a kid), sexiness (she dressed what we think of as the opposite of a boy when she discovered them), and sylphlike stature are as impossible to mimic as the rest of her.

When everyone ran out to buy that jumpsuit last week, that is what they wanted: everything it entailed, from the lights illuminating the scene right down to the It Girl inside. In her ode to the jumpsuit, The Cut’s Kathryn VanArendonk — who bought two sizes just to be sure — wrote not so much about how it looked as what it meant: “It’s revealing in a way that feels like a choice rather than a plea.” A British fan then polled Twitter: “Will buying the Fleabag jumpsuit solve my emotional problems AS WELL as making me look bomb?” The only answers she provided were “Yes” and “Absolutely.”   

“I think people don’t always view contemporary costuming as hard, and it’s really hard,” says Emma Fraser, creator of the TV Ate My Wardrobe blog. “It’s not just about throwing together an outfit,” she explains, it’s using clothes as “an extension of who that character is.” The last time a television star’s style migrated en masse into off-screen culture may have been The Rachel in the ’90s: the shaggy hairdon’t of the Friends everywoman played by Jennifer Aniston, whose face was normal enough that every woman thought a mere haircut could be a conduit for a New York City life that didn’t suck. Fleabag gives us an updated version of that same generational aspiration — the bold red lip, the navy jumpsuit, the “achievable” look and life. Describing the character’s allure, Fraser inadvertently defines the millennial: “Everything can be a mess, but you can still kind of be put together.” Watching television can be like window-shopping, shallow characters being little more than clothes horses for pricey brands, so seeing a layered antiheroine whose affordable accoutrements are inseparable from who she is feels revolutionary. And who, these days, doesn’t want to be part of a revolution? As Waller-Bridge herself texted Fleabag costume designer, Ray Holman, (referencing Twitter): “The jumpsuit is a movement.”

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Broadchurch brought Waller-Bridge and Holman together five years ago — she was acting on the series, he was doing costume design. He was too busy to work on the first season of Fleabag so Jo Thompson designed that one, but when Thompson was too busy during the second season, Holman stepped in. He read the script first, of course, because he always does that before accepting a project. And despite only having one episode’s worth of material, he took the job. “Oh my god,” he recalls Waller-Bridge telling him, “I did a little dance in the office when you said yes.” Holman had a limited BBC budget (he wouldn’t reveal it, but they reportedly spend around $1 million total per episode, pocket change next to Game of Thrones$15 million) and didn’t want anything to stand out (oops). Holman purchased a handful of jumpsuits, wide-leg jeans, striped shirts, and canvas shoes — all items he had discussed with Waller-Bridge — for around 12 outfits total. None of it was expensive: Fleabag runs a cafe in London, remember. “She is stylish but completely High Street,” Holman tells me. “It’s quite a generic urban look, really. It’s quite practical, but slightly stylish.” One of his secrets, he says, was dressing Fleabag according to her situation, rather than just her personal style. The flashback to her mother’s funeral was the hardest because it balanced two opposing ideas: Fleabag’s grief, and, more largely, the objectification of women even in their grief. In that scene, Fleabag appears in head-to-toe black, wearing a blouse that would not look out of place in a courtroom.

As much as the first season of Fleabag is about loss, the second is about love. And isn’t it like that messy bitch to fall for the one guy she can’t have sex with. When we first meet the priest (aka “the hot priest,” played by Sherlock’s Andrew Scott), it’s not clear he is one. He’s unknown to Fleabag, just a random sweary guy at the table of her family dinner. He’s not wearing the dog collar (the audience shouldn’t have any preconceived notions, says Holman). Instead, he is rumpled, in a lavender linen shirt designed by Oliver Spencer, master of the relaxed Brit look (as if that isn’t an oxymoron). Father looks good, but not too good. “He’s quite poor,” the costume designer explains. “He’s not a rich Catholic priest so he doesn’t have many clothes and the clothes he has, they’re old.” He’s not the point anyway. This episode belongs to Fleabag. Fleabag and her jumpsuit (and, okay, her priest boner).

“It could be a disaster, it could be absolutely brilliant” is what Holman thought when he first saw the jumpsuit in the basement of the Oxford Street Topshop in London. It was designed by a small local label, Love, which was founded by Teri Sallas and her husband, Toby, in 2003. “I wanted to make something that covered everything up but was still sexy,” Teri told The Guardian. Though the jumpsuit has been identified everywhere as black in color, Holman insists that he bought two versions – one black, one navy – and that the one on screen is blue (he just never corrected anyone, not to mention that Love, according to Toby, hasn’t produced that version “for some time.”) Holman hesitated because he knew a bra couldn’t be worn under it, but that’s also part of its charm — the apostatism of wearing such a thing to a family gathering. Fleabag’s slightly profane clothing choices, by the way, are deliberate. It’s part of her “off-key” character, which is why we find her in a too-short red dress at her dad’s wedding (that one sold out in the U.K. too) and this too-dressy jumpsuit (paired with sneakers). Maybe she hasn’t seen her family for ages and she’s trying a little too hard. Or maybe Waller-Bridge just put on the jumpsuit and fell in love with it. Holman says that when she wore it for the first time, it was a “wow moment” for them both. Waller-Bridge had two words for it: episode one.

The first episode of the second season has Fleabag at a fancy restaurant celebrating her parents’ engagement. Her family hasn’t been together like this in more than a year, since everything blew up between them over various mishaps, a number of them starring Fleabag. This jumpsuit is her, grown-up — elegant, but, still, showing some tit. The struggle within (and without) her continues, but on a more subdued level. At the table she is wry and ramrod straight, her sideboob teasing the holy father beside her. Smoking behind the restaurant, alone, in the dark, the glow of the street lamp bringing out her curves, she is introspectively sultry. “You look strong,” her dad says. And when she and the other father end up back there alone for the first time, instead of asking for his blessing, she keeps her sins to herself. “Fuck you,” the priest calls to her naked back. It’s a Fleabag kind of benediction.

The second season of Fleabag originally aired on the BBC in March, but British site Stylist didn’t track down the jumpsuit until about two months ago, at which  point it sold out. Since the show’s Amazon premiere on May 17, American viewers have been similarly clambering to buy it. Holman was “completely surprised” by the response and bemused by the “jumpsuit as movement,” but thinks it’s great they helped a local indie label boost its sales. Fraser, who is also British, is witnessing the cycle for the second time and offers some prosaic reasons for the transatlantic phenomenon, including availability (shot in advance, shows often come out when the clothes are no longer available) and affordability. Not to mention practicality — per VanArendonk, the jumpsuit “could so easily pass for something much more expensive, but which I can put on without fretting about stains, child smudges, wrinkles, weird crotch lines, or much at all in the way of further styling” — as long as you have a body that approximates Waller-Bridge’s. Fraser provides the contrasting example of Killing Eve (another series developed by Waller-Bridge), with its aspirational “outlandish” costuming, particularly Villanelle’s translucent bubble gum pink pouffe-frock from the first season. “Nobody could afford that Molly Goddard dress,” she says, “and where would you wear that?”

But the jumpsuit is more about the story of Fleabag, which it serves to represent. This is the story of a young woman who looks like she has it together but doesn’t, and if you get just close enough, you can see it. This is a woman who knows who she is, but still feels the need to perform, who is constantly wrestling with the push and pull of revealing too much and too little. And in the perfect chiaroscuro, this is a woman who thrives on the frisson of impossible love. But it’s also about the story of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the It Girl whose singularity, which is what everyone keeps trying to imitate, is It precisely because of its indivisibility from her. This is a woman who can be easily conflated with the character she created from elements of her own life. When Slate asks why so many journalists want the jumpsuit, the answer is obvious: because they want to create an award-winning one-woman play (Fleabag) in their 20s, because they want to helm two series (Crashing, Fleabag) by the time they are 30 (and then a third, Killing Eve), because they want to be hired to appear in a Star Wars film and to brush up Bond. If they can’t have Waller-Bridge’s career, at least they can have her clothes.

* * *

The Fleabag jumpsuit actually appeared on the red carpet (the black version, anyway) a full six months before it appeared on the show, but no one remembers that. Waller-Bridge wore it, along with a huge grin, up-swept hair, and patent leather flats to a screening of Killing Eve in September. In that context, without a cigarette, without her flapper do, without the brick wall or the glowing light or the cleavage or the priest, the jumpsuit lost its mystique. In those photos it has reverted back to a, well, black jumpsuit. The same thing happened each time someone posted a photo of themselves in it. Even when it suited them, which was often, it didn’t have the same power without Fleabag’s context. And the more people bought it, the less impact it had. Like the sparkly white dress in Cinderella, the sleek black jumpsuit dissolved in the daylight.

The irony is that these writers would have been better off, you know, writing. Because that’s what they really want — to be this famous writer, to be who she is and what she creates. Of course, that costs a lot more than $50. A jumpsuit is a tangible symbol of the life these women want and the fallacy, as understandable as it is in a culture that silences women as well as writers — why am I doing this, again? — is buying a well-cut piece of dark material as a shortcut to that life. Fraser was actually one of the few women writers who resisted the jumpsuit’s siren song, but it was a close encounter. She was about to buy it before remembering who she was: a woman who had other jumpsuits, and who also needed to wear a bra. A woman who did not have a production company turning her body into a genre, who wasn’t living a fictional romance with a man of God, who didn’t live a real life in which she herself was an idol (well, by Hollywood standards). “I had it in my basket,” Fraser says, and then she asked herself a question that, ironically, is very Fleabag: “What are you doing?”

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

At Home on Carmine Street

Tongdang5 / Getty

Abigail Rasminsky | Longreads | August 2018| 14 minutes (3,400 words)

 

When the two stragglers let the door clatter shut behind them, I turn the lights in the restaurant’s dining room all the way up and zip over to the stereo. For the past few months, we’ve been blasting the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” while closing. We all sing You may ask yourself, my God, what have I done? while manning brooms and mops and rags, none of us aware that we are singing of our own lives. At the chorus, we give in, drop what we’re doing and dance: Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down…

I stack the chairs and tables as I’ve been taught, sweep crusts of bread and remnants of lettuce off the tiled floor, grab the register drawer with the remaining cash — 200, 300 bucks tops, since I’ve been emptying it steadily all night — while, behind the counter, Emily cleans the cappuccino machine and stashes the whipped cream, milk, and pie in the fridge. Tom drags the mop over the floor I just swept, the bucket for dunking sitting at the lip of the kitchen.

During the day, the place is bustling with people — upstairs, downstairs, out front, gates open all summer long. But now it’s 12 a.m. at The Grey Dog on Carmine Street in the West Village, and everyone else has gone home.

I leave Emily and Tom singing in the dining room, and carry the money from the register, platter-like in one hand, through the swinging doors of the upstairs kitchen, down the narrow, slippery staircase, past the dishwashing station and the baker’s area, where the croissants and scones are warmed at 5:30 a.m., past the catering department, where two Irishmen make platters of Caesar salad and triangular-cut sandwiches all morning to the sounds of NY1, and get to the restaurant’s windowless, corner office. I unhook the mass of keys from the loop of my jeans and let myself in. Sammy, the resident cat, slips past my ankles. The office reeks of cigarettes and pot.

Up on the desk, I count the cash, separating crisp bills from soft ones, count it again, and add it to the change drawer under the desk, which is always stacked with rows of 1s, 5s, 10s, 20s, and a couple of 50s — $1,000 or $2,000 total. Much of that night’s profits — but not all — have already been rolled up, wrapped in elastic bands, and dropped into a heavy metal drop box in the corner of the room.

When I’m done, I switch off the lights and lock the door behind me, making sure that Sammy is inside. If I forget — as I have before — the cat wandering the restaurant will set off the alarm at 3 a.m. and my boss will get a call from the police: There’s been a break-in.

Just as I turn around to walk through the unlit basement and bound back up the stairs, I see Emily in the semi-darkness. There is a gun by her right ear, its barrel pointing at me. Her body is bigger than usual these days — she’s 27 and six months pregnant with her second child, a mistake courtesy of a quick fuck in the restaurant’s downstairs bathroom with one of the cooks. They broke the sink off the wall, and now here she is, shuffling along the slick floor, belly first, with a man at her back, pushing her slowly into me, toward the office door at my back. I can barely see his face; it is nuzzled behind Emily’s hair and concealed by the panic on her own face.

Emily and I stand frozen in the underground quiet, looking at each other.

Then it hits me: The door.

I didn’t lock the front door.

Emily whispers, “Open the office.”
Read more…

Leaving a Good Man Is Hard To Do

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Kelli María Korducki | Excerpt adapted from Hard To Do: The Surprising, Feminist History of Breaking Up | May 2018 | 13 minutes (3,558 words)

Several years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the prolonged and heart-wrenching breakup that persisted in destroying my entire life over the course of many months, a friend sent me an essay she thought I should read. She was also in the middle of a breakup — a divorce — and we had met a few years earlier through the partners we were simultaneously losing. As one terrible summer faded into an even bleaker fall, we became Gchat pen pals in an ongoing correspondence of mutual despair.

I was officially single and deeply ashamed. To me, my breakup had constituted a karmic injustice that I could have stopped — against my wonderful former partner, against our respective families, and against the scores of women throughout history who’d been denied the love and respect of a Good Man. My friend told me she looked at this must-read piece from time to time, whenever she was feeling scared about the future. I still wasn’t sure that I might have one.

Go, even though you love him.
Go, even though he’s kind and faithful and dear to you.
Go, even though he’s your best friend and you’re his.
Go, even though you can’t imagine your life without him.
Go, even though he adores you and your leaving will devastate him.
Go, even though your friends will be disappointed or surprised or pissed off or all three.
Go, even though you once said you would stay. Go, even though you’re afraid of being alone.
Go, even though you’re sure no one will ever love you as well as he does.
Go, even though there is nowhere to go.
Go, even though you don’t know exactly why you can’t stay.
Go, because you want to. Because wanting to leave is enough.

Read more…

Making Peace with the Site of a Suicide

Photo by Liz Arnold

Liz Arnold | The Common | Spring 2018 | 19 minutes (5,189 words)

Sixteen years ago, my mother found my father behind the shed on a Saturday morning in June. “Get up off the ground in your good shirt,” she told him, before she understood he was dead. “He looked like he was sleeping,” she told us. “The gun glinted in the grass.”

Seven years after my father’s suicide, I opened the envelope containing police photographs of the scene. He did not look like he was sleeping. Limbs: a swastika. Angles inhuman. Violence and velocity rendered in two hundred pounds of a six-foot man. The gun glinted in the grass — she was right about that.

Initially, I was upset she got it wrong. Did she get it wrong? Or she lied to protect her children, three grown adults. (I was 25 at the time.) Or shock wrote its own version. She says that shock drove her back into the house to start a load of whites. She watched her hand grasp the silver knob on the washing machine.

Maybe we’re trying to protect each other. I haven’t told her that I’ve read the autopsy report, or that I viewed photographs of the scene.

I remember how, on the night of his death, when I’d flown home to Michigan from Los Angeles, she tapped her temple twice, quickly. “Not a lot of blood,” she said. That was true, though I wouldn’t know until years later that the temple wasn’t the site of the entrance wound. “Intra-oral,” it said on the report. Of course. He was a dentist who collected guns, and his expertise in those two fields converged at the palate, the most vulnerable place in the skull. Bypassing bone, the impact destroys the control center for vital organs.

I’ve since revised my account to believe he was standing. He was standing behind the shed, and then—I can’t piece it together anymore. Read more…

With a Rent-Stabilized Lease, Finding the Line Between Luck and a Life Sentence

East 13th Street in New York (AP Photo/Ed Bailey)

Eryn Loeb | Longreads | March 2018 | 16 minutes (3,988 words)

 

The whole reason I had the rent-stabilized apartment on East 13th Street was because my aunt lived in it before me. Leslie first rented the place in 1981, when she was 23, for $345 a month. In the early ’90s she left and moved to Seattle, but kept the lease in her name. When I was looking for a place to land after college, she was quick to kick out a random subletter and turn the place over to me. The subletter, a tiny Japanese woman who was running an illicit hair salon out of the kitchen, had staple-gunned bed sheets up throughout the place as makeshift room dividers. The effect, when I first came to check out the place and negotiate her exit, was a kind of diaphanous claustrophobia.

The apartment was a dingy, naturally repellent kind of place that set me on edge even as it sucked me in. But it didn’t even occur to me not to seize on it: Here was a place in New York that could be mine, alone. All of a sudden I was one of those lucky people who inherit something that’s otherwise impossible to get, and have an easier life because of it. (That last part, though, didn’t strike me at the time.) I was 22 when I lugged my boxes in on a stormy-sticky July day in 2004. The rent by then was $775.

It was a railroad apartment, somewhere around 300 square feet — a long, awkward space, cave-like and crooked, in a deep funk of cracking and peeling and generally breaking down. Horizontal surfaces sloped dramatically; all the furniture on the west wall had to be propped on blocks to keep it from toppling over. The light fixture in the tiny, sink-less bathroom was half-detached from the ceiling in a way that might have seemed dangerous if I thought about it seriously. Early on I chipped some paint off the bathroom door, exposing cross-sections of something like a dozen layers of paint beneath the most recent coat: turquoises and taupes alternating with the layers of white that signaled periodic fresh starts.

The kitchen floor — cloudy, black, sticky linoleum tiles Leslie told me she had laid over plywood some 20 years ago — was coming up in patches, ragged chunks of it breaking off and clinging to my bare feet. The only sink was in the kitchen, and so it was the site not only of always overdue dishwashing but also of twice daily toothbrushing. I paced as I brushed, returning to the wobbly sink cabinet to spit mouthfuls of spent paste without regard for any plates and utensils blocking the way of the drain. A heel-sized hole formed in a spot right in front of the sink, exposing an archaeology of the floor: layers of wood and particle board and laminate laid down and covered over and then covered over again.

The whole building was like that, a place of pilings on, of covering up, of semi-smoothing over, of barely acceptable surfaces coming undone. Five stories that were safe in the ways that mattered, and sketchy enough to confer some cred. Along the narrow stairways the walls were covered with proof of comings and goings, arced scuffs and deep abrasions from thousands of oversized objects being dragged up and down, in and out.

Read more…