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Elizabeth Wurtzel Made it Okay to Write ‘Ouch’

NEW YORK - AUGUST 14: American writer Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of the memoir "Prozac Nation" holds up a locket with the word "Prozac" on it and poses for a portrait in front of a window display of a hand holding pills on August 14, 1991 in New York City, New York. (Photo by Catherine McGann/Getty Images)

I loved Peter Schjeldahl’s recent New Yorker essay in which he alerted readers to his battle with terminal lung cancer. But I took umbrage when an acquaintance on social media praised Schjeldahl for adhering to the long-reigning maxim that a writer must never say “ouch” — never let the reader see that the painful experience you’re writing about actually hurt you.

It occurred to me that this is another of several “rules” about writing — established by affluent, straight, white men — that need to be re-written. I mean, could there be a more stereotypically male directive, or one more informed by white gentility? As far as I’m concerned, false bravado has no place in memoir.

When I learned this week of memoirist and Gen X icon Elizabeth Wurtzel’s death, at 52, from metastatic breast cancer, I realized: she re-wrote that rule.

Wurtzel’s raw, absorbing memoirs, Prozac Nation, and More, Now, Again, were ground-breaking in this way. They made it okay — even fashionable — to write “ouch,” something many of us in the trenches of publishing memoir and personal essays now see as valid and valuable. This is how readers with similar experiences have their pain validated; this is how readers with different experiences develop empathy toward others. This is how we change the world.

Wurtzel died as she lived, baring her deep, existential pain and vulnerability until the very end. She was working on her final personal essay for Medium’s GEN vertical when she passed away on January 7th.

In the piece she reveals that as her health was declining, her marriage was unraveling, and she was also still wrestling with new information her mother finally uncovered a couple of years ago: that her biological father was not the same man as the father she grew up with. Of her waning marriage, she writes:

I am estranged and strange, strangled up in blue.

I do not want to feel this way. I am going through the five stages of grief all at once, which Reddit strings have no doubt turned into 523. They are a collision course, a Robert Moses plan, a metropolitan traffic system of figuring it out.
I feel bad and mad and sad.

Is this a festival of insight or a clusterfuck of stupid? I change my mind all the time about this and about everything else.

I got married because I was done with crazy. But here it is, back again, the revenant I cannot shake. I feel like it’s 1993, when my heart had a black eye all the time.

26 is a boxing match of the soul.

I did not expect bruises at 52.

Wurtzel was often derided for her candid “oversharing,” and that rankled me. I’ve been defending her and other brave writers like her forever. Although I didn’t know her very well, we were acquainted, first meeting in the 90s when I dated her cousin. She was the sort of bold, outspoken woman I both admired and feared — the kind who inspired me to start an unapologetic women tag at Longreads. (And I had been meaning to ask her to write a piece for the Fine Lines series I launched a couple of years ago. I am kicking myself for missing the opportunity to add her voice to that series.)

I’m sad she’s gone. I’ve been finding comfort in wonderful remembrances of her by Deborah Copaken at The Atlantic, Emily Gould at Vanity Fair, and Molly Oswaks at the New York Times. Jia Tolentino at The New Yorker, Kera Bolonik at NBC News, Mandy Stadtmiller at Medium, and Nancy Jo Sales at The Cut.

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How Bagel Makers’ Union Local 338 Beat NYC’s “Kosher Nostra”

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In the 1950s, organized crime in New York City wanted in on burgeoning bagel profits. As Jason Turbow recounts in this fun piece at Grubstreet, the New York City Bagel Makers’ Union Local 338 — a membership made almost solely of Jewish bagel makers and their sons — wasn’t prepared to share the gelt.

Despite a decidedly limited reach through the first half of last century, demand kept dozens of bakeries in business throughout Manhattan and the eastern boroughs. They were miserable places to work, located in the basements of apartment houses and other large buildings with coal-fired furnaces that could be converted into ovens. Ambient temperatures in those rooms reached 120 degrees, with bakers frequently stripping down to their underwear, even in the dead of winter, while furiously sidestepping infestations of roaches and rats. “There appears to be no other industry, not even the making of clothes in sweatshops, which is carried on amid so much dirt and filth,” reported the state of New York in one of several scathing industry safety reviews. It was not uncommon for poor tradesmen to ply temporary homes in the corners of these rooms, sleeping on empty flour sacks in the handful of hours between shifts. So dire were conditions that they even inspired a Yiddish curse: Lig in der erd un bak beygl. “Lay in the ground and bake bagels.” (Alternatively translated: “Go to hell and bake bagels.”)

The excessive hours mandated in such environments were so brutal that in the late 1920s, bagel bakers, primarily immigrants from Eastern Europe, banded together in protest. The result — Union Local 338, under the umbrella of the Bakery and Confectionery Workers (B&C) International — offered a measure of professional leverage. Beginning in the 1930s, if one wanted to run a bagel shop in Manhattan, one had no choice but to employ union bakers. They were, after all, virtually the only men in town capable of making a proper bagel, not to mention exceedingly judicious when it came to imparting their wisdom. So comprehensive was this mandate that bakery owners were prohibited from manning their own ovens at the risk of costly and relentless picket lines outside their shops. (Picketing was the official response to virtually all major labor disputes. The union prevailed every time.)

Union Local 338 never grew much past 300 bakers, but the power it held was enduring. Membership was intentionally exclusive, based on the lineage-driven, old-world tradition of passing down a generationally honed craft from father to son. On this basis, acceptance was limited to the sons of existing 338 members (with the rare son-in-law and occasional nephew sliding quietly under the rope), a structure that retained an exclusively Jewish identity. Until American-born offspring began to turn over No. 338’s roster in the 1950s, the local communicated primarily in Yiddish, its correspondence and record-keeping entirely indecipherable to outsiders. The newspaper of record, the one read by bakers during their breaks, was the Yiddish-language daily Forverts — the Forward — which today publishes online in both English and Yiddish.

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‘I Believe in Love’: Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Final Year, In Her Own Words

Longreads Pick

Memoirist Elizabeth Wurtzel was working on this, her final personal essay, when she passed away on January 7th, 2020 from metastatic breast cancer. In the piece she reveals that as her health was declining, her marriage was unraveling, and that she was still wrestling with new information her mother finally revealed a couple of years ago: that her biological father was not the same man as the father she grew up with. With an introduction and end note from her editor and friend, Garance Franke-Ruta.

Source: GEN
Published: Jan 8, 2020
Length: 19 minutes (4,830 words)

What I Did for (Strange) Love

Paul Natkin / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Laura Bond | Longreads | January 2020 | 9 minutes (2,218 words)

 
I spent the final dregs of a sixth-grade summer in my brother’s room, perched on the perimeter of his waterbed, forced to listen to the weird new music he discovered every day. It was a gloomy parade of bands from England that didn’t register on FM radio in 1987: The Smiths, Soft Cell, Siouxsie and the Banshees. I hated most of this music but, like the Phoenix heat, it was inescapable. I tried to hide from it, but the sound warbled through the sheetrock wall that separated our bedrooms. It permeated my ears and consciousness.

One sweaty August evening, my brother finally played something I liked. The singer’s voice was deep, resonant, with a British twang that was both elegant and cocky, a combination I found hard to resist in music and, years later, boyfriends. The melodies were bright and catchy. On the album cover, four pale young musicians crowded together wearing leather and eyeliner, conspiratorial and cute. Depeche Mode, they were called. As we listened to the entire record, twice, I felt for the first time the whole-body percolation that accompanies the discovery of good new music.
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Finding Solace in the Charged Particles of the Aurora Borealis

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Hugo Sanchez, 48, immigrated to Canada to escape the brutal civil war in El Salvador. As David Wolman reports in this moving profile at Outside, Sanchez’s friendly, kind exterior hides the horrors he experienced growing up in Central America and the pain and grief he endured after losing his son Emilio, who died unexpectedly at age 10. Sanchez, a passionate photographer, finds solace in capturing the Northern Lights on film.

Growing up in Central America, Hugo had never heard of the northern lights: la aurora was a phrase used only to describe the special glow of dawn. But since relocating to Edmonton, Alberta, nearly 30 years ago, he’s had scores of sightings of what he sometimes calls Lady Aurora. Nowadays, when the forecast looks good or half decent, Hugo will load up his 2007 Mazda and drive, alone and often in the middle of the night, to Elk Island National Park, about 40 minutes from his home on the northwestern edge of Edmonton. There he’ll set up and wait. It’s a calming place, he says, where he can reflect on what he’s been through, what he’s lost, and what he still has.

Before peeling off from the group, Hugo and I listened to a Wiseman local give an informal lesson about the physics of auroras. He stood outside a cabin filled with furs and mining-era memorabilia, and, with mittened hands gesturing toward the sky, explained how nonstop nuclear fusion in the sun sends electrons and protons zooming into space—the solar wind. Some of these charged particles make their way into earth’s upper atmosphere, where they smash into oxygen, nitrogen, and other gases. The collisions emit visible light: greens mostly, with cameos from pink, violet, blue, yellow, and red.

A rare happy memory from that time came when Hugo first saw the northern lights. He and Jamie were driving on Highway 2 between Calgary and Edmonton, far from any cities, when they saw a glow rising from the horizon, gradually lighting up the sky. Even to Jamie, who had seen many auroras, it was stunning. Later she told Hugo that her people, the Cree First Nations, believe “the northern lights are dancing spirits of loved ones who have passed on.”

A few minutes later, Hugo steps away from his cameras. He looks up at the sky, alive with color and motion, and takes a deep breath. “I’m happy to see you, Emilio,” he says, sniffling, his voice cracking slightly. “I miss you, buddy. And I love you. Mom loves you, too. So, thanks for everything you’re doing lately because this is…” he says though tears. “I love you, buddy.”

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The Man Who Chases Auroras to Push Away Darkness

Longreads Pick

“After tragedy followed Hugo Sanchez from El Salvador to Canada, he started photographing the northern lights, finding a new sense of purpose in the wintertime sky.”

Source: Outside
Published: Jan 6, 2020
Length: 16 minutes (4,121 words)

Risking Everything for a Better Life

A passenger aircraft comes into land at London Heathrow Airport in London, U.K. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

There’s a small section of South West London in which bodies — usually black or brown bodies — fall from the sky. For Maclean’s, Shannon Gormley reports on the dangers migrants face as they attempt to find safety and greater economic opportunity in a new country. While some attempt travel secreted away in transport trucks, others choose the wheel well of a jetliner traveling to London Heathrow Airport in a treacherous, and almost always fatal bid to improve their fortunes.

There’s a pretty little part of South West London where dead people fall from the sky. It’s a perfectly charming area.

The first one plummeted into a supermarket parking lot that was then under construction. That was in 1996. Two years later, a couple on a date swore they saw a second body hit the same spot, though this has never been confirmed. Another few years, another dead person in another parking lot, this one across from the supermarket which had by then been completed. The area received a decade-long reprieve from the bodies after that, but nothing lasts forever. In 2012 residents found one on a leafy side street; then, in 2015, on an air-conditioning unit on top of an office building. And this past summer, the latest: It plunged headlong into a walled back garden, neatly cracking the pavement open and landing next to a sunbather who responded with an appropriate mixture of shock and horror. That is supposed to have been the nearest near-miss.

First, the stowaway takes to the runway, with the lights along the tarmac. Sometimes he makes a game plan with a smuggler, a plan for freedom and for whatever else. And sometimes he just makes a mad break for it, running as if his life depends on it because he is certain that it does.

However he reaches the plane, if he reaches the plane, he often heads for a wheel. He hoists himself into the wheel-well, a space just big enough to curl his frame into. There, he braces himself. Or he panics.

He braces himself if he knows what’s coming. The spinning of the wheel, the thunder of the engines, the climb above the Earth, the freezing air, the oxygen-starved air. He panics if he realizes he’s been misinformed by a deceptive smuggler or a hopeful idiot, told that above the wheel lies a secret trap door that leads to a secret tunnel in the underbelly of a plane that magically carries its passengers to a better life.

And then he’s killed, probably. Around three in four wheel-well stowaways are, in one of three ways. When the wheels retract, some stowaways are crushed by the landing gear. When the plane hits high altitudes, others are asphyxiated or freeze to death. And when the wheels go back down, those still holding on to life have probably lost their hold on consciousness before they slip out of the well and drop to Earth. That is rare, though. By the time the landing gear opens—often, over a pretty little part of South West London that happens to sit under a flight path to Heathrow—the typical plane stowaway is already dead.

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Faulty Equipment, Lapsed Training, Repeated Warnings: How a Preventable Disaster Killed Six Marines

Longreads Pick

“Marine commanders did not act on dozens of pleas for additional manpower, machinery and time. When a training exercise ended in death, leadership blamed the very men they had neglected.”

Source: ProPublica
Published: Dec 30, 2019
Length: 37 minutes (9,343 words)

Addiction’s Seismic Effects on a Family

Illustration by Laurent Hrybyk

Sarah Evans | Longreads | December 2019 | 9 minutes (2,405 words)

 

“Get the fuck out of my life.”

Sam’s voice wobbles and cracks, confessing to youth and vulnerability that his venom-filled words otherwise mask. The door slams in my face, as my youngest child runs — literally runs — to meet his drug dealer. I heave a sigh and head to bed for the night. We won’t see Sam again tonight, and maybe not tomorrow either.

***

It wasn’t always like this, but I can construct the map that has led us here. Snippets of his childhood haunt me. Tonight I get lost in a memory of a hot summer night when my kids were spinning around like tops in the backyard under the strings of light that crisscrossed our backyard. I can still hear the peals of laughter escaping Sam, barely out of toddlerhood. His pace picked up, making my stomach flip-flop just watching him. His older sister, Mia, came to an abrupt halt and sat down next to me.
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When Media Miscalculations Pivot Talented People Out of a Job

Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Anyone who has ever worked retail or food service jobs (raises hand) or droll office jobs (raises other hand) has a solid baseline against which to assess their current job. Former Deadspin editor David Roth worked enough dead-end jobs in what he calls a “fluorescent mehscape of anoffice” to know when he found great media jobs, but even those soured or squeezed him out, and he ended up basically where he began: at the mercy of other people and forces he could not control. For Hazlitt, Roth writes about the media plague that was known as “pivoting to video,” a plague he both contracted and unwittingly became the face of for a short time.

Facebook lied about the demand for video content. Many websites listened to Zuck’s overinflated numbers and replaced writing with video. Many writers like Roth suffered, and it’s still unclear how much video people even want to watch online. Sure, media is a fickle industry. Things change constantly. Great jobs end. Writers and editors struggle to find new ones and wonder if this one should be their last media job before they pivot entirely to different professions like advertising or nursing, because damn, dude, you’re getting old, and media’s getting even tougher than it already was. Thankfully for readers, Roth has stayed in media. He’s as incisive as he is hilarious, breaking down the dark comedy of media work in the internet era and his own wonky place in it. His sentences are killers and all the more proof that we need him publishing. “Much of my job,” he writes, “there and everywhere else I have worked, has amounted to wading every day into the internet’s sprawling garbage lagoons in search of eye-catching chunks of floating trash that I might show to other people on the off chance that it might amuse or disgust them; I did not always enjoy the smell, but I’d worked enough other jobs to know that there were worse places to spend your day.” But even in that grim environment, he found reasons to work hard and take pride in his projects.

My next workplace understood video not as the secret future of the internet, but as a useful if modest part of an uneasy present. The sites that comprised the larger company were popular and profitable and powerfully in flux, as they had been ever since an aggrieved tech billionaire, using a honeybaked WWE antique as a cutout, successfully sued them into bankruptcy. The coterie of venture capitalists that had bought the sites at a discount briefly attempted an ambitious pump-and-dump asset-flip, then punted and brought in some consultants to justify and oversee layoffs and buyouts in advance of a different and more desperate kind of sale. Everything at the place atrophied as ownership looked for and found ways not to spend money on workers and work it no longer even pretended to care about. The satellite office where we shot our videos emptied first of people, then fixtures and furnishings. On the last day there, before management let the lease run out, I booted a wildly oversized tennis ball, one of the inexplicable promotional doodads that had been left behind, and knew that, wherever it landed, it could not hit anything that could break or wasn’t already broken.

Strangely, for all the ambient hauntedness of that moment, this was also one of the happiest and most productive times I’ve had at any job. Ownership didn’t just not-care about what we were doing, but was actively and obviously not paying attention to any of it; the plugger sent up from Miami to oversee the sites before the sale seemed not to have even heard of them before. But as long as we stayed within the budgets agreed-upon back when everyone was still pretending to care, we could do pretty much whatever we wanted. The lack of institutional support necessarily limited the scope, but the totality of that neglect allowed us to try things, and keep working on them until they got good.

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