Search Results for: cancer

‘None of This Happened the Way You Think It Did”

Longreads Pick

“But losing her friend twice, first to cancer and then to the underworld of the cadaver market, reminded her that, no matter how much she attempted to confront death, there were many unimagined trap doors.”

Published: Jun 10, 2019
Length: 22 minutes (5,549 words)

Time To Kill the Rabbit?

Stringer / Getty, Collage by Homestead

Lily Meyer | Longreads | June 2019 | 10 minutes (2,725 words)

Jordan Peele’s second horror movie, Us, is full of rabbits. They twitch and hop through his underground world, their innocence a strange affront. Both Us and its predecessor, Get Out, are interested in innocence; Peele is expert at skewering the American habit, particularly present and noxious among liberal white Americans, of pretending to be blameless. The rabbits in Us serve as reminders of what true blamelessness looks like: animal, unknowing, and helpless, which is to say extremely vulnerable.

John Updike may have had a similar idea when he named his most famous protagonist Rabbit Angstrom. Rabbit — real name Harry — clings hard to the idea of innocence. Rabbit is an adult man, and not an especially kind or wise one, but in his head, he’s a high school basketball star, praised and beloved no matter how he behaves. Throughout his four-book life, Rabbit remains averse to adulthood. He wants to be a good boy.

Given his habit of sexualizing women, it’s easy to imagine Rabbit as an early reader of Playboy, that icon of male misbehavior. Where Peele’s rabbits signify goodness, the Playboy Bunny represents a certain kind of bad — though Hugh Hefner claimed not to think so. In a 1967 interview, he told Oriana Fallaci that “the rabbit, the bunny, in America has a sexual meaning, and I chose it because it’s a fresh animal, shy, vivacious, jumping — sexy… Consider the kind of girl that we made popular: the Playmate of the Month. She is never sophisticated, a girl you cannot really have. She is a young, healthy, simple girl.” Innocence was key to Playboy’s version of sexiness, and yet everyone knew — you only had to look at the centerfold — that innocence was feigned. Read more…

Father’s Little Helper

Illustration by Eric Peterson

Scott Korb | Longreads | June 2019 | 14 minutes (3,467 words)

I.

Some of what you’re reading I was writing a few hours after taking half a Valium, prescribed by my doctor, partly for anxiety and partly for general neck and shoulder pain, and also a tingle and numbness that I was then feeling down my left arm into my fingers. It began with a yoga pose. It’s hard to know now what exactly I wrote while under the drug’s influence, such as it was. When I took the Valium I was 39; now I’m 41.

These 40-odd years, if Schopenhauer is right, have given me the text of my life. “The next 30,” he says, will “supply the commentary,” of which this, I hope, is an early part.

The pharmacist, who was younger than me, with slick hair, and whom I’d gotten to know a little over the years since my wife was treated for breast cancer, used the word spasm when referring to the orders faxed over from my doctor’s office. I nodded, yes, muscle spasms, even though that didn’t seem right; maybe I don’t know what spasm means. I said nothing about the low-grade anxiety I’ve felt for much of my life, which has gotten worse since my wife’s treatments finished up. “Low and slow,” he recommended. So I took half a pill. I’d never taken one before, and I’m cautious.

While discussing the pain in my neck and shoulder, the facial tics I’ve had my whole life, I also told the doctor I’m reluctant to take drugs, even Ibuprofen, though my wife has told me Valium can be fun. She recalls a day just before Father’s Day, 2014, wandering through New York City’s West Village, buying me expensive t-shirts in the late-spring heat, a week after major surgery, without a worry in the world.

I decided to take the Valium in advance of an MRI my doctor had prescribed to capture images of my cervical spine, hunting for disease. The pill would help get me through the test.
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Demonology: A Woman’s Right to Fury

Hulton Archive / Sarah Crichton Books

Darcey Steinke | Excerpt from Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life | Sarah Crichton Books, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux | June 2019 | 17 minutes (4,557 words)

I walked up the Q train station steps, pushed through the turnstile, and headed out into the stormy fall night. Even as I left the station, anger swirled in my chest, severe and combustible. I moved away from the dark trees of Prospect Park down toward Flatbush Avenue. Some people say fury makes them blind, unable to see the world around them. I felt the opposite. Rage focused my attention. The wet asphalt reflected a red ATM sign. In the market on the corner, I watched a policeman buy a coffee in a white paper cup. Down Flatbush past the nail salon with the wall of multicolored polish, then past the vegetable stand, lemons and limes shining just inside the glass door, and left on Midwood, where I walked under wild trees, as different from trees in calm sunlight as a living person is from a zombie. Branches moved frantically in the greenish streetlight.

I had my worries. I wasn’t sure I could get the money together for my daughter’s college, and I’d developed a mysterious skin condition, with hives rising up under my bra strap and at the waist of my jeans. Those were on a back burner. In the forefront that night was a rage with a singular focus directed at my husband.

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It’s Like That: The Makings of a Hip-Hop Writer

T-Neck Records, 4th & B'way, Jive, Profile Records, Ruffhouse Records

Michael A. Gonzales | Longreads | June 2019 | 45 minutes (7,644 words)

 

Recently a friend told me, “When I was a newbie at Vibe magazine, I always thought, Mike looks like what I always imagined a real writer looked like, with your trenchcoat and briefcase and papers … and your hats. I can’t forget the hats.” Though he did forget the Mikli glasses and wingtips, I had to confess my style was one I’d visualized years before when I was a Harlem boy hanging out in the Hamilton Grange Library on 145th Street, looking at Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin book jacket pictures.

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‘If Any of My Old Friends Are Reading This, It Is Okay Out Here.’

A woman is baptized during a Jehovah's Witnesses assembly gathering. Martin Bureau / AFP / Getty Images

Jacqueline Alnes | Longreads | June 2019 | 16 minutes (4,301 words)

Religion can offer narratives that help us make sense of the world, answers to difficult questions like: Where do we go when we die? How can we best love others? Why do bad things happen to good people? Within belief systems, people learn to love, to grieve, to serve, and to live, often with the hope of some eternal reward at the end. For many people, there is beauty and comfort to be found within these faith-based communities. But what happens if you are someone who begins to doubt everything you’ve grown up believing, everything you’ve built your life around? What happens if, by expressing this doubt, you are shunned forever by your family, community, partner, and way of life? How do you learn to move through the world and make meaning?

Amber Scorah, in her riveting debut memoir, Leaving the Witness, explores the upheaval of exiting a faith. Raised from birth as a Jehovah’s Witness, Scorah experienced difficulty tempering natural desire and curiosity for the sake of faith. As a teenager, she had sex with her boyfriend and was promptly disfellowshipped, leaving her unmoored from a religion that had served as the blueprint for her life up to that point. Rather than leave, Scorah, afraid of being killed by God at Armageddon and unable to see a sustainable path to an alternate future, returned to the faith. She married a Jehovah’s Witness and they moved to China and began preaching. There, Scorah’s doubts swelled until she could no longer suppress them, and she left, not knowing what grief and beauty lay ahead.

Leaving the Witness, witty and moving in turns, offers a rare look into the workings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well as the various complications that prevent others from leaving despite their own doubts. Scorah, by untangling and exposing the mechanisms that once held her, offers a path for others to imagine new and unexpectedly hopeful futures for themselves, despite the fear and grief that accompany such a transition. I spoke with Scorah via Skype about her writing process, how she’s learned to dismantle harmful dichotomies, and how she has learned to carry and grow from immense loss.

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True Roots

Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

Ronnie Citron-Fink | True Roots | Island Press | June 2019 | 34 minutes (5.655 words)

 

How’d You do it? Are you doing that on purpose? Are you okay? Ever since I stopped coloring my silver hair, I’ve gotten a lot of questions. One of the most common during my hair transition was Why are you letting it go gray? While my roots didn’t ask permission before they stopped growing in dark brown, it was a complex mix of fear and determination that rearranged my beauty priorities. The question of why — why, after twenty-five years of using chemical dyes, I gave them up-is something I’ve thought about a lot.

My world began to shift four years ago. I was sitting in a meeting about toxics reform in Washington, DC, when an environmental scientist began to describe the buildup of chemicals in our bodies. As she rattled off a list of ingredients in personal care products-toluene, benzophenone, stearates, triclosan — my scalp started to tingle. “We’re just beginning to understand how these chemicals compromise long-term health,” she concluded.

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The Year of the Cat

Illustration by Homestead

Elisabeth Donnelly | Longreads | May 2019 | 14 minutes (3,392 words)

In an old photo from when I lived in a house in Catskill, New York, on the edge of the Hudson River, I am asleep on the couch with a small cat curled up on my chest. The casual observer would be forgiven for thinking that it was my cat in this still life tableau: snoring woman, mouth wide open, head flung to the side, a red plaid blanket, and a cat in a circle as if it is right at home.

But the thing was, she wasn’t my cat. I didn’t feed her, I didn’t scoop her poop, I didn’t consistently provide her with a home and shelter. She was like a weedy, persistent, besotted lover who wouldn’t listen to the word “no,” who spent every night outside my house with a boombox in the air, playing “In Your Eyes.” Yet to explain it properly — my relationship with my fake cat — we have to back things up slightly.
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Confessions of a Lapsed Catholic Dancer

Getty, Stephen Arnold, Illustration by Homestead

Kate Branca | Longreads | May 2019 | 22 minutes (5,497 words)

 

You hear the drums before you see us, a circle of figures facing inward, our arms rigid, our feet pounding the stage in an even, rhythmic, side-stepping march. The circle bobs up and down with our forcefulness. Our costumes are geometric bodysuits, designed not to contour to our human bodies, but to transform them into something more angular, hardened, like a shell. They have V-neck fronts and stiff cap sleeves and straight pant legs that stop suddenly at the shin, transforming our bodies into great Xs of yellow, purple, and black. We wear strips of black tape on our cheeks, like war paint. Our costumes make us look like ancient Aztecs or alien warriors — beings of a past or future time.

When I am wearing that costume and bound to that ring, I am transported back nine years; suddenly I am a 19-year-old performing the choreography of Robert Battle with my college dance company — and also none of those things. It feels like I am nothing, or that we are collectively something else, emptied, but electric, maybe capable of boring a hole in space or time. During a performance, when I catch sight of something mundane among us, like a wisp of hair sprung from Brittany’s bun, or a nervous twitch in Erin’s fingers, my chest blooms with love for the moment: for the startling gift of feeling like I am many people, in many places, traversing many times all at once.

We twist and extend our arms into wide, heavenward Vs and beckon the stage lights with flicks of our hands. We tuck and splay and smack our thighs. Then the pace of the drumming quickens with a RAPAPAPAPAP! and one in our company enters the center of the circle where a spotlight appears. She spins wildly in one direction, then the other, her feet stamping the ground as fast as the mallets hitting the drums. Meanwhile, those of us around her shoot our arms into the air like crops hit by a sudden gust of wind. She rejoins the circle so that only the light remains inside the ring made up of our bodies, and now that it’s there, finally there, we are frenzied by it. Hopping, slamming, jumping, falling, flinging ourselves in patterns around its edges. With a final pound, the drums stop, leaving us standing around the light’s rim with our feet wide, arch to arch with one another, arms by our sides, chests heaving, but open to the sky, our necks craned toward whatever bulb or star gave us this brightness. We lower our chins as the stage fades to black.

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Total Depravity: The Origins of the Drug Epidemic in Appalachia Laid Bare

Getty / Black Inc. Books

Richard Cooke | Excerpt from Tired of Winning: A Chronicle of American Decline | Black Inc. Books | May 2019 | 21 minutes (5,527 words)

They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Mark 16:18

One night John Stephen Toler dreamed that the Lord had placed him high on a cliff, overlooking a forest-filled valley. He had this vision while living in Man, West Virginia, where some of the townsfolk thought he was a hell-bound abomination; he countered that God works in different ways. The mountains were where he sought sanctuary, so he felt no fear; but as he watched, all the trees he could see were consumed by wildfire. It was incredible, he said, to see ‘how quick it was devoured’, and the meaning of the parable was clear. The forest was Man and the fire was drugs, and when the drugs came to Man, that was exactly how it happened – it was devoured ‘so fast, that you didn’t even see it coming’, he said. We were in Huntington, West Virginia, and by now John Stephen Toler was in recovery.

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