Search Results for: cancer

Renovating a Family

Illustration by Missy Chimovitz

Christine Kalafus | Longreads | December 2019 | 14 minutes (3,666 words)

 

1.

There’s an art to giving bad news well. Think it out carefully. Choose the appropriate moment. Most of all: Don’t screw it up and make things worse.

I sat on our kitchen counter while my son stood sipping his coffee and I told him his father had an affair. The news of the affair was old — 17 years, four houses, and one renewal of wedding vows old. But telling my son about his father’s affair was urgent, the way testing our house’s main beam for termites before moving in had been urgent.

My husband’s affair had been the first in a series of betrayals. As we began to rebuild our marriage, I became pregnant with twins. The betrayal by my usually healthy body wasn’t the pregnancy — it was the aggressive breast cancer I developed. Cancer in my right breast growing with the babies, undetected until three weeks before they were due. One day of operations: A C-section, a lumpectomy, and a tubal ligation were like a series of crashing waves. But only until the real water came, a long winter of steady downpours on top of snow, on top of everything. Our basement repeatedly flooded, as if the house wanted us out.
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A Beloved Art Critic Sings His Swan Song

NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 30: Art critic Peter Schjeldahl attends The 2011 New Yorker Festival: In Conversation with Steve Martin on September 30, 2011 in New York, United States. (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for The New Yorker)

Many in the literary and art worlds have been sharing this moving kitchen-sink essay by beloved, long-time New Yorker writer and art critic Peter Schjeldahl, in which he reveals that he is dying, at 77, of lung cancer.

In the piece, he poignantly looks back at his life and career, his history as a recovering alcoholic, his continued status as a smoker — and a not-so-wise medical choice he made a few years ago that might have contributed to shortening his life.

Between bulletins from my body that say this isn’t so, I still feel like a kid inside. Four and a half years ago, while rushing to catch a bus (“Don’t run for a bus” was a rule for longevity in Mel Brooks’s “2000 Year Old Man”), I tripped trying to leap, gazelle-like, over a chunk of broken asphalt and must have caught a toe. When I came to on the street, surrounded by strangers, I had no memory of falling or of much else (who I was, where I was). There was blood. My glasses were smashed. I said, “I’m O.K.” The strangers strenuously disagreed. An ambulance had arrived.

I was mostly conscious when wheeled on a gurney into an emergency room in Greenwich Village. A scrawny old-time Village-hipster type was driving the nurses crazy about something, likely trying to wheedle drugs. Strolling past and glancing down at me, he said tenderly, “Die, baby.” That didn’t seem like a terrible idea, right then, and it struck me in a remote sort of way as the funniest thing I’d ever heard.

A cat scan to check out a suspicion that my neck was broken (weird story short: my neck was found to have broken and healed sometime in the past, unbeknownst to me) incidentally discovered a spot in my left lung. This later led to hospital visits for scans and tests, including a needle biopsy (ouch), all of them inconclusive. Fed up with the rigmarole, I refused further investigation. Shouldn’t have? Live and learn.

He also turns over in his mind what it means to be dying, and to have six months’ warning that the end is nigh. “Take death for a walk in your minds, folks,” he suggests at the end. “Either you’ll be glad you did or, keeling over suddenly, you won’t be out anything.”

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What the World’s Most Controversial Herbicide Is Doing to Rural Argentina

A display of Roundup at Monsanto headquarters in St Louis. Brent Stirton/Getty Images.

Carey Gillam | Whitewash | Island Press | October 2017 | 21 minutes (4,832 words)

 

American farmland has long been the largest market for genetically engineered seeds and the glyphosate herbicides used on them, but the United States is by no means the only country to have adopted the new technology with open arms. Farmers in Argentina started using genetically engineered seeds about the same time farmers in the United States did, after regulators in Argentina approved Monsanto Company’s Roundup Ready soybeans in 1996. Soy production soared over the next decade as farmers who previously had been tending to grass-fed cattle, growing rice and potatoes, or running dairy farms shifted their focus to growing soybeans. Many farmers plowed up pastures to become part of what was billed as a biotech revolution. Because the beans tolerated direct sprays of glyphosate herbicide, controlling weeds was easier than ever, and, like the Americans, Argentine farmers quickly became eager buyers of both the specialty seeds and the glyphosate chemicals. The timing was perfect. Rising demand for protein — translation: meat — was fueling strong global demand for soy needed to feed livestock that would end up on dinner plates around the world. Argentina soon became the world’s third-largest soybean supplier, and genetically modified soybeans became Argentina’s most important export. Argentine farmers adopted biotech cotton and corn as well, with roughly 24 million acres of the nation’s farmland planted with biotech seeds by 2014, most of which were designed to be sprayed with glyphosate.

As in the United States, aggressive use of glyphosate year after year on farm fields led to a rise in glyphosate-resistant weeds, spurring many farmers to use more and more of the herbicide, often alongside other chemicals, to fight back. According to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, total pesticide use in Argentina rose by 90 percent between 1997, when the country was beginning to adopt the new type of farming, and 2011, when it was well established. Use of herbicides, including glyphosate, rose by 185 percent during that time frame. And, just as in the United States, concerns for human health and for the environment have emerged.

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The Christmas Tape

SKIF Production / Getty, and Homestead Studio

Wendy McClure | Longreads | December 2019 | 18 minutes (4,618 words)

The Christmas Tape has always existed.

The Christmas Tape was recorded around 1973 or 1974. My dad thinks we were in our second Oak Park house, the one on Elmwood. I would have been 2 or 3. I don’t remember.

The Christmas Tape was our family tape, a seven-inch reel of holiday music played on an open-reel deck. The first four songs were taped from a folk-music show called The Midnight Special, which aired Saturday evenings in Chicago. I don’t know which one of my parents recorded the Christmas Tape, but I think it was my mother.

The Christmas Tape meant Christmas, which meant that everything was going to be all right.

Because the songs came off the radio — because whoever taped them had only a moment to toggle the RECORD switch — they all have their first few seconds clipped off at the beginning. Each one ends with a few soft thuds of fumbled edits before stumbling into the next song.

Nobody knows these songs; nobody outside our family at least. My brother and I never heard them anywhere else, except on The Tape, and we assumed they came from some alternate Christmas universe.

They are, in playing order:

“The Little Drummer Boy,” by Marlene Dietrich, who sings it torpidly in German while a children’s choir mewls rampa pam pam! in accompaniment. (It sounds, really, like a mash-up between the pageant scene in A Charlie Brown Christmas and a smoky Berlin cabaret.)

“Mystery Song Number One,” one of two folk tunes on The Tape so woebegone and obscure that not even my parents could remember what they were called or who the hell performed them. We thought of this one as “Three Drummers from Africa,” since that was the refrain: Three drummers from Africa/ leading the way/ to play for the baby on Christ-a-mas Day.

“Mystery Song Number Two,” featuring a single guitar and the vocals of a slightly dour-sounding trio or quartet. Maybe called “Come Let Us Sing.” Maybe not even a Christmas song.

“Go Where I Send Thee,” by Odetta: For years my brother and I had no idea who the folk singer Odetta was, so for a long time this song was just a voice, neither a he nor a she, racing through the lyrics of raggedly and breathlessly and ferociously in a tempo so frantic and ecstatic that it matched our own Christmas! Christmas! excitement.

Last year I emailed my dad to ask who recorded The Christmas Tape, since he is the only parent I can ask now. He wrote back saying that he and my mom used to love The Midnight Special. “It featured all the folk songs that killed the 60s,” he wrote. It is the sort of funny thing my father likes to say these days, funny but slightly evasive. Does he not remember whether he or my mother recorded the songs? Does he mean he wanted the 60s dead? (Probably.) When I try to nail down family history details I get genial not-quite-answers like this that I have to work around. This is how I came to think it was my mom who recorded The Christmas Tape.

There used to be more to The Christmas Tape. After those first four songs, my mother recorded two popular holiday LPs, collections of carols and traditional songs by the Harry Simeon Chorale and the Robert Shaw Chorale, so that The Tape drifted off into the more conventional realms of “Silent Night” and “Angels We Have Heard on High” for the next two hours or so. Then it sounded more like any other family’s Christmas tape, if other families had Christmas tapes.

I don’t know why my mother decided to tape albums that we already owned and could easily play on the turntable; maybe she grew impatient with recording songs off the radio. Or maybe she wanted to create an expanse of unbroken time, free from the interruption of radio commercials or the need to turn a record album over. Time that she could live inside, with us, seamless as a snow globe.

It’s true the air seemed to change when the tape deck was switched on: a thick pop from the speakers and then an expectant hum, the world enhanced.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Runner Rob Krar. (Photo by Kent Nishimura/The Denver Post)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Elizabeth Van Brocklin, Brian Merchant, Christine Fennessy, Peter Schjeldahl, and Gabriella Paiella.

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The Art of Dying

Longreads Pick

In this long, kitchen-sink essay, long-time New Yorker writer and art critic Peter Schjeldahl reveals that he is dying of lung cancer. He poignantly looks back at his life and career, and his history as a smoker.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Dec 16, 2019
Length: 37 minutes (9,282 words)

Longreads Best of 2019: Investigative Reporting

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in investigative reporting.

Alice Driver
Long-form journalist and translator based in Mexico City.

Stories About My Brother (Prachi Gupta, Jezebel)

Gupta investigates her brother’s death with tenderness and intimacy, providing us with a rare glimpse into the way toxic masculinity affects men. She recounts childhood memories of her brother Yush and his evolving views on power and masculinity, which have been shaped by his family and his mostly white classmates and peers. As Gupta grows up, she embraces feminism, which her brother defines as a “female supremacy movement,” and from that point on, their relationship deteriorates. Gupta, haunted by her brother’s death, digs deep to push through the pain of mourning and discover the cause. When she interviews Yush’s friends, they reveal that he had deep-seated insecurities about his height which led him to seek out limb-lengthening surgery. Yush believed that being taller would make him richer and more successful. Instead, he died of a pulmonary embolism, one of the side risks of the limb-lengthening surgery. Gupta’s work is personal, revelatory, shocking and provides insight into an area where we need more work: the ways in which conventional ideas of masculinity and power harm men.

The Death and Life of Frankie Madrid (Valeria Fernández, California Sunday)

I am drawn to investigations that harness the power of one story to illuminate the situation of a whole group — in this case, the lives of young, undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Fernández writes poetically about the death and life of Frankie Madrid, an undocumented teen who arrived in the U.S. with his mom when he was either 4 or 6 months old. Fernandéz begins the story with Frankie’s death — he committed suicide after being deported to Mexico — and then works her way back in time, investigating the cause of his suicide, his relationship with his mother and the difficulties of daily life while being undocumented. Via Frankie’s story, we begin to understand the pressures that undocumented kids face and to question the increasingly inhumane U.S. immigration policies and practices that played a role in his suicide.
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We Are All We Have

Lisa Valder / Getty

Megan Stielstra | Longreads | December 2019 | 22 minutes (5,562 words)

I spent last December taking care of my 70-year-old mother after surgery. She doesn’t like being taken care of. She takes care of herself. She lives happily alone in an impeccably decorated condo near Ann Arbor full of art and books and a fireplace that turns on with a remote control. She does Pilates every morning. She visits my 93-year-old grandmother every afternoon. She wears vegan “leather” and doesn’t eat dairy and goes to her doctors’ appointments and canvasses for the Democratic party and Facetimes her grandson in Chicago on Sundays so I can have a merciful extra hour of sleep. We have the same last name; sometimes her former students read my stuff and email through my website to ask if I am related to the Ms. Stielstra who taught fourth grade and totally changed their lives. I’m her daughter, I say. She’s wonderful, they say, and I say, I know.

“I need surgery,” she told me in September. We were on speakerphone, me stuck in traffic trying to get from the university where I teach to my son’s elementary school. In my head was every movie ever made of a child sitting sad and alone because their mother is late to pick them up. The word surgery hit like a baseball bat: I thought of the inoperable tumor in my best friend’s daughter’s brain, my father’s heart attack on a mountain in Alaska, my friend Randy’s emergency quadruple bypass, the cancers that took both my grandfathers, the hip replacement my grandmother had never recovered from, and the tumor they peeled years ago off my ovary. Please don’t let it spread, I thought.

“Not that kind of surgery,” my mother said, responding audibly to my inner monologue. We talk three or four times a week and she knows how I think. Or maybe it’s a mother-daughter thing, our bodies tied together across miles and molecules. Maybe she’s really a witch. “It’s foot surgery,” she said. “Again.”

Five years before she’d had a cyst removed from the bone in her foot and something hadn’t healed right. The pain was constant. She used a cane. She couldn’t drive long distances. She’d been to countless podiatrists, orthopedists, physical therapists. “Looks okay,” they said after X-Rays. “Try this exercise, this ice pack, this orthotic.” She bought special shoes. She bought a stationary bike. Nothing got better and no one could say why. “These things happen as we get older,” they told her, another way of saying It’s all in your head. “I know my body,” she told them, another way of saying Fuck that noise. Of course my elegant mother doesn’t use the word fuck. “Ladies can say shit, damn, and hell,” she always told me, reciting the sentence like it was gospel, like she’d read it in Emily Post. “But they can never say — ” She didn’t finish the sentence.

“Foot surgery is good, right?” I said into the speakerphone. My relief was near-tangible, a thing I could hold to my heart. “Maybe they’ll find out what’s wrong.”

“That’s the plan,” she said. “But I won’t be able to walk for a month and — ” She hates asking me for help. I have a kid and a job and she doesn’t want to bother me even though I tell her repeatedly that it’s the furthest thing from. Of course I’ll be there. This is how we take care of each other.
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The Longreads 2019 Holiday Gift Book Guide

Tiina & Geir / Getty

Let Longreads help you with your holiday shopping! We’ve made a catalog of books we featured in 2019 that we think would make great gifts for everyone on your list.

 

Books of friendships & feuds.

Yuval Taylor’s Zora & Langston is a lavishly detailed account of the friendship, literary collaboration, and epic falling out of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes; Dylan Jones’ Wichita Lineman tells the parallel life stories of Jim Webb and Glen Campbell in the years after they came together to create the enigmatic eponymous song; and Andrew Curran’s Diderot: The Art of Thinking Freely chronicles Diderot’s intellectual sparring with Rousseau, Voltaire, and Catherine the Great.

Books of conspiracies, coincidences, & cover-ups.

Tim O’Neill’s Chaos lays out the evidence he collected during his 20-year investigation of the Manson family murders; Anna Merlan’s Republic of Lies takes a tour of some of the major conspiracy theories haunting the American psyche today; Evan Ratliff’s Mastermind pieces together a vast criminal network that is astonishingly controlled by just one man; Kate Brown’s Manual for Survival examines the extent to which the aftereffects of Chernobyl were covered up by world governments; Brian J. Boeck’s Stalin’s Scribe  hypothesizes that one of Russia’s most beloved classic novels was plagiarized; and Erik Davis’ High Weirdness is a study of the symbolic “synchronicities” that seem to have recurred during three famous psychedelic experiences of the 1970s.

Books about family.

The bonds of family bend and break across vast distances in Ocean Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s novel Patsy; Mira Jacobs’ graphic memoir Good Talk meditates on mothering in a mixed-race family in America; Grace Talusan’s The Body Papers and T Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls are memoirs that celebrate family while also reckoning with legacies of neglect and abuse; and Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House is a 100-year history of her family’s New Orleans home, which was lost during Hurricane Katrina.

Books of investigations & revelations.

Nicole Weisensee Egan’s Chasing Cosby details how the case against Bill Cosby unfolded and why the story took so long to gain traction in the media; Arthur Holland Michel’s Eyes in the Sky reveals that drone surveillance has become widespread in American cities without much public awareness; Ronnie Citron-Fink’s True Roots investigates the real cost of hair dye to humans and the environment; Reniqua Allen’s It Was All a Dream chronicles black millennials’ experiences of income and racial inequality in the 21st century, and explores how this black generation is persevering in transformative new ways; Emily Bazelon’s Charged explores how the power of prosecutors has grown out of control in many American cities; and Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women provides an almost painfully intimate window into the romantic lives of three women who have recently been deeply, obsessively in love with a man.

Frightening books for your fearless friends.

Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall is a nailbiting novella of iron-age reenactors and parental abuse; Japanese Ghost Stories is a reissue of Lafcadio Hearn’s foundational collection of ghastly tales; and Mona Awad’s Bunny is a delightfully terrifying novel of sex, magic, and MFAs.

Histories that challenge our understanding of the past.

Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments reconstructs the free and experimental lives that black young women and girls were living in the second and third generations born after slavery; Amanda Kolson Hurley’s Radical Suburbs revises what the role of the suburb has been in American history, showing that they were sometimes havens for radicals; Robert MacFarlane’s Underland investigates the human underground world, revealing us to be a surprisingly subterranean species; Daniel Immerwahr’s How To Hide an Empire rewrites the history of the United States from the perspective of its imperial territories; Amir Alexander’s Proof! argues that the discovery of Euclidean geometry profoundly influenced social and political thought; and David Teuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee tells the history of Native America since the Wounded Knee Massacre, reclaiming Native history after the point of its so-called demise.

Compulsively readable fiction.

Bryan Washington’s Lot, by turns heartbreaking and hilarious, is a collection of interlocking short stories named after cities and streets in Houston; Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha is a too-real satire of the world after Trump’s coming apocalypse; Mary HK Choi’s Permanent Record explores how modern lives and romances are mediated by technology; Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina & Corina is a collection of interlocking short stories set in Denver, and in each one a woman has suffered violence at the hands of a man; Susan Choi’s novel Trust Exercise is a straightforward story of teenage romance that becomes more complicated with every twist of the narrative; and Téa Obreht’s Inland is a sprawling Western based on the true story of the U.S. Camel Corps.

Essays & Criticism.

Shapes of Native Nonfiction, an anthology edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton, showcases the craftsmanship of contemporary Native storytelling; Luke O’Neil’s Welcome To Hell World is a vital and despairing collection of essays on modern American life; T Fleischmann’s Time Is a Thing the Body Moves Through uses the artworks of Felix Gonzáles-Torres to reflect on how the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art; Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing is a manifesto that calls for a radical winding down the attention economy; Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain is a love letter to A Tribe Called Quest; and Jess Row’s White Flights is a literary dissection of whiteness in literature.

Minds & bodies.

Bassey Ikpi’s I’m Telling the Truth But I’m Lying reconstructs her experience of living with Bipolar II; Darcey Steinke’s Flash Count Diary is a philosophical meditation on menopause; Anne Boyer’s The Undying is a lyrical manifesto against the cancer industrial complex; Keah Brown’s The Pretty One is a lighthearted collection of personal essays that challenge the idea the idea that disability precludes self-love, romance, and happiness; Cameron Dezen Hammon’s memoir This Is My Body reflects on the painful contradictions of harboring deep Evangelical faith in a female body; and Andrea J. Buchanan’s The Beginning of Everything is a memoir of her marriage and mind falling apart.

Extraordinary memoirs.

Ahmet Altan’s I Will Never See the World Again was clandestinely written in the Turkish prison where he is being held as a political dissident; Marc Hamer’s How To Catch a Mole chronicles his rediscovery of the lost art of molecatching; Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is the inventively told tale of how she survived domestic abuse at the hands of her partner; Carolyn Forché’s What You Have Heard Is True is the story of her experiences in El Salvador as during the civil war, which she famously recorded at the time in verse; Delphine Minou’s I’m Writing You From Tehran is her account of falling in love with the city from which her family had fled; and Matt and Ted Lee’s Hot Box is a whirlwind look at the fast-paced world of high-end catering in New York City.

Book about just one thing.

Semicolons, wind, and beef.

Happy Holidays!

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Why I Wanted To Finish My Father’s Life’s Work

Illustration by Homestead Studio, inspired by photo supplied by the author

Karen Brown | Longreads | December 2019 | 9 minutes (2,139 words)

“Do you think you’ll pursue more significant work one day?”

That’s the kind of casual barb my father would deliver over breakfast on my visits home after I was well into my career as a radio journalist.

That may seem unsupportive, which was not typical. He was the emotional rock in my life for 50 years. He chaperoned my elementary school dances, read every article I wrote for the high school newspaper, and later, sent around news of my journalism awards to his friends and colleagues. Every year, he wrote me a birthday card extolling all the ways he admired me.

And yet. He had this dream for my career, that I would become a nationally prominent journalist who might one day topple a presidency and change the world. Instead I became a regionally-respected public radio reporter who mostly does health-related features.

He made those comments about his tempered expectations to let me know he could be both loving and honest. But to me, they felt annoying and unfair. In the end, we’d reach a mutual understanding that no one gets to do exactly what they dream of.

I’ve been thinking a lot about those conversations as I put my own writing projects on the back burner to try to finish my father’s final book.
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