Search Results for: essay

Death Rattle: The Body’s Betrayals

Longreads Pick

In this moving lyric essay on grief, pain, and the body’s frailty, Ellen Wayland-Smith recalls, with heart-wrenching intimacy, how bodies have failed and fallen in her own life, and reflects on various literary and historical reckonings with the finality of death and the inevitability of the fall.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 21, 2018
Length: 16 minutes (4,127 words)

‘Forgive Yourself. And Forgive Me.’

Longreads Pick
Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 19, 2018
Length: 10 minutes (2,574 words)

Use and Abuse

(Getty/alicemoi)

Amy Long | Ninth Letter | Fall/Winter 2017-18 | 25 minutes (6,753 words)

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Ryan and I are groping each other on Layne’s older sister’s bed. My sisters crouch at the foot so their bodies won’t block the light. Layne surveys her scene. She’s lined my eyes in thick kohl. I wear a black slip she cut so short my underwear shows if I move either leg at all. Ryan wears what he always wears: white T-shirt, Levis. His feet are bare. I never see his feet bare. We are high on methadone and Xanax, barely aware of Beth and Chelsea or even Layne. We act out our own little movie, everything black and white like the film in Layne’s camera. She’d asked us to pose for her, and I said we would because I wanted my friends to like my boyfriend, and I wanted the 4-by-6-inch still images that would say This really happened in case Ryan and I unraveled like my slip threatens to do when he teases a thread. Layne instructs Ryan to kiss me: on the mouth, the neck. “Put your hands there,” she says and points to my waist. She says, “Amy, move in closer. Ryan, smile.” Ryan smiles. Layne snorts out a laugh. “Not like that,” she says. “Like a person.” A genuine grin spreads across his face. Layne snaps a photo. I’m so close to Ryan I can feel the heat coming off his body. I smell the tobacco and Old Spice that linger on his skin. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I’m still learning what people do in bed together. Simulating sex we’ve never had is like when people ask me how it feels to be a triplet, and I can’t answer because I don’t know how it feels to be otherwise. “Like this?” I ask. Layne shrugs. “Just do what you usually do.” I don’t tell her that we don’t yet have a way we usually do things. Ryan slips me a second methadone pill. He takes two. Under the opiate euphoria, it’s easy to pretend we really are just making out and not being photographed, that this moment is real instead of orchestrated. We don’t forget Layne’s there, but we are good models. We do what she asks. We play ourselves, fucked up and infatuated. Read more…

The Friend That Got Away

Longreads Pick
Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 16, 2018
Length: 11 minutes (2,860 words)

The Man in the Mirror

Longreads Pick

In this personal essay, in the aftermath of rape, Alison Kinney discovers that a new lover who helps you to heal can just as easily betray you.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 9, 2018
Length: 16 minutes (4,156 words)

When Financial Privilege is Mistakenly Assumed

At The Rumpus, Narratively deputy editor Lilly Dancyger has an essay I strongly identify with.

In her piece — excerpted from Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class, a new anthology edited by Michelle Tea — Dancyger writes about dealing with people’s mistaken assumptions about the economics of her upbringing. A high-school dropout who later worked her way through college and graduate school, Dancyger grew up poor — the daughter of a single mother who was a recovering heroin addict. In New York City media circles, people tend to make comments indicating they assume she comes from financial privilege.

I’ve had similar experiences, growing up adjacent to money while not having much. I was surrounded by cousins and step-family who had much more, giving people around me the impression that I was living a much more comfortable life than I was. I felt I couldn’t speak up about their misconceptions, or the financial and power differentials within my family life. There was never a right moment to say, “No, no — I worked three jobs to put myself through college while she had the benefit of a trust fund.”

Here, Dancyger proudly sets her record straight. After attending a media industry event where people’s comments make her realize she “passes” as privileged, she reflects on her struggle to put herself through school and succeed in publishing.

Now I pass. I’ve made it. So why do I feel so queasy? Why did I have the urge to defend myself at that networking event, to tell the people around me, “I’m not one of you!”

The usual narrative about the scrappy working-class kid who pulls herself up is that she’s supposed to be embarrassed about where she comes from. She’s supposed to work hard to keep up the illusion, to convince her peers that she, too, went to sleepaway summer camps and lived in college dorms. When she passes, she has succeeded.

But I don’t want to blend in. I’m proud of how hard I’ve worked. I’m proud of the fact that I’ve never treated waitstaff or security guards or bus drivers like they’re not there, that I relate to them more than I do to most of my peers. I’m proud of the fact that I dropped out of high school, and not just because I still managed to go on to get an Ivy League graduate degree, but because I knew what was best for me at the age of just fourteen, and I had the courage to do it.

I don’t feel ashamed of my history, I feel ashamed of letting it be erased.

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Passing as Privileged

Longreads Pick

A personal essay in which Narratively deputy editor Lilly Dancyger writes about dealing with people’s mistaken assumptions about the economics of her upbringing. A high-school dropout who later worked her way through college and graduate school, Dancyger grew up poor — the daughter of a single mother who was a recovering heroin addict. In New York City media circles, people tend to make comments indicating they assume she comes from privilege. Here, Dancyger sets the record straight.

Source: The Rumpus
Published: Mar 5, 2018
Length: 6 minutes (1,639 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

(Jan Rieckhoff / ullstein bild via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Lili LoofbourowRachel Monroe, Benjamin Weiser, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, and Megan Greenwell.

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The Man in the Mirror

Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait

Alison Kinney | Longreads | March 2018 | 17 minutes (4,156 words)

 

1.

In the foreground of the early Netherlandish painting stands a couple, holding hands, amidst the comforts of their cherry-upholstered, brass chandelier-lit bedroom. The husband, Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini, raises one hand in greeting, but neither to his unnamed wife, who clasps one hand over her belly, nor to the lapdog at their feet: behind the couple, a small, wall-mounted convex mirror reflects two other men, facing the Arnolfinis in their room yet visible only in the glass. One of these men may be the artist himself, Jan van Eyck.

Like many other paintings where looking glasses, polished suits of armor, jugs, and carafes expand or shift the perspectives, The Arnolfini Portrait shows us how many people are really in the picture. Painted mirrors reflect their creators, or at least their easels, in Vermeer’s Music Lesson; in the Jabach family portrait, where Charles Le Brun paints his mirror image right into the group; and in Andrea Solario’s Head of St. John the Baptist, where the reflection of the artist’s own head gleams from the foot of the platter. Mirrors reveal the whole clientele and an acrobat’s feet in Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère; the two observers of a couple’s ring purchase in Petrus Christus’s Goldsmith in his Shop; and, regal in miniature, Philip IV and Mariana of Austria in Velázquez’s Las Meninas. Sometimes mirrors invite us to regard the artist’s reflection as our own; as John Ashbery wrote of Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,

What is novel is the extreme care in rendering
The velleities of the rounded reflecting surface
(It is the first mirror portrait),
So that you could be fooled for a moment
Before you realize the reflection
Isn’t yours.

The mirror’s revelations surprise everyone except the artist, who, in The Arnolfini Portrait, paints his signature over the mirror, like a graffito on the wall: “Johannes de eyck fuit hic 1434.” Jan was here.

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Looking Back On the Last Housing Bubble From the Precipice of the Next One

(Getty)

I could have used a trigger warning for Ryan Dezember’s recent Wall Street Journal essay commemorating the 10th anniversary of the bursting of the housing bubble.

Dezember writes about getting stuck for more than a decade with a deeply devalued house he’d bought on the Alabama Gulf Coast at a speculator’s price during the market’s peak in 2005.

My husband and I had a similar experience. Around the same time, we paid asking price for a house in Rosendale, New York, a depressed town in the Hudson Valley, after our lower offer was rejected. “Rosendale is really coming up now,” the owner argued. Two years later, the bubble burst, and Chase cut off the home equity line of credit we’d been using to renovate, saying we were now under water. In their opinion, our house was worth about 30 percent less than what we owed on it.

Due to the recession, we had less work, our incomes dropped, and the price of oil soared, making it hard for us to heat the house and pay the mortgage. We tried taking in a tenant, but for a variety of reasons, that was only workable for a month. We looked into ways to convert the house into a two-family so it would bring in income, but that would have meant borrowing money on credit cards to hopefully, maybe make some money. Eventually, we rented the whole place out and moved to an apartment in nearby Kingston.

Dezember’s experience was much more dramatic and painful than ours: His marriage fell apart, ours is intact; his renters used the place as a drug depot, while ours are actually about to buy our house (we close next Thursday!). And our home’s value has healthily rebounded to the point that we’re not losing too much of what we put into the place.

Now we find ourselves looking for a new home to buy in suddenly-chic Kingston, where we’ve been renting for four years, and where prices have quickly come to feel artificially inflated. We worry we’re about to buy into yet another housing bubble. How long before this one bursts? Dezember writes:

At a staff meeting last summer, my editors at the Journal put out a call for stories to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the housing crash. One colleague pitched a story about young Wall Street types who viewed the crisis as a historical event. Such a story would have never occurred to me. As far as I was concerned, the housing crisis had ended just a few weeks earlier.

About 2.5 million American homes are still worth less than their mortgage debt, according to estimates by CoreLogic . That is about double what it should be in an otherwise healthy market, said Frank Nothaft, CoreLogic’s chief economist.

Those of us who have emerged from underwater missed the chance to buy low. Home prices in many markets now exceed their 2006 peaks.

Investors such as Mr. Schwarzman who amassed thousands of houses to rent have bet more than $40 billion wagering that the crisis was so traumatic for people like me, and so destructive to our finances, that we’ll be renters forever. They may be right.

At a wedding I attended recently, I met a real-estate broker who touted the riches to be made by buying units in the glassy residential towers popping up along the waterfront in Brooklyn, where I live. No matter how slapdash the construction, she said, prices have only one direction to go.

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