The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

This week, we’re sharing stories from Sabine Heinlein, Leslie Jamison, Ijeoma Oluo, Eric Newcomer with Brad Stone, and Jill Lepore.
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In this personal essay, S. Kirk Walsh reflects on her friendship with a gay man battling AIDS — how he taught her to grieve her own infertility, and live life more fully.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Sabine Heinlein, Leslie Jamison, Ijeoma Oluo, Eric Newcomer with Brad Stone, and Jill Lepore.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Sara Eckel | Longreads | January 2018 | 19 minutes (4,774 words)
In the fall of 2016, I stood on the concrete steps of a mustard-colored ranch house off the New York State Thruway in Ulster County, a broken red umbrella hooked below my shoulder. The mustached man at the door — 50ish, in a t-shirt and khakis — had the stern, dry look of a high-school science teacher.
“Hi, Thomas?”
He nodded.
“Hi, Thomas, my name is Sara, and I’m a neighborhood volunteer for Zephyr Teachout for Congress.”
Thomas didn’t tell me to go away, didn’t slam the door or scold me for interrupting his day. He stoically endured my spiel about why I was spending my Sunday afternoon doing this — because Zephyr has been fighting corruption for her entire career, and I believe she’ll go to Washington and represent the people of New York’s 19th District, rather than corporations and billionaires.
“Okay, thank you,” he said, closing the door.
“Would you like some literature?” I asked, proffering some rain-dotted pamphlets.
“No, you people have sent us plenty.”
You people.
In this personal essay, after years of trying to distinguish herself, Sara Eckel considers the value of door-to-door canvassing, phone-banking, and other anonymous tasks of everyday activism.
An essay excerpted from So You Want to Talk About Race in which Ijeoma Oluo writes about a messy, uncomfortable, and important conversation she had with her white mother about race and racism.
An essay examining women’s long-standing conditioning away from owning and expressing anger, instead often sublimating their rage in sadness, which has historically been more acceptable.

Laurie Penny | Longreads | January 2018 | 19 minutes (4,764 words)
The problem of sexual violation can not be treated as distinct from the problematic of sexuality itself. The ubiquity of sexual violations is obviously related to what is taken to be routine, everyday sex, the ‘facts’ of pleasure and desire.
— Linda MartAn Alcoff, Rape and Resistance
This kind of mania will always at some point exhaust itself.
— Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine
***
Oh, girls, look what we’ve done now. We’ve gone too far. The growing backlash against the MeToo movement has finally settled on a form that can face itself in the mirror. The charge is hysteria, moral panic, hatred of sex, hatred of men. More specifically, as Andrew Sullivan complained in New York magazine this week, “the righteous exposure of hideous abuse of power had morphed into a more generalized revolution against the patriarchy.” Well, yes. That’s rather the point.
Sullivan is far from the only one to accuse the MeToo movement of becoming a moral panic about sexuality itself, and he joins a chorus of hand-wringers warning that if this continues — well, men will lose their jobs unjustly, and what could be worse than that, really? The story being put about is that women, girls, and a few presumably hoodwinked men are now so carried away by their “anger” and “temporary power” that, according to one piece in the Atlantic, they have become “dangerous.” Of course — what could be more terrifying than an angry, powerful woman, especially if you secretly care a little bit more about being comfortable than you do about justice? This was always how the counter-narrative was going to unfold: It was always going to become a meltdown about castrating feminist hellcats whipping up their followers into a Cybelian frenzy, interpreting any clumsy come-on as an attempted rape and murder. We know what happens when women get out of control, don’t we?

Troy Jollimore | Zyzzyva | Winter 2017 | 30 minutes (8,142 words)
More than a decade ago, in the aftermath of the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs, the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn wrote:
A few months ago, the American public, who in political theory and to some extent even in reality are “sovereign” in the United States, were given a group of pictures showing American soldiers tormenting desperate, naked, extremely thin people in chains — degrading them, mocking them, and physically torturing them. And so the question arose, How would the American public react to that? And the answer was that in their capacity as individuals, certain people definitely suffered or were shocked when they saw those pictures. But in their capacity as the sovereign public, they did not react. A cry of lamentation and outrage did not rise up across the land. The president and his highest officials were not compelled to abase themselves publicly, apologize, and resign, nor did they find themselves thrown out of office, nor did the political candidates from the party out of power grow hoarse with denouncing the astounding crimes which were witnessed by practically everyone throughout the entire world. As far as one could tell, over a period of weeks, the atrocities shown in the pictures had been assimilated into the list of things which the American public was willing to consider normal and which they could accept. And so now one has to ask, well, what does that portend?
Thirteen years later, we have a quite good idea of what such a thing portends. Thirteen years later we know much more than Shawn, or anyone, could have known at the time about just how much could be “assimilated into the list of things which the American public was willing to consider normal and which they could accept.” We know so much about this now that it is rather a wonder any of us can sleep at night. And in fact, some people tell me that they aren’t sleeping, that they have not been sleeping well for a while. Not since November. That’s what I keep hearing. Of course, there are those who lost the ability to enjoy an untroubled night’s sleep long before that. Read more…

We asked writers, editors, and booksellers to tell us about a few books they felt deserved more recognition last year. Here are their 10 suggestions.
Maris Kreizman
Writer and critic, former Editorial Director of Book of the Month Club
There’s nothing I love more than an unreliable narrator, and the protagonist of Patty Yumi Cottrell’s debut novel is a doozy. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is the story of Helen, a school teacher from New York City, who casts herself in the role of lead detective on a very tough and personal case — her adopted brother’s suicide. When Helen returns to her childhood home of Milwaukee to investigate, truths about Helen and her family are slowly revealed, and we begin to realize that Helen may be worthy of scrutiny herself. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is both a clever and poignant exploration of the distance between how we imagine ourselves to be and who we truly are.

Dara Lurie | Longreads | January 2018 | 12 minutes (3,011 words)
This essay is published in collaboration with TMI Project, a non-profit organization offering transformative memoir workshops and performances that invite storytellers and audience members to explore new perspectives. By bravely and candidly sharing their personal stories, storytellers become agents of change for social justice movement building. Dara told an abbreviated version of this story onstage at TMI Project’s inaugural Black Stories Matter show in March 2017.
Peggi’s voice comes muffled through the closed door to her office. Her words come in rapid bursts with long silences in between. In the dance studio, my 6-year-old brother races his tiny Hot Wheels car across the floor. On Peggi’s daybed, I curl over the open pages of a worn fairy tale book kept on a shelf just for me. I keep my eyes fixed on the pages of the book, even when Peggi comes in the room. I am trying to forget the last two days of my life; the guttural terror of Mommy’s screams, my grandmother’s pitiful moaning and my Uncle Stanley’s grim-faced silence as he drove us back to New York. Now, Peggi is standing over me, speaking.
“Your mother had a cerebral aneurysm,” she says. “A blood vessel exploded in her head. She might not survive the operation.”
Peggi speaks in the flat tone of naked truth. One day, I will understand Peggi’s courage; her rare ability to look life straight in the eye. But at this moment, I hate her truthfulness, and I wish she would go away. I look back to my book to signal my lack of interest, but Peggi continues.
“Even if she does survive, the doctor says she might be a vegetable for the rest of her life.”
“When can I get my Halloween costume?” I ask when Peggi stops talking.
The slap comes as quick as lightning, scorching the side of my face.
“I hate you!” I shout, hurling my book into a corner.
One evening, a couple of weeks later, Peggi sits down on the edge of the daybed where, as usual, my 10-year-old face is buried in a book. “It’s impossible,” she begins, “for me to run this school and take care of you both.” I look up from my story. “I’ve found a place where you and your brother will stay for the time being.” Her voice is soft, asking me to understand. “It’ll only be for a little while,” she says. I look back down at my book. “Until your mother gets better…” she continues, but I let her words dissolve into the background rumble of distant traffic.
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