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Waiting for Alice

Jasmin Merden / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Leslie Kendall Dye | Longreads | January, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,577 words)

Alice is destroying my marriage. It began unexpectedly and accelerated quickly, and now we’re in the thick of a potentially ruinous interpersonal struggle. Kerry (my husband) sees it as a contest between my passion and his pragmatism. I do too, but not in a bad way. I look at it this way: Our marriage is like a seesaw, which fulfills its function by rocking back and forth. Alice, at the moment, is the teeter point. As such, she’s complicated. She is also the most gorgeous creature who ever lived.

Alice has curly hair, the color of oatmeal. Mornings she can be found basking in the sunlight that floods the two front rooms of our apartment, either on my daughter Lydia’s bed or on the living room carpet. In summer, the ash tree blooms and fills the windows, and our city apartment looks like a country house. Alice looks like a duchess, curled on the hearth. She knows that at 5 p.m., when I bring my radio into the kitchen and start making dinner, Lydia will be home soon. Our front door is thin enough that we hear everything in the outside hall — goodnight kisses, lovers’ spats, newspapers landing at our neighbors’ front doors. We are one floor above the lobby, and Alice’s ears flatten against her head when the downstairs doors squeak. Lydia often pauses in the vestibule between the first and second door to inspect the packages that the postman has dropped. Alice holds her breath in that pause, listening for what comes next, which is Lydia banging up the stairs to our door. She is a small child, but very bangy; each step announcing her after-school weariness. Alice, having been trained not to bark, stands at our door with barely constrained poise. She quivers. When the knob turns, she backs up, paws the ground, and emits a single yip. Lydia’s backpack crashes to the ground — it gets heavier every year — and the rituals of reunion commence. Alice licks Lydia’s face, Lydia massages Alice’s ears. Alice turns in circles, Lydia says, “OK, Alice, OK! ” She picks her up and cradles her, rubs Alice’s nose with her own. Lydia’s father comes up the stairs. Lydia gets Alice’s leash. When the three of them return from the park, we will eat.

People often make fun of small dogs like Alice. She is a teacup toy poodle, she is under 10 pounds, and people say, “That dog is the size of a rat.” Yes, I want to say, and you are the size of a Great Dane. So what? In an interview, President Obama once said something unkind about “little yappy” dogs and Michelle shut him down. All dogs are dogs. All dogs look silly and mournful when wet; all dogs have urgent ears. A small dog is as likely to sniff or cuddle or growl or bark as a large one. Across all breeds, there is a common dogness. People think big dogs express salt-of-the-earthness in their owners, something that speaks of mud and skinned knees and free-range parenting. They think little dogs, on the other hand, reveal their owners to be tacky, or frivolous, or worst of all girly, as if delicacy is the province of only one gender. Alice feels no pressure though; she doesn’t care how she looks. She can be both graceful and awkward. She is ethereal when she lifts her paw; she is clumsy when she roots in the wastebasket. When we catch her, she looks up, her jaws clenched around a tissue stained with lipstick or an emptied bag of kettle corn. “Drop it, Alice,” we say. She narrows her eyes. “Alice, drop it.” She places her treasure on the floor, as though it were a wounded sparrow. Then she slinks away, a little angry. Alice also likes to chew toes; she stations herself at the foot of the bed while we watch TV. She brings her kibble from the kitchen to the dining room table, eating it from the floor while we eat. She will lick the inside of your nose if you let her. She is a dog’s dog. She’s a little girl’s dog. She is our dog.


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For my husband, the problems with Alice are many. She is expensive and she requires too many walks — Kerry, being the most responsible member of the household ends up taking her for most of them. She wrecks midday carnal relations. She stares. When we lock her out, she whines at the bedroom door. Someday she may get sick, so sick that we can’t afford her care, and it will be two — three if you count Alice — against one, in favor of deepening our debt to save her. Kerry would of course want to save Alice, but Kerry also wants to pay our rent. Alice annoys approximately one half of the 12 or so tenants in the building — the French woman who receives right-wing mail and the guy who works out of his home as a medium are most likely the ones who have called management about her paws skidding on the hardwood floor at all hours. The gray-haired couple upstairs barely tolerates children; potentially incontinent creatures don’t mix with carpeted hallways. Our downstairs neighbor does like Alice, as does her cat Bubby, who glides up the stairs routinely to request stomach rubs from Lydia. When Alice came, Bubby knew he’d better make friends with her. We don’t know how the FBI agent on the fourth floor feels, because that’s her job.

She will lick the inside of your nose if you let her. She is a dog’s dog. She’s a little girl’s dog. She is our dog.

Kerry fears neighborly rage, our one-year lease, and NYC’s scarcity of affordable housing. Kerry is cautious, Kerry is careful, Kerry is against extra spending, which is something Lydia and I are very much for. Lydia and I like new paperbacks and take-out burritos and postcards from the museum gift shop. We like bringing flowers when we visit friends, and chocolate, too, and tea. We are not good with margins and austerity, though when we got Alice we promised to be better. I have taken on more work and Alice doesn’t eat the finest dog food or anything. We frequently have scrambled eggs for dinner. Still, Kerry worries.

For Lydia and me, there is only one problem with Alice: She doesn’t exist. Actually, she might, but if she does, we don’t know her yet. We might have seen her picture online, at one of the rescue sites we frequent, but maybe none of those dogs was Alice.

The other night, we fought over Alice. Lydia, to my pride and shame, moderated. “I understand how Daddy feels, because you told him Alice wouldn’t be for a while, and then you and I started in right away. I understand how Mommy feels, because Daddy can never be persuaded of anything, and it’s not like we can compromise and get only half a dog.”

In our wedding vows, Kerry promised we could get a dog. “Two dogs, we’ll have to talk about,” he added, meaning one dog was OK, I reminded him.

“I didn’t know about the wedding vow, Daddy,” Lydia said.

Kerry looked abashed. But then he said: “Someone has to worry about the routine responsibilities. Mommy does housework on impulse, whereas Daddy does all the scheduled events, like laundry. I don’t want to be the dog walker because I am the only one who can keep a schedule.”

“Won’t Alice ever pee on impulse?” Lydia asked.

“You’re not helping,” I said.

Alice has become a dark cloud for Kerry, a constant pre-ulcerous stomachache. He never used to worry about our desire to get a dog because there’s a big clause in our lease: NO DOGS. It’s on a separate page. NO DOGS gets its own page, stapled at the back.

But two weeks ago, Lydia asked me to ask, just to be sure. Kerry said good, that will be an end to it. I wrote to building management. They wrote back the following:

“Dogs are decided on a case-by-case basis. Tell us your plan and we’ll let you know.”

I started in my chair. For so long, we had sighed and complained to our friends: “Our building won’t allow dogs. We want one so badly!” Now, it was a case-by-case decision and suddenly, Alice appeared. Kerry’s face clouded, his shoulders tensed. “Don’t tell Lydia right away,” he pleaded. I told him I wouldn’t, I understood the pressures of a dog, I was not as gung ho as he thought, I wanted to be measured, to wait until we had more security, to wait until Lydia could walk a dog by herself. I thought I meant it. I did mean it. But Alice kept looking at me. She looked at me from my lap, and she looked out from Lydia’s arms where the two of them lay snuggled on a Saturday, sleeping in. She looked at Kerry too, with love in her eyes, teaching him how to love her back. She looked at me so much that I gave in and began looking too, not just at her, but for her.

Here’s why.

Last year Lydia’s first grade class did a months-long unit on families. The three of us almost ended up in therapy as a result. All the kids brought their parents and their siblings on their presentation days. Baby brothers crawled on the floor in diapers, big sisters described middle school. Lydia came home scowling. “Angela doesn’t have siblings,” I said. “Neither does Riley.” It was no use. It seemed that all other only children went on lots of vacations or were devoted to sports that kept them busy or lived in high-rises with lots of other kids who came over all the time to watch movies. I stopped reading books to Lydia that had siblings in them. Meet the Austins, Cheaper by the Dozen, The Saturdays, all these large-family books disappeared into my closet.

It festered through winter. I explained to Lydia again why she is an only child. Mommy suffered a near psychotic depression during pregnancy, we can’t afford a second child if we want to stay in Manhattan, or if she wants to go to a weekly ballet class, or for us to replace her shoes as her feet grow. The choice to have one child makes sense.

I asked other parents of onlies how they handled the pleading; most people said that it hadn’t come up, that their onlies liked their situation just fine. Meanwhile, my daughter had mastered pathos at a Dickensian level. The vortex of her longing sucked up small pleasures, blotted out the sun, made me ache for a pregnancy that I knew could do me in. With sudden clarity, I realized I was a failure at homemaking, for what is a home without lots and lots and lots of kids? There had to be noise and crashes at unexpected times, and club meetings on the stairs, and walking a scrappy little sister to school. My life was a sham, it was not full, it was a cruelty inflicted on my one precious child. I began taking antidepressants.


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Eventually, winter let up. Lydia attended dance camp and learned inappropriate songs. Friends slept over. They built forts and they fought and out of sight things crashed to the floor. We had dinner parties and the house got messy. I worked to keep our apartment as full and gay as possible. It became a habit. We became hosts. We threw a Christmas party and a New Year’s dinner. Then I googled successful only children. Daniel Radcliffe is an only child. So too, Cary Grant and Carol Burnett. I felt better, even triumphant.

In The Woman Upstairs, Claire Messud writes about how a family of three never looks like a real family when they sit down to dinner. When I read that, I recognized the sentiment, and I felt worse.

Then, on a bus one spring day last year, I sat next to a woman who was holding a black poodle on her lap. She massaged the dog’s head with her thumb. We got to talking. I told her my child loved dogs, and I wanted to get her one. The woman replied that her daughter was an only child, and the dog was the best compensation she could think of. Indeed, she said, the dog had worked wonders.

In the play The Member of the Wedding, there is this line, distilled and poignant. Lonely Frankie says it about Janis and Jarvis, her brother and soon-to-be sister-in-law. “They are the we of me.” The three of us are already three, but a vision flared: Alice could make us three even more of a “we.”

Kerry said the other night that he married me partly because I don’t think things through and I married him partly because he does. He was angry that I had told Lydia the building said “maybe.” I had promised to keep it under my hat. I was angry because he doesn’t understand how much we need Alice. He said: “I thought you were a grown-up.” I said: “I thought you loved me.”

The three of us are already three, but a vision flared: Alice could make us three even more of a ‘we.’

I do wonder if I should have my head examined. Alice is obviously something more than a dog to me, she is some sort of promise, some dream deferred onto which I can project realization. She is the anti-lonely, the kinetic and frenetic to energize the quiet world of three, she is also peace at bedtime, Lydia maybe falling asleep at a normal hour. There is a time in life when our parents shape and define it, they set the terms of what is both normal and possible. Alice is a way to expand my powers, to convince myself that I can stretch our universe, place one more star inside its boundaries. I remind Kerry we could not afford Lydia, either. I remind him how much we had to adjust to walking her in the park, too. He reminds me that dogs and people are not the same, and I shoot back that that’s the point — we are not making another baby, we are merely adopting a dog. There is always a counterresponse; it is a fight between two equally sane points of view. That’s why Alice is pushing us apart. To Kerry, she’s the sword of Damocles. To me, she’s the final click on the lamp’s dial, the one that brings us to the brightest wattage possible for our home. We are both right. The domestic seesaw rocks.

For as long as I’ve known him, Kerry’s had a plan. He runs the numbers, he thinks ahead. Where we’ll eat dinner and what time the movie is playing and whether the bus or the subway will be faster today. He uses calendars and maps and software. He is calm and efficient and brainy. He has tried to teach me to stick to a plan, too, with some success. I, in turn, have coaxed him to surrender, to trust that even unpredictable pleasures can be counted on: I am forever changing the plan, but I am always here. Little dogs yip and run around in circles and confuse the situation of your life. But they also build their world around you, and if you can endure the noise and motion, you get all those lovely kisses. To me, this is the perfect plan, the stable and the kinetic, forever in pursuit of each other. That’s us. That’s family. That’s Alice.

* * *

Leslie Kendall Dye is a writer and actress in New York City. Her work has appeared at The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, Vela, Electric Literature, SELF, The LA Review of Books, and others. She is at work on a memoir about mothers, daughters, drugs, and show business.

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Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Michael Barajas, Evan Ratliff, Andrew Mckirdy, Raffi Khatchadourian, and Agnes Callard.

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1. The Prison Inside Prison

Michael Barajas | Texas Observer | January 21, 2020 | 25 minutes (6,335 words)

Decades with no personal contact, no way back into the general prison population, cut off from the possibility of parole — solitary confinement is an ongoing experiment in cruelty on human subjects.

2. The Mysterious Lawyer X

Evan Ratliff | The California Sunday Magazine | January 16, 2020 | 48 minutes (12,100 words)

Nicola Gobbo defended Melbourne’s most notorious criminals at the height of a gangland war. They didn’t know she had a secret.

3. Throwaway Society: Rejecting a Life Consumed by Plastic

Andrew McMirdy | The Japan Times | January 10, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,465 words)

Japan is the second-biggest producer of plastic waste per capita, after the US. One journalist tries to spend a week without using single-use plastic and discovers how dependent Japan’s food system has become on disposable plastic.

4. N.K. Jemisin’s Dream Worlds

Raffi Khatchadourian | The New Yorker | January 20, 2020 | 26 minutes (6,746 words)

In Raffi Khatchadourian’s New Yorker profile, N.K. Jemisin recounts the racism she witnessed as a child in Alabama in the ’80s, as well as racism — editorial and otherwise — that she has lived through in her career.

5. Who Wants to Play the Status Game?

Agnes Callard | The Point | January 16, 2020 | 6 minutes (1,549 words)

Hi, nice to meet you, are we playing the Importance Game or the Leveling Game? With a skilled player, it’s hard to tell one from the other.

In Defense of Boris the Russki

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Ayşegül Savas | Longreads | January 2020 | 10 minutes (2,603 words)

Recently while running, I listened to Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch on audiobook. It was recommended to me because of my interest in suspenseful novels and books about art.

An hour into listening, I was puzzled by the book’s two-dimensional characters and unbelievable plot twists. Back from a run, I read that although the book had won the Pulitzer Prize, there’d been some controversy surrounding the award. Francine Prose drew attention to Tartt’s lazy clichés. James Wood described the book as a children’s story. The Paris Review, London Review of Books, and Sunday Times had similar things to say.

Several chapters later, I realized that none of the criticisms had objected to the book’s racism. After another search, I was relieved to see that one article on Salon questioned the book’s “wishful portrayal of people of color,” all of whom played the part of loving, docile servants. The writer carefully dissected these characters, revealing the “banal multicultural textbook” fantasy of an old world with its antique paintings and selfless servants, which continually looked away from real racial dynamics.

But by the end of the article, the writer had still not mentioned, in her meticulous study of racial blind spots as they applied to peripheral characters, the racism at the book’s very center, in the character of the Russian Boris who is the protagonist’s nemesis and best friend.

I’m especially surprised that this had gone entirely unnoticed in the U.S ever since the book’s publication in 2013, even though literary conversations of the past decade have often simultaneously been conversations about identity.
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Leadership Academy

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Victor Yang | Longreads | January 2020 | 16 minutes (4,128 words)

 Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

To my mother; Wendy; and all my teachers

I locked my rickety bike in Boston Common. My dress clothes were stained with sweat. In the park’s public bathrooms, I maneuvered my armpits against the hand dryer. A block over, I shivered in the conference room’s AC.

“Tell me about yourself,” asked the woman across the table. I told her about my family. My father’s mother was killed in a fight with her neighbors in rural China. My mother still struggled forming a sentence in correct English. For the past decade, she had been making $14 per hour as a lab tech and cleaner.

“Her fight is my fight,” I said. “It is the fight of all the workers in your union.” My mother’s salary had stayed stagnant for the past decade, whereas this union had raised the pay of janitors from $9.95 to $17.85 an hour. The year after I came on staff, we would win a contract to bring them up to $20 per hour.

My future boss nodded. “What was it like going to Harvard?” She was holding my résumé in her hands. Her smile was curious. She didn’t question my intentions, unlike two prior interviewers who pointed to my Ph.D. from Oxford. They wondered out loud if their job was a twentysomething idealist’s version of a tour stop in fighting poverty.

She hired me as an organizer for the janitors’ union. I was the son of a working-class immigrant and a graduate of two of the most elite universities in the world. I sold myself as candidates do in their stump speeches. Vote for me, and I will bring every American into the middle class. Those politicians may have graduated from Yale and Stanford, but they always mentioned family hardships. Their mother had been laid off, or their grandfather became homeless. As if the steps on the class ladder were like colors on an artist’s palette. Mix enough of them, and you can dull the shine of your Ivy League degree and the gold in your bank account. A humble gray in America’s melting pot.

We get jobs for many reasons other than pure merit: the people we know, the schools we attended, the stories we tell. I told the story of my mother’s failure.

* * *

Wendy wielded a knife with the same scary proficiency as my mother. With a plantain in the palm of her left hand, she’d flick her right wrist. Chunks fell in rapid succession from the peel into the sizzling oil. I hovered in her kitchen or just outside of it. We both wiped sweat off our brows. Her apartment boasted a view of brownstones and sidewalk cafés, but the management company had sealed the windows half shut.


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“What is it like to live in the world of the one percent?” I asked. Wendy laughed, the bulge of her belly shaking, the part of her body she called a colchón. Her mattress. Rents in Boston’s South End had climbed to $3,000 for a one-bedroom like Wendy’s. But she had government-subsidized housing. She was the only person in Boston I knew who could afford to live alone. Rent was proportional to her salary, so she only paid a few hundred a month. She didn’t make much as a part-time janitor.

My mother’s salary had stayed stagnant for the past decade, whereas this union had raised the pay of janitors from $9.95 to $17.85 an hour.

On the first shelf of her TV stand, she showed me her ceramic sandals with the fat pink thongs, watermelon slices painted an artificial red, and the miniature pigs with etched-in parentheses for noses. Each set in her collection came in twos, with little dots on top. “Salt and pepper shakers,” she explained. “We resort to simple joys as poor people, no?” I cringed. At the union, I made $50,000 a year, double my mother’s salary, and almost quadruple Wendy’s. Like all union members, she paid two percent of her salary in dues. Every last cent of my paycheck came from their pockets.

I didn’t say this. Instead, on my visits to Wendy’s house, we took turns guessing at and delighting over how little we spent on our respective outfits from Goodwill. I had been shopping at thrift stores for years because of my mother. “We’re not poor anymore,” my mother said. But she still scoured Macy’s racks for clearance deals, and I still got my clothes secondhand. Thanks to a lifetime of learning from my working-class mother, I could grow close to working-class Wendy.

* * *

My mother blamed Harvard. “They made your head too big,” she said. In her words, I was “wasting my education to help poor people.” As a kid, I promised to win enough scholarships to earn back the money she had forsaken as a stay-at-home mom. On a trip back to China when I was in fifth grade, she brandished a bestseller in the bookstore: 哈佛女, Harvard Girl. Not in her worst nightmares would I use my Harvard education to become a labor organizer.

Members of our labor union cleaned toilet bowls and office floors. Union staff like me were called organizers, charged to clean up social injustice. I worked in the union’s political division. During my time there, I led our union’s workers to become the major force behind a historic upset on the Boston City Council, electing the first-ever woman of color to a conservative seat. We won millions of dollars for affordable housing on the state ballot and passed pro-immigrant legislation in a Trump-esque city. To achieve the American Dream together, we said.

“So you’re just 造反,” my mother said. The first character is the verb to make, the second is to turn over. Together, they denote rebellion. In Chinese, it means you’re up to no good.

I want to do right by you, I wanted to tell her. Others shouldn’t have to suffer the way you have. Instead, I said, “I’m not a troublemaker.” I struggled to describe the job in my limited Mandarin. “Think of me as a teacher.”

I was a teacher. I served as the lead educator for the 18,000 workers in our union. The vast majority were Spanish-speaking janitors, many of them immigrants my mother’s age. My boss charged me with launching a yearlong education program called the Social Justice Leadership Academy. I ran workshops to educate our members on campaigns we were pursuing for economic and immigrant justice.

The first step was to recruit a cohort of 30 students. My boss gave me a name to start with. “Wendy,” she said. “She’ll do the program.” A few days later, a tall woman took a seat across from me in the same overly air-conditioned room where I had my first interview. Wendy was about my height, almost six feet. With her small-rimmed glasses and collared shirts, she could have passed as my teacher. “I just want to learn,” she said. Unlike the version of me who had sat in that same interview seat, she wasn’t claiming to want to change the world, nor rewrite a history that had befallen her mother. She didn’t harbor grand illusions.

I had been in the job for a month and was playing gatekeeper to people who had fought in the union for decades. They had gone on strike, survived civil wars, and raised kids older than me, but somehow I managed to gather up 20-some sheets of paper: 20-some students who signed contracts to attend every session. The Academy consisted of one Saturday class every month from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Many of our workers were trying to cobble together rent money and legal status. The union had answers, we told them. We were on the road to win a $15 minimum wage and laws to protect undocumented immigrants.

Wendy attended every single session, but she was the exception. In the first year of the program, the union hall was so empty, it looked more like a warehouse than a classroom. The few windows were in an offset part of the room, facing high-rises that blocked out the sun. From the ceiling, exposed wires and strip lighting glared onto us. People rolled in hours late, if at all. I’m sick. I took an overtime shift. I have to cook for my daughter’s birthday tomorrow. I didn’t blame them. Nothing could replace time spent with family, I believed, even though I moved away from my parents 10 years prior.

Every month, I stood up and opened class in my amateur Spanish. Everyone else in the room was a native speaker. They were the ones who had snuck children across the border and battled abusive husbands. Yet I was supposed to teach them about immigrant and gender justice.

Officially, the Leadership Academy intended to equip janitors with the skills to lobby politicians, rally coworkers to action, and win campaigns for immigrant rights and economic equality. I had my own agenda, too. I wanted our union members to feel human, to learn and dream beyond their day-to-day work. It was jarring to bump into them on the job — say, at the airport on my trips out of Boston. In the terminal bathrooms, I was a vacationer with disposable income, and they were blue uniforms scrubbing toilets and pushing trash carts. In the tight aisle between the urinals and sinks, everyone rushed past them. I, too, avoided saying hi. I didn’t want to acknowledge how my workers spent their waking hours, invisible. It reminded me of seeing my own mother on the clock. In uniform, she was not the intelligent woman who raised me, but a faceless low-wage worker.

I made myself a pledge for the Leadership Academy. In my class, janitors would be teachers. I divided up the workshop content like slabs of pork, preparing word-by-word scripts for them. America’s borders exclude people based on their nationality and skin color. Sanctuary cities prohibit cooperation between immigration authorities and local police. I gave workers private lessons in the history of redlining in the U.S. and the process for bills to become law. My boss thought it’d be too much material for them to handle. But I took on the responsibility. I wanted to show that low-wage workers were capable.

I had seen my workers hold their own in political debate about Colombian politics and U.S. elections. But in front of our classroom, they stumbled over the awkward Spanish I had written for them. “Isn’t this your job?” they asked. They were janitors, and I was their teacher. School made people like them feel dumb. Like their workplaces and the anti-immigrant media, my academy was another space that dulled their brilliance.

* * *

My mother was brilliant. When I was in middle school, she was a two-kid parent, a two-job holder, a four-course Chinese dinner cook, and a community college student taking eight classes a semester. Sometimes I’d sit next to her after school, just outside the kitchen. She could slice onions, keep her eyes on my geometry homework, and arrange car pools on the phone, all at the same time.

School made people like them feel dumb. Like their workplaces and the anti-immigrant media, my academy was another space that dulled their brilliance.

I used to apply to jobs on my mother’s behalf. On her résumé, I dropped her degree in electrical engineering and a decade of work in the ’80s as a programmer in Beijing. On her new résumé in the New World, she read as a younger woman, if also a poorer one. She vacuumed hotel rooms; she decorated cakes; she mixed chemical solutions. Jobs that didn’t require English. Her bosses were demanding; her pay was too little. She quit. She got laid off.

English was key to her dreams in America. I didn’t help her. When she tried practicing, my hands flew up to either side of my face, like earmuffs. “You’ll never learn,” I told her. I picked up more of the language in my first few months of primary school than she would her entire life. On my trips back home as an adult, I read her Amelia Bedelia books, and she’d stare dumb at the puns before giving up. It made me imagine a rubber band tied to her tongue, pulling her back at the slightest stretch of progress.

I could have become a dedicated teacher for my mother like I did for my workers. I could have taken time off from my schooling or my job. But it was easier to write her off. It was easier to wonder if what everyone thought about my mother and her broken English and pitiful salary were true. She was brilliant and stupid. She could do anything, and she could do nothing.

* * *

Wendy didn’t believe in excuses. Once, she offered to make reminder calls for the Academy. I refused. I was getting paid for this work; she was not. She insisted, sitting down in the empty cubicle next to mine. Some of her classmates were taking their kids to the park. “So what if the weather’s nice?” she asked them on the phone. Her face was a cross between a scowl and a laugh, her chuckles like rocks tumbling off a cliff. “La lucha sigue.” The fight continues.

She pushed people, as organizers should. During discussions in the Academy, her hands made swiping gestures to interrupt the same old men gabbing on about their glory days. A few members looked up at me hopefully, but I was never brave enough to cut people off. One time Wendy got up and tapped me on the shoulder. When I shook my head, she interrupted the man herself. “We have to give room for everyone to talk,” she said as the room breathed a sigh of relief.

“I’m radical,” she said, sidling up to me. “I don’t care what other people think of me.” I nodded. But her attitude wasn’t radical. It felt familiar and right. In her broken English, my mother never left a government office or customer service desk without getting her point across. I saw Wendy do the same. They were kindred spirits.

“You’re a leader of leaders,” I told Wendy. She responded with a half howl, half giggle. But I knew it to be true. She believed in the brilliance of other people, and she demanded they show it.

* * *

The next year I ran the Leadership Academy, I stopped giving them scripts. “Write your own,” I said. They looked at me with wide eyes, bewildered.

“What do I know about immigrant justice?” they asked.

“Everything,” I said.

A week later, they came to the workshop with pages of handwritten notes. “I threw up the night before,” several of them confessed. One of them gave a survey of the history of American capitalism, from Columbus in 1492 to the hegemony of the U.S. dollar post–World War II. Gladys’s explanation of historical economy was the best I had ever heard, better than any lecture from my Harvard professors.

On paper, I taught a new group of workers each year of the Academy. But after each cohort graduated, the alumni still insisted on attending. In the third year, they demanded sessions twice a month. “If you do the work,” I told them. So they did. They ran interviews to recruit the new cohort. They organized the turnout calls Wendy and I used to do. They assigned every student a role: photographer, moderator, cleanup captain. Wendy and the other workers took over. The problem hadn’t been that they couldn’t succeed in the Academy. The problem was that I hadn’t let them make the program their own. I hadn’t trusted their intelligence. When I did, they exceeded my greatest expectations.

* * *

“Stop biking,” Wendy ordered when I arrived at the office with shoes covered in salt and snow slush, pebbles grating the floor with each step. Like my mother, she fretted over my safety. “Only in America do rich people choose to ride bikes,” Wendy said. We chuckled at the $250 green contraption I referred to as my spouse. The union members named it my luxury car.

Biking was my one daily pleasure. For an hour or two a day, I could take my mind off of my workers who had gotten harassed, fired, and deported. I zipped between the Financial District and the Latino neighborhoods, past rear bumper lights and stalled subway cars. The city shrunk under my tires. Leg down, pedal up, an effortless momentum: the tread of my tires marked a line forward I often struggled to envision in my activist work.

The problem hadn’t been that they [my workers] couldn’t succeed in the Academy. The problem was that I hadn’t let them make the program their own. I hadn’t trusted their intelligence. When I did, they exceeded my greatest expectations.

Wendy checked on me more than my mother. At the end of her afternoon hospital shift, she walked the few blocks between her worksite and mine. There she hovered next to my cubicle until I told her how I was doing. I’m tired. Overwhelmed. I didn’t share such feelings with my mother. “What could be so hard about your job,” my mother often asked. But Wendy didn’t judge. I showed Wendy the to-do lists I wrote on the back of deconstructed cereal boxes, the cardboard big enough to fit most of the day’s tasks. When I fell ill, she texted me every few hours. Don’t work so hard. You should take a break. Before joining the union, I used to get a cold every two years. In this job, it was every two months.

Among the Spanish expressions she taught me — bad words, slang, and proverbs included — one phrase she repeats to this day: de los buenos quedamos pocos. There are only a few of us good ones left. I nodded as I coughed. “I’m dying.” This half joke was the closest truth I gave her. Between long hours, endless meetings, and Trump’s tweets, I was drowning in discouragement.

The Academy was successful, but it didn’t feel like enough. It was only a part of my job. The part the rest of the union often overlooked. I had to joust with my colleagues to keep the room reservations and dates for workshops that my workers had scheduled months in advance. I often lost. There were always more pressing matters the union needed workers to attend to: layoffs, labor violations, and legislative votes. In my last year of the job, the union slashed the program’s budget. The implicit message: Education was good and fun, but what good were workshops if people were still going to be stuck in low-wage jobs, or worse, without any work at all?

Wendy was trying to get her GED, because her school in the Dominican Republic had yet to produce the high school diploma she earned two decades ago. “Check back later,” they said. I helped her look into high school equivalency classes in Spanish. There were none in Boston, a city of hundreds of thousands of Latinos. The closest classes a town and river away. “I don’t want to be a janitor forever,” she said.

I cringed when Wendy tripped over the easiest of English words. When she sat in the spare cubicle next to mine, her fingers pecked at the keyboard, like a chicken’s beak in slow motion. As she tried logging into her Hotmail account, I turned back to my screen to distract myself, shooting off five emails.

There’s a story I never shared with Wendy. My mother got an associate’s degree in this country. When I was in middle school, I translated her assignments from Chinese to English. No one responded to the 200-plus job applications we sent out, the extra line on her résumé never changed her job prospects. She made far less than those workers of mine who never finished middle school, as she liked to remind me. If an accredited degree didn’t do her any good, what could a ragtag Academy promise my members?

* * *

One day, two-and-a-half years into the job, I left the office after 8 p.m. and rode over to the South End. It was late April. The first flowers were popping out, the last dredges of orange-gray rays of dusk soaking the petals. As much as I dreaded it, Wendy needed to hear it from me face-to-face. “¡Ya estoy!” I yelled into her apartment buzzer. She placed a large rag on the ground of her apartment for my bike. The length of my bike was longer than the width of her hallway, so she left the door ajar. “I can’t stay long,” I told her, even though I never managed to get out of her house in less than an hour. She giggled that I had stunned yet another one of her neighbors with my Spanish. “You look handsome,” she said, even though I was in just a T-shirt and black shorts that day and most days. She handed me as many heads of broccoli and cabbage as my backpack could fit. They were leftover produce from the $2-a-bag truck that stopped every week outside her apartment building.

I interrupted her gossip about another worker: “I have to tell you. I’m leaving.” She asked me to repeat myself, her face blank. We were close on the couch, my head almost backing into the right handlebar of my bicycle. Silence followed. I didn’t want her to think that I was tired of her. That wasn’t it. I was tired of what her story meant, that someone so smart could end up with a job that society thought was for dumb people. I was tired of what I couldn’t change.

“You can’t change your moving date?” she finally asked. “I’ll buy you a ticket to leave later.” I didn’t chuckle. She wasn’t joking. Before I dragged my bike out of the doorway, she stopped me to reveal two potatoes in the palm of her hand. They were smooth and eerily white, the latest installment in her collection of salt and pepper shakers. We had a last laugh.

The next session of the Academy — and my last — Wendy was absent. She had already booked a trip to see family in Philly. I didn’t expect to see her Skype face on Gladys’s phone when my members ushered me into another room, the glass windows covered with red tissue paper. Gladys had revised the workshop agenda to include a “guest speaker” part. The guest speaker was actually four smuggled bottles of champagne, one big rice cake, and a mountain of pupusas Daisy finished making at 1:00 that morning. They flashed cameras. Amanda, a Dominican grandmother in her 60s, stepped forward from the circle, in front of the yellow streamers and orange balloons. She hadn’t been politically active before we met. Over the past few years, she had inched her body from the corner of the room into the center, with sweaty pits and wide smiles. “There was something inside of me,” she said, putting her right hand on her heart, “that I didn’t know was there until I met you.” My chest swelled, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d ever hear such words from my mother.

In the months since, members call and WhatsApp me. They share stories of sticking up for their coworkers, demanding the sick time they deserve, and applying lessons from the Academy. Because they are trying to fill my shoes at the union, they laugh and say, “We’ll have to ride around town on bicycles.”

I left Boston to return home to my family in Kentucky. This year, I have spent more time with my mother than I have in the past decade. I wish I could tell a noble story that swept full circle: that I had gone to the union to avoid doing the work I should have done with my mother, and that I left the union to come back to her. The reality is, I returned because my parents offered me a free roof and a sunny place to write.

With time, the victories are starting to sink in. My workers remind me not of the times that our work made headlines, but the moments I felt most alive, when my workers felt most alive. Amanda wrapping her arms around my chest, or Wendy crying as she read the Spanish translation of this essay. I remember when Gladys gave her speech on the history of capitalism, or when Wilson, a soft-spoken man, presented a survey of feminism from the Middle Ages to the present, or when all of us took the train to a conference, laughing together like long-time friends. We upturned what society said about their jobs and their intelligence. We were able to 造反. Our little revolution.

From my parents’ house, I complain to Wendy. My mother and I bicker over things a world away from deportations and labor strikes: the size of the bowls I choose for our family dinner, the width of my onion slices in the pan. We fight with a ferocity every night that Wendy and I never had in her kitchen. Wendy texts me that this is just right. This is the labor of family.

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
‘To Be Well’: An Unmothered Daughter’s Search for Love, by Vanessa Mártir
Witness Mami Roar, by Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez

* * *

Victor Yang is a writer, educator, and organizer. His writing has been published in Fourth GenreGulf CoastThe RumpusThe Tahoma Literary Review, and The Boston Globe. He was the 2018 Chertkov Fellow at the Blue Mountain Center. The proud son of Chinese immigrants, he has been fighting for immigrant and racial justice for a decade.

Editor: Vanessa Mártir

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Through a Glass, Tearfully

Illustration by Hannah Li

Maureen Stanton | Longreads | January 2020 | 26 minutes (6,448 words)

In the early 1990s I joined a stream of people strolling past the AIDS quilt spread across a gymnasium floor in Lansing, Michigan, the room quiet but for our muffled sniffling. I hadn’t expected the quilt — a patchwork of many quilts — to affect me so powerfully, the clothes and artifacts and mementos stitched into tapestries, with dates of births and premature deaths, soft beautiful tombstones.

Humans are the only creatures who cry for emotional reasons. Animals do not shed tears of emotion; apes have tear ducts but only to “bathe and heal” the eyes. Crying makes us human. In the 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, people who’d been replaced by aliens could no longer cry, a telltale sign that they were not human. In one scene, a man carries a pod containing the alien replica of a small child. “There’ll be no more tears,” he tells the child’s mother.

***

Some people are super tasters or super smellers, or even super see-ers, with an uncanny ability to remember faces. I am a super crier, or maybe a super empathizer. An astrologer once said that my soul bears the karmic burden of feeling others’ pain as if it were my own. This is apparently because of the placement on my birth chart of the comet Chiron, “the wounded healer,” named after a Greek centaur who could heal everyone but himself.

Once, in Columbus, Ohio, I choked up at Taco John’s, a brand new mom and pop joint, all spiffy with shiny stainless steel, but empty of customers. I could see the work and sacrifice the family had made to realize their dream — opening a taco shop. I could feel their hope when I walked in the door, but I could calculate the meager profit from my order against the cost of utilities, salaries, supplies. I could see their dream failing.

I nearly lost it again at Karyn’s Kitchen, a food truck in someone’s yard along the road to my house in Maine. Karyn probably figured she’d snag summer traffic on the way to the beach, but who wants to eat in someone’s yard? I ate there once out of pity — her husband’s “famous” meatloaf, which she served with mashed potatoes, steamed carrots, and two slices of white bread with a pat of margarine. When I asked her to heat up the cold gravy, she microwaved it until the plastic container melted and handed it to me like that. When I drive by Karyn’s yard now, I can’t stand to look at the empty space where her dream failed.

A woman in a laundromat once yelled at her small son, “No one wants to hear you,” and I got a lump in my throat.
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We Use Language as a Spade

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In this beautiful personal essay at The Sun Magazine, Christine Marshall considers cats and kittens, the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, and how writing has helped her to express and process her anger, resentment, and grief after a series of miscarriages.

BISHOP’S POEMS ARE like the sky on a clear night. At first you notice the brightness, stars as thick and close as pores in the face. The stars and moon and planets form patterns and shapes. They remind you how much energy exists in the world. Then you start to notice what’s behind the stars: an eternity of dark.

IN A 1966 letter to her poet friend Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop mentions her cat Tobias, who still flourishes, age fifteen. The 1960s were not a great decade for Bishop, who was embroiled in a painful breakup with the love of her life, Lota de Macedo Soares. Bishop didn’t write about her heartache in her letter to her friend. She stayed light. She chatted about the weather and politics and the neighbors’ children and her cats.

Writing, I decide, is not just a record of our experiences but a reaching beyond what we have known, an opportunity to use empathy and curiosity to broaden our sense of self. There’s a strange assumption in the phrase Write what you know — that we already know ourselves.

We don’t stop at what we know. We don’t use language simply as a mirror. We also use it as a spade.

Read the story

Telling Stories In Order to Live: On Writing and Money

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | January 2020 | 14 minutes (3,866 words)

I made the decision to write full time in the summer of 2008. I was leaving a teaching position in Beijing, and moving back to Oaxaca, Mexico, my husband’s hometown. I said I was going to “live from writing.” I had no idea what that really meant, but it was a leap I wanted to take.

We lived in a $150-a-month apartment in a scruffy colonia on the outskirts of the city. The financial bar I had set for myself was around $500 a month. I met this at first by grading practice TESOL exams online. This meant hours upon hours of listening to nervous Koreans analyze Harry Potter or explain worm digestion. I was so bored I pulled out enough of my own hair to give myself a bald spot.

From here, I moved on to writing practice TESOL exams, then practice SAT exams for a Korean contractor who worked for the Princeton Review in Asia. This took less time and paid more, leaving hours of the day free for me to write overwrought and purplish essays about my travel experiences. Nights, Jorge and I ate tlayudas in a nearby señora’s garage and drank forties of Corona. A few months into my full-time writing life, I got a gig as a blogger and editor at a travel site. I learned WordPress and basic HTML and got to publish my overwrought and purplish essays on a platform for an actual audience. In the meantime, I started my second personal blog, named for — cringe with me here — a Julio Cortázar short story. My blog allowed me to publish experimental essays in Spanglish and wax philosophical about the old man at the market who carved wooden airplanes. It allowed me, in other words, to suck.

My writing sucked for a long time in diverse ways, with the occasional sentence or paragraph or maybe even mini-essay that was half decent and resonant with the promise of the actually good. In late 2009, I went to a goat slaughter at an old hacienda in Huajuapan de Léon, a dry and dusty city a few hours from Oaxaca. The slaughter was an annual event in which local herders brought their goats to be killed en masse, their meat and skin and blood and bones all put immediately to use.

It allowed me, in other words, to suck.

The scene at the hacienda seemed straight out of the 1700s. The killing was more humane than I’d expected; one swift knife in the throat and the animal died instantly. Hundreds of goats were killed simultaneously so that none had to anticipate suffering. In courtyards around the hacienda, women carved the skin from the bones and hung it like underwear to dry, men etched out internal organs and tossed them in blue buckets. Kids raced around playing tag in bloody huaraches. I took notes nonstop in my little notebook. We returned to the city late at night, and the next morning I woke up at six and started writing.

It took me three days to complete a narrative of the experience. I wrote with a concentration, intensity, and focus I’d never had before, but for which all the sucky writing of the past year (and the previous decade, in bits and pieces) had prepared me. On a whim, I applied to six MFA programs and submitted the goat essay as my writing sample. One by one the rejections rolled in, until only one school was left. I not only had to get in, I had to get funding, which wasn’t guaranteed, so I figured it was probably all over. Then one day I returned from my run and opened my email and there was an acceptance from the University of Pittsburgh, guaranteeing me full funding for the duration of the three-year program. I screamed. I jumped around the apartment screaming. I dragged Jorge out of bed and we ran down the street to our friends’ apartment and we all drank shots of mezcal at nine in the morning. I would have three years to write, full-time, funded.

In 2010 Jorge and I moved back to the U.S. for my program. The following year, I got an internship at Harper’s Magazine and started Vela, my own magazine of nonfiction writing by women. The idea of the magazine was to counter some of the frustration I’d felt in New York at the narrowness of what might be called the legacy literary world, its white, male Ivy-Leagueness. I invited five women writers I knew and respected to participate, and the concept was for us to have a collective portfolio of our skills. I was idealistic in the way of the clueless outsider. I just wanted our small group of women to show that we could write. We published stories about abusive relationships. About the Zapatistas. About stepparenting. About chronic illness. About gold mines in Peru and gangs in Ecuador and the lingering impacts of genocide in Cambodia. None of our work was paid. Our crew put in hours and hours of writing, of editing each other’s work, of copyediting and designing and promoting and participating in epic rambly email threads. All of us had day jobs: grad school, teaching, editing. We wanted to prove to ourselves and the gatekeepers that we could do it. And we did.

One by one, we grew more successful: We published in major magazines. We won grants. Some of us went on to write books, others got teaching jobs. Meanwhile we opened the magazine up for submissions. Had we been a standard literary journal, pay would’ve been a nonissue. Literary journals rarely pay and if they do, they pay enough to subsidize, say, a new pair of jeans. But we operated in a liminal zone — most of us didn’t consider ourselves journalists and we didn’t define our magazine or its mission as journalism, but most of our work wasn’t in the more academic or highly “literary” essayistic style either. We were somewhere between literary journalism and travel writing and essay writing and narrative, and this ambiguity of genre had been part of the point in the first place: to push on the boundaries of those categories. It seemed clear that journalism had to be funded and well-compensated. Literary writing, less so, although why wasn’t exactly clear. I got hundreds of emails after we’d opened to submissions from writers who demanded to know how much we paid. Many of these emails consisted of semi-belligerent offers to write “guest posts” about personal travel experiences for a certain fee. When I said we didn’t pay, I often got angry rants in response, once from a woman who had no significant bylines or books, but who charged upward of $2,000 for her writing workshops. She called our magazine a scam. Meanwhile, I read the explosion of think and opinion pieces on paying writers. I was about to graduate from my MFA program and become a full-time freelancer. By this point, five years into “living from writing,” I wanted to be paid for my creative work. I knew I wouldn’t write for my own magazine if it didn’t pay. And so we ran a Kickstarter exclusively with the point of paying writers, and we raised $28,000. With that money we were able to publish some extraordinary work from writers we might not have gotten otherwise: two essays led to major book deals, others led to grants and to longer, more in-depth journalistic stories with bigger magazines.

Ultimately, our biggest mistake was not budgeting any money for ourselves: We’d been bombarded with commentary about the importance of paying writers, but not editors. The latter worked for a paltry stipend or no salary at all. None of us had the time or the desire to take on a full-time business role. Instead, we put the magazine on hiatus while we tried to figure out future funding and plans. In the meantime, dozens of other magazines sprouted up, all in that space between journalism and the literary essay. Most of these advertised boldly and proudly that they paid — but upon investigation, the pay was $50. Maybe $100 or $200 for a long-form piece. The conversation about “writing for free” continued, now focused on the insult of being asked to write “for exposure,” with the usual rants on Twitter and think pieces making the rounds. The idea of an experienced writer being asked to do her professional work for a major media corporation for “exposure” is ludicrous and insulting. But all the bombast and pressure and rhetoric around writing “for free” ignores a few key realities: Many professional and experienced writers are being asked to write for very little, which is somehow celebrated as “payment” but is in fact nowhere near a functional wage; and many inexperienced and early-career writers might not be doing work that merits payment. The latter is a reality not many people want to discuss. My early work sucked. No one would have paid for it, and I wouldn’t blame them. I wrote hundreds of thousands of pages that would, were I to print them out, fill an entire room of my house. Little snippets of them ended up published. The 70,000-word book I wrote for my MFA thesis ended up as a 7,000-word Harper’s Magazine story. Bits and pieces of work I’d written about Spanglish and Mexico and my marriage ended up as an Oxford American essay. But most of this work was compost — stinky, rotting, coffee-ground and broken-egg essays feeding richer work down the line. It wasn’t simply that it sucked. It was also that I wrote it for myself: to find out how I saw, what I cared about, how I strung my ideas and scenes together. I wrote it for the basic purpose of trying to figure out what mattered and how to convey that it mattered on the page.

But most of this work was compost — stinky, rotting, coffee-ground and broken-egg essays feeding richer work down the line.

I believe — I stake my existence on believing — that art should be compensated, and compensated with a living wage. This is not a given, which is why I live in Pittsburgh, why I have a part-time job that miraculously provides health insurance. I no longer write “for free.” I have started, in fact, demanding more pay for almost every piece, knowing that as a woman I’ll likely be offered less, and knowing that if I don’t ask I surely won’t get it. At the same time, writing with money as the end goal and predominant measure of value changes the nature of the game. Maybe this isn’t always negative; commercial pressure can work as a valuable creative restraint, forcing writers out of solipsistic indulgences. But thinking only of where a piece will sell, what I can write to make the money I need — urgently need, right now — to pay for our roof, also makes me wonder why I am still doing this. Why live this life of a writer, so poorly compensated in money and acclaim, so uncertain, so competitive, so crazy-making, if I’m not even doing it because I believe in it? If I’m not doing it because I’m writing something I have to write to figure out what it means to be human? Why do it if it’s just a job?

And yet at the same time, of course it’s just a job — this is the secret I didn’t know when I began. It requires the same grind and tedium as a job. The same negotiations for pay and promotion. The same boredom and frustration. But sometimes I need to remember that if it is just this, the meaning can bottom out — then I wonder, why do it at all. There has to be some risk, some leap that may not necessarily be compensated. That is uncertain and scary. Writing that matters is often risky — its saleability may not be immediately obvious, its style may be unconventional, it may break with standard forms and narratives. It does what it has to do to figure itself out. Certainly, there is phenomenal writing that doesn’t necessarily follow these rules, that may pop up within very familiar genres and categories. There is also plenty of writing that flaunts convention and fails to achieve anything of importance. Yet writing for a living often means writing, ultimately, what the market will bear. It means internalizing the stylistic and rhetorical and intellectual underpinnings of the literary behemoths, then shaping one’s work in their image. It means putting the cart of audience — and the style of “high magazine-ese” — before the horse of the idea, of the struggle to make sense of the intractable. It can shrink the work into manageable and predictable frames, and this can explain why so much of what is published and shared feels so familiar, and fails to generate that feeling of the whole world having been rattled and made new.

The other day, I went to a talk by a well-known writer who has become a guru on the business of writing, and she talked quite a bit about audience: She hinted that writers who don’t consider their audience aren’t savvy enough businesspeople, and maybe even self-centered or obsessed with prestige. But I wondered how it is possible to create authentic work, with that essential spark of the urgent and the curious, that is centered first and foremost on an audience’s imagined desires. Trying to derive a work from the question Who’s the audience for x and what will they like? instead of from a thorny idea, or an overpowering emotion, or a story that feels vital seems to me to quash the work’s life and purpose. It becomes purely commercial.

Trying to derive a work from the question Who’s the audience for x and what will they like? instead of from a thorny idea, or an overpowering emotion, or a story that feels vital seems to me to quash the work’s life and purpose. It becomes purely commercial.

I Skyped the other day with my little brother, a fellow artist who lives in Sweden and works as a barista and reaps all the benefits of the Scandanavian welfare state while flailing around trying to make a career out of music. “I know it’s bad when you’re Skypeing me at 1:30 p.m.,” he told me, meaning productivity, career-obsessed me, normally squeezing every last drop of potential wordage and progress out of the day, must be having a crisis if I am sitting in slippers in my backyard at 1 p.m. talking to him. He grinned through a mouthful of frozen pizza. I went on one of the flights of what-is-this-life fancy I can only indulge with him. I talked about Richard Powers’s The Overstory, and how after I read it I had that uncanny feeling of both how limited my work and life are and how profound and big the true mission and scope of art can be. It simultaneously made me want to give up — if I can never do that, why bother? and to forget all my woes and keep going, with a realigned compass focused not on publication but on that feeling I had each night I put The Overstory down. Why live this life, why embark on this madness of writing full-time, constant rejection, constant financial stress, the constant tug of pettiness and ego, if I’m not doing it because I’m trying to get at that essence of connection or meaning or mystery that makes a reader put down a book and just sit for a while and stare, or cry, or call her mother? Why do it if not for that? That, at the end of the day, has very little to do with money.

At the same time, when I have finished a piece of writing now, I am fully aware of the skill and the expertise required to create it — I cannot imagine publishing it for free. It is my livelihood. I need it to be recognized with adequate pay. I need the pay to fund my existence. The pay becomes the recognition and validation that reinforces the meaning of the work. The job and the passion blur in confusing ways, helixed so tightly it’s hard to unwind them. The irony is that the further I get into my career and the more I really need and demand money, the more I come to question what this means for my writing, what I believe and care about as a writer, what I am exchanging for what. It becomes harder and harder to write in that pure void of ideas and perseverance without knowing when the money will come and from where, trusting that eventually, if the work is good enough, it will come. Trusting that if and when it does, it means I’m doing it right. That it’s “worth it.” Eventually, the money has always come, but it has always not been enough, and I have always kept at it anyway believing eventually it will be, and on and on.

Recently, I started a newsletter. I did it in part because of all the pressure to kick off the promotion process for my second book, but also because for years now I’ve been wanting to write the kinds of essays I used to write: introspective, heartfelt, unabashedly Midwestern in spirit, with guest appearances by my dad and Annie Dillard. I didn’t write them and didn’t start the newsletter for years because I wouldn’t be paid, and I thought I should be concentrating only on what I could sell. Yet in starting the newsletter I rediscovered the joy of writing as a fundamental way of being in and moving through the world. It felt so unexpectedly good. I wrote what I wanted, what came from the gut, without any nagging train of thought in the head about who would read and where that would position me and how that would advance my career and what opportunity would open up. I just wrote for the joy of paying attention to my everyday life, thinking about what matters.

No professional writer or artist should be working for free. But neither should they be writing for $50 or $150 or $200, or for a paltry monthly stipend. Instead of painting a stark dichotomy between paid and unpaid work, I wonder if we could think of artistic careers as moving along a spectrum or timeline, from early work that might be funded by other means — MFAs, day jobs — to beginning work that might be paid a small amount, to professional work that should be paid a living wage. A publication offering $50 for an essay can’t announce “We pay!” as a sort of uniform accomplishment; the mere act of paying doesn’t necessarily make the work more valid nor does it properly compensate the work. When the focus becomes so much on the act of payment as a type of validation, not only do other metrics of value get lost — creative freedom and exploration and support — but what it means to pay meaningfully and fairly gets lost as well.

I wrote what I wanted, what came from the gut, without any nagging train of thought in the head about who would read and where that would position me and how that would advance my career and what opportunity would open up. I just wrote for the joy of paying attention to my everyday life, thinking about what matters.

I don’t regret writing for free all those years when I was figuring out how to write. But I have more complicated feelings about writing full-time now for what amounts to barely a living wage. I find it much harder in the early middle of my career to sustain and justify this work — I’m not a 28-year-old graduate student who can live on the same pizza for a week anymore. I have a child. I have a freaking mortgage. I went out for a beer the other night with a friend, also about 10 years into her writing and editing career, very accomplished and very financially unstable, and she said, “We’re too far in now to back out!” It’s true. It feels like we can’t give up. But the path forward is so uncertain — success looks so distinct for each particular artist and may not have any correlation with money. I was whining and moaning with my husband the other night about my career and when I would “make it” and he said, “Maybe you have made it,” and I realized that yes, maybe I have. Had anyone told me in graduate school I’d be writing for the magazines I write for and publishing my second book, I’d have let my head fill with self-congratulatory fantasies of greatness. Now, I spend most mornings writing at a plastic table on our front porch with a fitted sheet as a tablecloth. I am constantly hustling. Sometimes I am fulfilled in the way people can be fulfilled by a single word: writer. Often I am keening anxiously toward the future. This is an object lesson in the human condition of forever wanting more and never being aware of what is going on right here right now, but it’s also a lesson in the improbability and uncertainty of “living from writing” or from any art, of how really going at it with passion and dedication offers no guarantees or certainty or promise of stability. Yes, many artists and writers accept this as common knowledge — perhaps even as a badge of honor — starting out, but there is a very big difference between knowing it at an idealistic 28 and knowing it at 36 with a child, uncertain health insurance, and a house. I am fully aware now of the precise contours, dimensions, nooks, crannies of the gap between my ideals and financial and commercial realities. Much time is spent navigating that gap, possibly as much time as I spend writing.

Writing for free, or for very little, is something I would not and cannot do now — and yet at the same time, I long for the inhibition of that time when my writing wasn’t so hitched to my ability to pay for childcare or buy groceries. I have found it the most difficult to sustain my belief in the larger purpose of what I am doing when I am also desperately trying to get it to pay me and pay me enough. Yet at the same time, I do see progress: I am making a living. I am living from writing, my writing, still the writing I want to do and also writing I sell. But the balance is delicate and fragile. It is not so much between writing for free and writing for pay: it is between writing that makes the act of writing worthwhile, that feels somehow essential to deeper human understanding, and receiving sufficient money for this writing — between the very solitary act of making something I need to make out of a personal urgency and the needs and desires and economic whims of thousands of other people. This is the cost and the meaning of “living from writing.” I keep doing it, because I don’t know what else to do, because I am not qualified to do anything else, because I have come this far and I don’t want to give up now. I keep doing it in the hopes that someday that elusive balance will be struck between financial stability and creative freedom. In the meantime, I try to keep my compass as finely tuned to the north of what troubles me, moves me, confuses me, even as I draw up Google spreadsheets, as I write the tentative notes to editors asking for just a little more, as I cling to that ledge of living from writing and keep trying to peek over the top.

* * *

Sarah Menkedick is the author of Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America, forthcoming from Pantheon in April 2020. Her first book, Homing Instincts, (Pantheon, 2017), was long listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her work has been featured in Harper’s, Pacific Standard, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Guernica, Oxford American, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She was a 2015-2016 Fulbright Fellow in Oaxaca, Mexico, and a 2019 Creative Nonfiction Writing Fellow. Follow her on Instagram @familiasantiago. Visit her website at http://www.sarahmenkedick.com.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

The Disease of Deceit

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Dvora Meyers | Longreads | January 2020 | 38 minutes (9,656 words)

In June, I woke to an alert from Facebook, a notification of a memory from five years ago. It was a photo of a woman in a park, leaning over, kissing the top of my dog’s head. The woman’s face was partially hidden but I immediately knew who it was — Chaya. Read more…

Whatever Happened to ______ ?

Illustration by Holly Stapleton

Anonymous | Longreads | January 2020 | 20 minutes (4,879 words)

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?/Are you — Nobody — too?”” — Emily Dickinson, 1891

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” — Virginia Woolf, 1929

“No name? Well, the roads are full of nameless girls.” — George RR Martin, Feast of Crows

* * *

Years back, on a summer night in Oregon’s high desert, I was riding in a car with three other people. There were two women asleep in the backseat, leaning in opposite directions. I was in the front on the passenger’s side, and a man was driving. Somebody had put Rod Stewart’s Storyteller: The Complete Anthology, blaring and loud, on the car’s sound system, and though I wouldn’t have considered myself a fan, the heartfelt crooning was as seemingly endless and beautiful as the desert around us. We were wrapped in a velvet night, under a star-filled sky, headlights cutting through the dark. We were writers, carpooling back from a rare weekend retreat. A cool wind found its way in through a narrow slice of open window and whipped the driver’s shaggy hair into a minor frenzy. Over the sound of Rod Stewart’s mandolin, this driver scratched mosquito bites and told me about a woman writer he’d once known. “She was so talented,” he said, in admiration.

I envisioned a passive, classical sculpture of a beautiful woman being physically hoisted onto a pedestal.

“She was an awesome writer. Really, amazing.” Wistfully he added, “She got married. I’ve never seen her writing again.”

End of story.
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Searching Sephora for an Antidote to Aging — and Grief

Illustration by Courtney Kuebler

Abby Mims | Longreads | January 2020 | 12 minutes (2,959 words)

The Sephora sales girl was in her early 20s. As she took off my makeup, I was marveling at hers, not to mention her flawless, creamy skin. Her smoky eye was perfect, all layers of dark blue, grey and black, a look that whenever I attempt it is a smeary, bruised-looking mess. Her eyebrows were expertly plucked and reinforced by a Kardashian-sized amount of brow pencil, creating arcs not found in nature. Glancing around, I saw that nearly all the salesgirls’ faces contained these same elements.

“I really need something for this situation,” I said to her, drawing a circle in the air to indicate everything between my 45-year-old chin and collarbone. “This is happening.”

“Oh, no, you look great!” she said, giggling. She was sweet, but when I turned my head, and caught my profile in the well-lit mirror, it was unmistakable. It was my grandmother’s neck, it was my mother’s neck, it was my neck. It was the beginnings of a wattle, and it was happening.

I had escaped to Sephora, which is housed in the same mall I’d haunted as a teenager, during a trip home to Portland last spring. I’m sure I arrived at the store looking a bit like a ghost myself — I was visiting from California with my 4-year-old son Jamie to help my stepfather, Jim, clean out the house where I grew up. My mother had been dead for five years, and Jim had moved in with his girlfriend, and while all the packing and sorting and moving in with girlfriends was entirely the natural course of things, I wasn’t prepared. I pictured the house preserved as it had been since my mom died, which was essentially as it was when she was alive. To his credit, Jim had tried to warn me, letting me know he’d been getting rid of things and making small improvements to the house for months, but I was stunned all the same.

When Jamie and I came through the front door, our footsteps echoed into the house’s emptiness. There was only a smattering of furniture left, and nearly everything was in boxes: there wasn’t a fork or wine opener in the kitchen, let alone the ancient bandaids or nearly empty shampoo bottles that had always lived in the far corners of the bathroom cupboards. The half-dozen or so Hindu-style altars my mother kept around the house were dismantled, and nearly all her beloved books had been packed up or given away. There were no family photos left on the walls, and the flickering electronic picture frames, the ones that I’d focused on during the four long years my mother was dying, were gone. I pictured them perfectly in my mind’s eye: alternating glimpses into my awkward teen years (spiral perms, stiff, hair-sprayed bangs, clear braces, skin a shade of orange only found in tanning beds, over-plucked eyebrows), my estranged sister’s wedding and my parents’ trip to India in 2008, six months before my 63-year-old mother was diagnosed with a glioblastoma. For now, the house will be rented out, but eventually, it will be sold. Hopefully, my husband and I will be able to buy it, but that transaction will be at some murky date in the future, if ever.

All of this was amplified by the fact that the room where Jamie and I slept was my old bedroom, and some modifications aside, the same room where my mother died. We slept there because that was the one room with a bed left in it, and it felt like a hassle to move it on top of everything else. Plus, strange as it may sound, the experience wasn’t morbid. This was in part because the room looked nothing like it had in either incarnation: the walls were a different color and it was nearly empty, aside from said bed, an old dresser, a lamp and a rolled-up area rug. Also, the room contained so much more love than sadness for me because, by the end, despite how much I loved and depended on my mother, all I wanted was for her to be free. My point of view was buoyed by the fact that she had spent her career in geriatric and hospice social work and studied Eastern religions for decades. This is to say that her views on dying were far more evolved than most: she simply viewed it as another phase of life. We were also able to give her the “good death” that she wanted — at home, on her own terms, surrounded by the people she loved. This didn’t mean she was entirely at peace about dying, or didn’t lament her impending death.

“I mean, we all die, but I don’t want to miss anything,” she often said.

Instead of the quintessential grief or sadness I had expected to feel sleeping in that room with my son, I experienced an alchemy of memories that drifted between my youthful existence and her dying process. It tended to happen in the half-sleep of early morning, as Jamie and I lay together in bed. Under a corner window, we’d listened to the caw of crows, the chatter of squirrels, and the tap-tap-tap of the occasional woodpecker – all sounds that brought back my childhood. As I looked up into the gray sky through a web of spruce branches, the window became something of a portal from the past to the present for me. I realized it is a window out of which my first love, Brian, escaped, mid-coitus, on a lazy Saturday afternoon when I was 17. My parents had come home hours early. It is the window that hosted the hummingbird feeders that captivated my mother’s attention in her final months. She would often lose her train of thought when birds alighted there, her face radiating joy when they lingered, seemingly soaking up their weight in sugar water. It is the window I looked out of during my teenage years and dreamed of being anywhere else. It is the window I looked out of with a similar desire in my mid-30s, when my mother’s diagnosis came back terminal and I was sure I could not exist in the world without her.
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