Search Results for: essay

Climate Messaging: A Case for Negativity

A home on stilts sits amidst coastal waters and marshlands along Louisiana Highway 1 on August 24, 2019 in Grand Isle, Louisiana. Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost over 2,000 square miles of land and wetlands, an area roughly the size of Delaware. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | September 2019 | 14 minutes (3,656 words)

An ex-boyfriend once told me that if someone were to make a movie about his life it would begin with a pregnant woman riding a Coke machine out of a hurricane. That woman was his grandmother, pregnant with his dad during Hurricane Audrey, which killed at least 416 people, spawned 23 tornadoes inland, and effectively destroyed Cameron Parish — currently the largest parish in Louisiana and one of the least populated. Cameron was hit again in 2005 by Hurricane Rita, which wiped out my ex-boyfriend’s house, and then again in 2008 by Hurricane Ike. It was in the news more recently when it was revealed the area has the highest percentage of climate change skeptics in the country.

I was indignant, not about the polling but about the way it was presented. The economy down there is heavily reliant on shrimping and oil. Young people generally move forty miles north up to the city of Lake Charles in Calcasieu Parish and the land in Cameron is forecast to be some of the first in the United States to disappear into the sea — a much-cited football field of the state is lost to the Gulf of Mexico every hour and the land is turning to lace. It’s not that people in Cameron are just supernaturally stupid, I said to this ex-boyfriend over the phone, the problem is that most everyone who had the means and believes in climate change has already left. He’s a coastal engineer working on a project to restore the state’s wetlands, so it’s not like he’s indifferent to this, but he told me not to get worked up.

“We are stupid,” he said. Read more…

‘People Can Become Houses’

Adam Shemper / Grove Press

Danielle A. Jackson  | Longreads | September 2019 | 18 minutes (4,289 words)

The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom’s debut memoir, tells the story of the light-green shotgun house in New Orleans East her mother, Ivory Mae, bought in 1961. At 19, Ivory Mae was the first in her immediate family to own a home; her mother had been born on a plantation in St. Charles Parish. Over years of renovations, the house acquired a second floor at its rear and a layer of pale yellow vinyl siding. 

The book is also about a neighborhood, a city, a nation, and how generations of systemic neglect weigh on the human beings who bear it. New Orleans East was a vast, mostly undeveloped marshland in the early ’60s, a fledgling suburb within the city held afloat by investment from retailers and oil developers. Its neighborhoods were, at the time, predominantly white. The public schools were not yet integrated. 

The Brooms built a lively home life there. Sarah, the youngest of 12, was born in 1979. Largely missing from city maps and narratives that highlight the tourist-friendly French Quarter, New Orleans East fell into disrepair by the late ’80s. As investors pulled out, its streets became lined with abandoned apartment buildings and men in cars soliciting sex.

Sarah was just 6 months old when her father, Simon Broom, died suddenly at home. She came of age with the ache of his absence. The house became increasingly difficult to maintain, and shame settled in alongside the family’s grief.

 

Throughout The Yellow House’s four sections, which Broom calls “movements,” after the parts of a symphony, she pulls from hundreds of hours of interviews to include exceptionally long passages where her family members speak for themselves; the book is, in part, an oral history. She says it is because their stories “compose” hers. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans East and destroyed their home. By then, Broom had a magazine job in New York and had been gone from her hometown for nearly a decade. Her Louisiana family recounts the storm in “Water,” the book’s riveting third movement. In the fourth, the author unravels the questions the full text poses: about grief and identity, American racism and environmental catastrophe, family and womanhood and the multiple meanings of home.

The Yellow House is beautifully wrought on a grand scale and at the level of the sentence. It is intricately researched, narratively complex, and dives into the most fundamental questions of our time: Who am I? How did I become me? How does one survive catastrophe when it is inevitable? How does one rebuild? The Yellow House was longlisted for a National Book Award and became a New York Times best seller in late August. I spoke to Broom two days before its release. A condensed version of our conversation follows. 

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Longreads: Even before Toni Morrison passed away, I’d noticed certain things about The Yellow House that reminded me of her novels. Beloved begins by mapping the house where Sethe and her family live, the place that is haunted, with an address: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.” There’s a scene in the documentary The Pieces I Am showing how Morrison sketched out a floor plan of this house. The architecture and physicality of a house and how a house can live as an object, but also as an imagined thing, a goal, a part of us, is really the foundation of your book. Could you talk about Toni Morrison’s influence on you and your work?

Sarah M. Broom: I remember finding out that Toni Morrison had died. It was rainy and dim where I was in upstate New York, and I kept thinking, This day is so low hanging. That’s how I kept imagining it. Almost like the sky was hovering close, just above my head. I felt grief. It was bottomless and familial. The way that one grieves a family member is like grieving a part of a system, a part of an organism. And I knew this, but I really knew this after she died — she was literally a part of my system. A part of what it meant for me to be a writer. She was so interwoven in these layered ways into the ways in which I think. 

In The Yellow House, I talk about “water having a perfect memory” [from the essay “The Site of Memory”]. Most people only mention that part of the essay, about how water is forever trying to get back to where it was. But the part that comes after that is equally as important. She says, “Writers are like that, remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.” Writing this book for me was driven in some deep way by that quotation, which is really about the ways in which Morrison thought about and dealt with place. It was a given and known thing that she was from Lorain, Ohio. I think that in a way she was always writing deeply about place and about belonging.

There was an interview a few years ago in the Telegraph, where she is talking about a conversation with her sister, Lois, who still lived in their hometown. Her sister told her the street where they grew up is gone. In the interview she says that her sister drew her a map of the street and wrote in the names of the people who used to live in the houses on their street. They figured out that 20 houses were gone. What Morrison said in the interview is that loss, that absence of the houses and all the memories they held, it’s a death. That idea fueled me as I was trying to understand my book and the architecture of it. 

Another thing about Morrison, which matters so much to me: Often, especially with writers of color, people focus a lot on our story and less on our craft. Toni Morrison wrote sentences that were so multi-varied and layered and also were road maps to something. Beyond that, they had an innate musicality to them and they made you feel. I think often when certain writers make you feel, people misunderstand the difficulty of that. Making a person feel something is the greatest thing an artist can do, and it’s all about craft. It’s about rhythm and cadence and tone.

Is it also about what you have to take out to get to that? What isn’t there?

Absolutely. There is a composed-ness. It’s jazz-ical. Great language and great writing is jazz-ical, it’s spontaneous but it’s super controlled. Whenever I was at a point that I felt that I needed to remember the sounds of what writing could do, I always read Toni Morrison. And that’s a gift. I’ll probably be rereading her throughout this entire book tour because I can’t imagine not having her voice every single day. 

Read more…

Grandiose and Claustrophobic: ‘Prozac Nation’ Turns 25

Riverhead Books

Anne Thériault | Longreads | September 2019 | 6 minutes (1,607 words)

 

When I was 20, I cornered my ex-boyfriend in his bedroom during a party and cried on him for two hours, leaving a watery mascara stain down the front of his shirt. When he finally managed to extricate himself, I found his best friend and did the same to him. I made the rounds of the party, rehashing my misery to anyone who would listen: how my ex had broken my heart, how I was certain that I was an unloveable failure, how I thought about killing myself. I knew that I should stop and go home, but I couldn’t; my feelings were huge and immediate; the thought of being alone was unbearable.

I’d always been an over-emotional cryer, but that year was a personal nadir when it came to mental health. There had been the breakup, then I’d lost my housing situation, and finally, financial problems had forced me to drop out of school. I went from being an occasional downer to a wailing banshee party-ruiner. I just couldn’t differentiate between the immediate relief of dissolving into tears and the long-term gratification of cultivating emotional continence — probably because I no longer believed I had a future. My friends were exasperated and wanted to know why I couldn’t just stop doing things that made me feel bad. My answer — everything made me feel bad anyway, and I just couldn’t help it — seemed insufficient even to me.

A few weeks after the party crying incident, I found a copy of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation at a secondhand bookstore. It had been out for nearly a decade, but up until then I’d resisted it. For one thing, I’d actually been on Prozac for the previous three years, so reading it seemed a little too clichéd. For another, I was skeptical that the beautiful girl on the cover, with her clear skin and artfully messy hair, could know anything about my ugly life. But by the end of the prologue — titled, with extreme subtlety and nuance, “I Hate Myself And I Want To Die” — I was hooked.

Whether we like it or not, Prozac Nation really did change the landscape when it comes to the way women write about themselves.

Prozac Nation is a young person’s book, both in terms of its author and its target audience. It’s full of florid language, sweeping generalizations, and an obsessive, unproductive introspection. Each chapter begins with an epigraph from someone like Albert Einstein, Sylvia Plath, or Edith Wharton. Many of the original reviews were negative, and offered valid critical perspectives on the book. The text did need a stronger editorial grip, at the very least to fix the distracting moments when Wurtzel jumps from one tense to another within the same paragraph. The narrative really was just as repetitive and self-pitying as critics accused it of being. Wurtzel seemed to have no perspective when it came to her own behavior, offering it all up for consumption without any kind of analysis. But all of this (tense-jumping aside) might be the book’s secret genius.

Prozac Nation was the first time I saw myself reflected in writing about mental illness. Sure, I’d read and loved Plath, Kaysen, and all the other stars of the depressed-lady canon, but none of their work was as relatable to me then as Wurtzel’s prose, at once grandiose and claustrophobic. It’s the kind of book that feels like edgy literature to a white girl in her early 20s, and I don’t mean that as snidely as it might sound; everyone deserves their own version of On The Road or Naked Lunch for that period in their life. Prozac Nation read to my 20-year-old self like something I aspired to someday write, precious epigraphs and all. At one point early in the narrative, Wurtzel voices a worry that her story is “too stupid, too girlish, too middle class.” But that was exactly why it resonated with me. Even the parts that grated on my nerves, like Wurtzel’s frequent bewailing of the fact that she had once been the best little girl in the world, sounded like me. In fact, I had a litany of similar regrets that I dragged out whenever I was down; I called it my catechism, which I thought was witty and ironic. There are certainly times when Prozac Nation feels monotonous and solipsistic, but that aligns with my own experiences with depressive spirals. Repetition and self-obsession are part of the nature of the illness.

Wurtzel was oversharing before oversharing even became an everyday term we use, writing in a way that made people recoil with discomfort.

What seemed most important to me about Wurtzel’s writing was that she had been messy, and she was willing to detail that mess without apology. Just: here is how I’ve behaved. She offers the reader no contextualizing, no explaining, no objective distance from the events described. I still can’t tell if Wurtzel did this intentionally or not — and, if it’s a device meant to draw readers deep into her own stream of consciousness, she doesn’t always wield it skilfully — but either way, it was a radical departure from how I’d seen women write about themselves. I’d never read a story about a woman engaging in such rambunctious self-destruction that didn’t turn into a morality tale; on the other hand, there was no shortage of stories about men being comparably messy. This isn’t meant to be a bad faith argument about how “equality” means women deserve to behave just as badly as men, but rather that youthful messiness is a reality for people of all genders. There is power in seeing yourself represented, warts and all. How do you survive something if you don’t know that someone else has already survived it, too?

Whether we like it or not, Prozac Nation really did change the landscape when it comes to the way women write about themselves. It laid the groundwork for the what Jia Tolentino called the “personal-essay boom” of the early 2010s, an era when no detail was too graphic, no humiliation too private for sharing. Wurtzel was oversharing before oversharing even became an everyday term we use, writing in a way that made people recoil with discomfort. But, like so many of those XOJane-style pieces, she also made people feel seen. Wurtzel’s writing has influenced how I write about mental illness; it’s made me more committed to relate my experiences in honest ways, rather than style them to appear more understandable or sympathetic. Through her, I’ve learned that it’s much more interesting when I center myself in my own narrative rather than the feelings my readers might have about it. The embarrassing personal details are, somehow, what makes these stories relatable. I’m sure there are many others whose writing owes a similar debt of gratitude to Wurtzel, even if they don’t realize it.


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Prozac Nation was published on September 25, 1994, three days after Friends premiered on NBC. Both are emblematic of that era: angsty Gen-X youth and the golden age of television sitcoms. Like many cultural artifacts that are very rooted in their particular time and place, neither has aged very well. Wurtzel’s semi-premise — that the use of SSRIs was too widespread, that America had become a nation of pill-poppers who were drawn to Prozac because of its name-brand trendiness — seems especially unsturdy. For one thing, she doesn’t even encounter the drug until the very end of the book, and when she does take it, she experiences a swift and nearly miraculous recovery. For another, all of the panic about SSRI consumption seems, in retrospect, almost adorable in its unfoundedness. Doctors were pushing the idea that oxycontin was non-habit-forming in any amount, but people were worried about Prozac?

Re-reading Prozac Nation again after all these years felt a bit like being a 20-year-old melting down at a party: embarrassing, but somehow comforting in its familiarity.

Many of those concerns piggybacked on the very real problems with mid-century tranquilizer use, but they were also influenced by what psychiatrist Gerald L. Klerman termed pharmacological Calvinism: the idea that a drug that alleviates unhappiness is morally questionable. It’s an attitude that’s still very much present today, even though the use of SSRIs has become more normalized over the past 25 years. Pharmacological Calvinism is what makes your high school friend share those memes describing nature as the real antidepressant. It’s what leads people to view medication that treats anxiety and depression as a “crutch” rather than an ongoing and necessary treatment (which is a weird framing in and of itself, considering that people rarely use crutches unless they really need them). It’s the reason we hear arguments like the one in David Lazarus’ recent Los Angeles Times essay, where he describes himself as a “drug addict” because quitting antidepressants caused him to experience symptoms of depression, and quotes doctors praising the “work” of not taking medication as compared to the “easy” out of taking a pill every day. Of course, some people do experience adverse reactions while discontinuing use of SSRIs, but history has largely proven them to be quite safe compared to many other medications that experience similar faddish moments.

Re-reading Prozac Nation again after all these years felt a bit like being a 20-year-old melting down at a party: embarrassing, but somehow comforting in its familiarity. It made me feel grateful, above all else, for no longer being young. It’s such a relief to get older and be less vulnerable to Big Emotions, to have better coping skills, and to know how to opt out of drama. But I’m also grateful to my younger self for being deep in that depressive morass and still managing to navigate us to where we are now. I don’t hate her for who she was, as much as she sometimes failed to measure up to who I wanted to be. I try to be tender to her and understand that she was doing the messy best she could. Hopefully Wurtzel feels the same way.

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Anne Thériault is a Toronto-based writer whose bylines can be found all over the internet, including at the Guardian, The London Review of Books and Longreads, where she created the Queens of Infamy series.

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Editor: Ben Huberman

A Close Look at the Thing We Call ‘Celebrity’

AP Photo/Matt Sayles

How are certain people famous enough to be famous for being famous? And how do people famous for getting laughed at earn $28 million a year? For The Times Literary Supplement, Irina Dumitrescu looks at three books about celebrity to examine the phenomenon of celebrity itself, now and throughout history. This is a fascinating example of the way a book review becomes an essay about a larger subject. Its intelligence also echoes one of the subject’s many facets: the inverse relationship between earnings and what we consider “ability.” It’s easy to dismiss famous people like the Kardashians because they didn’t get famous by producing artful films or performing music, but their ability to, as Dumitrescu puts it, “absorb the energy of the world’s criticism and translate it into cash,” is a well-honed skill that deserves its own kind of respectful recognition, because if celebs didn’t provide the public with something, then we wouldn’t engage with them the way we do. We may laugh at people like the Kardashians, but they’re laughing all the way to the bank, so the question is: What do celebrities give us?

People turn to celebrities to feel emotion, connection, even transcendence. The emotions a star provokes can be just as gratifying if they are negative. Disgust, scorn and outrage provide their own satisfactions. A celebrity who is good at her job gives the public the opportunity to experience unruly feelings. She also arouses in them a desire for her true, “authentic” self. Marcus convincingly argues that celebrities do so by crafting their image carefully. Bernhardt enchanted audiences through precisely controlled movements, deliberately modulated vocal intonation, and the careful choreography of her performances both on stage and off. This was a woman who had herself photographed sleeping in a coffin, was reported to keep a menagerie of exotic pets, and apparently drank from a skull and kept a skeleton in her bedroom….

Celebrities feed the eternal hunger for newness without ever being truly new. Cashmore reminds us that Kim Kardashian found her teachers in previous socialites, in Anna Nicole Smith’s willingness to self-destruct for reality television cameras and in Paris Hilton’s nightclub and TV ubiquity (in fact, Kim started out on Paris’s show The Simple Life as a friend and stylist). For Cashmore, Madonna’s erotic revelations in the documentary Truth or Dare (1991; released in the UK as In Bed with Madonna) tolled the death bell for privacy: “Sit still for a couple of hours watching … and you’ll turn into an inveterate voyeur and spend the rest of your days as a restless, tormented spirit wandering through the arid wastelands of other people’s lives”. The shape of criticism has not changed much either. In an interview with George Ezra last year, Elton John – subscribing to our first narrative about modern celebrity and overlooking the lessons of the second – railed against reality TV “celebrities”: “For me a celebrity is somebody who is top of their game, a top film star, in music, whatever. I hate the word celebrity … You’ve got to work for it and the people that don’t work for it and get it instantaneously are the ones that go pfft”. As Cashmore points out, there has always been someone who thinks the current crop of stars is different and not working hard enough. Indeed, it is a reliable way of telling a person’s age: your generation is determined by the last parvenu you consider a genius and the first you think is a trumped-up mediocrity. This is one clue to the strength of the Kardashian brand. Cashmore describes Paris Hilton in the early 2000s as a shiny new toy, thrown aside once the novelty wore off. The fertile Kardashian clan, however, can always counteract boredom by bringing out a new model: a younger sister with big dreams and the entrepreneurial touch, a baby with an Instagram handle ready to be monetized.

Dumitrescu is a writer whose sentences sparkle with multiple truths, and whose intelligence treats this familiar American pastime not as a simple guilty pleasure, but as a phenomenon worth studying. Yet like most writers, she’s not earning a fraction of the big bucks the Kardashians do. That’s another sad facet of this essay.

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How to Predict the Unpredictable

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Katie Gutierrez | Longreads | September 2019 | 13 minutes (3,370 words)

 
On the side of a busy road, I called her name: Lola! Lola! Flaxen weeds blew at my knees. Traffic a blur of painted metal. She could be anywhere. And then I saw her — a black pug parting the grass, running toward me. I took her into my arms and pressed my forehead against hers, relief stinging sweet.

I told Adrian about the dream with my eyes still closed. We had only been living together for two weeks, since he’d moved to San Antonio from Sydney to be with me. We’d known each other since we met on a cross-continental flight 10 years earlier, though we’d only been together, long-distance, for the last two years.

When he didn’t respond, I opened my eyes. He was grinning at a Craigslist photo: a black pug puppy drooping in slim-fingered hands. She looked like a child’s school project: clumsily glued googly eyes, pink felt tongue.

“We can’t,” I said, laughing, but he was already sending the email.

We drove to a neighborhood in northwest San Antonio. It was March, and the puppies looked like miniature seals, basking, all shiny black fur and skin rolls. They were big for their age, except for the only girl, the runt in the back corner. At first we passed one of the boys back and forth. Then the girl, who instantly crawled up our necks, her sharp puppy claws sticking like burrs in the collars of our shirts. She licked our chins, swiping at our ears and cheeks.

“This is her, isn’t it?” Adrian asked.

I nodded, thrilled and mystified at where we found ourselves, all because of a dream.

“What should we name her?” I asked.

“I think it has to be Lola,” he said.
Read more…

Editor’s Roundtable: Fans, ‘Grams and Installment Plans

The Wing in Boston. (Jessica Rinaldi / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

On our September 20, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Essays Editor Sari Botton, Head of Audience Catherine Cusick, and Culture Columnist Soraya Roberts share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.  

This week, the editors discuss stories in Inc., The Cut, and The Baffler.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


6:52The Wing Has $118 Million in Funding, Superfans Like Meryl Streep, and Plenty of Skeptics. It’s Just Getting Started.” (Christine Lagorio-Chafkine, October 2019, Inc.)

17:28Who Would I Be Without Instagram?” (Tavi Gevinson, September 16, 2019, The Cut)

26:00 “Revolution on the Installment Plan.” (Jessa Crispin, Sept/Oct 2019, The Baffler)

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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

Regarding the Interpretation of Others

Jean-Regis Rouston/Roger Viollet via Getty Images

Patrick Nathan | Longreads | September 2019 | 30 minutes (8,235 words)


“The only review of Under the Sign of Saturn would be the eighth essay — an essay describing me as I have described them. The pathos of intellectual avidity, the collector (mind as every-thing), melancholy & history, arbitrating the moral claim versus aestheticism, and so forth. The intellectual as an impossible project.”

Susan Sontag, journal entry, May 1980


 

1:

Differently, we buy and borrow, and steal, our ongoing educations. American writers tend to forget this, even dissuade it. There is an assumption — general, if not unconscious — that “we” have all read Raymond Carver and Joan Didion, seen Dazed and Confused and The Princess Bride, and exhausted “prestige” television from Lost to Big Little Lies. That these works are canon in a post- or anti-canonical culture highlights the need for inexhaustible and pluralistic inspiration against the deprivation of that need. What’s worse, if you are labeled — black, queer, immigrant, disabled, trans, or a woman — those expectations constrict; the canon tightens. To be a gay writer means one must have read Edmund White and seen Mean Girls; to write as a black woman means one must have read Angela Davis and seen Kara Walker’s silhouettes. What was supposed to liberate our literary sensibilities has reduced us, clinically, to trained specialists. Under this pressure, so carefully curated and categorized, it’s difficult to will one’s own work into being. To learn passively, and ultimately write passively, is the great cultural temptation.

Yes, I have been reading — and reading about — Susan Sontag. There is nothing passive in her legacy. In her combined erudition, ambition, and seriousness, she has few peers, and for several years she has symbolized my aspirations as a writer — the uncompromising rigor with which she approached her essays; her self-proclaimed interest in “everything”; an urgency in dissenting, when ethically necessary, from received opinion; her energy in consuming art constantly; and the esteem, to the end of her life, in which she held literature, above all fiction. Her passion is contagious. Sontag’s narcotic approach to art and experience is, for a provincial writer with little access, renewably invigorating; and because Sontag’s lifetime of work is willed, Nietzscheanly, from her passions, reading about her life is its own invigorating project. In this, Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work, at 832 pages, is certainly her legacy’s largest complement. Read more…

This Month in Books: ‘I Don’t Want To Become a Giant Insect!’

Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images

Dear Reader,

This month’s books newsletter is a bodily affair. In an interview with Laura Barcella about her new book Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers, Sady Doyle discusses the body horror of womanhood: “reproductive horrors,” of course, and “the horror of being in a body so heavily controlled, penalized, and stigmatized,” naturally, but also the horror of violence against women; the grim spectacle of dead American wives piling up like soldiers:

I return over and over to the metaphor of war. We’re allowed to say that war is hell, but what does it mean when we lose fewer U.S. soldiers between 2000 and 2012 than women killed by their own husbands?

Whereas in her interview with Jonny Auping about Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe presents an inverted vision of dead women: “so many of the murders that we consume in media — the murders that make up the bulk of our cultural imagination — are with female victims,” she says. However,

I ask people, “What percentage of murder is a male perpetrator and a female victim?” People invariably say 70 percent or 80 percent. It’s actually 25 percent. That’s shocking to a lot of people because so many of the murders that we consume in media…are with female victims.

Seen through this prism, our obsession with female death is politically out of joint. But that’s exactly Monroe’s point: women’s deaths — a specific kind of young, white woman’s death, that is — are depoliticized, and thus more easily consumable as media. Which actually does end up tying in neatly to Doyle’s thinking; in Dead Blondes, she analyzes how women are made monstrous in the cultural imagination — specifically she focuses on horror films — because of all the monstrous things that are done to them in real life. This kind of state of exception that swirls around the subject of women and death, in both authors’ view, seems to breed a unique sort of narrative monstrosity that bleeds back into real life. In fact, Monroe’s book, rather than focusing on horror films, centers around four women who have developed an obsessive relationship with true crime and murder.


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Bodies, of course, don’t just belong to the dead. In her review of two recent novels — Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Patsy — Morgan Jerkins writes, regarding the mother and son at the center of Vuong’s novel, that “survival, the physical endurance of their bodies, is what binds them no matter where their family settles.” The body becomes a very particular site of meaning for young people affected by migration and displacement — and for the literature of migration:

Survival is a steady theme throughout immigrant literature, but what is most striking in Vuong and Dennis-Benn’s work is that they concentrate on the intimacy of their subjects without bombarding the reader with cold and calcified historical detail; instead, we learn about their countries’ histories — and about the consequences of the characters’ movement across vast spaces — through the living, breathing reality of the protagonists’ bodies.

And not all bodies are the same. There are sick bodies and bodies with disabilities, both of which require their inhabitants to navigate different landscapes than the ones encountered by healthy or abled people. Anne Boyer talks about being a body circulated through space by the logic of cancer capitalism in an excerpt from her memoir-in-essays The Undying; Keah Brown talks about her committed loving relationships (and brief flings) with the chairs in her life in an essay from The Pretty One; and in an interview with Naomi Elias about her memoir I’m Telling the Truth But I’m Lying, Bassey Ikpi describes the different approach she had to take to writing about her memories since Bipolar II had affected how she experienced own life: there were periods where “I just didn’t feel connected to myself, where I didn’t feel like I was in my own body.”

In all this body-talk, I can’t believe I haven’t even touched yet on Erik Davis’ High Weirdness! It’s a deep dive into the strange experiences of the psychonauts — those fabled far-out white guys of the early seventies who took a lot of drugs, got into the occult, and connected with a higher being. As Terrence McKenna wrote regarding an incident involving his brother Dennis during the famous Experiment at La Chorrera,

Dennis gave forth, for a few seconds, a very machine-like, loud, dry buzz, during which his body became stiff. After a moment’s silence, he broke into a frightened series of excited questions. “What happened?” and, most memorably, “I don’t want to become a giant insect!”

There are all types of bodies to inhabit in the world: sick and ill, placed and displaced, about to turn into an insect or not, etc. May you and your body go on to read many good books this month!

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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Keeping My Promise to Popo

Longreads Pick

In this personal essay, as Anne Liu Kellor says goodbye to her Chinese grandmother in the hospital, she taps into buried memories and family trauma.

Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 18, 2019
Length: 10 minutes (2,604 words)

Communiqué from an Exurban Satellite Clinic of a Cancer Pavilion Named after a Financier

Mannequins modeling a wig and a cooling accessory to be worn under a wig by someone undergoing chemotherapy. (FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images)

Anne Boyer | an excerpt adapted from The Undying| Farrar, Straus and Giroux | September 2019 | 14 minutes (3,665 words)

 

Pull your hair out by the handfuls in socially distressing locations: Sephora, family court, Bank of America, in whatever location where you do your paid work, while in conversation with the landlord, at Leavenworth prison, however in the gaze of men. Negotiate for what you need because you will need it now more than ever. If these negotiations fail, yank your hair out of your head in front of who would deny you, leave clumps of your hair in the woods, on the prairies, in QuikTrip parking lots, in front of every bar at which your conventionally feminine appearance earned you and your friends pitchers of domestic beer.

Put your head out the window of the car and let the wind blow the hair off your head. Let your friends harvest locks of your hair to give to other friends to leave in socially distressing locations: to scatter at ports, at national monuments, inside the architecture built to make ordinary people feel small and stupid, to throw against harassers on the streets.

Pull your pubic hair out in clumps from the root and send it in unmarked envelopes to technocrats. Leave your armpit hair at the Superfund site you once lived near, your nose hairs for any human resources officer who denies you leave. Read more…