The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jennifer Gonnerman, Evan Allen, Britni de la Cretaz, Jen Banbury, and Gordon Edgar.
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A travel essay in which, at a theater in Branson, Missouri, Pam Mandel finds an unexpected plot twist in a very familiar story.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jennifer Gonnerman, Evan Allen, Britni de la Cretaz, Jen Banbury, and Gordon Edgar.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…
A personal essay in which Sara Eckel recalls surprising her agnostic parents by becoming a born-again Christian at age 10. It was the first of many attempts to believe.

Sara Eckel | Longreads | June 2018 | 17 minutes (4,267 words)
Sometimes, while out with a friend I’ve known for 10 or 20 years, I’ll pivot on my barstool and ask, “Did I ever mention that I’m a born-again Christian?” The question rarely computes. My close friends know I grew up in an agnostic household, and they’re pretty sure the only Sunday morning activities I leave the house for are yoga and brunch. Some have even heard me casually describe myself as an atheist. Nevertheless, on a bookshelf in my parents’ house, there’s a Bible with an inscription in my loopy 10-year-old handwriting: “Today, I am a born-again Christian.” Below that, the words “Hallelujah!” in a woman’s elegant, slanted script.
***
The ceremony took place at that woman’s house — in my memory, her name is Mrs. Hannah — in the suburb of Cincinnati where my family lived during my grade school years. For my parents, southern Ohio was a six-year tour of duty — just a place where my dad got a job. For my younger brother, it’s barely a memory. But for me, it was where I first encountered the world and where I was repeatedly told I lacked something essential.
“You have a black hole in your soul,” a little boy told me on the way out of kindergarten one day. I walked home and promptly burst into tears in front of my mother.
A 21st-century reader might pause at the idea that I walked home alone from kindergarten, but in 1970s Ohio, there was nothing strange about a free-range 5-year-old. However, our neighbors were appalled that my family didn’t go to church. On the playground one day, I tried to explain it to a group of baffled classmates gathered around me in a semicircle, but it was like saying that we didn’t brush our teeth or eat dinner each night. The kids weren’t mean; they simply didn’t know how to reconcile a classmate who spent her Sunday mornings lounging in her pajamas and reading the funnies.
Once, while walking to school with my two best friends, both named Debbie, the girls had a jokey debate about what would happen after I died. I had obviously not cleared the prerequisite for heaven. On the other hand, I was their friend — eternal hellfire didn’t seem quite right, either. They imagined a fight between God and the devil, with me floating up and down through the ether.
“She’s too good for hell,” the devil would say.
“She’s too bad for heaven,” God would reply.
I think they were trying to work out how God could be so cruel as to reject their friend. On the other hand, they had to go to church. They had clocked in hundreds of Sunday mornings wearing rayon dresses in the too-warm air while I was kicked back on the couch eating cinnamon doughnuts. There should be some consequences.
A travel essay in which, during a last-minute solo excursion to Lake Atitlan, Jami Attenberg considers the advantages to taking more risks and opening up to the unfamiliar, and the differences between healthy solitude and isolation.

NPR’s Linda Holmes wrote about last week’s painful New York Times interview with the cast of “Arrested Development.” Why, in a time of constantly horrifying news about how men treat women, did this story — which is “only” about verbal abuse — strike a nerve?
But maybe it was this interview because the disrespect felt so benign in the delivery and so destructive in the effect. How can you have “zero complaints” about a workplace someone else remembers as containing the worst verbal abuse of her career? Is that not, itself, a complaint? Why is it important that over and above forgiveness, Tambor receives absolution from the utterly unaffected men in the cast, right in front of the woman who initially told the Hollywood Reporter she didn’t even want to talk about her history with him in the first place? Tambor brought all this up, put all of it out in public, just so everyone else could explain why it didn’t matter? Is this reverse roast, this closing argument by a self-appointed defense attorney — is this supposed to be his reckoning?
Many of us — yes, women, but humans in general — prepare for conflict by trying to toughen up. We build leathery skins and metal bones, and we learn how to fight back without being blamed for the force we used. Come at us throwing rocks, and we cross our forearms and hope they bounce off. Come at us in secret, we run for light. Come at us harder, we at least try to get away. But there is something about these gentle poisoned touches, where someone puts a hand on your shoulder and says, “I understand, but after all,” and an audience cheers, and something bad seeps underneath your skin and up your neck.

Madhur Anand | Brick | Fall 2017 | 18 minutes (3,526 words)
May his head burn! Your words are rocks thrown at my forehead! I will peel her skin off! Threats and insults like these do not sound that bad in their native Punjabi. Even when they are directed at loved ones. Even when they come from your own mother. The pronouns are catalysts for combustion, a quick, irreversible reaction, with only ashes for proof. However, an English word like partition can sit in an Indian’s mouth for hours, or even for a lifetime, in motion toward something shapeless, and then melted, gone. Sometimes partition represents a noun (a broken door), sometimes it is a verb (to divide into parts), but it is never clear who is at fault. An Urdu poet once called partition a birthday party for anonymous and a funeral for unanimity. A mathematician saw it in his mind as a fractal, a Koch snowflake, a continuous curve without tangents. A political scientist speaks only of before-and-after maps, the thick red Radcliffe Line. Nobody ever truly understands one another. Translation is never simple.
***
Mother makes chapattis. They are perfectly round, a circumference entirely calculable by first measuring a tangent, thanks to the discovery of constants. The first one she makes is reserved for the Brahmin, who will come later in the day to pick it up. The last one she makes is for a crow or a dog, whoever comes first. The rest are for us, but there must always be one left over at the end of the day, reserved for nobody, for nothing. That is how Mother would define abundance if she knew the word in English. How she achieves it, on the other hand, is a mystery. I am already bathed, dressed in my salwar kameez, and outside, content to throw five nameless stones onto the cement floor. I grasp them in my fist in groups of one, two, three, and then four while tossing another straight up. That one will fall either where I want it to or where it will. I hope for intersection but do not worry too much about the outcome. The five of us are here now. Mother, father, sister, brother, and me. There will come a time when I will be the only one left of us. Still up in the air. Read more…

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s essay at The New York Review of Books asks us to reconsider the passport: while the West uses “passport” as shorthand for “opportunity and exploration,” the reality is very different, and passports are more frequently tools of control than liberation. And what happens as they’re increasingly digitized, and we move from passports to fingerprints and retinal scans for identification? Our movement is constrained by our very bodies.
Passports, in other words, were invented not to let us roam freely, but to keep us in place—and in check. They represent the borders and boundaries countries draw around themselves, and the lines they draw around people, too. This is the case in wartime and in peace. While most countries no longer ask for Casablanca’s famous exit visas, all their elimination has done is remove a cudgel from the bureaucratic gauntlet. As barriers on people’s leaving fall away, blocks on their entering shoot up. And what is the use in leaving if you have nowhere to go?
If the passport served as a symbol of belonging to a sovereign nation, and, for the more fortunate, a way to travel outside it, not long from now the lines will be drawn around our bodies, rather than our countries. As printed papers and analogue technologies are giving way to intricate scans that can identify us by the patterns on our irises, the shape of our faces, and even maps of our veins and arteries, we no longer are our papers; rather, our papers become us.

Brittany Allen | Longreads | May 2018 | 12 minutes (3,259 words)
A kind of cognitive dissonance occurs when your body is a political battlefield, but your body is also an ordinary meat-sack, worth love and attention and a good talking-to like any other flawed protagonist. In this reader’s experience, to be black, or perhaps more generally “Other,” in today’s America, is to dwell in this contradiction; it is to feel freighted by the harrowing historical origins of one’s existence, even as it is to know what every human knows — dailiness, murk, muddle, and tedium. Fiction writers who carry the burden of “Otherhood” must contend with this paradox on the page (not to mention in the marketplace). And when one is a Lorax, one may find oneself wondering how to treat the political heft of “Otherhood,” while creating characters and situations that feel true in the most mundane, human sense. Put another way: when you’re a Lorax, how do you write for an individual truffula tree without sinking under the weight of all their combined trunks? How do you render humanity when recent history and current politics — those arch and lumpy enemies to imagination — cast tall shadows over the lives of your chosen subjects?
I’ve met few fictions that really inhabit the murkiest corners of — say — black life in America, perhaps because rare is the author who gets to write (or feels free to write), about what and who is murky and daily when such an obvious historical tragedy defines us from the get-go. I’ve encountered few fictions that explore the maddening, difficult-to-name contradictions inherent to “Otherhood” (as I know it); few characters who feel like myself, or the people I love and know. Black folk who have wondered about their own individual responsibility to blackness. Black folk who struggle to name the pesky, omnipresent sensation that they are thwarted in some way that’s vaguely but crucially connected to their skin color. But this spring marks the arrival of two new collections that take on all the cognitive dissonance with compassion, insight, and unflinching honesty: Jamel Brinkley’s A Lucky Man (Graywolf) and Nafissa Thompson-Spires’ Heads of the Colored People (Atria). Read more…

It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that my parents admitted I was a decidedly terrible five-year-old ballerina. It was no great blow to learn I sucked at something I hadn’t attempted in two decades; as I grew older, I was burned by athletic endeavors generally and found my confidence in books and academic success instead. But if my loving parents observed my lack of grace onstage, that meant my teacher, my classmates, and the entire audience at our ballet recital definitely noticed, and that stung a bit.
There’s something enticing about the rigorous structure of the ballet world, the gamble of hard work paying off. With ballet, you have an identity, inside jokes, long hours, and people who get you — camaraderie. I craved that sense of belonging, from the first day of kindergarten through my failed sorority rushes in college. It’s the seduction of security, of always having someone to sit with, always having someplace to be. I wanted to rest in the knowledge that I was accepted and validated, especially by talented women.
These days, I love absorbing ballet via pop culture and the occasional live performance. I obsessed over Dance Academy on Netflix, and Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild is one of my all-time favorite books. If I could pick one magic power, forget flight or invisibility — I’d choose dance.
Alice Robb’s profile of Alexandra Ansanelli chronicles her meteoric rise onstage and offers a fascinating inside look at how her personality and psyche were shaped by her rigorous and often isolating training. From online dating to her day job, Ansanelli shares how she struggled to assimilate into civilian life after retiring from ballet at age 28.
I know how tough it is to live with regret, how easy it is to get sucked into the “what if” depression spiral. Olivia Campbell’s “what ifs” swirl around her past as a “semi-professional dancer” and which bodies are deemed acceptable and beautiful in ballet. Hers wasn’t.
Over a year before #MeToo permeated the international conversation, journalist Jessica Luther reported on ballerina Lissa Curtis’ exceedingly brave decision to hold her rapist — her former ballet instructor — accountable in court. I was moved by Curtis’ openness in discussing her PTSD and her healing process, especially her changing relationship to dance.
Whew, the pointe shoes ALONE. $29,000?!
This assumes the student starts wearing pointe shoes in sixth grade — around the time that most ballet schools allow students to try them out — and buys shoes priced at about $80 per pair.4 My estimate assumes that a sixth-grader goes through a pair of shoes every three months. By seventh grade, she needs a new pair of pointe shoes after one month; by ninth grade that need increases to one each week; and by the time she is in 10th grade, I’ve accounted for her buying two pairs per week. That might sound like a lot of shoes, but dancers have assured me that these high numbers are about right.
On a more hopeful note, this piece offers insight into programs like Dance Theatre of Harlem and Project Plié make ballet more accessible to students from diverse backgrounds.
As I read “Rust Belt ballerina” Amy Jo Burns’ essay, I felt the tug of something familiar. I wracked my brain, then I remembered: I’d encountered her writing in Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, an anthology edited by Roxane Gay. Though I read several pieces from Not That Bad during a quiet half-hour at work, Burns’ stuck with me especially; I’d like to write like her one day. I admired her clear-eyed, unsparing observations of how her attacker received few consequences and how her fellow survivors were vilified by their small town. In “Body on Fire,” Burns intersperses her own relationship to ballet with a powerful meditation on the life, art, and sexist biographing of Emma Livry, a young French ballerina who died after suffering burns from the stage’s gaslights.
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