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Behind the Writing: On Research

Type by Katie Kosma

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | February 2019 | 29 minutes (7,983 words)

In December, I turned in the first draft of my second book. I assumed that when I finished it, I would stand up and scream. Actually scream “YES!” followed by a stream of sundry obscenities, then collapse on the floor and make my husband take a picture for Instagram.

Instead, I was in a quiet back room of Hillman Library, on the University of Pittsburgh campus, drinking a 99¢ mug of coffee, googling Erich Fromm quotes, when I suddenly realized I was done, and I just sat there mildly stupefied, then caught the bus and went home. It was an appropriate end to a writing process that felt a lot less like glorious creation and a lot more like survival and persistence: just getting through one day, one page to the next, trying to keep the pyramid of information, ideas, and sentences from collapsing into a wet heap. It sucked, but in the way most serious creative endeavors suck, with a lining of deep gratification that afterward allows one to pretend that it was all in the service of a mystical something and not really, at base, insane.

It was an appropriate end to a writing process that felt a lot less like glorious creation and a lot more like survival and persistence: just getting through one day, one page to the next, trying to keep the pyramid of information, ideas, and sentences from collapsing into a wet heap.

What made this second book so difficult was research: not the process of doing it, not compiling and organizing it, but the quandary of how to make it creative. How to write a book that felt like it spoke to huge questions — the meaning of life, what matters and why, all the things one gets misty-eyed about around a bonfire — via gobs of information.

Read more…

‘I Spent Two Years Researching Before I Wrote a Single Line’: Geeking Out With Marlon James

Mark Seliger / Penguin Random House

Adam Morgan| Longreads | February 2019 | 8 minutes (1,962 words)

I understand why Marlon James calls his new trilogy “an African Game of Thrones” — it builds the right expectations for an epic fantasy with dozens of characters spread across warring kingdoms. However, judging by the first book in the series, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, another apt comparison, especially when it comes to style and structure, might be “an African Gormenghast.”

Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series (1946-1959), if you’ve never read it, is a dense literary labyrinth that makes A Game of Thrones and its sequels look downright old-fashioned. The story of a wealthy heir who lives in a vast, crumbling castle, Gormenghast has never been wildly popular thanks to its challenging style, but it does hold cult status among scholars and writers like Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Sofia Samatar, even Harold Bloom. “Reading it at the age of 13,” Samatar has written, “I understood that fantasy, the place I was looking for, is not to be found in dragons, ghosts, or magic wands. It resides in language.”

Growing up in the suburbs of Kingston, Jamaica, Marlon James didn’t have access to many fantasy novels, but he did stumble upon Gormenghast as an adult. “It was like a blueprint for how the fantastical grows up,” he says, echoing Samatar, adding that it’s the one book that “continues to rule his life.”

Perhaps that’s why Black Leopard, Red Wolf takes so many narrative risks. It’s a sprawling series of stories within stories that fold back on themselves, a hypnotic spoken-word fable full of sex, violence, and magic. It’s not quite what you’re expecting — and it’s all the better for it. Read more…

‘Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body’ and Other Lies I’ve Been Told: A Reading List on Mental Health and Sport

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Over two miles into my first Division I cross country race, I felt buoyant. My legs turned over like a well-oiled machine and my chest fluttered with promise: as a freshman, I was in third place for my team. I dug the metal teeth of my spikes into dirt and focused on maintaining an even clip. Lost in the reverie of the race, I almost didn’t see my coach standing on the sideline, her blond hair pulled back, face shadowed in a hat.

“Get your shit together,” she seethed as I ran past. Focused and faster than anyone anticipated, I glanced over at her, unsure whether she was speaking to me or someone else. But I was alone. “Move your fucking ass.”

The feeling of calm in my chest dissipated with her words, as if a balloon had been pricked, all the air let loose. Rather than ruminating on the strength in my legs, the smooth swish of my uniform against inner arm, my mind reeled. What was I doing wrong? I was already on pace for a significant personal record — was I supposed to be running faster? Had I appeared unfocused as I ran past?

When I look back at that first race, I always remember those words, the way the tension crept into my limbs. And the feeling stayed throughout the season. Nothing ever seemed good enough for Coach — she’d tell us we were a fucking shit show as a team when we didn’t run as fast as anticipated or when our outfits didn’t match or when we took too long on warmup. Before a race, we could either be a fucking hero and get our shit together or not. There was no in-between. I was 17 years old at the time, adjusting to life halfway across the country from my family, new food, a new sleep schedule, higher mileage, and learning the contours of socializing with my team, but those were not factored into my performance, nor was there any acknowledgment that adjusting to college — especially as a Division I athlete — can be a difficult, and stress-inducing situation.

My coach’s words were not unfamiliar to me. As an athlete, I’d been told iterations of get your shit together my entire career. In high school, no matter what our emotional state was, we were trained to say every day is a great day! The phrase, one my coach used to yell into the sunrise while he biked next to me, is scrawled all over the margins of my training journals, even when the descriptions of my runs read “hurt a lot,” “windy,” or “bloody toe.” Shirts at cross country meets featured sayings like pain is weakness leaving the body; champions train, losers complain; and seven days without running makes one weak. These slogans, intended to be humorous in some cases, emphasized the mentality that many sports do: athletes should be tough enough to overcome anything. If you don’t, it means you’re weak.

I internalized that way of thinking while growing up. I’ve been competitive as an athlete since I was in third grade, and I learned to ignore my emotions, focusing instead on external measures of time, pace, and mileage. My strategy earned me respect from coaches as someone who would train through anything — sickness, shin splints, a bone that grew threw my big toe — and place well in races, no matter what was happening in my personal life. When I placed well, I told myself I was satisfied. And when I didn’t, my entire sense of self-worth came tumbling down. I’d vow to work harder in practice, and the whole cycle would repeat itself ad nauseam; I was always chasing an invisible goal that remained just out of reach.

Midway through my freshman year, I began experiencing neurological issues. As I’d learned to do throughout my years of training, I tried running through the symptoms. Even when this ended in me collapsing on the track, I’d try and try again. To quit seemed unthinkable, but eventually I did. I experienced an acute bout of depression. Without running, who was I? Why hadn’t I been strong enough to push through? I berated myself for being weak, for symptoms out of my control, for losing a sport that had been my entire identity.

Eight years have passed since then, and I am finally learning to run in a way that honors both my physical and emotional health. I am growing more comfortable talking about my experiences with depression, and the way that running played a role in my self-worth for such a long period of time. In speaking about it, I have also realized that I’m not alone. Many athletes struggle with mental health issues, but the culture of sport — especially at the top tiers of competition — often emphasizes physical performance over holistic wellbeing. The culture is changing in ways, yes, but the rhetoric of athlete’s “overcoming” anything is still deeply ingrained in the language of coaches, and the way athletes speak to themselves.

In the following essays, athletes testify on their experiences with mental illness, factors that exacerbate mental illness in sport, and ways that we as a culture can begin to change our language and training in an attempt to support wellness emotionally as well as physically.

1. When athletes share their battles with mental illness (Scott Gleeson and Erik Brady, August 30, 2017, USA Today)

As Scott Gleeson and Erik Brady report, nearly one in five Americans experience some form of mental illness and, for athletes, because of the stressors of the sport, experiences with injuries, and overtraining, the percentage may be even higher. Testimony from a range of athletes — Michael Phelps, Jerry West, Brandon Marshall, Allison Schmitt, among others — about their experiences with mental illness and sport are featured in this piece, all of them urging athletes to speak up about their experiences, seek professional help, and change the culture of sport for the better.

“Sometimes, I walk in a room and regret being so naked and vulnerable, but this is bigger than me,” Imani Boyette says. “I believe my purpose is to talk about the things that people are uncomfortable or afraid to talk about.”

2. Everyone Is Going Through Something (Kevin Love, March 6, 2018, The Players’ Tribune)

On November 5th, at a home basketball game against the Hawks, 29-year-old Cleveland Cavalier Kevin Love began to experience what he now knows was a panic attack. In the days and weeks that followed, after medical testing and conversations with his team, he began to see a therapist, which is something he never envisioned himself doing, particularly because of his identity as a pro basketball player.

“Nobody talked about what they were struggling with on the inside. I remember thinking, What are my problems? I’m healthy. I play basketball for a living. What do I have to worry about? I’d never heard of any pro athlete talking about mental health, and I didn’t want to be the only one. I didn’t want to look weak. Honestly, I just didn’t think I needed it. It’s like the playbook said — figure it out on your own, like everyone else around me always had.”

In this candid and moving essay, Love breaks the silence surrounding mental health, particularly in regard to sport, and, as the title of his essay makes clear, recognizes that “everyone is going through something.”

3. U.S. Athletes Need Better Mental Health Care (Martin Fritz Huber, May 16, 2018, Outside)

After DeMar DeRozan of the Toronto Raptors tweeted about his depression and Kevin Love of the Cleveland Cavaliers penned a viral essay about his experience with panic attacks, the NBA, as Martin Fritz Huber reports, created a position for a director of mental health and wellness.

“I think that’s the biggest burden on American sport culture,” says Brent Walker, an executive board member with the Association for Applied Sport Psychology. “I’ve heard repeatedly from professional and elite athletes how they don’t want to admit having to having a weakness—mental [illness] being one of those.”

Huber breaks down how other countries approach mental health in relation to sport, and asks what it might take to adjust the current system in the U.S. so that athletes are supported.

4. No, Running Isn’t Always the Best Therapy (Erin Kelly, July 23, 2018, Runner’s World)

“Phrases like ‘Running is cheaper than therapy!’ and ‘I run because punching people is frowned upon,’ are routinely splashed on running-themed bumper stickers, social memes, and apparel, and reinforce the idea that running offers a healthy mental outlet.”

Though studies show that running has positive benefits on wellbeing and mood, Erin Kelly, in this well-researched personal essay, pushes back against the notion that running can cure everything. Instead, she advocates that athletes reflect on why they’re participating in sport, and seek therapy when needed in addition to logging miles.

Related Read: When a Stress Expert Battles Mental Illness (Brad Stulberg, March 7, 2018, Outside)

5. The WNBA Needs Liz Cambage, but She May Not Need It (Lindsay Gibbs, August 20, 2018, The Ringer)

As Lindsay Gibbs reports, toxic effects of systemic racism, unequal pay in the WNBA, and a string of losses left Australian Liz Cambage, who plays for the WNBA’s Dallas Wings, depressed.

“When she returned to Melbourne, Cambage ghosted almost everyone in her life and retreated into a world of depression and anxiety. She said she heavily self-medicated with prescription pills and alcohol. She said that she isn’t surprised by her on-court success this season.”

Cambage credits honesty — with herself and others — as the reason she’s emerged from the dark place where she was.

6. Split Image (Kate Fagan, May 7, 2015, ESPN)

Social media allows us to curate images that tell a certain narrative — one that’s not always the most honest. As Kate Fagan reports, Madison Holleran, formerly a runner at Penn, seemed like she had the perfect life based on her Instagram and texts.

“But she was also a perfectionist who struggled when she performed poorly. She was a deep thinker, someone who was aware of the image she presented to the world, and someone who often struggled with what that image conveyed about her, with how people superficially read who she was, what her life was like.”

After Madison committed suicide, her family and friends scoured old posts and texts for clues about what was wrong and the warning signs they missed. Ultimately, this piece asks us to consider what lurks beneath the surface of social media’s veneer.

Related read: Are Female Long-Distance Runners More Prone to Suicidal Depression? (Emily De La Bruyere, February 3, 2014, The Daily Beast)

7. Talent. A Football Scholarship. Then Crushing Depression. (Kurt Streeter, November 15, 2018, The New York Times)

“What experts know is this: Recent studies place suicide as the third leading cause of death for college athletes, behind motor vehicle accidents and medical issues.

And nearly 25 percent of college athletes who participated in a widely touted 2016 study led by researchers at Drexel University displayed signs of depressive symptoms.”

In this profile of Isaiah Renfro, a top freshman wide receiver at the University of Washington who attempted suicide, Kurt Streeter writes about the pressures placed on NCAA athletes, what it means to quit sport after building an identity as a high-performing athlete, the important role that coaches play in supporting athletes off the field and on, and the hope that Renfro now feels for his life after seeking treatment.

8. Sports Stats May Be an Ideal Measure of Mental Health (B. David Zarley, October 17, 2016, The Atlantic)

At the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, associate professor Daniel Eisenberg is leading a team of researchers at Athletes Connected in order to help athletes understand mental-health problems and track concrete data on the subject. As B. David Zarley reports, Eisenberg and other researchers collect weekly mental-health surveys which focus on academic and athletic performances and levels of anxiety and depression in order to pinpoint connections between the two.

“I think sports and celebrity are two places where we can begin to lift the mental-health stigma, by showing that real people who perform, and who are well valued by society through their athletic contributions, do also suffer from symptoms of ill mental health,” says Chris Gibbons, a post-doctoral fellow and the director of health assessment and innovation at the University of Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre.”

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about neurological illness and running. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

What Gwyneth Paltrow and Great Expectations Taught Me about the Male Gaze

Illustration by Wenjia Tang

Sara Petersen | Longreads | February 2019 | 15 minutes (4,273 words)

I was 17 when I watched Gwyneth Paltrow bend her knee gently toward Ethan Hawke’s stooped figure in Alfonso Cuaron’s 1998 film adaptation of Great Expectations. In the gloom of a suburban Massachusetts movie theatre, I watched, my body stiff, my fingers gripping the red plush seat, as Hawke’s hand moved slowly up her leg. I watched as Paltrow’s lovely head tilted back in pleasure. I had never been kissed and I wasn’t entirely sure what Hawke’s hand was doing beneath the layers of Paltrow’s mint-green tulle prom dress, but that seemed beside the point. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her face. Her face, which seemed to exist only to be seen.

In the film, the kneecap scene begins with Estella discovering Finn’s portrait of her hanging on his bedroom wall. She stares at the painting with dispassionate eyes before turning and saying to him, “I don’t wear my hair like that anymore.”

“You should,” he replies.

“Do you like it that way?” Her voice purrs and a ghost of a smile twitches at the corners of her lips. It’s clear she is turned on by looking at herself through his eyes.

“What else do you like?” she asks, as she moves closer to his seated form before sliding her golden leg toward him.

As his hand moves toward her white cotton underwear, her lips part with what must be ecstasy; the angular planes of her face glow. The scene ends with Estella leaning down toward Finn in a gesture of kindness which seems to cost her nothing. She offers her mouth to Finn’s, which is hanging open with stupid, raw desire. Just as he relaxes into the realization that his fantasy is becoming real, just as he moves more confidently toward her and reaches for the ends of her brittle blond hair, Estella suddenly stands up, her body iron-straight and leaves the room. Her eyes are calm and cold and she is in complete control.

***

At 17, I had fresh-bud boobs, a little-girl tummy, and hard bumps of cystic acne dotting my chin. I had participated in the pageantry of “going out with” a few boys, and I was just beginning to discover what it meant to feel wanted, just beginning to confuse being wanted with having power. My boyfriend-in-name-only gave me a grubby hemp necklace festooned with a soon-to-tarnish silver sun, and after watching Great Expectations, I spent countless hours in bed, fingering the rays of that little sun, wondering if he saw me as golden, as light, as beautiful. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Estella came along at just the right — or ultimately wrong — time in my development.


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Watching Estella use her body to gain control made me curious about desire, made me think about the male gaze before I knew what the male gaze was. Estella enchanted me with her stony perfection, her utter lack of awkwardness or apology, her total command of her audience. I never wondered what she wanted, which of course, was entirely the point. For me, at gangly and insecure 17, Estella was the pinnacle, the holy grail of what any woman might ever hope to be: a gorgeous object of desire.

In her 1998 review of Great Expectations for the New York Times, Janet Maslin writes, “Ms. Paltrow does turn herself into the elegant object of desire that the story requires. Her presence is as coolly striking as her role (in Mitch Glazer’s screenplay) is underwritten. Incidentally, this is one more film in which the heroine’s posing nude for an artist is supposed to make her more fully defined.” At 17, I didn’t read the New York Times, and even if I had, I think Maslin’s critique would only have fanned the flames of my craving to be seen as worth seeing. In high school, it’s every awkward girl’s dream to be thought of as “coolly striking.”

When I recall the movie scenes that lodged themselves into my still pliable, tender subconscious, it’s the kneecap scene first and foremost. But there’s also the penultimate scene in which Finn paints naked Estella in a frenzy of both erotic and artistic ecstasy. She takes off her clothes before uttering her first and final line in the scene: “So do you want me sitting or standing?”

The rest of the scene consists of her languidly moving throughout a New York City loft as Finn frenetically splashes paint across countless canvases, so entranced is he by the glory of Estella’s flesh. And of course, like any good movie that fetishizes unhealthy attachments, there’s the kissing-in-the-rain scene. In other words, the scenes that mattered to me were the scenes in which Estella is devoid of any active purpose or agency; the scenes that mattered were the scenes in which Estella passively submitted to Finn’s desperate eyes.

Maybe it was Finn’s desperation (and, transmuted through the male gaze through which I viewed Estella), my own, that muddled me into imagining Estella the central focus of the film. I didn’t know that Finn is supposed to be the subject of Great Expectations. Feminism existed only as a sterile word in a paragraph about suffragettes in my history textbook and I did not have the tools to view Estella as what she is: an empty shell crafted for male consumption, even demonized as a femme fatale. I did not know that there were limited roles for women — domestic goddess or dangerous sexual minx, or perhaps worst of all, pitiful spinster — and that Estella represented not rosy possibility but a narrow and reductive scope of female representation. Anne Bancroft’s Miss Dinsmoor (Miss Havisham in the novel) tried to show me what happened when a woman defied patriarchal norms, but I was too enthralled by the shiny object of Estella that I didn’t pay attention. Grotesque in clownish makeup and abject in her heartbreak, I saw Miss Dinsmoor through the male gaze, and by that I mean, I saw her as disgusting, a wreck of thwarted desire I longed to look away from.

I did not know that there were limited roles for women — domestic goddess or dangerous sexual minx, or perhaps worst of all, pitiful spinster — and that Estella represented not rosy possibility but a narrow and reductive scope of female representation.

I relegated Miss Dinsmoor to the back of my mind where she belonged, and focused my ambitions on becoming an “elegant object of desire.” Estella never seemed flustered, upset, or awkward, her role as object seemed peaceful and complete. Maybe if I could define myself through and for someone else’s eyes, a man’s eyes, I wouldn’t have to do the work of defining myself for myself.

***

At college in Boston, my breasts became more than buds, and I began dressing to showcase that fact, tagging along with girlfriends to stores in Downtown Crossing to buy all-important “clubbing clothes.” In my case, this meant a pair of boot-cut pleather pants and a triangle top in flimsy polyester zebra print. I wore my new clothes with a combination of curiosity and entirely feigned confidence until it became clear that boys were starting to look.

I watched boys watch me, and the hunger etched into Ethan Hawke’s face flashed across my brain. At frat parties in Allston, or in the bottom bunk of extra-long twins, I became intoxicated by the reflection of myself I had become increasingly adept at invoking in boys’ eyes. I would stand tall and hold my head high on my neck and envision Paltrow’s knee moving slowly toward Hawke’s open hand. I would remember the delicate hooks of her collarbones. Estella doesn’t seem to want anything from Finn. From anyone. In a critical piece about the male gaze in both the novel and the film adaptation, Michael K. Johnson writes, “Pip [or Finn] is blind to any desire on Estella’s part, for if Estella desires, she begins to emerge as a subject rather than an object, and thereby would destabilize Pip’s construction of himself as the hero of his romantic quest.” I thought the not caring and not wanting was the magic that locked people in, allowed a person to bask in the warmth of being seen as something the seer wants. I didn’t imagine Estella’s lack of desire meant that she could never flourish as anything more than a foil to a man’s story.

I finally read Great Expectations around the time I met the perfect test subject for my performance of Estella cool — a boy in a band. By then, I had so internalized Paltrow’s slight underbite, her weightless body, her chilly power, that it was difficult to imagine Estella in heavy petticoats. Miss Havisham’s death by flaming bridal dress failed to make an impression.

The boy in the band scorned me as being a dumb blond at our first meeting (I called him aloof, to which he responded, “I’m surprised you even know what that means”), and his slouchy disinterest was the ultimate aphrodisiac. The first time we slept together, he told me he was in way over his head, and I thought about Finn’s bottomless desire for Estella. The more I projected Estella onto my face, my body, the more the boy in the band wanted me. He hovered his body over mine, and I thought about Paltrow’s lifted chin as she pushes Hawke’s hand between her legs.

The boy in the band fucked me with an urgency that made me dizzy, made me forget the inner trapping of my mind, made me exist only within my body. The force of his desire was all I wanted, needed. His desire was enough for us both — his desire fueled mine. Being wanted like that made everything simple, made my insecurities melt away, made my doubts about myself and what I wanted from life drift into the ether. His desire for my body filled me to the brim, leaving no room for anything else, and that feeling — of being enough because of being wanted — that feeling was calm, was rest. It felt like power.

I never orgasmed with him, but when I was alone in the dark, I pictured myself through his eyes and did.

Maybe if I could define myself through and for someone else’s eyes, a man’s eyes, I wouldn’t have to do the work of defining myself for myself.

When the boy in the band teetered toward indifference, I conjured Estella, thought of her hard icy heart, which was so desirable, so beautiful, and I worked harder on freezing my own soft, warm places. When he didn’t call me, I didn’t call him to complain. I made plans with girlfriends and drank too much until he finally did. When I could no longer locate the image of me reflected in his eyes — the me as he wanted me — I withdrew until the image returned. When we went out together, I collected the stares of other men and boys as if they were a currency I could use to pay my way into the band boy’s heart. When I did these things, I saw that my instincts were right. His desire returned and it filled me up. I told myself we were in love, remembering how Finn and Estella made love look like pain. I remembered their tortured kiss in the rain and committed to making a success of star-crossed love because surely difficult endeavors were worth pursuing. The boy in the band never painted a picture of me like Finn did for Estella, but I vowed to keep us together until he wrote a song instead.

It was all perfect until I made the mistake of thinking maybe the boy in the band wanted the real me, not the veneer I had worked so hard to create. It was perfect until the person who wanted things, needed things — the person that was me — reared her ugly head and scared him off.

I started to ask for things. Things like dinner, double dates with friends, cozy sleepovers planned in advance. Too much. Most of the time, I subsumed my desires to be alone with him and forced myself to be easy, cool, to go with his flow, despite the fact that I was not truly a chill person, that I hated not knowing where I would sleep on a given night. I paid too much for blond highlights that made me look like I had been out in the sun, because the version of me he liked was naturally beautiful without trying. I would sit in the corner of his apartment wearing a mustard-colored vintage sweater because I thought it made me look bohemian, watching him watch a movie I didn’t want to watch with his best friend and bandmate, and the more they enjoyed the movie, the more they enjoyed each other, the more I hated him, his friend, and their easy comradery. The more I hated myself for failing to keep him interested in me.

I went to great lengths to hold his attention. The summer of my 23rd year, I traveled to Vermont to play a coquettish 1940s secretary at a summer stock theatre. When the show closed, a girlfriend and I snuck into the women’s dressing room, where I donned my Marilyn Monroe platinum wig and stripped down to fishnets and a black bra. Steph snapped photos of me, making sure they were optimally sexy. When I developed the black-and-white disposable-camera film, I analyzed each photo carefully, before selecting the ones in which I looked most assured of whoever it was I was pretending to be and pasted them into one of those artsy books girls in their twenties make for their boyfriends who are in bands. Cleverly, I thought, I developed a narrative to accompany the photos. Alongside a photo of me perched above an ironing board, cold iron in hand, my ass jutting out against my black American Eagle underwear, I wrote, “She can be clean.” Alongside a photo of me peering over my shoulder with empty eyes and faux nonchalance, a la Estella, I wrote, “She can be cold.” And alongside a photo of me sitting on the floor cross-legged, my boobs out and slightly saggy, the perky wig tossed to the side, I wrote, “She can be yours.” This last photo felt like a risk, felt like honesty. It was a photo of the me I wanted him to want.

It’s not that these tricks failed to ignite his desire, it’s that I became increasingly resentful of the need to conjure tricks at all. The longer we were together, the harder it was for me to be someone else, and the more I resented him for finding that someone else more appealing than me. As much as I tried to remember the power of Estella, my frosty mask started to itch. The injustice of the whole venture began to preoccupy me. I had groomed my body according to his desires; molded my tastes, my attitude, my clothing to what I thought were his wants. I had done everything Estella taught me would work. But it wasn’t working. There was a flaw in the equation, and I had no choice but to assume the flaw was me. I thought something about the authentic me must’ve been marring my performance. Something about me wasn’t enough. My suppressed desire to be wanted as myself started to turn the real me into something dangerously near combustion.

Miss Havisham died wearing a flaming wedding dress. She died in a blaze of frustrated desire and unrealized potential.

On a raw, drizzly night in November, he texted saying he was in the middle of a jam session and couldn’t make it to my apartment. He was supposed to sleep over, fuck me, then hold me. When I couldn’t make him come to me, something fell apart inside, and it was with equal parts relief and horror, that my whole explosive self came screaming to the surface. Banging my palms against the glossy white of the painted bricks in the tiny Beacon Hill bedroom I shared with my sister, I shrieked and felt validated when my vocal chords felt like they were choking me. I craved that sense of stillness that only his body wanting mine could give me. Without it, I felt empty, felt missing. I think now I had allowed his desire to sweep away the rest of me, so when the desire disappeared, so did I. Unmoored.

Everything was perfect until my pesky subjecthood tried to claw its way free from objectification.

My inability to make him do what I wanted in this one small moment brought the reality of my failure crashing home. I had spent countless months putting all my energy into cultivating what I thought was power only to find it was ultimately meaningless, that my “power” had only ever been submission, that desire could only be fleeting, and this realization shook me to the core. I knew I wasn’t a true Estella, but I had lived for so long in her skin, I still wasn’t clear who the real me was. I just knew she was angry, I just knew she wanted to be seen. Because without someone looking, I felt invisible.

Behind the tears, behind the desperation, I probably imagined a camera documenting the whole thing.

My sister didn’t know what to do with me, so she called my parents, who threatened to call an ambulance if I didn’t stop saying I wanted to hurt myself. Which I did want. Not seriously, but just enough for my external pain to match my internal pain. The blissfully unyielding white walls of the Beacon Hill apartment bruised my knuckles and substantiated the howling void inside of me. The pain made me feel grounded.

The boy in the band broke up with me soon after, and a therapist prescribed me something akin to horse tranquilizers should I find myself gripped by another panic attack, which is what the therapist called the flood of feeling that had deluged me on that chilly November night. The pills came in handy once the boy in the band took me back.

Feminist scholar Hilary Schor says this about Great Expectations: “Pip’s authorship is so strong as to make Estella’s story almost disappear, to make Estella almost disappear.” For me, watching Great Expectations at 17 did more than that, it halted a burgeoning self from appearing in the first place.

The irony is no longer lost on me that I spent the remainder of my twenties as a struggling actor determined to be seen without fully knowing or even asking myself what it was I wanted to be seen as or for. I continued to seek validation from men and eventually stumbled across a guy who wasn’t in a band, a guy who wanted to move in together and get a puppy. It was the first relationship in which I felt comfortable to be my ugliest, most basic self. I felt no compunction about wearing a shapeless pair of flannel PJ pants I’d had since high school around him, and this committed relationship felt so good, so restful, so much easier than waiting in open-call lines, so much easier than sending out another slew of headshots, so much easier than asking myself if I really even wanted to be an actress in the first place, and this sense of ease made me think that I had finally figured out what I wanted. I wanted to get married and have kids.

After struggling for so long to find myself, I was relieved that motherhood had found me.

As a mother, I would no longer need to worry about being sexually desirable, about being who someone else wanted me to be, about being “successful.” My nagging fear of purposelessness would disappear, the repressed anxiety that whispered about lack of motivation or ambition or direction would cease interrupting my sleep. I could be earnest and boring and comfortable. I could devote myself fully to a new life, an endeavor so worthy that it couldn’t fail to fill me with joy and satisfaction. As a mother, I wouldn’t need to schmooze or hone my craft or have any craft at all. I would just need to love and be loved. Most importantly, I would care so much about this new little person, that I could stop worrying about myself.

So it was with a heartbreaking sort of recklessness and desperation that I threw myself into wifehood and motherhood as the conclusive panacea to a lack of self-knowledge.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that motherhood did not provide a smooth path to selfhood, but rather made me seriously engage with the work of finding myself for the first time. My body, which used to feel like a magical vessel with which I could choose my own adventure, was stripped down to its most grimly physiological purpose. And the new baby, whose desire for me was insatiable, didn’t care if I was cool, didn’t care if my pores were big or small, didn’t care about me at all, the real me or otherwise.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that motherhood did not provide a smooth path to selfhood, but rather made me seriously engage with the work of finding myself for the first time.

Estella had taught me that to be wanted was everything, and being wanted had gotten me a husband, which had, in turn gotten me a baby. Of course, I had deliberately sought these things for myself, but while cluster feeding my newborn throughout the night, tears moved silently down my face, I felt like this life had been done to me. So blindly had I ridden the roller coaster of objectification, I forgot to ever ask myself, “What do you want?”

I spent the days following my first child’s birth waiting in vain to feel an overwhelming sense of rightness. I held him against me and waited for some sort of feeling that this was always what I wanted, always what I was meant to do, to descend upon me and quiet the voices within that kept persisting in wanting, wanting, wanting. I wiped away spit-up, ran the dishwasher, sat in a circle of smiling adults singing songs about animals, and ached with loneliness. I came to realize that motherhood can never fill an empty person up. On the contrary, motherhood can sweep an empty person away entirely.

Motherhood taught me about feminism with a force that took my breath away, and the ramshackle self I had cobbled together through the eyes of others came tumbling down in the darkness of postpartum depression. I’ve since read and thought a lot about postpartum depression, and while of course, women undergo vast physical and hormonal changes following the creation and birth of a human being that impact their mental health, I have some of my own theories about why some of us are more prone to that particular blackness than others.

Historically, the world has not cared about what women want. The world has only very recently offered this question to women. The world has only very recently thought to ask women whether or not they want marriage. Children. And even though the questions have slowly started to seep into some girls’ lives, many other girls, myself included, were (and still are) raised breathing the air of a male world, a world in which women’s most valuable currency is her ability to be what a man wants, is her ability to starve her own selfhood for the sake of someone else’s.

Historically, the world has not cared about what women want. The world has only very recently offered this question to women.

And for me, motherhood, was the culmination of disillusionment. Especially at the beginning, motherhood takes, takes, takes. And if the new mother’s foundation is a simulacrum, the baby soon takes so much that nothing much is left. To enter into motherhood, a job defined by self-sacrifice, without a strong sense of self in place, is a dangerous venture. Postpartum depression was a brutal teacher who made me realize that figuring out who I was and what I wanted was no longer a luxury, it was critical to me putting one foot in front of the other.

***

After hours of nonsleep, the sun glared through my curtains, and I peeled myself from the breast milk–soaked sheets and limped to the bathroom, where I confronted the mirror. There was no one else left to look at me, no one else that could make me feel seen. I would have to look at myself. My face was gaunt, my skin wan, my eyes heavily shadowed in a shade of exhausted purple, and I saw an abject figure looking back at me. I remembered Miss Havisham.

At 37, I still occasionally think of Paltrow’s slender kneecap emerging from the folds of mint tulle when I enter a dark bar and scan the male faces. Old habits.

After hours of nonsleep, the sun glared through my curtains, and I peeled myself from the breast milk–soaked sheets and limped to the bathroom, where I confronted the mirror. There was no one else left to look at me, no one else that could make me feel seen. I would have to look at myself.

I think of another moment more often — a moment I’ve never seen — the moment after Estella leaves the room. Does she even exist? At 17, I didn’t wonder about Estella’s desires. I do now.

Estella was never asked what she wanted. Miss Havisham raised her to break hearts, to wreak revenge for Miss Havisham’s own broken heart. And lest we judge Miss Havisham too harshly, she had every reason to suppose that living a life free from personal desire would be less tortuous for a woman than risking making one’s true desires known. Miss Havisham desired love from a man; she wanted a man’s love to complete her, and when that didn’t happen, she didn’t know how to complete herself.

And what do I want? I want to have been asked the question in the first place. And I want to use my bitterly earned knowledge to ensure my own daughter knows that asking herself that question should always be her first priority. I want to live the rest of my life giving voice to my anger that she still lives in a world in which she must prioritize her desires, because there’s no guarantee anyone else will. I want to live each day as a continued effort to listen to myself, to fill myself up.

***

Sara’s essays about feminism, motherhood, and the performance of femininity have appeared in The Rumpus, Catapult, Ploughshares, Vox, The Lily, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She’s working on a collection.

Editor: Krista Stevens

Fact checker: Ethan Chiel

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Labor Pains: A Reading List

A doctor examines a pregnant woman in Allahabad, India, 2011. (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh, File)

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories. 

Prior to researching this column, I felt no significant babymaking desire tugging at my uterus. This is not to say I have not thought of being a mother or a stepmother. Adoption and foster-to-adopt programs have always held a special fascination for me, even when I was a little kid. But the biological mechanics of what happens at the end of the human assembly line — you know, the manner in which the finished product exits the factory door? That always freaked me out.

According to my mother, Child Me reacted to the discussion of labor and delivery with disinterest at best and revulsion at worst. Mom worried that she’d somehow made me afraid of it. In fact, she had not; she’d always spoken of pregnancy as the happiest time of her young life, and had two relatively swift and uncomplicated deliveries with healthy babies. When she was 24, I woke her up at 1:00 a.m. one October morning and was out in the world by a quarter past four, taking the traditional route. When she was 27, my brother took maybe six or seven hours on a Sunday in early December. She said he “shot out like a football.” I never knew how to react to that, and I still don’t.

As a child, I asked her how painful it was. She said, “Kind of like… having to do number two in a really big way.” She has since admitted this was an understatement, though one often does go number two when one does a vaginal delivery, but says “it wasn’t that bad” and “at the end you get a beautiful baby!”

My mother accepted long ago that making babies was not high on my priority list. She always encouraged my career and creative aspirations. I give her a lot of credit for not pressuring me about it like some women’s mothers do. I’ve told her that I just don’t have baby fever.

But then I researched this column.

And now…

Well, aside from abstinence from sexual intercourse, there is no greater method of birth control than reading birth stories. Add articles about labor and delivery as managed by the medical industry in the United States, and you’ve got a cocktail that should be nearly as effective as the common oral contraceptive.

My hat is off to women who go through with having a baby — and especially those who choose to do it again. That’s wild, lady! But as you’ll see from the stories I’ve collected below, some labor and delivery experiences are less than ideal, to say the very least. I’m glad real women share what really happens to them rather than glossing it over with some fairy tale bullshit. More real stories from real women who don’t pretend everything is easy, please. And more reporting on the way Black women and poor immigrant women are consistently offered a lower standard of maternal healthcare.

1. “I Think, Therefore I Am Getting The Goddamned Epidural” (Rebecca Schuman, Longreads, November 2017)

I despise every hippie braggart Schuman cites from Ina May Gaskin’s creepy-sounding books Spiritual Midwifery and Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth. At one point I also wanted to lightly smack her husband and kick the shit out of her anesthesiologist, though probably not as much as she did.

Dads make mistakes. It is a fact that my dad is awesome and also that while I was being born, he walked into the wrong labor and delivery room, misreading the name on the door. He did not recognize the gaping vagina before him and swiftly made his exit. During my mother’s second delivery experience, with my younger brother, he pissed her the fuck off by a.) complaining about the room temperature and opening the window when she was fucking cold and b.) bringing in a TV so he and the doctor and any orderlies could watch the game. But he turned out to be a splendid dad.

(As for a similar redemption for Schuman’s shitty, bored, Instagram-scrolling anesthesiologist, I have less hope. I’ve always regarded anesthesiologists as the groovy magicians of surgery — they show up, make your life better — or worse, if they want! — and then disappear. This gal seems to have gone to the wrong wizarding school.)

Schuman, who is one smart cookie, talks about Descartes in an accessible way and connects him quite easily to birthing:

“But what then am I?” he asked. “A thing which thinks. What is a thing which thinks? It is a thing which doubts, understands, [conceives], affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels.” These might not seem to be questions (or answers) that one naturally associates with the act of giving birth, but perhaps they should be. The midwives in my books were asking versions of these questions, after all, and they shouldn’t be the only ones who got to. Indeed, what makes all that mother-Goddess-yoni-orgasm stuff disquieting is not actually its medical dubiousness. It’s the decidedly un-philosophical certainty of the operation.

If I still drank, I would toss back some bourbon with Schuman (though not if either of us were pregnant, obviously). Regardless, I would like to buy her a beverage or a large carbohydrate-based baked substance one day.

2. “The Lavender Room” (Cheryl Strayed, Slate, April 2014)

Cheryl Strayed had an ideal situation: the desire for a baby, good health, access to excellent care. Then she labored for 43 hours and pushed an 11-pound kid out of her undercarriage. I have no words other than “holy shit, what a warrior.” She is very encouraging of other women having their baby the way they want, which makes this a very sweet and loving story. When she mentions laboring while asking her deceased mother to help her, I got teary-eyed.

It also reminded me of how long labor can take. My sister-in-law and younger brother texted me a few hours after her water broke on a Sunday afternoon. I felt sure the baby would be there by the time I arrived to New Jersey on a flight from Los Angeles the next afternoon. Nope! I visited the hospital room, drank margaritas at the Stuff Yer Face in New Brunswick, New Jersey with the other aunties and an uncle and got a full night’s sleep before I finally woke up to the news that a child was born unto us. Now we are all obsessed with him and his favorite song is “Psycho Killer” by the Talking Heads. He is 17 months old and looks like Wallace Shawn.

3. “I’ve Given Birth 4 Very Different Ways – Here’s What I’ve Learned” (Laurie Batzel, PopSugar, June 2018)

I think I love this woman. She curses way less than I do but she does not pull punches.

I’m a former ballet dancer and have performed in blood-soaked pointe shoes through severe sprains and other sundry injuries. My pain tolerance is not insignificant. But there is no pain on earth like having a baby. When the nurse told me it was too late for an epidural, I would have sobbed if I’d had the strength. I had marched around the labor and delivery unit for three hours straight to avoid Dr. Jerk, I hadn’t slept in over 36 hours, and, as badly as I wanted the “traditional” birthing experience, I would have performed my own C-section right then and there to make the pain stop. Seriously, it’s a good thing there were no spare scalpels, letter openers, or jagged shoelace tips lying around, because I would have gone rogue in a heartbeat.

She had two C-sections followed by two VBACs (vaginal birth after Caeseran). She also says that if a guy tries to convince you that passing a kidney stone is as painful as giving birth with no drugs, you can punch him “in the biscuits.” Starry eyes over here! She concludes with the very kind sentiment “there’s no wrong way to become a mother.” What a refreshing antidote to some of the “you must have a vaginal birth with no drugs so that you can be a true woman” bullshit I read while looking through articles.

4. “Lost Mothers” (ProPublica, 2017-2018)

In publishing, any subject can become a trend, a flash in the pan, a momentary topic of national chatter. Sparked in no small part by Serena Williams talking to Vogue about nearly dying after the birth of her daughter, 2018 saw more mainstream publications begin to cover the topic of maternal mortality among Black women. But organizations like ProPublica, NPR, and smaller independent publications had addressed the issue previously, and Black women themselves had been speaking up about it for years.

It is incumbent upon reporters at mainstream publications to continue to report on this humiliating and devastating national health crisis. In the meantime, ProPublica did the legwork with a series of articles about the many, many Black women who experience a ghastly standard of maternal healthcare in the United States.

5. “I Was Pregnant and in Crisis. All the Doctors and Nurses Saw Was an Incompetent Black Woman” (Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom, Time, January 2019)

This story is vivid and it is horrifying and it is heartbreaking. Read every word of it. Here are a few: “When the medical profession systematically denies the existence of Black women’s pain, underdiagnoses our pain, refuses to alleviate or treat our pain, healthcare marks us as incompetent bureaucratic subjects. Then it serves us accordingly.”

6. “Why does it cost $32,093 just to give birth in America?” (Jessica Glenza, The Guardian, January 2018)

These statistics are stark. Writes Glenza:

Despite these high costs, the US consistently ranks poorly in health outcomes for mothers and infants. The US rate of infant mortality is 6.1 for every 1,000 live births, higher than Slovakia and Hungary, and nearly three times the rate of Japan and Finland. The US also has the worst rate of maternal mortality in the developed world. That means America is simultaneously the most expensive and one of the riskiest industrialized nations in which to have children.

So we’re paying the most in the developed world for the shittiest treatment in the developed world? Okay, makes sense. No wonder so many women reject the conventional medical approach to birth and buy into comforting “orgasmic birth is possible, babies just slip right out, pain is all in your mind and was put there by The Man, also buy my book and taint moisturizer” pseudoscience, rocketing from one extreme to the other.

As with anything else, it seems, a complementary medical approach is best, blending conventional medicine with alternative or “traditional” healing techniques. But while my complementary medical idea sounds delightful if you can afford to pay out of pocket, how may health insurance plans will pay for your midwife, doula, obstetrician, nurses and 1+ nights stay at some swanky, soothingly lit spa retreat? Oy vey, what a mess.

* * *

The other ways to obtain a beautiful baby without almost certainly going number two in the process have always seemed the more palatable options to me. Of course, the headaches and heartbreaks possible with adoption and foster-to-adopt are innumerable. Taking on the huge responsibility of parenting does not seem simple — nor should it, I suppose.  Plenty of abusive, nasty jerks have kids, and I rather wish they’d give up for fear of poop on the delivery table or too many forms at the agency.

I may yet become a mother. I don’t know. At present, I am glad to be an aunt; I am glad to entertain my friends when they have kids, or to entertain the kids so that my friends can use the toilet in peace or take a nap. I feel enormous gratitude that generations of American women have fought to ensure that women of childbearing age have rights and protections that were unthinkable years ago — as well as the right to prevent or terminate a pregnancy.

I feel energized to work harder to ensure better access to healthcare for all women, and to help make certain motherhood remains a choice. I should say “biological reproduction” because, as Batzel wrote, “There’s no wrong way to become a mother.”  And of course I know — and you now know I know – it is fine to choose to go without children. You’ll sleep more and save money, much of which you can spend spoiling other people’s kids. I can’t recommend that enough.

* * *

Sara Benincasa is a stand-up comedian, actress, college speaker on mental health awareness, and the author of Real Artists Have Day JobsDC TripGreat, and Agorafabulous!: Dispatches From My Bedroom. She also wrote a very silly joke book called Tim Kaine Is Your Nice Dad. Recent roles include “Corporate” on Comedy Central, “Bill Nye Saves The World” on Netflix, “The Jim Gaffigan Show” on TVLand and critically-acclaimed short film “The Focus Group,” which she also wrote. She also hosts the podcast “Where Ya From?”

Editor: Michelle Weber

The Hunt for Planet Nine

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Shannon Stirone | Longreads | January 2019 | 37 minutes (9,047 words)

At 9,200 feet, there is 20 percent less oxygen than at sea level, enough to take all the air from my lungs after just three steps. But it didn’t stop Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin from hastily shuffling into the lobby of Hale Pōhaku to check the weather forecast. They stared at the TV monitor, craning their necks, suitcases in one hand, fingers pointing to the screens with the other. “It’s Sunday,” Brown said, “there’s no new forecast until tomorrow. Damn.” We were at base camp on the dormant volcano Mauna Kea, on the big Island of Hawaii. The pair were here to use one of the most powerful telescopes in the world, called Subaru. Tomorrow night, December 3, marked the start of their sixth observing run and their next attempt to find the biggest missing object in our solar system, called — for the moment — Planet Nine.

The Onizuka Center for International Astronomy, located at Hale Pōhaku, looked exactly as you might imagine a Hawaiian dormitory built in the early 1980s would. Each table was covered in an azure nylon tablecloth with salt and pepper shakers. The backs of the chairs depicted scenes from around the island: Mauna Kea, palm trees, snow-capped volcanoes, sandy beaches. It was 7 p.m. when we arrived, and most everyone who lived and worked at these dorms was asleep. (In astronomers’ quarters, most people sleep during the day or wake at odd hours of the night to go to work.) The cafeteria was empty. “Oh my god, they have Pop-Tarts! They haven’t had Pop-Tarts here for ten years!” said Brown as he unwrapped the shiny foil package to put one in the toaster. This was a good sign — Pop-Tarts are the nonsuperstitious tradition of astronomical observing — and also dinner.

We would have a snack and go over the game plan for tomorrow night. Brown and Batygin sat down at one of the round tables, laptops out. Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, felt optimistic. Batygin, a theoretical astrophysicist and professor of Planetary Sciences at Caltech, guessed it would take them 10 more years of observing. This is their dynamic. If the planet they’re looking for exists, it is likely six times the mass of Earth, with an atmosphere made of hydrogen and helium covering its rock-and-ice core. What makes it hard to find is its likely location: at least 400 times further away from the sun than our own planet, and 15 to 20 times further out than Pluto. As a theorist Batygin feels that he’s already mathematically proven its existence. But it’s generally accepted that for a planet to be considered discovered in the field of astronomy, the theory must also be accompanied by a photograph. This is where the Subaru telescope comes in. They know that Planet Nine is somewhere in between the constellation Orion and Taurus, but that’s about as exact as they can get, and they’ll need good weather to locate it. Right now the last predicted forecast showed fog. Even at six times the mass of earth, Planet Nine is so far away that it would appear as a barely visible point of light, even through the lens of the most powerful telescope they could get their hands on.

Brown felt optimistic. Batygin guessed it would take them 10 more years of observing.

Though it was only 7 p.m. it was time to settle in for the night. We took a series of wooden bridges faintly illuminated with reddish light to the dorms. (Red light does not affect night vision). Because of the reduced oxygen, the carry-on-size suitcase I had with me might as well have been the dead body of a weightlifter. We stopped to take a break to catch our breath, and looked up. There is hardly any light at Hale Pōhaku after sundown. An hour away from Kona or Hilo, there are no streetlights, no real building lights, no car lights, it’s just dark. What can be easy to forget for anyone that lives in or around a city, is that the night sky is not black, but gray. We are drowning ourselves with so much light that we don’t realize how much light the darkness really contains. Wherever Planet Nine is–if Planet Nine even is–its surface is touched by the sun’s light just like our planet, and as a result some of it is illuminated. The physical particles of light that travel the billions of miles between both bodies also move through space. Their journey begins at the sun, stirring around deep inside the core for thousands of years, moving eventually to the surface where they are finally released. This newly exposed light travels out into the cosmos and to distant unknown worlds. This is why we came, we had to escape the light in order to find it.

We stood there for a moment and as our eyes adjusted, the galaxy turned on. Clusters of stars became the entire sky. Each speck of light had traveled its own distance; traversed its path through the dark void of space, some from the time of the earliest human civilizations, light that left at the dawn of the invention of agriculture and cities, at the time this mountain was last covered in lava. Mike pointed over the hills to a hazy cone of yellow light that shot up like a triangle from the Earth, explaining it was a rare astronomical phenomenon some people wait their whole lives to see: “That is the zodiacal light. It is the sunlight reflecting off of the dust that’s floating in the asteroid belt. This is the best I’ve ever seen it. Wow.” Across the sky to the right was the arm of the Milky Way galaxy. It was as though a painter had dipped their brush in starlight and clouds and smeared it ever so carefully across the universe.

***

With dozens of astronomical discoveries to his name, 53-year-old Mike Brown has the distinction of having found more dwarf planets than any other human in history. Dwarf planets are hundreds of times smaller than Earth, so detecting them when they orbit so far out is extremely tricky. (Pluto, for example, is 500 times less massive than our planet.) In 2001, Brown discovered two dwarf planets called 2001 YH140 and 2001 YJ140. Two years later, using the Palomar Observatory in the mountains outside of San Diego, he caught some light from a distant Kuiper Belt object that no one had ever seen before. It was three times farther away than Pluto, and smaller too. The object was so distant that the view of the sun from its surface could be blotted out with the tip of a pen if held at arm’s length. He named it Sedna. Then, in 2005, he found another object — more massive but just a bit smaller than Pluto. He would later name this dwarf planet Eris after the Greek goddess of strife and discord, and oh how much strife this thing caused.

The International Astronomical Union decided that if there were other “Pluto-size” objects out there then maybe the title “planet” was not a good one for Pluto. Brown became known as the “Pluto Killer” — though mostly by way of his adopted Twitter handle. (Brown said he actually finds Pluto quite interesting, but only admits it under his breath so as not to ruin his bad boy reputation.)

Years later, two astronomers, Scott Sheppard and Chad Trujillo, noticed that a dozen distant Kuiper Belt objects appeared as though they were all operating in concert in the Unknown Regions of space, sharing certain orbital characteristics. Brown was intrigued by their 2014 paper, but thought something wasn’t quite right with their hypothesis. That same year Batygin, his former student, was working down the hall. Brown asked Batygin if he wouldn’t mind looking at the data with him. Though Brown briefly wondered about the possibility of a planet, he and Batygin quickly pivoted to the idea that enough collective gravity might have put the objects in this orbit. “We tried to examine every hypothesis other than a planet and took it very seriously,” said Batygin. “This is not like you come in one day and think a little bit about it then you’re done. It takes a lot of time. I made almost complete models for every single other hypothesis before we allowed ourselves to consider the planetary explanation. You have to rule out every other possibility first.”

They are not the first to be puzzled by oddities in the outer solar system. Not long after the discovery of Uranus in the 18th century, astronomers observed that the planet’s orbit wasn’t moving at the rate that predictions said it should. The planet appeared to randomly accelerate in its orbit, then decelerate. In 1846, French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier suggested this was the result of another large planet orbiting beyond Uranus that had not yet been found. As in all astronomical observation, an image must be taken in order to consider an object discovered, and no one had ever seen a planet beyond Uranus. Not only did Le Verrier suggest a planet as the cause, he predicted what he thought to be the location. As an expert in mathematics and celestial mechanics, Le Verrier was confident in his claim, so much so that he wrote to German astronomer Johann Galle who was working at the Berlin Observatory at the time, and told him to look at a specific point in the sky. Galle opened the letter on September 23, 1846 and right away he and his assistant, fellow astronomer Heinrich Louis d’Arrest, took to the telescope. Using Le Verrier’s coordinates along with a recently updated star chart, they were able to finally compare this moving object against the tapestry of unmoving stars — they found Neptune less than one hour later.

Brown and Batygin faced a version of the same question Le Verrier asked of himself 169 years ago: What is happening beyond where we can see?

Planet Nine’s Le Verrier is Batygin, who, as 2014 turned into 2015, took to every blackboard and computer simulation he had at his disposal to think over Sheppard and Trujillo’s hypothesis using math that only few people in the world understand. He spent more than a year, along with Brown, trying to figure out why these objects were clustered together in space.

Before Planet Nine, Batygin knew little about observing and Brown didn’t know much about theory, but Planet Nine cannot be found without both. If anyone knew the theory behind how planetary bodies behaved in space, it was Batygin. By 2014, he was a renowned theoretical astrophysicist, and the following year, was named among Forbes 30 Under 30. He had first distinguished himself at the age of 22, when he proved mathematically that our solar system was unstable — a problem Isaac Newton himself had hoped to solve — and that eventually (a few billion years from now) Mercury could either fall into the sun or collide with Venus, which would result in Mars’s ejection from the solar system. Now Brown and Batygin faced a version of the same question Le Verrier asked of himself 169 years ago: What is happening beyond where we can see?

Part of their job was first to try to find a solution less extreme— like a passing star or a galactic anomaly —  than a giant undiscovered planet far off in the depths of the solar system, because, a hidden planet? That was absurd. But finally, in the spring of 2015, they both agreed, the only other explanation for this clustering of Kuiper Belt objects was indeed a planet — a big one. On January 20, 2016, they made the announcement proposing that our solar system has a giant planet orbiting far away from everything else. They told all astronomers with access to the most powerful telescopes to go and find it. They wanted to find it too.

***

Hale Pōhaku. Monday, December 3, 2018. 2:30 a.m.

We met in the cafeteria. It is suggested that all people observing on the summit spend several hours at base camp to adjust to the altitude to prevent dizziness, slurred speech, and death. The summit of the mountain is 13,796 feet and has only 60 percent of the oxygen found at sea level. We were up literally before dawn to begin adjusting to the observing schedule that would now be:

10:30 p.m.: Wake up and eat (Breakfast? Dinner?)

11 p.m.: Leave for the telescope

Midnight to 6 a.m.: Observe

Groggy and grunting, both Brown and Batygin dragged their feet down the stairs of the dorm’s living room. They do their thinking at base camp and their struggling at the summit. (According to Brown, “Thinking at 14,000 feet is not a good idea.”) Over Froot Loops and Cheerios, they carefully ran over their own computer simulations with updated search parameters, making inside jokes to each other and giggling. They sometimes debate the location of the planet for hours at a time. At this particular moment, Brown was not only certain that Planet Nine’s semimajor axis — that is the mean distance of the sun along its orbit — was 310, but he was just about willing to stake his life on it. Batygin disagreed: “The reason that we’re here right now is because it might not be at 310, it might be at 400.” Brown said, looking at me, “Like I said to Konstantin, if we don’t get any data, I’m done with this crap, I’m out.”

“Yeah, but you say that every time,” said Batygin.

To me, “He reminds me that I say that every time.”

“It’s not like you’re doing any actual work.”

“I’m actually doing a lot. It actually takes me a long time.”

It went on like this. At issue was how many data points they were using in their simulations. Brown had two, but Batygin thought this was wrong, and felt that Brown’s room for error (aka, “the wall”) was too small. While they consider themselves “regular Caltech nerds,” this was also reference to Game of Thrones, since all the distant Kuiper Belt objects are cold and living “beyond the wall.” Quick, someone hold the door for this fight:

“You know where else it could be?” said Batygin. “800 AU.”

“Pshhh.”

“What is the error bar wall? If you try to fit the wall—”

“I don’t try to fit the wall.”

If you did—”

I don’t try to fit the wall. You try to fit the wall.”

“If you tried to fit the wall.”

“I wouldn’t.”

This type of friendly, extremely nerdy, almost-marital bickering is typical of Brown and Batygin, and maybe even expected from two guys who have spent the past few years recreating the solar system together. They each run simulations that begin at some point in the past 4 billion years. Since we can’t go back in time to see what could have placed Planet Nine where it is or to actually find out where it is, they each recreate the growth of the planets over time. Their simulations can take from three days to three months to run, and they start them after all of the large planets have formed, some 3 to 4 billion years ago. In 2018 alone they ran more than 2,000 Planet Nine parameters with different masses and locations, averaging 38 new solar systems a week. As a result, the slight variations in data are what keep Brown and Batygin bickering and in check.

In order to find their planet, they need to use one of the most powerful telescopes on Earth to capture the light coming from such a great distance. The Subaru Telescope, which was first named the Japanese National Large Telescope, is owned and operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. Among telescopes its size, Subaru has the largest field of view and magnification available of any Earth-based telescope, which is why this is their only hope of finding the planet. The special camera on Subaru, the Hyper Suprime-Cam, is the real trick. At 10 feet high and 870 megapixels, it is able to focus down to the width of a human hair. The next day, they would try after an entire year without any usable data. This is the search for Planet Nine.

At 4 p.m., we went to bed.

***

Hale Pōhaku. Monday, December 3, 2018 (still). 11:15 p.m.

Brown speedwalked into the cafeteria, threw his black messenger bag onto one of the chairs of the round table, and with wide eyes whisper-yelled, “HOW IS THE WEATHER AT THE SUMMIT!?” The 30-second walk from the dorms to the common building was not great. It was raining. There was fog. Batygin and Surhud More, an astronomer and collaborator from the Japanese science team were prepared with an answer. “Only 10 percent humidity at the summit,” More replied trying to settle Brown’s nerves. Over the past three years Brown and Batygin have made five trips to the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea. Of the 18 and a half days they have spent observing, only eight and a half nights have produced useful data. This was no time for fog, almost a four letter word but not quite.

The parking lot at Hale Pōhaku is paved, while most of the road to the summit is not. A sign at the edge of the parking lot reminds visitors to stop and switch into four-wheel drive for the 25-minute drive up the mountain. This delineation between paved road and unpaved road is a reminder that the journey is dangerous, it takes effort, caution. We must have patience, we must move slowly and remember this is a temporary visit. Our oxygen is about to be reduced by 40 percent, and we will see fewer stars because there is less oxygen in our blood to help our eyes focus. We drove at approximately four miles per hour with just the power of our headlights to prevent us from driving one foot to the right and plummeting down the mountain to our death.

I have been to the tops of mountains, but none like the summit of Mauna Kea. It is not just its meaning and value to the Hawaiian people that might influence the feeling there. When I stepped out of the car, I was grabbed by the wind, encircled, wrapped, and marked — human foreigner. It was cold, below freezing, and it was dark. Nearly the darkest part of any night is around midnight, but after my eyes adjusted, somehow there was a little light. Our bodies’ survival mechanisms kick in, pupils are automatically dilated, opened up as wide as possible. In darkness like this we are vulnerable and our animal brains know it. It is the same feeling I imagine I would have if suddenly placed on Mars. This land is not for humans. There is barely any oxygen, there is almost no water in the air. There is no life around, no plants, no birds, nothing — these rocks are the beginning and end of everything. Just enough light from the stars overhead reflected off the bright white paint of the domes. There were no smells. The wind hit me again like a giant palm to my body. Even the sound of the dirt and stone below my shoe was foreign, like stepping on glass but not quite. It was a sound I had never heard. I was not where I had been. I felt reverent and intrusive, almost disoriented. With each crunch of rock under my shoe I was reminded that this is old land. Original land. Volcanoes are monoliths formed from fire and water and air — a million-year-old history cracked and ached below my feet.

I have been to the tops of mountains, but none like the summit of Mauna Kea. I was grabbed by the wind, encircled, wrapped, and marked — human foreigner.

The mountain last saw fire from its peak 4,500 years ago. It was towards the end of the Bronze Age. Humans began to use the plow. The world’s population was only 25 million, and writing would soon begin in Sumeria and Egypt. I felt suddenly as though I had intruded on the past. Standing there being nearly blown over by the wind and pricked with the cold air felt like being in what in Celtic culture they call a “thin place.” The saying goes that the distance between heaven and earth is only three feet apart, but in a thin place, that distance collapses. Oftentimes it is used to describe the moment when a person is about to take their last breath, or right before they take their first. Where heaven meets the Earth — this is Mauna Kea.

For Hawaiians this mountain is sacred. The highest peak in all the Hawaiian islands, it is what they call a “wao akua,” which translates to “home of the gods.” The summit of the Mauna, or mountain, is the place where the gods live. Mauna Kea, in English, translates to “white mountain,” a nod to the snow-capped peaks, but the full name is Mauna a Wakea, or god of the sky. Traditionally, only religious leaders and Hawaiian royalty were allowed to travel to the top, the place for shrines, burials, and ceremonies. The summit has never been just for anyone — only those with the right could ascend the mountain and be in the presence of the gods. For this reason the use of the summit as a place for large telescopes and observing has been highly contested by the Native Hawaiian community, considering construction on the mountain as a desecration of their most sacred land. Now “science city” dominates it. Whether you believe in god, or the gods, or heaven or hell, or nothing at all, the summit of this ancient mountain and this sacred place felt as though the distance between the unreachable stars and the top of the Earth had collapsed and for as long as we were there, we existed in the thin place.

***

Mauna Kea, Subaru Observing Control Room. Tuesday, December 4, 2018. Midnight.

At 14,000 feet Brown’s fears of fog no longer mattered. “I can’t believe it’s so clear!” he said. After taking the elevator up to the third floor where the observing room is, they both nearly ran in, set down their stuff, and immediately got to work. Brown had his laptop open before his jacket was off and Batygin was already on a computer typing in a code that would deliver images to him during the night. They needed to get the telescope calibrated and focused on the patch of sky they would be observing. An engineer and support observer were each at their own computers next to the main screen, which had a countdown clock that read Time to Completion. In this instance, they were calibrating the telescope. It counted down: 136, 135, 134, 133. One computer screen hung from the top of the room that showed multiple views of various control rooms, one of which was in Tokyo where, every morning, they greet the Japanese team. Brown and Batygin had the last half of the night, midnight to 6 a.m., for observing. They would observe with half nights for four days, and the last three they would get the run of the telescope from sundown to sunrise.

The countdown reached zero, and the sound of a cuckoo clock went off. This sound marked the end of calibration. They were ready to observe. It also “cuckcooed!” every time an exposure finished. Their plan was to capture about 100 fields on every half night, weather permitting. The fields functioned like circles on a map, marking the total viewing area of the telescope: around 9 full moons worth. Every exposure lasted 60 seconds, and with each one came a new image of the sky. Batygin’s job was to look at random stars in the images to measure their width. The more circular the stars appeared in the camera, the better the seeing was. If he clicked on a star and it appeared jagged, it meant there was upper atmospheric turbulence; if it was slightly oval, the telescope was out of focus; if it appeared washed out, it meant that there was fog. All of this messed with their ability to capture a precise point of light. That’s a problem when your entire task is to capture a precise point of light. The windier the conditions, the more the stars’ light would smear across what is called an arc second. And to find Planet Nine they needed all arc second readings to be under 2.0, ideally under 1.0. Planet Nine likely travels — at the most — two arc seconds a night, so if the winds are too high in the upper atmosphere, so much that it’s smearing the stars into two or three arc seconds wide, the data become unusable. Think of zero arc seconds as being a perfect point in the sky; as the arc seconds creep up, the light gets blurrier, smearing out a little to the sides and blocking whatever possible planet might be hiding behind.

Brown named each field with four numbers in a spreadsheet and kept a log of stars’ arc seconds that Batygin randomly clicked on in that field. If the “seeing” was bad, Brown would make a note in the log and they would have to go back and reimage that field. This is where observing becomes less romantic and more like a creepy radio number station. They would wait to take about 10 images, and Batygin would then read off the numbers in batches: “4817 is 1.4. 4918 is 0.9. 4919 is 1.05. 5319 is 1.1. 5318 is 1.4,” and so on.

‘We have algorithms? Uh, no. I have spent most of my life writing these programs. This is not stuff you can get at the App Store.’

Minutes after starting up the cameras, they were collecting data. The weather was holding so spirits were high. Maybe a bit too high? Up at 14,000 feet one can get what is called an “altitude high,” which happens when the brain is deprived of oxygen. Some people get cranky, some get sleepy and mellow. Batygin gets happy. More, even, than normal. Every time he comes up to the summit, he has to use oxygen so he knew he was due for some air. There was a first aid cabinet with personal oxygen tanks that you strap around your waist with a belt and pre-wrapped plastic nose inserts. It was 12:45 a.m. and Batygin had not yet plugged in.

He was in the thick of collecting star data and writing down the next set of numbers to read off to Brown when he opened an image of stars. The sensors on the camera, all 116 of them, collect so much of the sky that as soon as you start to zoom in on any photo, not only do you fill the screen with so many stars that it looks like TV static, but galaxies appear, asteroids, you name it. The screen becomes littered with space stuff. With a black-and-white image open, he pointed to the screen and said, “I think I found Planet Nine!” He was joking, but to Brown’s ears, he sounded way too happy. Brown jumped up out of his seat, grumbled “Oh man” under his breath, and walked to the first aid cabinet for a monitor to test Batygin’s oxygen. It was below 70. His lips had turned a little purple, and he was way too excited to be up at midnight and working. Brown was worried about him, but Batygin laughed it off, with a facetious dying message to his wife: “Just tell Olga I love her.” He unwrapped the plastic tubes that strap around your head and placed them inside his nose. “I’m about to get way less happy,” Batygin said, half disappointed, half warning us all. He flipped the switch on the oxygen tank, the batteries started up and he took in one long deep breath.

The control room had more than two dozen computer monitors, most of which have specific readouts: the temperature of the telescope mirror, precipitation, wind speed, etc. Above the computers was a shelf with five speakers that each trace back to a microphone placed on the telescope. Every time the camera’s shutter opened and closed it made a sound like Optimus Prime mid-transformation. The volume was up loud so that staff could walk to the break room for coffee and still hear the shutter open and close, which is does every 60 seconds, followed by a cuckoo to mark the successful download of the exposure. Open, 60 seconds, close, “cuckoo!”

Subaru collects a lot of light and from a large swath of the sky. As a result, every night the team’s data contained hundreds of asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects, many that have never been seen before. Under normal circumstances, these appearances would warrant follow up, and even excitement, but there is an urgency to this search. Brown and Batygin don’t have time to chase these things night after night, which is what is required to “discover” something. These objects are just light that is collected and discarded. As Batygin and More sorted through images, measuring the seeing in each field, discussing numbers and computer codes, a new image came through and they zoomed in. Against the blue of the computer screen, a massive spiral galaxy appeared. It had a wispy ghostlike body with long almost jellyfish-like tendrils that stretched around on itself. We leaned over to look at the picture and said, “Oh wow!” which warranted a quick half-joking reply from Brown: “Ugh, galaxies. Those are the worst.”


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The trouble with looking for one thing in the sky is that our galaxy is full of stars, 100 billion of them, most of which annoy Brown to no end. If Planet Nine exists, it is so faint and so far away that it can easily get overpowered by a regular show-hogging ham of a star. The absolute worst place to look for Planet Nine is into the plane of our galaxy where a lot of those stars live. By 2 a.m., another package of Pop-Tarts had been opened. The numbers were coming in over 1.4 — not great. Brown decided they should move the telescope and begin observing on the other side of the galactic plane. They sent the request to the telescope operators to calculate how long the slew would take. They told him that because of the time of night, to get around the plane of the galaxy would take 40 minutes. “Forty minutes!” Brown exclaimed, “Shit, shit, fuck, fuck.”

Forty minutes is a long time. I was told that it costs a dollar a second to use this telescope, and 40 minutes is a lot of observing time lost when you only have six hours in one night to find a planet. He decided they would wait a few more hours until the galactic plane had moved overhead, so the slew that would have taken 40 minutes would only take 10. They would keep observing with the 1.4s until the 4 a.m. slew.

By 4:30, the slew was complete, and the brightness of the galactic plane was out of the way. Brown asked Batygin to read out the numbers.

“Yep! 7715 is 0.8. 7516 is 1.0. 7515 is 0.7. 7518 is 0.8.” They continued coming in under 1, a relief. Joking in the room resumed. An observer asked Batygin how they process the data after they return to Caltech, to which he replied, “Well, we have these algorithms—”

Brown interjected: “We have algorithms? Uh, no. I have spent most of my life writing these programs. This is not stuff you can get at the App Store.”

“You should sell your algorithms on Google Play,” joked Batygin.

“Ninety-nine cents,” said Brown, with a slight roll of his eyes. “Give me more numbers!”

At 5:50, we heard another “cuckoo!”. The dome began to close and the team packed up the Pop-Tarts and gear. Despite the 1.4s, the night marked the first successful collection of data in more than a year. All anyone could talk about was breakfast. There wasn’t any coffee at the summit, and warm eggs, potatoes, sausage, and enough coffee to fill a bucket was all that anyone wanted.

The beauty of leaving the summit after 6 a.m. was that it took around 25 minutes to get back to base camp: just enough time to watch the sun come up. In just under a minute the dark gray of twilight was swept away. The air was grayish blue, the rocks I had felt under my shoes earlier were a burnt umber, small and light. On Mauna Kea, the sun does not just rise, it cracks the sky open with an almost blinding yellow that is quickly seized and destroyed by an even brighter orange. Every second new colors appeared as banded layers of horizontal clouds. What I once understood to be light blue was slightly more light blue. It met and danced with lavender that bled like watercolor into mauve, then a soft pink. As we left the parking lot and started to drive down the mountain, other telescopes appeared. They were everywhere. Suddenly white and glossy silver, their towering domes stood atop the reddish soil of the peaks. They were massive. As we drove, the car shook from side to side from the road, like being in a paper airplane played with by the wind. We passed the red mounds of ancient volcanic vents that stood there, markers of lost time. The clouds, like the whitish gray of an old cobblestone street lingered in the valley below, and suddenly the purple sky began to turn.

***

Hale Pōhaku. Tuesday, December 4, 2018.7:30 a.m.

The living room just outside the cafeteria had a Christmas tree and completed jigsaw puzzle that looked like it had been baking in the sunlight since the dorms opened in 1983. There were three couches and cozy green chairs and a fireplace with red and white stockings, hung mostly with care. Batygin spent the day back at the dorm, first trying to figure out if a passing star could have perturbed Planet Nine, placing it into its weird orbit. Brown sorted through data from other telescopes trying to — surprise — find Planet Nine. He has spent nearly every free moment in Hawaii combing through data from the ZTF instrument on Palomar’s Samuel Oschin Telescope, the same telescope he used to find the dwarf planets that made him as famous as an astronomer can reasonably expect to be. So far anyway. Lunch was served at 1 p.m., but it would be our dinner. We would go to sleep at 3:30 p.m. and wake up at 11 p.m. to go back to the telescope.

The guys had no idea if they would find Planet Nine that week, and Brown’s mood oscillated accordingly. After they got back to Caltech and received the data from the headquarters in Tokyo, they would rely in large part on machine learning to sort through the roughly 160,000 images they’d have. They would take their list of candidates and run it through the computer, and any that came up as possible Planet Nines, as many as 1,000 images, would then be looked in the old school way: by eye. They would be looking for a tiny speck of moving light. “If ever there were one barely crawling across the screen,” Brown told me, “it would be an ‘Oh shit, that’s it moment.”

This search was different from Brown’s previous endeavors. “For my entire career what I feel like what I have been doing is exploring the solar system,” he told me. “It never occurred to me that there was more primary exploration left to do. So finding Planet Nine is the grandest exploration that can be done of the solar system right now. I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.”

“I agree with everything Mike said,” added Batygin.

“First time today!” Brown replied.

“Cherish it. It’s not going to happen again.”

Batygin feels confident that the planet is there. It is not just the evidence of these clustered objects, but after four years of simulations and doing calculations that look like they are in some alien language, he feels that his equations confirm that this is a large mass object that is shepherding these objects into place. Planet Nine is doing this. He wants to know that his math is right, and the detection of Planet Nine would do that: “There’s a different thrill here for me which is actually the thrill of refutation of confirmation. With theory it’s almost like it emerges out of nothing. And really it’s only in our heads, it’s not something that we have seen before. It is a pure outcome of imagination and there’s a thrilling magnetism to that because that imagination might be right. For me that is the most amazing thing, being guided only by mathematics.”

‘The correct analogy is that there’s this singular somewhere in the ocean and you don’t know where — there is only one giant white whale and you need to go kill it because it bit your leg off.’

“I’ve never worked on a problem that’s taken this long,” Brown told me. “It is really difficult to sustain this effort for one singular purpose. It’s hard. Sometimes I think let’s just find it so I can do something else I’m tired of this stupid planet. That’s the hardest part for me other than the frustration of not knowing where to find it.” Batygin agreed. “There have been a few times in the last few years that I actually stopped working on Planet Nine,” he said. “I had moments where I felt like I was getting over-obsessed with this and kind of going in circles so I would make the conscious effort, for the next two months I’m not going to think about Planet Nine, how about magnetic fields of young giant planets or the Schrodinger equation? I took my mind off of things so I could come back with renewed enthusiasm.”

“There is only one way to win this survey, and that is to actually find it.” Brown continued. “The correct analogy is that there’s this singular somewhere in the ocean and you don’t know where — there is only one giant white whale and you need to go kill it because it bit your leg off. Sadly, I think that’s the right analogy.”

***

Hale Pōhaku. Tuesday, December 4, 2018. 11:15 p.m.

Every morning Brown selects a playlist for the drive to the summit. It is usually five songs long, which is about how long it takes to get to the telescope. Brown connected his phone as Batygin, who was driving, switched the car into four-wheel drive and Cake’s 1996 hit “The Distance” began playing. We climbed the rest of the way up the mountain listening to Eminem, Kanye West, Lynyrd Skynyrd (Brown is from Alabama), and Jon Bon Jovi (they attempted the high notes).

When we arrived at the summit it was windy, much more than the day before. These were 50-mile-an-hour gusts, close to the maximum the telescope could take. The upper atmosphere was turbulent too. The first batch of numbers came in all over 2.0, which was very, very bad. While they waited to see if the winds calmed down, Batygin sketched out a graph and an equation in Greek. He kneeled on the floor next to Brown and asked for his help. Despite the fact that when we arrived at the summit we were warned that the altitude would make it harder to do calculations, what Batygin had in his notebook was black-belt-level math, he solved it without seeming to break a sweat. Brown checked the numbers: “We’re getting these 2.6s and 2.9s, and these I declare to be shit.”

“Hold on, I’m still not oxygened up,” said Batygin.

“What is 4319?” Brown asked, referring to one of the fields they had just imaged.

“You’re showing 1.7, I’m showing 2.2. Can you check?”

“Yeah,” Batygin replied, “It’s 2.2. Sorry, got that wrong.”

“Please put on your oxygen.”

Batygin placed the plastic tubes into his nose and, like putting on a cool pair of life-saving sunglasses, slipped the rest of the plastic tubing over his ears, and took a deep breath of that “sweet, sweet oxygen.” The control room computers had read out charts on the screens that showed wind speed and upper atmosphere turbulence as a red spiky graph, literally off the charts. Because of Planet Nine’s slow pace across the cosmos, these 2.0s and higher were useless data. They were looking for a barely visible point of light; if the stars were blurring out all over the place, Planet Nine would remain hiding. “We are not collecting data that is worthwhile,” Brown said as he began putting together a back-up plan for his back-up plan. In their three years of using Subaru they’ve had, as Batygin puts it, “pretty shitty luck.” Not only has the weather been unpredictable and rainy, but, in May 2018, the nearby volcano Kilauea erupted, destroying more than 700 houses and displacing roughly 3,000 residents. There was concern that sustained seismic activity also meant that Subaru and its camera might be rendered useless for a good portion of the year, leaving the team without an opportunity to observe. Plus, sometimes the weather is so bad on the summit, they can’t even go up. “Last December we were sequestered in astronomers headquarters and hoped that it would stop hailing.” Batygin said. “We didn’t collect one image that whole run. It was really disappointing.”

The team checked on the numbers again, which were climbing beyond 2.5, nearly killing Brown every time. Just short of defeated he said, “Three arc seconds and I’m going to the beach,” then requested more numbers.

“OK, this is a record breaker, are you ready?” asked Batygin.

Brown, resigned: “Yeah.”

“3.3.”

The entire room shouted: “3.3!”

“In all my twenty-five years of observing on Mauna Kea I have never had three arc seconds,” Brown said. Numbers this bad were like turning this gigantic 8.2-meter telescope into a one-meter telescope; it would be impossible to find Planet Nine like this. Brown sat at his computer, arms crossed, and said, “The seeing is crappy, but the good news is clouds are coming in!” Indeed a ghostlike cloud was creeping over the valley and heading straight toward the summit. They waited another 20 minutes or so before Brown asked how it was looking.

Batygin: “Ok, now THIS is a record. Are you ready? 4919 is 3.8.”

Entire room: “3.8!”

Brown: “3.8!? 3.8! I think … I officially declare failure, which will significantly influence the music mix on the way down.”

At 4:10 a.m. Brown and Batygin decided to try the other side of the galactic plane, in the hope that the seeing would be better, and indeed the numbers improved — back down to 1.3s and 1.5s. One of the tricky and interesting things about if this planet exists, is that if they find it, they will have absolutely no idea how it got there. While snacks were consumed and the room filled with a symphony of yawns, Batygin stared into space. He was doing the opposite of what one should do at 14,000 feet — thinking, writing code, and doing some complex math to try to figure out how the movement of our galaxy and passing stars could have affected Planet Nine over time in order to determine the planet’s location. By 5:20 a.m. the numbers were staying low, which was just enough to save this batch. At 5:51 a.m. we heard a cuckoo. The morning’s drive-down-the-mountain playlist appropriately began with the Rolling Stones’s “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

On Mauna Kea, the sun does not just rise, it cracks the sky open with an almost blinding yellow that is quickly seized and destroyed by an even brighter orange.

As day broke, the sky filled again with purples and pinks, the colors of dreams. We drove down the road and watched the landscape change: Small reddish rocks turned into boulders remaining from the Ice Age, when these mountains were once covered in glaciers. A third of the way down, a random shrub appeared alone next to the road. As we approached Hale Pōhaku, small bee-size yellow wildflowers danced left to right in the breeze, and tall stalk-like plants nestled into the ancient volcanic rock. Anyone would say it was beautiful here, the thick marshmallow clouds hovering in the valley below, always threatening the mental well-being of the astronomers watching out the window.

Back at base camp, around the same round table with the nylon tablecloth, Batygin and Brown reflected on the previous four years. “We had this conversation about a year ago,” said Batygin. “We were driving up to Mauna Kea, and Mike was like, ‘I think … this is kind of weird,’ and it is at the end of the day. It is weird because we get on a plane and we go to a beautiful island and instead of spending time like normal people do in Hawaii, we go to the only part of the island that is completely dead, and we stay up all night looking at the sky trying to find something that basically we imagine to be there. It’s a strange behavior but man, it’s so satisfying.”

***

I left Mauna Kea on Wednesday afternoon, right as the team was due to go to sleep. They observed five more nights and the weather cooperated for all of them. It was the first meaningful collection of data in more than a year. I waited until they both got back home to call and find out how it went. I spoke to Brown first. It had been just over two weeks and all of the images collected from the week of observing had not yet reached his desk at Caltech. “I’m depressed,” he said. “I’m in my we’re-not-going-to-find-it mode.” If they don’t find it this time, Brown said, “It’s perfectly plausible that we’ve pointed in the right direction and we’ve missed it.”

Two more weeks passed, a new year arrived, and with it came their data. I asked if they found it but so far, Planet Nine has not made its big debut. They are just starting to sort through their data, though. There is still hope. The trip wasn’t exactly their last chance to find Planet Nine. They’ll return in February for another round of observing. If they don’t find it then? “We will just keep going,” Batygin told me, “and by ‘keep going’ what I mean is wait for LSST.” The LSST is the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which is being constructed in the Chilean desert. It will be fully operational in 2022; its mirror will be even larger than Subaru and will scan the skies every possible clear night. If Planet Nine is out there, this thing will find it. And at first, it will likely discover 100’s more long-period Kuiper Belt objects that will point the team to the direction of Planet Nine.

“There’s a 5 or 10 percent chance anytime you look you’ll miss it because there’s a star in the way,” said Brown, “but you know, it just means — increasingly when you don’t find it you have to wonder what the heck is really going on here. I don’t think the answer is that there is no Planet Nine, certainly the phenomena that Planet Nine does are not going away. I don’t think there’s any other solution aside from Planet Nine to explain those phenomena so the question is why are we potentially failing in our prediction of where it is?”

Batygin said that finding Planet Nine is so difficult that it is not just like searching for a needle in a haystack, it is like “you’re also looking for it with the lights off and a bunch of fog and your calculations tell you that there should be one more needle in this room somewhere.” Can the effort be worth it? According to Brown, yes. “This is like first-level exploration of our solar system. This is like, finding a new continent,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine that any effort that I could actually put in would be ridiculous if we can actually find this thing that’s in our solar system that nobody knows about.”

Batygin said, “It’s really easy to miss something when you’re scanning the sky once, it’s true when you’re looking for the One Thing. We may or may not find Planet Nine, and of course if we find it, great, if we don’t find it then it doesn’t really mean anything.”

‘Finding Planet Nine is the grandest exploration that can be done of the solar system right now. I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.’

If they do find their planet, our daily life will mostly remain the same. Sure, mobiles over children’s beds might have nine planets putting them into a peaceful sleep; science textbooks will have to be edited and books about our solar system rewritten. But after the hullabaloo of the news cycle and the introduction of a new planet to all of humankind, things will go back to normal. But for science and the field of astronomy, it will help complete a puzzle and make for many new ones as well. If Planet Nine exists, and if it is found, not only will it serve as a way to understand the bulk of exoplanets that have been discovered around other stars, but it will also help us understand the history of our own solar system; it will help us understand more of how the planets came to be and why they settled where they did. It will be one of the 21st century’s greatest scientific discoveries. We have no idea what a six-Earth mass planet looks like. Uranus and Neptune are 14 and 17 Earth masses; Mars is 10 times less massive than Earth. There is nothing in our solar system that size. Six Earth masses could essentially be a core of a planet like Uranus and Neptune, and if Planet Nine exists that is likely its story. The team thinks that during the early days of the solar system, when the outer planets were forming, there was an additional planetary core, near where Uranus and Neptune were growing. But somewhere in those early days, the third core somehow got flung out by a gravitational interaction with Jupiter or Saturn, and as it was heading out of the solar system, became trapped by the gravity of the sun. Since that time it has been orbiting in the distant solar system, silently sculpting Kuiper Belt objects, marking evidence of its existence. If these objects do in fact point to Planet Nine, it will have been quite the planetary smoke signal, one so unlikely to be found.

And they’re not the only ones who’ve been scooped when searching for something. In January 1613, while observing Jupiter and its moons, Galileo caught a glimpse of what he thought was a “fixed star.” He marked a dark spot in his notebook and moved on. He had unknowingly detected the light from Neptune. And just months before Le Verrier predicted its existence, an observatory in England detected it three separate times, noting it as a star. Batygin takes comfort in facts like these. “When there is one thing you’re looking for in the night sky — even the world’s best astronomer, which certainly Galileo was really good — you’re going to miss it the first twenty-five times,” he said.

Many in the scientific community are still skeptical of Planet Nine’s existence. Batygin understands their skepticism: “Our firm belief is that only crazy people propose planets beyond Neptune.” But he and Brown have now joined the ranks of those throughout history who have said, “But what about a giant planet!” Only this time, they mean it, and they have the math to back it up. Batygin, being the theorist that he is, feels that he has already proven its existence, the same way Le Verrier predicted Neptune’s. Sure Galle was lucky that he happened to be using the telescope at the exact right time and that D’Arrest had brought a star chart with him, but even if he hadn’t, someone, someday would have found Neptune. For Planet Nine, its discovery day awaits. Until that day comes, if it ever does, they will keep searching.

After the observing run was complete, I asked the pair if they ever felt that trying to find Planet Nine was ridiculous, that the whole notion of a giant missing planet and the efforts they have gone to to find it ever make them feel defeated. They both gave me roughly the same response: no. Their answer brought to mind the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus. He thought a lot about the myth of Sisyphus and plucked his unfortunate mythical backstory away from the root of his actions, the eternal task of pushing a boulder up a mountain only to watch it fall back down again. For Camus, he symbolized the despair that can come from making consistent efforts only to be disappointed again and again with the outcome. However he saw this phenomenon with humankind. We have an ability to feel joy and find happiness in our tasks before a reward of completion ever arrives, even if it never does. “The struggle itself… is enough to fill a man’s heart,” he wrote.

Despite their constant disappointment and exhaustion, both Brown and Batygin find joy in the process of the search, in the not-knowing, in the wondering, and maybe sometimes even the waiting. “Man’s sole greatness is to fight against what is beyond him,” Camus said. So why do we bother going to the tops of mountains anyway? To see whatever is below, to understand if we are safe down there? We do it to feel bigger. To feel smaller. To get a new perspective, to do it and say we did it. There are many reasons to make that journey, to see what it is like on the other side, to get to know ourselves better. No one climbs a mountain without searching for an answer to something. So many hero stories begin or end at the top of a mountain. It is an act of completion, a marker of accomplishment, a reminder that one is alive and despite the absurdity of it all we can get ourselves to the top of the sky. Or maybe the attempt to reach the summit is in itself, enough. Camus said for this reason that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

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Shannon Stirone Shannon Stirone is a freelance writer based in California focused on NASA, space policy, and space exploration. Her work has appeared in Popular Science, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

 

Editor: Kelly Stout

Fact checker: Matt Giles

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

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The Tale of Boozy Suzy and Her Hammer Fist

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Britni de la Cretaz | Longreads | January 2019 | 15 minutes (3,959 words)

In February 2006, Polly Esther answered a classified ad in NOW Magazine, Toronto’s alt-weekly. “The Pillow Fight League wants YOU,” the ad read. “Tryouts, Sat. February 18th. Ask for Suzanne.”

“I’m like, ‘Oh, this sounds interesting,’” Esther told me over the phone from her home in Toronto recently. “I literally have no idea why I looked in the back of the paper that day or why, for some reason, this spoke to me. I called and I asked a bit about it: ‘We’re gonna be this women’s fight league. It’s pillow fighting, but it’ll be a mix of boxing and wrestling and mixed martial arts as well.’”
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There Was Nothing We Could Have Done, Because We’re Racist and You’re Black

closeup of an adult white man's hands holding a stethescope
Photo by Alex Proimos via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Those of us who are Tressie McMillan Cottom fans — if you’re not, why not? — have been eagerly waiting for her new book, Thick: And Other Essays to arrive. It’s available now, and Time has also kindly published an excerpt. It’s a horrifying story, shared in the generous service of helping us all understand just how deeply our social and political organizations trade in stereotypes that prop up capitalist, racist systems.

After several days of labor pains that no one ever diagnosed, because the pain was in my butt and not my back, I could not hold off labor anymore. I was wheeled into a delivery operating room, where I slipped in and out of consciousness. At one point I awoke and screamed, “Motherfucker.” The nurse told me to watch my language. I begged for an epidural. After three eternities an anesthesiologist arrived. He glared at me and said that if I wasn’t quiet he would leave and I would not get any pain relief. Just as a contraction crested, the needle pierced my spine and I tried desperately to be still and quiet so he would not leave me there that way. Thirty seconds after the injection, I passed out before my head hit the pillow.

When I awoke I was pushing and then my daughter was here. She died shortly after her first breath. The nurse wheeled me out of the operating room to take me back to recovery. I held my baby the whole way, because apparently that is what is done. After making plans for how we would handle her remains, the nurse turned to me and said, “Just so you know, there was nothing we could have done, because you did not tell us you were in labor.”

(For more on Thick, take a look at Morgan Jenkins’ critical essay on the book and the ways it unpacks racist, exclusionary definitions of beauty.)

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Theatre of Wokeness

Illustration by Katie Kosma

Danielle A. Jackson | Longreads | January 2019 | 7 minutes (1,942 words)

There’s a certain kind of conversation everybody seems to be having right now. It takes place most often online, but sometimes in real life. Specifics vary, and its frequency and level of intensity ebbs and flows with the news cycle. An awards show, a White House firing, a video of police misconduct, a local ballot initiative on medical marijuana — anything tangentially related to race or gender can be fodder. It starts out engaging enough. Then tensions mount; participants morph into archetypes. Its substance diminishes into the reduced, neutered language of the “moment” before disintegrating altogether.

In a would-be map of this phenomenon, the first Women’s March, held the day after President Trump’s inauguration, is an inflection point. On November 9, 2016, Teresa Shook, a white former attorney living in Hawaii, created a Facebook event for “a women’s march” that quickly drew several thousand RSVPs. Shook quickly enlisted a small group of women to help with early planning. Organizers were frightened the incoming administration would “threaten access to women’s healthcare, erode protection against sexual violence and roll back aid to struggling mothers.” Shook felt “shock and disbelief that this type of sentiment could win,” she told Reuters. “We had to let people know that is not who we are.” Yet, Trump’s victory wouldn’t have happened without heavy support from white women in the electorate. Terms like “intersectionality” entered the mass media’s lexicon to help explain the difficulty inherent in assembling women into a voting bloc. Along with the election’s results, the terms proliferated in a major way via Instagram, hashtags, and memes.

The march’s founders and early organizers soon appointed a diverse cadre  of women to leadership, with assistance from activist and political connector Michael Skolnik. The organizers also made sure an anti-racism agenda was part of their framework. Pulled together in just a few short months, the March was a resounding success. The central protest, in Washington, drew an estimated half a million attendees (yielding more than a million rides on DC’s Metro, the second largest crowd in its history, after the first inauguration of Barack Obama). When counting the well-attended “sister marches” held around the country, “1 percent to 1.6 percent of the U.S. population” participated in a demonstration, reported the Washington Post.

It isn’t exaggerating to say people who weren’t before are now concerned about race and social justice. According to a CNN / Kaiser poll, 49% of Americans said racism is “a big problem” in 2015, up from just over a quarter who said so in 2011. Gender inequality, too, seems top of mind: A Pew Research Center survey from 2018 said about half of Americans think men getting away with sexual harassment or assault is “a major problem.”

Some say we’re living through “a moment,” that we’re “having a reckoning.” I have a hard time with those words — they’re soundbite-y, naïve, and incomplete, as if the “moment” is for people who hadn’t even had to think about inequality or dealt with it in any large or small way — being followed around a store, or subjected to different standards on a job, or denied an apartment for no obvious reason. And if that’s the case, how’s it different from any other moment? Does it hold up, withstand rigor, or is it a surface-level reckoning, concerned with optics and the appearance of social justice and equality?

The Women’s March’s leaders have had to answer such questions. Under charges of administrative mismanagement as well as anti-Semitism, due to its alleged negligence toward Jewish women and interactions with the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan, some leaders and sister groups have split off from the central organizing body. Last August, Black Women’s Blueprint, a Brooklyn-based organization focused on policy advocacy and grassroots organizing, wrote Women’s March, Inc. an open letter: “Rather than rubbing elbows and entreating known misogynist leaders… we charge you to meet us in the trenches.” Hastily organized and orchestrated in pursuit of an of-the-moment illusion of inclusion, or what I’ll call a “theatre of wokeness,” the Women’s March may be in danger of imploding. In November, the founder, Shook, called for all four co-chairs to step down, and over the past few weeks (leading up to the third march, taking place January 19), several former sponsors and partners walked away from the March, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, EMILY’s List, and the Democratic National Committee.

Along with institutional and personal reckonings, our “moment” has also birthed a category of creations and products that support, mirror, and mine it. Sitcom episodes, satirical bits, comedy specials, films, and music, and other performance art across and in between genres and mediums have attempted to mimic and explore our confusion, our dinner table banter, the rhythm of our outrage cycle, our anxieties, awakenings, and incipient healing. It’s a prolific time. The results, for me, have been mixed; sometimes, in an attempt to titillate or provoke, characterization, interiority, or reflection gets lost or weighed down in favor of an appropriate level of wokeness. Other times, I’ve questioned the motives of the creators, wondering if staying current and in tune with the “moment” is what it’s all about after all. More than anything I wonder what the whole point is of the reckoning. In our creative responses, are we, in some cases, reinscribing the same disappointments we’re trying to reconcile? Further, what comes after the problems get addressed? What happens if, when, and after a collective consciousness has been awakened?


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I had these and other questions watching Slave Play, a three-act satire that ran until January 13 at the New York Theater Workshop (I also heard whispers that it could be headed for Broadway). Director Robert O’Hara and playwright Jeremy O. Harris — a student at Yale’s School of Drama, and one of New York Times Style Magazine’s Black male writers of our time — imagines a world that, once fully revealed, looks very much like our own. Yet, we don’t know that at first. We see, instead, three interracial couples engaged in “slave play,” or sexual acts meant to simulate the race, gender, and class dynamics of antebellum America. Disorienting details hint that something is askew. The slave woman twerking on the floor to Rihanna while cleaning; the mistress twitchily summoning a tall, light-skinned fiddler to her bedside; the Black overseer crying frustrated tears through pleasure as his white indentured partner licks his boots. It titillates, it makes us (some of us, mostly the white folks) laugh. It, thankfully, ends quickly, giving way to a modern-day scene that sends up a certain kind of east coast, academic, therapeutic language, the language of our “moment,” to hilarious effect. It turns out the three interracial couples are all in therapy because the Black partners can no longer feel sexual pleasure in their respective relationships. And true to real life, the white partners (or those with closest proximity to whiteness) are emotive, externalized, and sometimes vocally annoyed, while the Black partners, for much of the time, simmer, stunned and silent.

All the actors play to some level of humiliation, but the Black woman in the therapeutic experiment, Kaneisha, played with a convincing prickliness by Teyonah Parris, seems to get especially short shrift: face down, she eats a busted cantaloupe off the floor in the first act, and by the third act, exorcises some trauma when her formerly petulant partner agrees to call her a “nasty negress” while they’re having sex. “Thank you for listening,” she says after the word play turns into several minutes of vigorous fucking.

The ending is an unsettling, confusing affair. I wasn’t sure if a rape had taken place or if it was, instead, a “breakthrough” achieved through consent. At any rate the labor of Parris, on whose character arc the entire show builds its human core, stayed heavy on my mind for days.

“I don’t want people to be able to walk away from a play about slavery and say, ‘Oh, well, that’s not about 2018,’” Slave Play’s playwright told an audience of donors, according to a Times profile. But who, exactly, doesn’t notice that the reverberations of slavery are still with us? If we’re really trying to wake up white people, I wish folks would say that. Slave Play’s Black cast members likely had to do heavier lifting — physically and psychically —  than the white (or white-ish) cast members in reimagining scenes drawn from America’s slave past. Do these interventions even work? And if they do, at what cost— to the audiences who may be harmed? To the cast and crew?

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The politics of pleasure are as ripe as any place to dig, for creative play, for exploration and elucidation, mapped as it is into the subconscious, and there’s a legacy of its exploration in the work of Frantz Fanon and Adrienne Kennedy, both apparently influences on Slave Play’s playwright. The goal is to unsettle, to probe, and I can get with that, up to a point. What about context[1], interiority, reflection within the fictive universe of a piece? Maybe more of that would have been helpful in constructing Kaneisha as more than a spectacle. She speaks a lot, especially in the third act, but mostly, her character is seen through the eyes of her partner, as she talks about herself in relation to him and other white people from her past.

Even a journalistic endeavor could be improved with an ethics of care. In the six-part docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly,” which aired January 3-5 on Lifetime (and is still available on demand), the drama of Kelly’s victims’ pain is the main event, drawn out  for the benefit of the collective consciousness. I was well-acquainted with the story, yet still not entirely prepared for the grotesque details I saw and heard.

The series has already brought what feels like a shift: a lawyer for one of the families accusing Kelly confirmed that senior investigators from Fulton County, Georgia interviewed his client. The state’s attorney in Cook County, Illinois has asked for victims to reach out. There have also been costs: survivors featured in the documentary have been doxxed, discredited, and disparaged online. I saw it in my own feeds, from people in my own family. I’ve seen Black women, unaffiliated with Kelly, report they’re “not ok” and had difficulty sleeping after watching or talking about the series. In the series, some survivors were visibly traumatized during their interviews. (Watching Asante McGee revist a room she recalled being held captive in reminded me of a question from In the Wake: “Where is the breaking point, the breath, the pause…?”) How, really, should you manage when confronted with the truth of just how vulnerable you are?[2] More context could help. The music industry has a history of sexually exploiting underage girls—critics Ann Powers and Nelson George explain this powerfully in the series— but so does, specifically, the tradition of Black music upon which Kelly built everything. He’s a hip-hop generation misogynist who learned from his peers and from soul music forebears like Marvin Gaye and Al Green and James Brown, all of whom have allegations from harmed women tainting their legacies. Black Gen X-ers didn’t handle R. Kelly before because their forebears didn’t handle their own.

In Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Heather Love writes, “For groups constituted by historical injury, the challenge is to engage with the past without being destroyed by it.” Audiences and creators ask a great deal of people when they’re digging into the past, probing around the depths of ancient and not-so-ancient traumas. If the moment requires that the confusion of the present and the pain of the past get served up with realistic viscerality — if it’s about more than being current, and more than just theatre — special care should be taken with the subject matter as well as the casts, sources, and audiences most likely to be impacted.  

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[1] On January 14, 2019, Jonathan Square of the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom published a syllabus to help with processing Slave Play.

[2] Girls for Gender Equity and Black Women’s Blueprint produced and published reading guides and community toolkits for “Surviving R. Kelly.”

Tommy Tomlinson: The Weight I Carry

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In a piece at The Atlantic adapted from his forthcoming book, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man’s Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America, Tommy Tomlinson shares the physical and emotional costs of weighing 460 lbs, the emotions that drive him to eat, and the uplifting litany of activities he looks forward to doing as he loses weight.

“Eat less and exercise.”

That’s what some of you are saying right now. That’s what some of you have said the whole time you’ve been reading. That’s what some of you say—maybe not out loud, but you say it—every time you see a fat person downing fried eggs in a diner, or overstuffing a bathing suit on the beach, or staring out from one of those good-lord-what-happened-to-her? stories in the gossip magazines.

“Eat less and exercise.”

What I want you to understand, more than anything else, is that telling a fat person “Eat less and exercise” is like telling a boxer “Don’t get hit.”

You act as if there’s not an opponent.

Losing weight is a fucking rock fight. The enemies come from all sides: The deluge of marketing telling us to eat worse and eat more. The culture that has turned food into one of the last acceptable vices. Our families and friends, who want us to share in their pleasure. Our own body chemistry, dragging us back to the table out of fear that we’ll starve.

On top of all that, some of us fight holes in our souls that a boxcar of donuts couldn’t fill.

My compulsion to eat comes from all those places. I’m almost never hungry in the physical sense. But I’m always craving an emotional high, the kind that comes from making love, or being in the crowd for great live music, or watching the sun come up over the ocean. And I’m always wanting something to counter the low, when I’m anxious about work or arguing with family or depressed for reasons I can’t understand.

There’s a boat I want the man inside me to put in a lake. Daddy’s johnboat lives in our backyard. It’s green aluminum and still has its Georgia registration number on the side. When I was a kid, we hauled a thousand catfish over the side of that boat. Daddy died in 1990, and the boat hasn’t been in the water since way before then. I’ve always been afraid that I’m so big, I’d tip it over. It needs a drain plug and a little love. But it’s still strong enough to hold a normal-sized man, and maybe his beautiful wife.

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