Search Results for: fuck

Lacy M. Johnson on Rejecting the Need to Be Liked

Getty Images

As a girl growing up, I recall a recurring storyline in my life: climbing trees, jumping my bike across well, anything, ripping the knees out of my pants, refusing the frilly dress, the curling iron or even the hairbrush and being told, “that’s not what nice girls do.” The only real concern was that my parents (meaning well) truly believed that reducing myself to someone who was likeable — polite, quiet, and of course appearance-conscious, meant success as a woman in the world. If only.

At Tin House, Lacy M. Johnson has a reckoning with likability — that ingrained need to compromise ourselves to meet the impossible standards others demand. She asks that we “make space for these stories of our failures, our ugliness, our unlikability, and greet them with love when they appear.”

After its release, a criticism waged against my memoir was that my “narrator” (which, spoilers, is me) isn’t likable, that I write things that make my readers uncomfortable and that I make choices with which my readers disagree. As if my most important job in finding language for a story that had none were to please. As if by labeling me unlikable, they don’t have to listen to the story I needed to tell. Raped women are unlikable, apparently. So are strong women. Women who survive. Ambitious women are unlikable, women who are good at their jobs, women who tell the truth. Women who don’t take shit are unlikable, women who burn bridges, women who know what they are worth.

Why shouldn’t women know their worth? Just because we’re not supposed to? Just because people don’t like it when we do? I know that I am good at lots of things — I am not good at singing (you’ll hear what I mean at karaoke tonight) but I know I write like a bad motherfucker. I am very funny in person. Also, I just ran a marathon. It wasn’t pretty or fast but I persisted and it is from small confidences like these that I draw courage to tell the truth, without regard for my likability.

As a woman, I have been raised to be nurturing, to care for others feelings’ and wellbeing often at the expense of my own. I have been taught that to be liked is to be good. But I have noticed that certain men are allowed to be any way they want. They get to be nuanced and complex. Adventurous and reclusive. They can say anything, do anything, disregard rules and social norms, break laws, commit treason, rob us blind, and nothing is held against them. A white man, in particular, can be an abuser, a rapist, a pedophile, a kidnapper of children, can commit genocide or do nothing notable or interesting at all and we are expected to hang on his every word as if it is a gift to the world. Likability doesn’t even enter the conversation. His writing doesn’t even have to be very good.

I am still talking about writing, though there is an uncanny resemblance to current events in the wider world. Let us consider, for example, our most recent presidential election. On the one hand, we had such a man as this: an unapologetically racist, sexist, homophobic, serial sexual assailant — a grifter, a con man — and on the other hand we had a woman many people didn’t like. That election cycle reminded us of all the words for an unlikable woman: she was a bitch, a cunt, a hag, a harpy, a twat, a criminal — she was unbearable, unelectable, unlikable.

Unlikable to whom? I’m saying women are told we are unlikable, but let’s be honest, this pressure isn’t exclusive to women, especially not just to white women. The world tells black women they are unlikable when they are angry, even though they have the most reason to be angry. I find it unlikable that more of us aren’t angry alongside them. The world tells black men they are unlikable when they are too confident, too intelligent, when they behave like kings, when they are not men but children who reach into their pockets or stand together on corners. People who have immigrated to this country are told they are unlikable when they “take American jobs”; they are just as unlikable when they do not work. They are unlikable when they cross the border in the desert under the cover of night and when they come through a checkpoint in the middle of the day. We put their stories in cages.

Read the essay

Marriage Proposal Follies

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Amy Deneson | Longreads | October 2018 | 16 minutes (4,022 words)

 

This will be the day

That you will hear me say

That I will never run away

– Prince, Diamonds and Pearls

 

On the day New York State legalized same-sex marriage, I proposed to my girlfriend in the New York Times Modern Love column. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The column’s editor, Daniel Jones, had emailed me to request an essay he’d previously rejected for being too political. He explained the paper was dedicating part of every section in the Sunday edition to Marriage Equality. “If it’s not already committed elsewhere, there isn’t much time.”

I accepted his retraction and, being a personal-is-political kind of lesbian, sent back a few additions to his notes and ended the revision with a marriage proposal.

“Are you sure?” Jones called. “This will be the column’s first.”

“I’m ready, if you are, Dan.”

He recommended I find a way share the piece with her before Thursday, when the digital edition went live. “You want her to be the first to know.”
Read more…

Living with Dolly Parton

Mark Humphrey / AP, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jessica Wilkerson | Longreads | October 2018 | 43 minutes (7,851 words)

Dolly Parton was one of two women I learned to admire growing up in East Tennessee. The other was Pat Summitt, head coach of the Lady Volunteers, the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team. One flamboyantly female, the other a masculine woman. Both were arguably the best at what they did, had fantastic origins stories of hardscrabble lives in rural Tennessee, and told us that with enough grit and determination, we could succeed. Queer kids and nerdy girls, effeminate boys and boyish girls who desired something more than home took comfort in their boundary crossing. From these women they learned that they too could strike out on their own while maintaining both their authenticity and ties to home.

For years, I found solace in “Wildflowers,” written by Parton and performed with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris on their record Trio. The song’s instrumentation is spare, with the tinny chords of the autoharp and Ronstadt and Harris’s harmonies. In a near warble, Dolly sang of a “rambling rose” who didn’t “regret the path” she chose.

I moved away from home in ways more profound than the physical leaving, and it sometimes caused me to feel the pain of committing a betrayal. My grandmother Laverne warned me: “Don’t forget where you come from.”

Read more…

Greens

Author photo courtesy Simon & Schuster, Scribner / Simon & Schuster

Kiese Laymon | Excerpt adapted from Heavy: An American Memoir | Scribner | October 2018 | 20 minutes (4,158 words)

You were in Grandmama’s living room delicately placing a blinking black angel with a fluorescent mink coat on top of her Christmas tree while Uncle Jimmy and I were examining each other’s bodies in a one-bedroom apartment in Bloomington, Indiana. I was in my final year of graduate school. Uncle Jimmy and I were having a contest to see who could make their forearms veinier. “Shit, sport,” Uncle Jimmy said as he hugged me. “You eating a lot of spinach in grad school or what? You look like you training for the league.”

I was twenty-six years old, 183 pounds. My body fat was 8 percent.

Uncle Jimmy was six-three and so skinny that his eyes, which were nearly always yolk yellow, looked like they wanted to pop out of his head. He wore the same Chicago Bears sweatshirt, same gray church slacks, same church shoes he wore when he was forty pounds heavier.

When I asked him if anything was wrong, Uncle Jimmy said, “This blood pressure medicine the doctor got me on, it make it hard for a nigga to keep weight on. That’s all. Is it okay for me to say ‘nigga’ around you now? I know you’re a professor like your mama and shit now.”

I told Uncle Jimmy I was a graduate instructor and a graduate student. “That’s a long way from a professor. I think I wanna teach high school. But regardless, you can always say ‘nigga’ and any other word you want around me. I’m not my mama.”

On the way to Mississippi, we stopped at gas station after gas station. Uncle Jimmy went to the bathroom for ten minutes each time. I cranked up Aquemini and did push-ups and jumping jacks outside the van while he did whatever he needed to do. He eventually came back with pints of butter pecan ice cream and big bags of Lay’s Salt & Vinegar.

“Want some, nephew?” he asked.

“Naw,” I said over and over again. “I’m good.”

“You good?”

“I’m good,” I told him. I didn’t tell him I was running eleven miles, playing two hours of ball, and eating eight hundred calories a day. I didn’t tell him I gleefully passed out the previous week in the checkout line at Kroger. I didn’t tell him a cashier named Laurie asked if I was “diabetic or a dope fiend” when I woke up. I didn’t tell him the skinnier my body got, the more it knew what was going to happen, just as much as it remembered where it had been.

Uncle Jimmy looked at me, with Lay’s Salt & Vinegar grease all over his mouth, like my nose was a fitted hat. “Let me find out you went from fucking a white girl to eating like a white girl.”

“I just love losing weight,” I told him. “That’s really all it is. I just love losing weight.”

“You just love losing weight?” Uncle Jimmy was dying laughing. “My nephew went to grad school and now he turning into a white girl. You just love losing weight? That’s damn near the craziest shit I heard in thirty years, Kie. Who say shit like that? You just love losing weight?”

Somewhere around Little Rock, Arkansas, we stopped at a truck stop. Uncle Jimmy started telling me a story about one of his friends he worked with at the Caterpillar plant. He said he and this friend served the same tour in Vietnam and had been to Alcoholics Anonymous three times each.

“So yeah, he always talking big about all the Martell he drank over the weekend and all the pussy he be getting,” Uncle Jimmy said. “Always talking about how the white man’ll do anything to keep a nigga down. And he start talking about spoiled-ass Bush. I told him we been known there ain’t nothing the white man won’t do. He said he agreed. But soon as the white boss man come around, this nigga tuck his head into his shoulders like a gotdamn turtle. Steady grinning and jiving them white folk to death.”

I asked Uncle Jimmy why his friend acted one way around him and another way around the white boss man. “Shit,” he said, nervously tapping his foot under the table, “you know how some niggas are, addicted to giving the white man whatever he want whenever he want it. Not me, though. You know that.”

Uncle Jimmy was right. I’d spent the last four years of my life reading and creating art invested in who we were, what we knew, how we remembered, and what we imagined when white folk weren’t around. For me, that vision had everything to do with Grandmama’s porch. Every time I sat down to write, I imagined sitting on that porch with layers of black Mississippi in front of and behind me.

While Uncle Jimmy was in the bathroom, I called Grandmama on the pay phone to let her know we were going to be home later than we expected.

You picked up.

“Hey,” I said. “What y’all doing?”

“Hey, Kie, we’re on our way to the hospital. Tell Jimmy to meet us there. Is he drunk?”

“Naw,” I said. “He’s not drunk. He’s in the bathroom right now. Is Grandmama okay?”

You told me Grandmama had fallen asleep in her chair after complaining of dizziness. When you went to take her wig off, you saw blood on the inside of the wig. You told me you looked at the back of Grandmama’s head and saw this infected hole oozing with puss.

“Please don’t tell Jimmy,” you said. “If he gets even a little stressed, he’ll start drinking like a dolphin.”

“I don’t think dolphins drink, though.”

“Just bring your ass directly to the hospital, Kie.”

When Uncle Jimmy finally made it back to the car, he was flying on something more than Hennessy or weed. He handed me a Black Ice air freshener he bought and told me to make the world smell this good. When I asked him what he meant, he said, “Drive this van, nephew. Drive this shit. Make the world smell this good.” Uncle Jimmy could barely open his eyes or close his mouth. “Don’t use the brakes like you did last time, nephew. Drive this shit all the way home.”

‘Please don’t tell Jimmy,’ you said. ‘If he gets even a little stressed, he’ll start drinking like a dolphin.’

* * *

I’d heard Grandmama whimper over the loss of her best friend and her sisters. I’d heard Grandmama yell at Uncle Jimmy for daring to disrespect her in her house. I’d never heard Grandmama scream while begging the Lord to have mercy on her until that night in the hospital.

Uncle Jimmy wasn’t as high anymore. He and HaLester Myers, Grandmama’s new husband, were sitting in the waiting room, avoiding each other’s eyes, watching news about Bush and the Supreme Court. You, Aunt Linda, and Aunt Sue were down the hall talking shit about Uncle Jimmy. You blamed whatever he was going through on what he saw and did in Vietnam. Aunt Linda blamed alcohol. Aunt Sue blamed all of us for not praying for him more.

I walked away from y’all and went to Grandmama’s room.

With one hand in the pockets of my mesh shorts, and one hand holding hers, I told Grandmama it was going to be okay. Grandmama said she had faith in the white doctor who was taking care of her. She kept calling him “the white-man doctor,” though he was really a short, light-complexioned black man with a dry, red Afro.

“The white-man doctor got my best interest at heart,” she said. “Grandmama will be fine directly.”

The black doctor with the dry red Afro asked me to leave the room because they had to do a small procedure. He said the infection was deeper than he thought. It started in the middle of her head and went down the back of her neck. “We’re gonna help her with this pain,” he told me. “The infection is seeping into her bloodstream.”

I walked out of the room but he didn’t close the door behind me. “Lord Jesus,” Grandmama kept saying before she screamed. “Please have mercy. Please have mercy.” I knew, but didn’t want to admit, why Grandmama was screaming, why the black doctor with the dry red Afro didn’t give her enough anesthetic, why he thought cutting a full inch and a half deep into the back of her scalp was for her own good.

Folk always assumed black women would recover but never really cared if black women recovered. I knew Grandmama would act like she recovered before thanking Jesus for keeping her alive. She would never publicly reckon with damage done to her insides and outsides at the hands of people who claimed to have her best interest at heart. She would just thank Jesus for getting through the other side of suffering. Thanking Jesus for getting us through situations we should have never been in was one of our family’s superpowers.

I spent the night in the room sitting in a chair next to Grandmama’s bed and holding her hand. Grandmama didn’t say a word. She just looked out the window of the room, with her cheek pressed into the thin mattress until the sun came up.

The next morning, after I went for an early morning jog, Uncle Jimmy walked into Grandmama’s room. “These folk got me looking like a mummy, Jimmy Earl,” Grandmama said, before hugging Uncle Jimmy’s neck and talking about how skinny we’d both gotten since the last time she’d seen us. I told her she needed to do a better job of taking care of herself.

“You need to mind your business, Kie,” she said, “and don’t lose no more weight or your head liable to bop on down the road.”

“How can a head bop down a road, Grandmama?”

“You know what I mean, Kie,” she said, laughing at herself before directing her attention to Uncle Jimmy. “Why you ain’t eating, Jimmy Earl? You hear me?”

Grandmama looked at Uncle Jimmy and me standing side by side. She kept blinking her eyes in slow motion. The slow blinking was even worse than the eye twitching. Everyone in the family knew the slow blinking meant Grandmama was double disgusted with whatever she was looking at.

“I’m eating, Mama,” Uncle Jimmy said all of a sudden.

“What you eating, Jimmy Earl?”

Uncle Jimmy looked at me. “Gizzards,” he said. “Lots of spinach, too. All the spinach and gizzards I can eat.”

“Boy, you ain’t seen a leaf of no spinach. Why you ain’t eating, Jimmy Earl? Don’t get to lying off in this hospital.”

“I ate spinach the whole trip down,” Uncle Jimmy told Grandmama, while looking at me. “The whole trip down. Didn’t I eat spinach, Kie?”

Grandmama’s slow-blinking eyes dared me to lie so I kept my mouth shut and nodded up and down until I said, “Grandmama, what you think of Bush and them stealing that election?”

“Ain’t nothing the white man is too shamed to do, except do right by us. And it’s always some ol’ big-head black man who should know better trying to help the white man harm us.”

“Talking about Clarence Thomas?”

“Yeah, that ol’ big-head man know good and well these folk been stealing everything from us that ain’t nailed down since before I was born. I knew that man wasn’t right from when he sat on TV talking about a high-tech lynching when he got caught harassing that black woman. What her name is, Kie?”

“Anita Hill.”

“Right. Right. Anita Hill. All the education you got and you surprised they stole that election?” Grandmama asked me. “All that schooling, and you didn’t know what they was planning with all that gerrymandering? Kie, did Jimmy Earl eat spinach when y’all drove up here?”

I got up, stretched my calves, and weighed myself on the scale beside Grandmama’s bed. “I slept most of the way down here, but maybe,” I told her, and walked out of the room so Uncle Jimmy could tell all the lies he wanted to with no shame.

Stepping on the scale in Grandmama’s hospital room was the first time I’d stepped on a scale since leaving Indiana. The scale on the bottom floor of the gym at Indiana was the sleekest, sturdiest, most precise scale I’d ever stepped on. If I weighed myself, then took just a half sip of water or spit a few times, I could see a change in my weight. I weighed myself in the bottom of that gym before and after every workout, before and after every meal. I also got a tape measure to measure my waist every morning when I woke up. I came to Indiana with a thirty-three-inch waist and I managed to get it down to twenty-eight inches in two and a half years. Twenty- eight inches was good, and it was so far from forty- eight inches at my heaviest, but I knew I could get my waist even smaller if I worked harder.

If I weighed myself, then took just a half sip of water or spit a few times, I could see a change in my weight. I weighed myself in the bottom of that gym before and after every workout, before and after every meal. I also got a tape measure to measure my waist every morning when I woke up.

* * *

Grandmama was released from the hospital three days later. When I got to her house late Saturday night, Grandmama, Aunt Sue, Aunt Linda, and you were sitting around the TV watching The Color Purple in silence. Every time y’all watched it, it seemed like the first time. Y’all didn’t cry. Y’all didn’t move. Y’all just breathed deeply and made sure part of your body was touching the body of the woman next to you.

After the movie, while everyone in the living room was talking about how no good Clarence Thomas was for helping George Bush steal the election, you asked Aunt Linda and me if we wanted to go to the casino in Philadelphia. Aunt Linda, who lived in Vegas, swore that the Mississippi casinos were too country to hit, but she loved how reverential folk in those country casinos were to her.

“Vegas, honey,” she loved to say when folk asked about her elaborate wigs and her two-inch fingernails layered in ruby-red nail polish and studded diamonds. “I’m from Vegas, honey.”

I went in the bathroom to weigh myself before getting in the car, but Grandmama’s scale was gone.

Aunt Linda talked from Forest to Philadelphia about this video poker game and what she’d have to hit to get off the machine. When Aunt Linda asked you how much you’d have to hit, you didn’t answer her question.

The Golden Moon Casino in Philadelphia, Mississippi, was a windowless space of smoke, free alcohol, emergency lights, and ding-ding-dings. You didn’t have to play to hear the ding- ding-dings and see the emergency lights. I didn’t understand why anyone would put a dollar in a machine you’d probably lose when you could just watch folk, drink all you wanted, and listen to ding-ding-dings all night for free.

I sat in front of the machine across the casino floor from you, sipping diet pop, watching you spend every dollar you had in your pocket. I watched you rummage through your purse for enough quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies to take to the casino cage and get a few dollar bills. I watched you take those dollar bills and slide the money in the machine you were sitting at a few minutes earlier.

When you saw me watching you, I walked over and gave you the forty dollars Grandmama had given me for Christmas and the sixty dollars I had in my wallet. I watched you slide the five twenties in the same machine. In less than a minute, you walked over to Aunt Linda and sat next to her as she played. Neither one of you said a word. Aunt Linda eventually gave you what looked like another twenty and turned her back to you.

You went back to the same machine. When the money was gone, you looked over both shoulders and watched me watch you again. You walked over to me and asked if I brought my credit card. I told you I hadn’t had a credit card since somebody stole mine at Millsaps a few years ago.

“You need a credit card, Kie,” you said. “That’s how you build up your credit.”

I wanted to say so much, but we’d made it through Christmas without fighting and I didn’t know what I would do or feel if you slapped the taste out of my mouth after I’d given you my last money at a casino.

When we got home, you walked in Grandmama’s room, spread out across the foot of the bed, and told me to close the bedroom door.

“I don’t feel good, Ma,” you said to Grandmama.

“What you reckon it is?” Grandmama asked.

“Kie,” you said, “close the damn door.”

“Okay,” I said. “But why?”

“Because I said so, Kie. Just close the damn door.”

Grandmama looked at Uncle Jimmy and me standing side by side. She kept blinking her eyes in slow motion. The slow blinking was even worse than the eye twitching.


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up

Before I left for Indiana the next morning, Grandmama asked if I would go outside on the porch. Everyone else was either watching Tiger Woods beat white men in golf or they were in the kitchen assembling two-pound plates of food and slicing up German chocolate cake and sweet potato pie to take home. I sat in the same yellow peeling chair I sat in fifteen years earlier. I told Grandmama I couldn’t believe how full and green the woods looked when I was a kid. She told me no part of the world stops changing just because you leave it. “Why you tapping your foot like Jimmy Earl, Kie?”

I didn’t even notice I was tapping my toes on the porch.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I probably need to go for a run. I want you to take better care of yourself, Grandmama. For real. Don’t wait until the last minute if something is wrong with your body. And don’t try to fix your body if you know someone else can fix it better. You getting enough exercise?”

“You gone exercise crazy,” Grandmama said. “You lost all that little fat and now you trying to coach folk? The worst kinds of teachers be the teachers that teach other folk how to be like them. We all got ears. We all know when folk talking down to us. My whole life, I been exercising. You seen them big ol’ bags of cans in the backyard? I walk up and down this twice a day picking up cans to take to the can man. Them nice Mexican folk off in the trailer park next door, they brang me some of they cans after seeing me walk up and down this road. So I get my exercise. Worry about yourself.” I laughed off Grandmama’s comment. “Listen, Kie. Something in the milk ain’t clean. I want you to call your mama and Jimmy Earl more.”

“I talk to Mama every few days, Grandmama.”

“Well, talk every day then,” she said. “Twice a day. Call your uncle Jimmy Earl more, too.” I looked at Grandmama, who was now playing with the bandages wrapped around her head. “Do you hear me? It ain’t but about one or maybe two ways to get a blessing. But it’s a million ways to give a blessing away. And some folk, they be so good at giving away blessings. You give away your blessings enough, one day the Lord will up and take whatever blessing you need and leave you with nan blessing at all.”

“Nan blessing, Grandmama?” I asked, bent over laughing. “You need your own show.”

“Nan blessing, Kie. I’m telling you what I know. And I ain’t just talking about no money. I’m talking about anything the Lord seen fit to bless you with.”

“I hear you, Grandmama,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”

“What is it, Kie? I’m not trying to talk about nothing crazy out here on this porch now.”

“I hear everything you’re saying about blessings and talking to Mama. I’m just wondering what happened to your scale?”

“Lord have mercy,” Grandmama said, and started slow- blinking her eyes. “Sometimes I wonder if your bread is all the way done.”

“My bread is so done, Grandmama,” I told her. “I just really love losing weight.”

Grandmama’s eyes slowly and steadily blinked out on that porch that day.

On our way up to Indiana, I did not eat or drink. I had no way of knowing how much I weighed until I paid the dollar to weigh myself on the raggedy bathroom scale at a rest stop in Tennessee. According to the scale, I was 186 pounds, up two pounds from when I weighed myself at the hospital.

When we crossed the Arkansas state line, Uncle Jimmy stopped at a KFC and ordered some gizzards to go. A few miles down the road, we stopped at a grocery store that sold hot food. Uncle Jimmy told me to wait in the van. He came out with nothing and headed to another grocery store that served hot food. This time, he came out with two beige Styrofoam containers filled with greens and corn bread. He was trying to right his wrong.

“Want some, nephew?”

“Naw,” I told him. “I’m good.”

Uncle Jimmy sat in the parking lot of that grocery store eating what must have been a pound of greens and corn bread. When he was done with both containers, he told me Grandmama complained to the rest of the family that I’d been in school long enough. According to Uncle Jimmy, Grandmama said it was time for me to get a real job so I could help the family with money. Uncle Jimmy lied a lot, but I knew it was Grandmama’s style to tell the truth about whoever wasn’t in the room.

I told Uncle Jimmy I made about twelve thousand dollars a year at Indiana. After paying my rent and my bills, I had about two hundred and twenty dollars left every month. A hundred went to the student loans from Millsaps I defaulted on when you left all the notices in the mailbox. Forty went to Grandmama. Twenty went to savings. Sixty went to food.

“Mama said she want you to get a real job,” he said again. “So you should go ahead and get on that directly. Make some real money.”

I decided in Uncle Jimmy’s van that instead of working toward my PhD, I’d take my MFA and apply for a fellowship that placed grad students of color in liberal arts colleges to teach for two years. If I could get the fellowship, I’d revise the books I was working on while teaching, then I’d try to sell them and get a decent paying job somewhere else.

When Uncle Jimmy dropped me off, he didn’t hug my neck. He didn’t dap me up. He thanked me for not telling on him and told me he’d see me next year.

“Sometimes I wonder if maybe we could talk on the phone?” I asked him from outside the van.

Uncle Jimmy took off without responding to my question. I didn’t know exactly what Uncle Jimmy was putting in his body during our trip down to Mississippi. I knew on our trip back up to Indiana he’d eaten more greens than I’d ever seen a human eat in one sitting. After he dropped me off, I knew he was going to get back to flying and crashing because flying and crashing were what people in our family did when we were alone, ashamed, and scared to death.

After jogging up the stairs to my apartment, I got on my knees and thanked God I wasn’t flying and crashing like Uncle Jimmy, or crying and scratching crusted scabs out of my head like Grandmama, or moping and regretting all the money I lost in a casino like you. I rubbed my palms up and down my abs, searching for new muscles. I ran my fingers over my pecs, flexed both to see which one was more defined. I slid my hands into the gap between my hard thighs and squeezed as hard as I could. I traced the veins in my calves down to my ankles and back up behind my knees. Whenever I looked at myself in the mirror, I still saw a 319-pound fat black boy from Jackson. When I touched myself or saw how much I weighed or my percentage of body fat, I knew I’d created a body. I knew I’d made a body disappear.

I got off my knees and asked God to help y’all confront the memories you were running from. I asked God to help all of y’all lose your weight. I planned to do everything I could not to give my blessings away and provide for y’all. The first thing I had to do was sprint down to the gym before it closed. I wanted to know exactly how much I weighed so I could decide if it was okay for me to eat or drink before going to bed.

* * *

From Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon. Copyright © 2018 by Kiese Laymon. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

* * *

Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Kiese Laymon, Ottilie Schillig Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi, is the author of the novel Long Division and a collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. He is also the author of the memoir Heavy.

‘As a Grown Woman, I Still Have To Continuously Learn To Say No’

MirageC / Getty Images

Wei Tchou | Longreads | October 2018 | 14 minutes (3,646 words)

We’re certainly living in a time of revolution. I feel a great deal of wonder when I reflect on the fact that we’ve witnessed our society’s cultural norms regarding sexual assault and consent shift in real time, on the most public of stages: Washington, Hollywood. Yet I’m perhaps less attuned to the shifts happening within myself, in light of the national conversation. I know that I conceive of my own consent and agency more intentionally now, from day to day. But where I most often notice this evolution is in the way I think about my past — it’s as if many of my memories have been entirely rewritten.

I was thinking of all of this as I read Tanya Marquardt’s Stray: Memoir of a Runaway. In the book, Marquardt writes about escaping her dysfunctional home at age sixteen and finding community within the early-nineties underground goth scene in Vancouver, British Columbia. The book is haunting and spare, and wrestles with the nuances of one’s agency, in the face of cyclical abuse. Marquardt is an award-winning performer and playwright. Her play Transmission was published in the Canadian Theatre Review, and she has published personal essays in HuffPost UK and Medium.

We became friends, back in 2011, while we we both attending the M.F.A program at Hunter College, and we sat down recently to speak about the art of crafting memory into literature, the ongoing stigma against personal writing, and the ways in which the cultural conversation surrounding consent affected the writing of her book, among other topics. Read more…

Queens of Infamy: The Reign of Catherine de’ Medici

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | October 2018 | 26 minutes (6,557 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on badass world-historical women of centuries past.

* * *

Looking for a Queens of Infamy t-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.

When we last left the Serpent Queen, things were looking dire. She had been married to Henri, the heir to the French throne, for nearly five years. Although the Dauphin and Dauphine were both young and healthy, Catherine was failing in her most fundamental duty: providing the country with an heir. Rumors had spread throughout the court that she was incapable of conceiving. Since her husband’s only living brother was unmarried and childless, the entire fate of the Valois dynasty rested on Catherine’s ability to produce a child.

Faced with a rival noble faction, the Guises, who wanted to replace the apparently barren queen-to-be with one of their own, Catherine had thrown aside her pride and made a risky preemptive strike. Swooning pathetically at Francis I’s feet, the young woman tearfully begged the king to go ahead and replace her, saying that she loved Henri beyond measure and just wanted him to have a wife who could give him heirs. Catherine asked only that she be allowed to stay in France and humbly serve her beloved’s new bride.

It was a risky move, but Catherine had banked on the fact that the aging king couldn’t bear to see a young woman crying. Francis, nearly in tears himself, declared that it was God’s will that Catherine be the Dauphin’s wife. The question of replacing the Dauphine was resolved, for now.

But Catherine knew that this amnesty was only temporary; just across the English channel, Henry VIII was ditching his wives all over the place for not giving him a son. How long would it be before the Valois family decided to follow suit?

Read more…

Charting the Love — and Betrayal — in Our Stars

Illustration by Helen Li

Cherise Morris | Longreads | October 2018 | 22 minutes (4,598 words)

 

“What’s the first word that comes to mind when you think of ‘love’”? I asked you this question four months into our relationship, while writing an essay about love for a contest I never entered.

This was long before we exchanged the L-word, back when the winter’s cold gave us short days and long nights spent with no one but each other.

“Uh, can we come back to that one? Gimme some more options first.”

So, we did a quick word association activity. I stated words and you responded with the first thing each brought to mind.

I said, “water.”

You said, “me.”

“Tree.” “Life.”

“Windows.” “Light.”

“Ground.” “Floor.”

I said, “air.”

And you said, “love.”

Then, with the smile of a fox you replied, “Ah, I see what you did there.”

 

***

I was born in the image of my mother with broken teeth and a half-broken heart to match; air gave birth to air. My mother is an Aquarius, and I, a Libra — both “air signs” — and perhaps that’s why we’ve always gotten along.

I watched her, full-hearted and lonesome my entire childhood and adolescence, longing to be consumed by a certain kind of fairytale love. A love which never lies to you, never takes you for granted, never hurts or harms. But if I know anything to be true, it is that the perfection of fairytales is a grandiose illusion, which is why we love them so. Little girls are taught to long for the fairytale love stories of princesses far more than the bittersweet kind that grow us into goddesses.

According modern western astrology, Libra is the cardinal air sign of the zodiac, ruled by Venus, the planet named for the Roman goddess of love, which governs the ways Libras seek and build relationships. We value affirmation, aesthetics and the rosier side of justice above all else. At all costs we seek to avoid the topsy-turvy shakiness of conflict and anything less than perfect equilibrium, while often settling for pseudo-perfect if it will keep the boat from rocking for a while. Those living under the sign represented by the cosmic scales are obsessed with the romance of keeping up appearances, and thus, are predisposed to a sometimes-never-ending quest for alignment and acceptance through partnerships. They exalt a fabled euphoria, a dream of being made to feel weightless by the love of another. But if I know anything to be true, it is that love, despite its intangibility, is the weightiest of matters.

Although, one’s approach to love and relationships can’t be simply boiled down to the properties associated with one’s sun sign. Astrology is more complex than that. But back when I started to live this story, I did not yet have a nuanced understanding of the workings of the cosmos. I fell into the predictability of the Libran archetype, wanting to fall in love only to feel what it was like to be loved.

Read more…

Women Are Really, Really Mad Right Now

Simon and Schuster

Hope Reese | Longreads | October 2018 | 14 minutes (3,838 words)

 

“Women’s anger is not taken seriously,” author, journalist, and political commentator Rebecca Traister told me. “It’s not taken seriously as politically valid expression.”

That’s a major oversight, Traister argues in her new book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. Women’s anger has the power to spark major social and political movements; it’s an essential ingredient for democracy. In Good and Mad, both a political history and critical reflection, Traister chronicles women’s anger and shows the ways in which it’s been downplayed, stifled, and underestimated — from the anger of suffragettes to the achievements of activists like Florynce Kennedy, Rosa Parks, and Shirley Chisholm, to the groundswell of anger that erupted in 2017 with the #MeToo movement. Traister, a writer-at-large for New York magazine and contributing editor at Elle, has devoted a large part of her career to writing about women in politics, spending years covering Hillary Clinton, authoring All the Single Ladies in 2009 — a deep dive into the sociological significance of the rising number of unmarried women — and most recently covering women’s anger in our current political moment, like the response to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for Supreme Court Justice. Read more…

The Art of the Pan

If you’re looking for a diversion from the never ending political sh*t show in America, I highly recommend English Patient Twitter, where just about everyone in media is talking about Sarah Miller’s Popula essay about her struggle in 1996 to get away with panning “The English Patient” for an alt weekly paper.

Even before seeing that “racist, boring, laughable, pseudo-intellectual movie,” she knew she’d pan it. Her perspective on popular movies often ran counter to the mainstream — more bluntly put, she didn’t like most movies. But it wasn’t just a pose; she came by her negative criticism honestly, and made salient, compelling arguments for it.

This was a movie about good looking mostly white people talking complete rubbish to each other, the end. But it was based on a LITERARY NOVEL with LONG SENTENCES using BIG WORDS. It had RESPECTED ACTORS. PEOPLE DIED in it. Also, WORLD WAR II WAS THERE. Everyone had agreed to care about this thing, to call it good, to give it nine Academy Awards. But it was just a piece of shit sprinkled with glitter that everyone, including me, agreed to call gold.

But Miller wasn’t the only person at the time to lampoon the drama — Seinfeld‘s ‘The English Patient’ episode, which drew more than 31 million viewers when it aired in 1997, centers on Elaine’s hatred of the film:

Still, Miller’s editor considered her opinion of the Anthony Minghella screen adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s novel to be scandalous.

My review of The English Patient was not really a review. I began by extensively praising Kristin Scott Thomas’s hair, and used this as a way to transition into discussing the other good things about the film. One was the chance to see Naveen Andrews, who I had liked so much in The Buddha of Suburbia, which I spent a paragraph praising, and which, I stressed, had a good story and was actually about something—unlike The English Patient, which was about British people fucking in their colonies, and not nearly often enough to be any fun. I recounted the moment when Fiennes stuck his livery tongue into the alabaster hollow of Scott Thomas’s throat, and Sam and I cried out in unison, “Ewwww.”

It was the best thing I’d ever written.

I pretended to read the paper as Jennifer read my review. I waited for her to start giggling and making appreciative sounds. But she was silent. When she finally turned to speak to me her face was white. She said, “Sarah, we cannot print this review.”

“But the movie was really, really, bad,” I said. “I mean seriously, it was the worst.”

“That is not the consensus from people I know who are smart,” she said. She was pretty mad.

“I swear to God that no one could possibly like this movie,” I said. “I mean, anyone who likes this movie is an idiot.”

Fearing it would threaten her future freelance work with the paper, Miller re-wrote the piece, dishonestly she says — in such a way that, “I didn’t go so far as to say that the movie was great, but I know that overall I ended up recommending it.”

Now, 22 years later, there are those on Twitter who view the essay as scandalous — calling it smug and flagrantly contrarian. But there seem to be more in favor of it, who appreciate Miller’s brutal honesty, and her irreverence toward the Serious Film establishment.

Read the story

Character Work

Illustration by Ellice Weaver

Alison Fields | Longreads | October 2018 | 14 minutes (3,214 words)

My dad moved out of the house on January 1, 1990. He’d packed up his cartons of books, records, and stacks of old issues of the New Yorker from the shelves built specifically to house them. This left his study, my favorite room in the house, vacant. I’d largely accepted my parents’ separation and forthcoming divorce. I wasn’t Haley Mills. I had neither a twin nor a plan to get them back together. I don’t remember exactly how I managed his departure, except the first night he was gone — really gone — I lay in bed reading Anne Rice novels and listening to the Beatles on my Walkman, thinking my mother’s claims of “Nothing will change, everything will be the same, and we’ll be all right” had a fine whiff of bullshit about them.

Dad’s apartment was on the second story of a recently renovated building in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, full of other divorced parents and distracted weekend children. When the custodial schedule put me there, I spent a lot of time wandering our then-empty downtown. I might have stumbled into the sort of trouble that would have made me cooler in high school. But like most red-blooded American teenagers, I was really into Latin and architecture and Renaissance politics, so I spent a lot of time at the Basilica. There I pined after rosaries as jewelry, accidentally stole candles, and visited with the priest. He was a good-natured and quiet man, who perhaps recognized that even pious adolescents don’t spend whole Saturdays alone wandering around a drafty church if they’re even remotely happy. I’m sure I needed answers to a lot of the Big Metaphysical Questions life had served up the past few months, but mostly we talked about the Grand Central Oyster Bar and why my nascent atheism would be a real barrier to entry if I ever wanted to convert to Catholicism.

One Saturday, Dad took my younger sister on one of those guilt-fueled, divorced-parent shopping benders. When she returned, flush with toys, new stereo equipment, and a pair of hamsters, Dad handed me a blank check to take to the public library and pay my king’s ransom in overdue fees. I filled it out at the circulation desk under the twitching eye of the upstairs librarian. On the way out the door, I caught a glance of a yellow flyer that read AUDITIONS TODAY: YOUTH THEATER COMPANY SEEKS YOUNG ACTORS. Finally, I thought, a reason not to find God.

I might have stumbled into the sort of trouble that would have made me cooler in high school. But like most red-blooded American teenagers, I was really into Latin and architecture and Renaissance politics, so I spent a lot of time at the Basilica.

I hadn’t curled my hair, put on lip gloss, nor prepared a song from Les Miserables that was hopelessly out of my vocal range and life experience. But I needn’t have worried; I made the company in about 30 seconds. I was flattered and impressed with myself. I didn’t even have to act. They could just see the talent emanating right off of me. The director said she’d see me at orientation the next week at the theater — your new home away from home! Afterward, I stood on the sidewalk across from Dad’s apartment building, January sleet silvering down on me, and glanced up at the basilica. I thought, That poor priest is going to have to find someone else to talk to.

My mother took me to the information session. Unlike my father, who’d met news of my professional theater career with a “Great job, bud” and a nod back to the golf game, Mom found the whole turning your kids into professional actors pitch suspicious at best. I couldn’t figure out what her problem was. Sure, the audition process was unconventional. The theater, in name only, was a filthy warehouse filled with giant spiders and dingy whitewashed brick, with ancient wooden floors so bowed and worn you could pass notes through the cracks to the cellar. The next production was “an Irish play, you know, for St. Paddy’s Day” that had yet to be written seven weeks out from opening. My fellow young thespians were mostly the homeschooled children of hippie parents, and a handful of tough girls with skinhead boyfriends, lipstick the color of bruises, and pack-a-day smoking habits at 13. My closest peer was coincidentally the daughter of my father’s divorce attorney. I couldn’t exactly figure out what she was doing there, but I was glad she was around. Driving me down the derelict alley to rehearsal the first time, my mother was alarmed at the scruffy day-drunks relieving themselves against the wall across the street. I thought it was bohemian, you know, kind of punk rock. Though I would never have said that aloud because the tough girls would have punched me in the arm and called me a poser.

Mom thought it was possible the owners were running some kind of elaborate con. I was sure I was not being conned. “I mean, they haven’t asked me for a dime,” I said. “Yeah, well, they’re charging me several thousand dimes for you to be involved in all this,” she replied. I felt kind of guilty about that, but I also knew that because of the weirdness of the divorce she probably wouldn’t say no.
Read more…