Search Results for: marriage

Stripped: The Search for Human Rights in US Women’s Prisons

Illustration by Wenjia Tang

Adam Skolnick | Longreads | September 2018 | 36 minutes (9,904 words)

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

“God’s mercies are infinite. They are new every morning.”
— Lamentations 3:23

Though its pews were packed, the courtroom was silent as a sanctuary. Most onlookers who filed into Pierce County Superior Court in Tacoma, Washington, on January 25, 2013, were residents of nearby Gig Harbor, a community shaken by a shocking crime, here for the final act: the sentencing.

In the front row, Kay Nelson watched nervously as her sister, Karen Lofgren, the defendant, prepared to make her final statement. The sisters lived two streets apart. Nelson’s children were like older siblings to Lofgren’s two daughters, who were just 6 and 9 years old. Conservative and Christian, Nelson had always been an advocate for tougher crime laws, and until her sister landed in Lady Justice’s crosshairs, she could have never fathomed praying for a judge in criminal court to show mercy on her behalf.

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Vanishing Twins

Compassionate Eye Foundation / Andrew Olney / OJO Images Ltd

Leah Dieterich | Vanishing Twins | Soft Skull | September 2018 | 21 minutes (4,145 words)

One-eighth of all natural pregnancies begin as twins, the book said, but early in pregnancy, one twin becomes less viable and is compressed against the wall of the uterus or absorbed by the other twin.

Of course, I thought. I lost my twin.

This was after I’d read all the other books. The books about sexuality. The books about marriage. The books about love. None of them comforted me like this book did.

The story followed a pair of identical twins who were struggling to grow up without growing apart. My husband and I were struggling with that too.

I read it in one day, in every room of the house, on my stomach, on my back, on my bed, in the yard. I didn’t worry about the ants scaling my thigh, or the black widows living under the outdoor furniture.

One-eighth. I tell people this statistic when I tell them I’m writing about my search for the twin I never had. The number makes me seem less crazy.

“Suspicion is a philosophy of hope,” Adam Phillips says in Monogamy. “It makes us believe that there is something to know and something worth knowing. It makes us believe there is something rather than nothing.” He’s referring to the suspicion that one’s partner is having an affair, but the same holds true for the existence of my twin.

I’ve always preferred being in the company of one other person to being in a group. I’d thought this meant I was antisocial, but maybe it’s a desire to return to the relationship I had with another person in the womb. That pre-person—my little mirror ball of cells.

 

Maybe my twin would have danced ballet too. I stopped when I was eighteen. Maybe my twin would have kept going.

Because of ballet, I spent a lot of time looking at my reflection. In class, we crowded each other to dance in front of the skinny mirror, the single panel in the wall of mirrors that inexplicably elongated the images of our bodies. The teacher tried to spread us out but it was no use. Our only other option was to lose enough weight to look skinny in any mirror, and we tried that too.

Twelve years later, I sit in the dark behind a two-way mirror with my ad agency colleagues, watching a focus group eat hamburgers and talk about how they taste. It feels deceitful to watch people when they think they are alone with their reflection.

We like to believe that a mirror shows our truest self, but it rarely does. If you’re right up against it, with your nose touching the glass, you don’t see anything at all.

That was the way I pressed myself to Eric. And Elena. And Ethan. I was too close and could not focus.

In all the articles, twins separated at birth always seem to share incredible similarities and quirks, no matter how differently they were raised. They hold their beer cans with just their thumb and index finger; they have moles on the left side of their rib cages. Neither of them likes ketchup.

I thought if I met someone with disgustingly fast-growing cuticles who liked the smell of burned toast more than anything in the world, it would prove I’d been missing my mate.

If my twin was identical, it would have been a girl, but if it was fraternal, it could have been a boy or a girl. All this is to say I didn’t know what I was looking for.

 

Giselle got a boyfriend at the donut shop where she worked and quickly experienced all of her sexual firsts without me. This threw off the comforting symmetry that had always made our friendship seem predestined. Suddenly I felt as if I were a foot shorter than she was. At sixteen, her parents allowed her to finish high school via correspondence courses so she could spend more of her day at the dance studio. She was gone. Jumped off the seesaw while I was still on it, letting me drop with tailbone-breaking speed to the dirt below.

Ever since we met in third grade, no one at school had uttered our first names separately. They were always linked with an and. Now there was an empty space next to that and, a vacancy. Sometimes the weather in that space was mild, just the breeze of her being whisked away. Other times it rained for days.

I needed to sandbag it.

But instead of filling this void, I chose to build a structure around it. I got up at 6:30 a.m., was at school by 7:25, drank a Diet Coke, ate a Granny Smith apple for lunch, and finished my homework during study hall before driving myself to the city for ballet. This schedule was a scaffolding around my terror of being alone.

 

Was it her I wanted? Him? The acts themselves? It was difficult to pinpoint the object of my jealousy. It was easier to imitate, so I got myself a boyfriend—a popular boy I snagged by fooling around with his friend to prove I was sexually available. It was an odd way to show my interest in him, but he was a teenager, and it worked. Anyway, I was just spackling the hole Giselle had left.

My boyfriend was a soccer player who wasn’t interested in ballet or any arts, but it didn’t matter. At the time, our mutual interest of sexual exploration was enough. He became part of my schedule too. We’d fool around from two to four o’clock in one of our bedrooms while our parents were at work. After that, I’d drive thirty minutes to my ballet school, stopping midway at a Dunkin’ Donuts near the regional airport to get an iced coffee, adding skim milk and three packets of Equal. This low-cal, high-caffeine cocktail typically sufficed to keep me awake during the drive. Ballet class ran from five thirty to seven, and after that we’d rehearse for whatever performance we were working on until about eight thirty. I suppose I ate dinner when I got home, but I don’t recall. In my memory, that part of the day drops o like a cliff.

Prior to the boyfriend, before I started spending my after-school hours giving long and poorly executed blow jobs and getting urinary tract infections from sex, I would eat snacks. Having a boyfriend took the place of those snacks. I no longer needed them.

We like to believe that a mirror shows our truest self, but it rarely does. If you’re right up against it, with your nose touching the glass, you don’t see anything at all.

And I got thinner. Da was all my Russian ballet teacher said as she poked my side, indicating she was pleased with my weight loss. We were always praised when we became less and less of ourselves.

The desire to dwindle was strong. It felt religious, cleansing, a penance for some sin I couldn’t pinpoint. At the same time, I felt like a contest winner. But I knew I couldn’t have done it alone. As I held the ballet barre, legs working furiously below the serene upper body, my teacher’s bony finger acknowledging my concavity, I attributed my success to having a sexual partner, a playmate who made it easier to not nourish myself.

 

In the 1950s, my ballet teacher had been the prima ballerina of the Kirov Ballet. She was the Lilac Fairy in The Sleeping Beauty, as well as Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, but her signature role was The Dying Swan. It is a self-contained piece, a four-minute solo accompanied by piano and cello, depicting the last uttering movements of a dying swan. There is a flickery film of her dancing this piece on YouTube.

We often did The Dying Swan at the end of class. She tried to teach us how to die, but we were too young and too American. We were never doing it right. Nyet! she’d scream, and clap her hands for the pianist to stop. She’d shout corrections in French, our only shared language, and I’d translate for my classmates. And when language failed she was physical. She pulled on our arms and slapped our butts. When I think of her now, drawing her gnarled finger up the side of my ribs, she reminds me of the witch in “Hansel and Gretel,” wanting to eat me, though she rarely ate anything.

 

Vanishing Twin Syndrome. That’s what the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology calls it when a fetus in a multiple pregnancy dies in utero and is partially or completely reabsorbed by the surviving fetus.

This phenomenon has likely existed forever, but it wasn’t until the late 1970s, when ultrasounds became sophisticated enough to detect twins as early as five weeks, that doctors began having the unnerving experience of viewing twin embryos one month, only to find a singleton the next.

The term vanishing twin was coined in 1980, the year I was born.

In Lawrence Wright’s book Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are I read this: If the less viable twin is not consumed, it “exists in a kind of limbo, compressed by the other to a flattened, parchment-like state known as fetus papyraceus.”

Papyrus, like paper.

“Somewhere in the vicinity of twelve to fifteen percent of us—and that’s a minimum estimate—are walking around thinking we’re singletons, when in fact we’re only the big half.” That’s Wright quoting a geneticist, so of course I believe it. I believe in percentages, in pieces of pie. But I don’t like his choice of words: the big half.

I don’t want to be the big half. It sounds oafish and ugly.

And while it can’t be denied that the big half is the winner, the one who makes it out, it also means that losing someone is a consequence of growth.

 

Deadline.com: “VH1 Orders Competition Series for Identical Twins.” This headline appears in my browser. It is morning, and I’m in my office at the advertising agency. My friend Alex, who works in entertainment, has sent me this link because she knows I’m writing about my suspicion that I’ve lost a twin. Lately, everyone has been sending me these kinds of links, telling me about movies to watch and books to read, tagging me in the comments sections of news articles. It seems they’re all interested in twins now that they have someone to share their discoveries with.

I am alone in what used to be my shared office. On the other side of the room, the blinds are drawn and the desk is empty. I no longer have a partner, so there is no one to see that I’m reading this press release instead of working.

“VH1 is putting the bond between identical twins to the test with Twinning (working title), a 10-episode, hour-long competition reality series set to premiere next summer. The project, created and produced by Lighthearted Entertainment (Dating Naked), will feature 12 sets of twins going through challenges that will test their twin connection. (Reports of the incredible strength of the bond between identical twins include cases of siblings dating the same people, finishing each other’s sentences and feeling each other’s physical pain.) Through the challenges, sets of twins will be eliminated until one pair is named the twinners and walk away with the grand prize of $222,222.22.”

While I appreciate the cuteness of twinners, I’m annoyed by the grammar mistake. It should be “until one pair is named the twinner and walks away with the grand prize.”

A pair, while two people, is singular. This is the grammar I feel in my heart.

The fact that it’s called vanishing twin instead of vanished twin seems to indicate that the disappearance is perpetual, not completed, possibly not completable.

When one twin comes out and the other doesn’t, it’s over, in a certain sense. But grammatically, the vanishing twin is continually fading from existence. This makes it harder to mourn, because the disappearance never really ends.

Another friend tells me about a man she once worked with who had a pain in his ribs that wouldn’t go away. It turned out he had a cyst that needed to be removed. When they did the surgery, they found that the cyst was a teratoma—composed of bits of hair, teeth, and fetal bones—the remnant of a vanished twin. “He had his twin removed,” she said, and to underscore the reality of this unbelievable thing: “He took the day off work to have his twin removed.”

A pair, while two people, is singular. This is the grammar I feel in my heart.

I asked if she could put me in touch with him. I wanted to see if he’d ever wondered about having a twin or fantasized about it. Was the cyst a shock or did it somehow make sense? Did he ask to see what they’d removed? Did he have a scar?

“I don’t think he likes talking about it,” she said. “I probably shouldn’t have told you.”

 

“You have to meet Eric,” a ballet friend from high school told me over the phone. “You would love each other.” She was living in Colorado for the summer with her brother. Eric was their roommate.

“You’re exactly the same,” she said. “Artistic, smart, driven.” I was flattered. “You’re also both obsessed with your diets,” she said. I wasn’t sure if this was a compliment.

She built him up in such a way that I couldn’t imagine he’d be real. She told me he’d taught himself to write code during his last semester of college, even though he wasn’t a computer science major. She showed me his picture and said he’d done some modeling. He’d raced road bikes too, Tour de France–style. “He’s also the nicest person you’ll ever meet,” she said. It was too much. I didn’t believe one person could contain all these things.

A week after school ended, I flew to Denver, instead of home to Connecticut.

 

Would I know when I saw him? Would we finish each other’s sentences? Have moles in the same places?

Inside the apartment, the afternoon light was fading. We heard a key in the lock, and when the door opened, there was Eric, with his tan forearms and champagne-colored hair. Even the blue of his eyes was somehow golden.

He had my posture—straight-backed, as though he were being pulled by the crown of his head, skyward.

My friend and her brother got off the couch to hug him, and I stood up too. He extended his hand to shake mine, and the hem of his T-shirt sleeve hung away from his body near the tricep. I wanted to stick my finger between the fabric and the skin to see if I could do so without touching either.

 

There was still snow on the ground in Rocky Mountain National Park even though it was May, but we hiked in our sneakers because that was all we’d brought. Halfway up the mountain, I thought it would be fun to throw a snowball at my friend’s brother, whom I’d had a crush on in high school. I gathered a handful of snow, packed it into my palm, turned around, and threw it with all my might.

The snowball had barely left my fingertips when it hit Eric squarely in the face. He had been right behind me and had managed to turn his head at the last minute. His cheek was red and icy.

“That’s quite an arm you’ve got on you,” he said.

“I . . . don’t have great aim,” I said. “And I’m a lefty, so there was never a baseball glove that fit me in school, so . . .”

“I’m a lefty too,” he said.

The others were a few paces behind us. We kept hiking and when we got to the top, we all stood shoulder to shoulder looking down into the valley. I wanted to look at Eric’s face and was glad I had a reason to.

“Lemme see,” I said. He turned his face so I could see the red mark, but he kept his eyes on me.

 

We drank around the fire. Eric and I shotgunned beers, a trick I’d learned during my year in the Midwest. We both knew all the words to “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” and we rapped them with awkward bravado. When it got later and colder, our friends brushed their teeth and retired to the tent, while Eric and I went to his car to listen to music. He played me things I hadn’t heard: At the Drive-In, Digable Planets. We talked about our families, and while there were differences—his father was a teacher and mine a doctor; his mother went back to work (nights at a restaurant) when he was two and mine stayed home with us—there was one striking similarity: Both our parents had been married for twenty-five years. Most of our friends’ parents were divorced.

I don’t know how long we sat in the car. I was too infatuated to be tired. I wanted to touch his hand. I wanted to kiss him. But the armrest between us felt insurmountable. Eric said we should go to bed, so we quietly opened and shut his car doors. He found my hand in the darkness to lead me. His hand was warm and soft and firm and I felt a surge of relief. Hands, like kisses, could be bad, and ruin the chemistry. This is the perfect hand, I thought as we walked through the moonless night to the outhouse.

The trickle of my pee cut through the soundless air. I pulled my pants up, knowing Eric was waiting for me. The crotch of my underwear was cold. Wet with excitement.

We only had one tent for the four of us, and Eric and I lay beside our friends, who were either sleeping or pretending to. We began kissing and we did not stop, despite the siblings beside us.

We should have turned away and tried to sleep, but a magnetic energy held our bodies together as one body.

 

We spent the rest of the trip together. The siblings went about their business. My friend had to register for summer classes, and her brother was looking for a summer job. Eric was looking for a job too. Though he’d only graduated college a week ago, he couldn’t afford not to work, now that he didn’t have student loan money to cover his expenses. Luckily, it was the beginning of the first internet boom and anyone who could make a website could get a job.

One morning, Eric and I were alone in the apartment. After breakfast, he put on a collared shirt and I helped him tie his tie and wished him luck as he went off to an interview. It felt embarrassingly retro, as if I were a housewife sending my husband off to his job. But it was novel too, and I was grateful for a new role to play, now that I no longer had ballerina.

 

I was always looking for other lefties, watching people’s hands when they signed credit card slips at restaurants, threw balls, or cut with scissors. No one else in my family was left-handed, and neither were any of my friends, although this is not that surprising, since only ten percent of the population is left-handed.

“Both kinds of twins, fraternal and identical, have a higher rate of left-handedness,” Lawrence Wright says, “and some scientists . . . have suggested that left-handed singletons may be survivors of a vanished-twin pair.”

A card arrived in the mail from Eric. I opened it in my childhood bedroom and had to slow my eyes down to take in each part of the long rectangle. There was his tiny, almost illegible handwriting, and a collection of drawings he’d done in black ink and filled in with wide architectural markers. One drawing was of the Modular Man, a gestural outline of a man’s body created by the architect Le Corbusier, for scale in designs, and another was the Golden Spiral—a spiral drawn inside a rectangle whose length and height are proportionate to each other at a 3:2 ratio, the golden ratio. The math was sexy, because I didn’t fully grasp it, but also because it was rendered in muted golds and mauves, colors I was surprised a man had chosen.

I’d already sent him a card as well. Mine had a grid of squares I’d painted in watercolor. All but two were gray. We were the two matching red squares, I was trying to say. Everything else seemed drab by comparison.

Once you find someone to finish your sentences, do you stop finishing them for yourself?

The next month, Eric came to see me at my parents’ house in Connecticut, where I was living for the summer. Any reservations my mother had had when I told her I’d fallen in love with someone on my one-week trip to Colorado disappeared when she met him. “He never stops smiling,” she said.

Eric hadn’t been to many museums. He’d been to national parks; he’d been to Indian reservations. During the week we spent together in Colorado, he told me about the tiny loom his dad bought him as a kid, and the beadwork he’d done on it. He pointed to a sculpture in the corner of the apartment that he’d made in architecture school—a red sawhorse with a suspension bridge made of piano wire hanging below it.

Eric had never considered majoring in art even though he loved drawing and painting. Like mine, his parents had directed him toward something you can make money at.

We’d lain on the futon in his living room after the first time we’d had sex, while the siblings graciously slept in the bedroom. I told him that in eighth grade, I’d considered becoming a performance artist instead of a dancer, after seeing a piece by Janine Antoni on a museum field trip. I recalled my twelve-year-old self watching a video of her performance, which involved using her head to paint the entire floor of the gallery with black hair dye. There was a video screen at the entrance to the gallery where she’d done the performance and a velvet rope across the doorway to prevent people from walking on the piece. I leaned into the room, my waist on the rope, trying to take it all in. The white walls, the large black strokes covering the wood floor. I would have liked to touch them, to trace my finger along their semicircular arcs, to get down on my knees and bend my head to the floor, to feel how it might have felt to do the performance, hair heavy and dripping, butt in the air, dragging the bucket of hair dye alongside me.

I took Eric to New York City because he’d never been, and suggested we go to the Guggenheim, knowing he’d studied the Frank Lloyd Wright building in architecture school. We didn’t know anything about the exhibition that was going on, only that it featured the work of a video artist from the ’70s and ’80s called Nam June Paik. We walked up and up through the museum, curving ever so slightly to the left, spiraling skyward.

We’d seen paintings and photos in art history classes, and some sculpture too, but this kind of art was new to us. Large sculptures made of old TVs buzzed with an aurora of colors, lava lamp cubes with no stories.

“Thank you for bringing me here,” Eric said. “I came to see the building. I hadn’t even considered there would be something inside it.”

Years later, he told me that this was the moment he decided to become an artist.

 

He sat on the edge of my bed, the one I’d slept in since I was five years old, and I went to him, putting my hands on his knees and parting them, to fit my body into the V they created.

“I love you,” I said.

We’d only known each other a month. But this I love you was in my mouth, and if I was going to speak, it was the only thing that was going to come out.

“I love you too,” he said.

 

The ligature œ has a special sound, the “open-mid-front-rounded vowel,” which is something between an uh and an er. In French, you need it to make words like sœur and cœur. Sister and heart. It is taught to schoolchildren as o et e collés—o and e glued together.

I identify with this ligature. I see it and think that’s me, though I realize this is strange. Why not my initials? The monogram that graced my grade-school L.L.Bean backpack?

In French class I had cast myself as Odile, the doppelgänger. The O looking for her E.

I had found him.

 

It’s like we’re the same person. We finish each other’s sentences. This is what we’ve been taught to desire and expect of love. But there’s a question underneath that’s never addressed: once you find someone to finish your sentences, do you stop finishing them for yourself?

***

Excerpted from Vanishing Twins: A Marriage, copyright © 2018 by Leah Dieterich. Reprinted by permission of Soft Skull Press.

For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors

Heritage Images / Getty

Laura Esther Wolfson | An essay from the collection For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors | University of Iowa Press |  June 2018 | 10 minutes (2,516 words)

 

When I was a very young woman, I spent many months working and traveling in the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War would soon take many people by surprise. I was far from my mother and from everyone else who mattered. In the Soviet hinterlands, I met a woman I’ll call Nadezhda. She treated me like a daughter. She had none of her own. She clearly wished she did.

Reader, I married her son.

—————

There was more to it than that, of course. I met the son first, and, in the usual way, he brought me home to meet his parents. And the son was actually delightful. When he spoke, he grew irresistible. Small children (there were many in his extended family) were especially susceptible to his charms. They would wrap themselves around his legs when he stood up from a chair to keep him from leaving.

Those months spent in another language, an experience both freeing and confining, the tectonic historical shifts I witnessed at close range — these things changed me. That the changes might fade with time was unthinkable. I needed a way to bring it all back home.

I was too big to wrap myself around his legs the way the children did.

—————

I hopped over to the States to take care of some personal business, then circled back to Nadezhda, her son, and the rest of the family in those hinterlands I mentioned, which were in Soviet Georgia. Nadezhda had just become a grandmother by her other son, who was the younger by four years. The household now consisted of Nadezhda and her husband, the baby and its parents, the older son (my intended) and me.

Julia, the baby’s mother, complained to me about what I could see for myself: the family did not welcome her. The pregnancy had been an accident, their second. I say their second, but both mistakes were of course seen as entirely hers.

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Not Quite Not White

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Sharmila Sen | Not Quite Not White | Penguin Books | August 2018 | 30 minutes (6,053 words)

I had never seen a black man in person until I was 12 years old. If I search my memory hard enough, I can see a few faded newspaper photographs of West Indian cricketers in the Statesman. I can see dark-­skinned Africans within the panels of my beloved Phantom comics. There are faint recollections of black James Bond villains in Live and Let Die. If I squint even more, I can remember the evening when we crowded into our neighbor’s drawing room, watching Pelé on a black-and-­white television set, the first procured in our middle­-class neighborhood. The first flesh-and-­blood black man I saw was standing outside the entrance to the U.S. consulate in Calcutta, which is located on a street named after Ho Chi Minh. At the entrance to the consulate where Ma, Baba, and I had gone for our visa interviews, I saw two men in spotless uniforms. One was the whitest, blondest man I had ever seen in real life; the other was the darkest black.

The consulate smelled like America in my childish imagination. The air ­conditioned halls, the modern plastic and metal furniture, a water cooler from which I eagerly poured myself some water even though I was not thirsty. I breathed in the scent of wealth in there. It felt like newness on my skin. Everything was hushed, ordered, brightly lit. Not like my own loud, bustling city. Even the local Indian staff seemed to behave as if they were actually living in America.

I stood at the entrance of the U.S. consulate in Calcutta in 1982. In 1965, American immigration laws had been rewritten to allow for a greater number of non­-Europeans to enter the country. Not only were Indians and other Asians considered unwanted newcomers before 1965, even naturalization — the process by which a foreign­-born immigrant becomes a U.S. citizen — was disallowed for most who were not white until the 1950s. I knew little of this history when I entered the consulate with my parents. I did not even know I had something called race. Race as a category had not been part of the Indian census since 1951. I was about to move to a nation where nearly every official form had a section in which I would be offered an array of racial categories and expected to pick one.

In 1982, as it happens, it was not clear which race should be affixed to my person. Since the number of Indian immigrants was fairly insignificant in the United States until the latter part of the 20th century, the census barely took notice of us. At the time of the first U.S. census in 1790, there were essentially three races acknowledged by the government — white, black, and Indian. My kind of Indians, the ones from the subcontinent, however, fell into none of these categories. No matter how mysterious our race, we were not considered white during most of the 19th and 20th centuries by the American courts. In 1970, the U.S. Census Bureau declared people from India to be legally white. A decade later, in 1980, we were officially reclassified as Asian by the government, at the insistence of Indian immigrant groups who believed that the new classification would afford us greater affirmative action benefits. Yet, what was to be done with the decision to make Indians white only a decade earlier? What would happen to those white Indians? “Self-­reporting” was the Solomonic solution to this problem. In order to satisfy the demands of the diverse Indian community, after nearly a century of shuffling people from the Indian subcontinent from one racial category to another, the U.S. census had finally thrown up its hands in despair and asked us to “self­-report” our race. In the 1990 U.S. census, of the native­-born population with origins in the Indian subcontinent, nearly a quarter reported themselves to be white, a tiny minority (5 percent) reported themselves to be black, and the vast majority chose to report their race using terms that pertain to South Asia.

Such an astounding array of choices was not always available to people from India who found themselves in the United States a century ago. If Ma, Baba, and I could have embarked on a time machine and arrived in the country eight decades earlier, we would have found ourselves in a different situation. If I had immigrated in 1909, I would have been labeled “probably not white,” but a year later — when the U.S. courts decided to change their opinion on the matter — I would have been “white.” If I was Sadar Bhagwab Singh in 1917, or Akhay Kumar Mozumdar in 1919, or Bhagat Singh Thind in 1923, I would have been “not white.” Naturalization in the United States was reserved mostly for whites between 1790 and the middle of the 20th century. Non­white immigrants could not become naturalized and partake of the rights reserved for U.S. citizens. Indians were not allowed to become naturalized citizens until the 1940s. They could, however, toil in American factories and fields, offices and streets.

So Indian men such as Singh, Mozumdar, and Thind kept trying in vain to prove they were white in order to become naturalized citizens. But what actually made a person “white”? Could you be both “Caucasian” and “non­white”? As Singh, Mozumdar, and Thind all found out, yes, you could be Caucasian and also Not White. The courts ruled repeatedly in those early decades of the 20th century that naturalization was for “whites” only, and some “Caucasians” were not truly “white” enough to qualify.

That the two words — Caucasian and white — are used interchangeably today would come as a bittersweet surprise to all who were caught in the deep chasm between those labels a century ago. Yet, that is exactly the chasm in which people from the Indian subcontinent, an area that is second only to Africa in its genetic and linguistic diversity, were placed by the U.S. courts. In those early years of the 20th century, miscegenation laws could have prevented me from marrying a white American in states such as South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. The former governor of South Carolina and the current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, identifies herself as “white” on her voter registration card. Of course, according to the laws of this country, Haley can legally self-­report her race any way she pleases. The former governor of South Carolina was born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, daughter of Punjabi Sikh immigrants from India, and the racial category she chooses for herself tells a complex story of the state where the first shots of the Civil War were fired, and where even today West African–inflected Gullah culture (brought by black slaves) does not easily mix with white French Huguenot culture (brought by white slave owners).

Indians were not allowed to become naturalized citizens until the 1940s. They could, however, toil in American factories and fields, offices and streets.

A hundred years ago, Indians immigrated to the United States in very small numbers. They were mostly agricultural workers who traversed the networks of the British Empire, sailors who stayed behind in American ports, or Hindu holy men who were invited to lecture in cities such as New York and Chicago. The Immigration Act of 1917 placed India squarely within the Asiatic Barred Zone, an area from which immigrants were not allowed to legally enter the United States. This zone would not be legally unbarred until 1946.

Contemporary racial labels used in everyday American parlance are an odd amalgamation of the geographic (Asian), the linguistic (Hispanic), and the pseudo­biological (black, white). The rise of Islamophobia threatens to racialize Islam and conflates race with religion. This, however, is not a new phenomenon in American history. Early 20th-century America was still in the old habit of seeing Jews as “Hebrews” — as much a racial label as a religious one. It also happened that many Jews themselves preferred this system— until the murderous actions of the Nazis in Europe—because Judaism cannot be folded neatly into the box we call “religion” today, a box whose dimensions are largely of Protestant specifications. Similarly, “Hindoo” was as much a racial label as a religion in early­ 20th century America. Today what is considered my religious background might have been seen as my racial identity had I arrived in America at the beginning of the last century.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, signed by Lyndon B. Johnson, changed the quota system that restricted non­European immigrants from coming to the United States. People like me were going to become a bit more common on American soil. Hindoo, Asiatic, Caucasian, non­white, brown, Asian, South Asian. During the era of self­-reporting in the early 1980s, I was a young girl faced with a plethora of racial categories based on a wild mash­up of genetics, linguistics, theology, and geography, who landed in Boston on August 11, 1982. The entry date is marked on my first passport.

I carried an Indian passport back then. Navy blue with thick cardboard covers. I received that passport in December 1979. On page four, there is a line printed in minuscule letters: “Countries for which this passport is valid.” Below it a stamp, in purplish blue ink, slightly tilted, partly smudged, is still vividly legible after nearly 40 years. It says (first in Hindi): sabhi desh dakshin afrika aur rodeshiya ko chhorkar — ALL COUNTRIES Except Republic of South Africa and Colony of Rhodesia.”

Before immigrating to the United States, I had never left India. My 1979 passport was an aspirational possession. Yet, I was already becoming aware of certain countries that were forbidden to me. My parents explained that India did not allow me to travel to South Africa or Rhodesia because of something called apartheid. There existed places where people like us had gone as coolie labor, as merchants and traders, and even as lawyers (the young Mahatma Gandhi practiced law in Pretoria in the 1890s), during the time of the British. But white people did not treat brown and black people fairly and each group had to live apart. Unlike my forebears who had borne the “malodorousness of subjecthood” for two centuries — as the Indian political scientist Niraja Jayal once wrote—I was fragrant with citizenship and protected by the laws of my nation. And those laws prevented me from going to Rhodesia and South Africa, places where complex designations such as black, colored, Indian, and white would determine where I could live, where I could go to school, and who I could marry. But in the late 1970s, when I received my passport, I barely grasped what apartheid really meant.

Caucasian but Not White. Not White and Not Black. Minority. Non-­Christian. Person of Color. South Asian. I never thought of myself as any of these things before the autumn of 1982. I had grown up back in Calcutta with an entirely different set of extended labels for putting people into boxes. What language do you speak? Which gods do you worship? Which caste do you belong to? Are you part of the bhadralok (the Bengali word for the bourgeoisie)? Do you eat with relish the flesh of animals, fowl, fish, and crustaceans? Do you eat beef? Or do you eat only plants and grains? “Veg” and “Non­veg” in India are almost as evocative and important as “black” and “white” in America. We can detect a person’s religion, caste, ethnic group from the foods they eat and the foods they shun. Every society invents ways of partitioning themselves and methods of reading the hidden signs displayed by those who wish to cheat the rules. A person of a lower caste might want to pass as a Brahmin; a Muslim might want to pretend to be a Hindu when caught in the middle of a riot; a Hindu might pose as a Muslim to gain entry to a restricted space. We were taught to be vigilant about such trespassers. An Indian’s surname holds a multitude of information about her. In India, if you know my surname is Sen, you already know which language I speak as my mother tongue, my caste, the religious holidays I celebrate, my likely economic class, my literacy status, whether I am vegetarian, the birth, wedding, and funeral rites I might have. Conversely, a last name that holds very little information is suspect. What is this person trying to hide? The way one pronounces a certain word, the way a woman drapes her dupatta over her head, how her nose is pierced, whether a man’s foreskin is intact or circumcised, whether a little boy has a red thread around his wrist or a tabeez, an amulet, around his neck signifies so many things in India. In some cases, it can mean the difference between being killed by a mob during a communal riot and being pulled into safety. We had all these distinguishing labels. But race we did not have.

***

I grew up in India for the first 12 years of my life with­ out race. After ruling us for two centuries, the British had departed in 1947. The India of my childhood was a place marked by what economists call “capital flight.” These were years preceding the arrival of economic liberalization. Before the Internet and cheap cell phones, our knowledge of the United States was channeled largely by a few Holly­wood movies, occasional headlines in the newspapers, magazines such as Life and Reader’s Digest, and hand-me-down clothing brought back by relatives who had immigrated to the West. Television had not fully arrived in India during the first half of the 1970s. We tried halfheartedly to imitate American fashion, eat American fast food, or listen to American popular music. Still, we were always a few years behind on the trends. Of course, we were also happy with our own popular culture. We watched Hindi films made in Bombay, hummed along to the songs aired on All India Radio, and ate delicious street foods such as phuchka and jhalmuri without missing global chains such as KFC or Mc­ Donald’s. Our drinking water was procured daily from the neighborhood tube well. Ma, Baba, and I each had our own official ration cards. These rations cards were used for purchasing government-subsidized basic commodities — rice, flour, sugar — which we used to complement our groceries from the local bazaars. I had never seen a mall or a super­ market before I came to the United States. Ma and Baba did not own a telephone, a washing machine, a television, a cassette player, a car, or a credit card until we emigrated. Our sole mode of personal transportation was a blue Lambretta scooter purchased by Baba in the mid­1970s. When Baba was not around to take us around on the scooter, hand­-pulled rickshaws, red double­-decker buses, trams, and the occasional taxi were the usual ways we navigated the sprawling metropolis that was Calcutta.

We vaguely understood ourselves to be Not White because our grandparents and parents still remembered a time when white Europeans ruled us. The Indian notion of Not Whiteness was shaped more by nationalism than by race talk. The subcontinental obsession with skin color cannot be explained solely through the American grammar of racism. In a subcontinent where melanin can appear in wildly differing quantities among family members, the lightness or darkness of one’s skin cannot easily be used to mark rigid racial boundaries. Yet, the preference for paler skin was clear to all in Calcutta. Girls with “fair” skin were supposed to fare better than those with “wheatish” or “dark” skin when marriages were to be arranged. I grew up reading numerous sentimental tearjerkers about sisters whose fates were determined by their complexions—the fair one always married well and the dark one was forever shunned by all prospective bridegrooms. Rabindranath Tagore’s famous lyric about the beauty of the black­-skinned woman’s dark doe eyes was quoted often in literary families, marked by the same self­-righteousness with which well­-off Americans buy fair trade coffee beans. Still, I never came across a matrimonial advertisement in any newspaper that boasted of a dark­-skinned girl’s beautiful doe eyes.

I was warned regularly not to darken my own light complexion by playing too long under the noonday sun. Mothers and grandmothers had numerous homemade concoctions at the ready for keeping my skin pale. A ladleful of cream skimmed from the top of the milk pail, fresh ground turmeric, and sandalwood paste, as well as numerous citrus fruits, flowers, leaves, seeds, and nuts, were our allies in the endless war against the sun’s skin ­darkening rays. Women walked around Calcutta brandishing colorful umbrellas during the sunniest days lest the “fair” turn into “wheatish” or the “wheatish” into “dark.” Some of us had complexions as light as any European, but we knew that an invisible line divided us from the pink-­hued Dutch, English, French, and Portuguese. In the comic books of my child­ hood, the colorists painted the Europeans a homogeneous shade of pale rose and reserved every shade from light beige to dark mahogany to the brightest cerulean blue for Indi­ ans. This is how I saw the world as a girl — Europeans were pink. We were not.

The Indian notion of Not Whiteness was shaped more by nationalism than by race talk.

It would be a lie of the greatest magnitude if I were to claim that I lived in a society of equals, in a society without barriers, hierarchies, and labels, before I came to the United States. I have already said that I grew up as an elite—a speaker of the dominant language of my state, part of the dominant ethnolinguistic group, and a follower of the majority religion. I was an upper­ caste Hindu Bengali. The maternal side of my family were haute bourgeoisie, or upper middle class, by virtue of their landowner past. Three generations ago, some of these landowners — called zamindars in India — had turned to law, one of the few professions open to Indians under British colonial rule. They trained in law in Britain and returned to India as barristers, dressed in European­-style clothes, living in homes furnished with massive Victorian teak furniture. In time, some of these ancestors — men of my great­-grandfather’s generation — had made the transition from practicing law to agitating for political freedom from British rule. Eighteenth-­century American colonies had seen similar professional trajectories from law to revolutionary politics.

On my father’s side of the family, our cultural capital outstripped our financial capital. Ours was a family of scholars and intellectuals. In some parts of our home state, West Bengal, the mere mention of my grandfather’s name endeared me to total strangers. I did not need to read the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s book Distinction in order to learn that one can inherit cultural capital just as conveniently as one can inherit property, stocks, jewelry, or money. My paternal grandfather did not leave me a house or a trust fund. But he did give me a slight edge over my peers. Our school textbooks often included short essays on historical topics written by well-­known Bengali intellectuals. One of those essays focused on Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, a 19th century Indian queen famous for going to battle against the British who annexed her kingdom. Whenever we read that essay in class, I sat up a little straighter. We were supposed to take pride in our female ancestors who fought British men on the battlefield long before the independence movement was born. My pride, however, was of a pettier sort than grand nationalist sentiments. My grandfather was the author of that essay. Each time I saw his name in print, I felt a secret pride swell inside me. I was the descendant of a man whose writing was part of the official school syllabus. Even though I did not always tell my classmates or my teachers that the author was my grandfather, the knowledge itself was my cloak of protection. It gave me confidence — a bit of smugness even — that I took for granted. This is how elitism works.

***

The first morning I woke up in America I could smell bacon frying. I was nearly twelve years old. I had spent the night sleeping in the living room of Baba’s childhood friend. This friend, an architect and the grandson of one of modern India’s most influential artists, was married to a white woman. She was cooking us breakfast in the adjoining kitchen when I opened my eyes. Their duplex apartment was right across the Charles River from Harvard Square. My parents slept in one of the two bedrooms on the top level, while our host and his wife had the other bedroom. The couch was allotted to me. It was a modest apartment. As a parochial Bengali girl, I had envisioned the wealthy West as the land of opulent overstuffed sofas, velvet drapes, crystal vases, and expensive carpets. This home was utterly confusing to my eyes. The dining chairs were made of metal tubes and woven cane; the lamps looked like crushed white paper balloons. I had imagined America was the land of rich people with air ­conditioning, big cars, cities laid on grids, and skyscrapers. A new world, a young country where everything sparkled and smelled good, unlike Indian cities where ruins, rickshaws, crooked gullies, and the smell of oldness prevailed.

When I opened my eyes that morning, the first thing I saw was a triangular neon CITGO sign. I had no way of knowing that this had been a beloved Boston icon since 1940. Being an immigrant child before the era of the Internet, Wikipedia, or Google, I was seeing America for the first time.

It was a week of many firsts for me. I had flown on a plane. I had traveled outside India. I had bacon for breakfast. Even now, if I get too complacent about my sense of belonging here — my ability to speak, dress, look, think like an American — I only need to smell bacon frying and I am a newly arrived immigrant again. That morning, I smelled it, heard it sizzling and crackling, before I tasted it. It was a complex animal smell, making my mouth water and my stomach churn in revulsion at the same time. Today, my favorite sandwich is a BLT. I greedily search for those salty bits of bacon in a Cobb salad. Yet, the actual smell of bacon frying is a powerful reminder that I did not always relish these tastes, that there was a time when I struggled to train my palate according to the custom of this country.

Immigrants are supposed to be delighted when they arrive in America — huddled masses who have reached their final destination. But in 1982, I was sad when our British Airways plane landed at Boston’s Logan Airport. Baba, who originally trained as a geologist, and spent most of his working life in India as a sales representative for pharmaceutical companies, had been unemployed for many years. Since the late 1970s, our middle­-class life in Dover Lane had been sliding imperceptibly toward the unseen basti behind the garbage dump. My bharatanatyam classes ended because the fees for the dance school had become a luxury we could no longer afford. The number of maids we employed dwindled as the household budget shrunk. Fish and fowl appeared fewer times on the menu until one day they disappeared completely. Ma went less frequently to the tailor to order new dresses for me. Instead, we waited for the autumn, when my aunts sent us the customary gift of new fabric — a few meters of printed cotton, enough to make a dress for a young girl — for Durga puja. We began avoiding family weddings because we could not buy appropriate presents for the new couple. We stopped going to the nicer cinema halls of Calcutta and began to patronize the shabbier ones where ticket prices were lower. Those trips to Park Street restaurants such as Waldorf or Sky Room became a distant memory. We went there only when a better­-off friend or relative treated us to a night out. The blue Lambretta was brought indoors and stowed away in our hallway as a reminder of happier times when we could afford the price of petrol. The sofa and coffee table vanished one day and instead of buying new furniture, we began renting it. Because new school uniforms were expensive, the hems of my blue school skirts had been taken down one too many times. I used to rub my finger over the light blue line, the part of the fabric that had been bleached with repeated washes and ironings. Each time the hem was taken down, the faded line of the old edge became a token of my precarious status as a member of the bourgeoisie. I began to ask girls who were older than me if I could buy their old school textbooks because new textbooks were beyond our budget.

As it happened, our downward mobility coincided with a meteoric rise in my grades at school. The more we moved toward the unseen world where Prakash and his mother lived, the better I performed in my examinations. In our brutal Indian school system of ranking students, I used to be ranked among the bottom five girls in a class of 40. That was when I was 6 or 7 years old. Baba became unemployed when I was 9. Suddenly I was appearing in the top ten, then top three, and by the time I was 11, I was consistently ranked first in my class after our examination marks were announced. Yet, I had to ask around school for a set of used textbooks as each new school year approached. I was no longer able to invite all my classmates for my birthday party where a cake from Flury’s, decorated with marzipan roses, would have pride of place at the table. No matter how hard my mother tried to keep my uniforms clean and ironed, my blouses were never as white as those of the girls whose parents bought them new uniforms each year.

Even now, if I get too complacent about my sense of belonging here—my ability to speak, dress, look, think like an American—I only need to smell bacon frying and I am a newly arrived immigrant again.

I became friends with the school bus driver’s daughter, who was enrolled as a scholarship kid. She was one of the girls who received a free loaf of bread during tiffin time. I never ate bread that tasted so delicious, when she began sharing them with me during the bus ride home. Other girls might go home to daintier snacks. I saw such homes in advertisements. Tidy middle-class Indian homes riding the wave of upward mobility. Homes with televisions that children watched with their parents; with refrigerators filled with rows of soft drink bottles; with toaster ovens in which beaming mothers baked cakes for their kids who returned from school looking as fresh as they had left in the morning. But children in downwardly mobile homes know that an atmosphere of fear, resentment, anger, and dejection awaits them at home. One wrong move, and the whole house can explode. One mention of extra money needed for a field trip, or the cost of a new dress for the school chorus, or an art assignment that requires costly materials, and everything can go up in flames. As much as I hated the crowded, hot school bus, I was in no rush to return to Dover Lane. The bus driver’s daughter and I enjoyed the free bread at the back of the bus, and she tantalized me with promises of fluffy kittens. My new friend seemed to have an endless access to kittens and each afternoon she promised that she would sneak one into school for me. She strung me along in this manner for months, describing the kittens in great detail.

I tried, with partial success, to mask the bitter taste of genteel poverty with the sweet taste of arrogance. Arrogant — there is no other word for how I felt when I sat on those rented chairs in our drawing room and studied my report card at the end of each term. A row of beautiful numbers — 95, 96, 97, 98 — written neatly in blue fountain pen ink. Those numbers made me feel strong when, in reality, I was weak and vulnerable. A girl in a poor Indian home during the 1970s had limited options, even if she possessed an English- education and her grand­father’s name elicited looks of admiration and her great­ grandfather once sailed from England wearing beautifully tailored suits. If I were to maintain the crucial space between myself and the boy who swabbed the floor, and Darwanji who washed cars at 4 a.m., and Jamuna whose father collected her monthly wages, and the maimed children who begged on the streets, I needed more than faded photographs of my ancestors leaning against elegant teak furniture.

In an irrational act of generosity, the Architect arranged a job for Baba as a salesman in a men’s clothing store in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He helped us apply for green cards — a process that took nearly three years, over a quarter of my life at that point. The Architect had immigrated to the United States in the 1960s and studied design at Harvard. He had lost touch with Baba for many years until one day he decided to look us up in Calcutta. Spontaneously, he decided to help his unemployed friend and his family. Immigration routes are patterned on kinship networks. Brothers follow brothers. Children follow parents. Grandparents follow grandchildren. Through marriage these networks become ever more expansive and intricate. A new bride follows a husband. A few years later her mother might follow. Then her brother and his wife. Entire districts from certain parts of the world might find themselves in a small American town as families follow one another across well­-established migratory paths. A new immigrant feels secure knowing there is a brother with whom one could stay for a few months until a job is arranged. A cousin might provide just the right tip to secure employment in a new country.

Occasionally, friendship trumps kinship. A sibling might distance himself from his less successful brother, and kinfolk might slowly inch away from a family member emitting the faint whiff of poverty. In a poor society, impecunity is treated as a communicable disease. If you stand too close to poverty, you might catch it. Others see the poor as lacking merit and virtue. We were becoming infectious, virtue-less, without merit. And suddenly, just as I had begun to adjust to a slightly lower social class by giving up the little luxuries — new school uniforms, meat at the table, the use of a scooter — a long­ lost friend led us to a new life. Without accruing any financial benefits for himself, without any social or moral obligations, what was the Architect’s motivation? Perhaps he remembered rainy afternoons spent chatting over hot tea in a canteen. Maybe he recalled the red laterite soil of his hometown. He could have missed speaking Bengali with someone who knew him as a boy. Or maybe he wanted to be near someone who knew how to pronounce his name correctly. Perhaps he wanted to fashion three new immigrants into his ideal of the American nuclear family. I can only guess. I became the unintended beneficiary of his whimsy.

We waited for almost three years in India for our visas because Baba was too nervous to emigrate without a green card. We were making a historic leap from one continent to another, yet we were an extremely risk­averse family. Many immigrants carry these twin traits within themselves and some even pass them on to the next generation. As risk takers we leap far from the safety of home. Having left the comforts of home we know all too well that there is no safety net of kinship or citizenship to catch us should we topple. This makes us cautious. We check the lock on the door three times before going out. We save more than we spend. We collect sugar and ketchup packets from McDonald’s and cannot throw anything away. At work, we beat every deadline in the office and never pass up a second gig to make extra money. We tell our children to keep their heads down, study hard, and always look for a bargain. As risk­averse immigrants, we do not rock the boat. If you  were a trapeze artist without a net below you, wouldn’t you act the same way? Anything else would be irrational.

Scholars who study immigrants such as Baba and Ma would describe them as the classic example of Homo economicus. Economic man makes rational decisions that will increase his wealth and his ability to buy nice things. In those early days in America, whenever people asked why my parents immigrated I felt a sense of irritation and embarrassment. I could not say that we were fleeing war or political turmoil. We were not exiles seeking political or religious freedom. We were seeking economic gains. We were seeking more money. That is a humiliating thing for a 12-year-­old girl to have to repeat in a schoolyard. My parents sounded greedy. Or, worse, they sounded like people who had failed to be successful in the country of their birth and sought a second chance in a richer country. Because I arrived with them, I feared I too was tainted by these labels — greedy, unsuccessful, Homo economicus. At 12 I had made no rational choice, but the accident of my birth made me Homo economicus all the same.

In a poor society, impecunity is treated as a communicable disease. If you stand too close to poverty, you might catch it.

I wished we could pretend to be expats. Expats are glamorous and cosmopolitan. Cool expats like Ernest Hemingway sip Bellinis in Harry’s Bar in Venice. Modern expats are the well­-heeled white Europeans or Americans one encounters in cities such as Dubai, Singapore, and Shanghai. They are foreigners who have moved to distant shores for all the same reasons as a humble immigrant — higher wages, more job opportunities, greater purchasing power, and faster upward mobility. White expats often hold themselves apart from natives in the Middle East, Africa, or Asia, seeing themselves as superior. They send their children to the local American, British, French, or German school. They go to restaurants and shops frequented by others who share their tastes. They have their own clubs. In the West, we do not begrudge white expats their seclusion. New immigrants in America, by contrast, are perceived as undesirables who bring down the real estate value of a neighborhood. The women wear strange garb, their ill­mannered children run amok, and their grocery stores emit unpleasant odors. Meanwhile, white expats add value to their surroundings. Shanghai’s French Concession is chic because of the presence of white folk. European expats add glamour to the high­end restaurants of Abu Dhabi.

We weren’t chic expats or political dissidents with lofty ideologies. We were three people moving from a country with fewer resources to one with greater resources. I doubt we added glamour or value to our surroundings.

“Why did your parents come to America?”

“For better jobs.”

To this day this small exchange — repeated endlessly throughout my years in the United States — instantly determines the social hierarchy between my interlocutor and me. I wish I could say my parents possessed some extraordinary professional skill for which an American institution wooed them. We did not hold noble political or religious convictions that were at odds with the government of India. There was no war raging in my city and we were not being resettled. Homo economicus has a duller, more prosaic story to tell.

“Why did your parents come to America?”

“For better jobs.”

The native­-borns nod and feel pleased that they are citizens of a country that offers better everything — jobs, homes, clothes, food, schools, music. I would feel the same if I was in their shoes. It must feel good to be born in a country that has more wealth than other places, to have the hardest currency in your wallet. It must feel good to be generous and invite others — after intense vetting and preselection — to share in this plenty. Even though I had no say at all in my family’s decision to emigrate, I felt my shoulders weighed down with the plenitude of the host country. This plenitude of which I was to be the grateful recipient was evidence that white people were superior to people like me. How else could one nation be so wealthy and another be so poor; one country have so much to give and another stand in a queue to receive? The inequality of nations was surely a sign that some races were morally, physically, and intellectually superior to others. The inequality of nations surely had nothing to do with man, but was shaped by Providence.

“Why did your parents come to America?”

“For better jobs.”

***

From From Not Quite Not White, by Sharmila Sen, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright 2018 by Sharmila Sen.

An Inquiry Into Abuse

Corbis Historical / Getty

Elon Green | Longreads | August 2018 | 16 minutes (4,019 words)

Roger Morris was standing on the South Lawn of the White House. It was early 1969, and Richard Nixon had only been in office for three or four weeks. Morris was a holdover on the National Security Council from Lyndon Johnson’s administration, staying on at the behest of Henry Kissinger. Morris and his colleagues had been invited to fill empty spots on the lawn during a ceremony involving a visiting head of state. “I was suddenly aware of this figure, very close to me on my right,” Morris said. “I looked over and it was Pat Nixon.” Morris decided that, though he’d never met the first lady, as a courtesy he ought to say hello.

When the event concluded, Morris turned to Nixon. “I just want you to know how much I am enjoying my work. It’s a pleasure to work for a president who is so well-informed in foreign affairs,” he said. Morris wasn’t just blowing smoke. He found Nixon quite knowledgeable about his own portfolio — Africa, South Asia, and the United Nations. As Morris told me, “[Nixon] knew a lot of heads of state in Black Africa, personally and well, for years.” And it wasn’t uncommon, he said, for Nixon to point out mistakes made by Richard Helms, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, during briefings.

Nixon looked at Morris rather quizzically. “Oh dear,” she said. “You haven’t seen through him yet.” Morris, stunned, could only nod.

Pat Nixon was formidable. That year, during a visit to Vietnam, she became the first first lady to enter an active combat zone since World War II. But her relationship with the president could be a challenge. “No question it was a tough marriage,” Bob Woodward would tell Nixon biographer Fawn Brodie in 1980. “Even the people we talked to, who were very defensive about him, just felt that he didn’t treat her very well.”

Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who revealed the president’s secret taping apparatus, told Woodward not long ago that the first lady was “borderline abused.” Nixon would ignore her when they were together. “I wanted to shake him. ‘Answer her, goddamn it; she’s your wife!’”

There have also been darker reports, many of which were rounded up in Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan’s 2000 Nixon biography, The Arrogance of Power. For instance: Allegations that Nixon “kicked the hell” out of Pat in 1962. That, after telling America that the country would not have him to “kick around anymore,” the former vice president “beat the hell” out of her. That, in fact, she had been so injured “she could not go out the next day.” That, on an unspecified occasion, one aide or perhaps more “had to run in and pull [Nixon] off Pat,” who sustained bruises on her face.

That Nixon struck his wife while he was president.

‘Oh dear,’ Pat said. ‘You haven’t seen through him yet.’

The allegations have, for the most part, been in the public record for decades. (The Nixons’ daughter, Tricia Nixon Cox, unequivocally denied the allegations made in The Arrogance of Power in 2000.) But they remain relatively unexamined, particularly considering the severity. The scrutiny is not commensurate with the accusations.

For years, journalists and historians have mostly danced around the reports, gently poking and prodding. Nixon chroniclers tend either to acknowledge that the reports exist without assessing their reliability, or they ignore them altogether. A conspicuous absence of specifics in the public record — dates, locations, and documentation — may be to blame for this, and, especially when writing about allegations of abuse, one must write with care and caution.

What can be said with confidence is the truth of the matter has not been been satisfactorily resolved. With the benefit of distance and perspective, it’s worth giving the alleged incidents a second look and considering their sources more closely, because allegations of abuse are taken more seriously today than they were a half-century ago — or even more recently, when this history was being written.

***

In 1962, Nixon was running for governor of California against Edmund “Pat” Brown. He’d spent the previous eight years as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president. Nixon was suited to the position. “Eisenhower radically altered the role of his running mate by presenting him with critical assignments in both foreign and domestic affairs once he assumed his office,” wrote Irwin Gellman, one of the great Nixon chroniclers. “Because of the collaboration between these two leaders, Nixon deserves the title, ‘the first modern vice president.’”

The gubernatorial campaign was contentious. “Nixon had charged that Brown was soft on communism and crime, while the governor claimed that the former vice president was interested in the governorship only as a stepping stone to the White House,” the Los Angeles Times recalled years later.

Brown told Fawn Brodie, in her Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, that during the campaign he heard that Nixon “kicked the hell out of her, hit her.” The book was published in 1981, which makes this, I suspect, the earliest on-record accusation of its kind.

In a recording of the interview from July 1980, which is held with Brodie’s files at the University of Utah, Brodie and the loose-talking former governor wonder if the alleged abuse — they had both heard the rumors — was physical or purely emotional; they’re uncertain. This is what follows:

BRODIE: Were you aware of Pat as a campaigner, in the campaign, at all? Was she —

BROWN: I don’t think she campaigned. She may have gone to a few women’s parties. But we got word, at one stage of the campaign, that he kicked the hell out of her. He hit her or some damn thing. Did you ever hear that?

BRODIE: That story keeps surfacing.

BROWN: Some of the guys that were on the plane with the campaign came to me confidentially and said, “Nixon really slugged his wife. He treated her terribly. He hauled her out in the presence of people.”

BRODIE: He slugged his wife in front of people?

BROWN: Well, in front of one of the press that was supposed to be friendly to him. He got so angry.

BRODIE: He hit her.

BROWN: But I can’t prove that. I never used it.

Brodie disliked Nixon. As Newell Bringhurst recounted in Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer’s Life, Brodie called her subject a “shabby, pathetic felon,” “a rattlesnake,” and a “plain damn liar.” When, in November 1977, Brodie’s husband, Bernard, was diagnosed with cancer, she paused her research, quoting her husband saying: “That son of a bitch can wait.” (Brodie herself would die of lung cancer in January 1981, never entirely finishing the manuscript.)

In a recent conversation, Bringhurst called Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character Brodie’s weakest book. “It’s not a balanced biography at all,” he said. “She went into that — into the research and the writing — with a biased perspective.” It’s true, and understandably so: After Nixon was elected president in 1968, after promising to end the war in Vietnam, Brodie’s son was nearly drafted. When Nixon, several years later, attempted to smear the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND Corporation colleague of Bernard Brodie’s, it was salt in the wounds.

Brodie had for many years taught college classes on how to write a biography. And yet, said Bringhurst, “she violated, in many ways, the very canons that she tried to teach her students: You have to have some empathy and perspective for the person you’re writing the biography on.

The allegations have, for the most part, been in the public record for decades. But they remain relatively unexamined, particularly considering the severity.

Brown wasn’t the only source for accusations leveled against Nixon during that period. There’s a quote from Frank Cullen in The Arrogance of Power by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, who, to their great credit, explore the allegations in greater detail than any biographers before or since. Cullen, a Brown senior aide, said he had heard that Nixon “beat the hell [out of]” Pat in the wake of the gubernatorial loss.

By the 1962 campaign, Cullen was an old hand at politics. He’d volunteered on John F. Kennedy’s congressional campaigns in 1948, and stayed on for the Senate run in 1952. In 1960, during Kennedy’s campaign for president, Robert Kennedy introduced Cullen to Brown, who would appoint Cullen assistant legislative secretary. (In 1972, Cullen helped coordinate the visit to the United States by China’s table tennis team that was later famously called “ping-pong diplomacy.”)

***

Other people have made accusations about Nixon. In March 1998, in a talk he believed to be off-the-record, Seymour Hersh told an audience of Harvard’s Nieman fellows about “a serious empirical basis for believing [Nixon] was a wife beater. … I’m talking about trauma, and three distinct cases.” Hersh would reprise the charge three months later during appearances on CNBC and NBC.

More recently, Hersh wrote about it in his memoir, Reporter. A couple hundred pages in, he writes that a few weeks after the resignation:

I was called by someone connected to a nearby hospital … and told that Nixon’s wife, Pat, had been treated in the emergency room there a few days after she and Nixon had returned from Washington. She told her doctors that her husband had hit her. I can say that the person who talked to me had very precise information on the extent of her injuries and the anger of the emergency room physician who treated her.

After receiving the tip, Hersh called John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s White House counsel. Ehrlichman not only declined to wave Hersh away from the story, but said he knew of two other instances of abuse: one from 1962 — presumably the instance referenced by Cullen — but also one that occurred during Nixon’s presidency. (Hersh, in an interview with me for the Columbia Journalism Reviewsaid his hospital source was a doctor.)

The biographers Summers and Swan, who interviewed Hersh, also talked to John Sears, who worked for Nixon in 1968. With Sears, who was suspected of being Deep Throat, it’s essentially a high-level game of telephone: Sears heard from Waller Taylor, a senior partner at Nixon’s law firm, that in 1962 Pat Nixon was hit so hard “he blackened her eye” and “she threatened to leave him over it.”

Sears, now 78, told me he was surprised by Taylor’s story because he himself had neither seen nor, until that point, heard of such abuse. Still, he said, “I saw no reason [Taylor] would make up such a thing. He was a friend of theirs.” This seems to be true. Summers and Swan note that Taylor’s father had been an early supporter of Nixon’s, and Taylor himself introduced Nixon to trickster Donald Segretti. Segretti, however, disputes the latter point. “I’ve had a lot of things over the years made up about me that are just complete fantasy. This sounds like one of those stories,” Segretti said. “I do not know who this Waller Taylor was, [and] I never met President Nixon.” (For good measure, without prompting, Segretti also denied authorship of the “Canuck letter.”)

Sears recalled telling the story to Patrick Hillings, who succeeded Nixon in Congress: “He said it was quite possible; the whole business of the loss in California had made them both upset, and that Nixon had finally agreed to move to New York and get out of politics. But there was a lot of problems in and around that.” Hillings, said Sears, didn’t attest to the truth of the allegations, “but he thought it believable.” (I asked John Dean, who succeeded Ehrlichman as White House Counsel, if he knew about the abuse allegations. Dean’s name doesn’t come up in any of these stories, but historically he’s been quite critical of his old boss — he cooperated with the Senate Watergate investigators — so I assumed he would be candid. “I have zero knowledge of RN striking his wife,” he emailed.)

Seymour Hersh told an audience about ‘a serious empirical basis for believing [Nixon] was a wife beater. … I’m talking about trauma, and three distinct cases.’

The game of telephone continues with a quote from William Van Petten, a reporter who covered the ’62 campaign. Van Petten told a writer named Jon Ewing that he found Nixon to be “a terrible, belligerent drunk” who “beat Pat badly … so badly that she could not go out the next day.” Van Petten, Summers and Swan write, was informed this had happened before, and that Nixon aides, including Ehrlichman, “would on occasion have to go in and intervene.”

What to make of it all? For his part, John Farrell, author of last year’s Pulitzer finalist, Richard Nixon: The Life, dismisses much of this, asserting that the sources are not to be trusted. “Richard Nixon fired John Ehrlichman. Nixon fired John Sears, too,” he said. (Sears said he left under a “mutual understanding.”) However, he allows, “Pat Hillings would have known. Pat Hillings was incredibly close to the Nixons. But he’s not with us anymore.”

Summers, who conducted the interviews with Ehrlichman for The Arrogance of Power, doesn’t believe that Nixon having fired Ehrlichman tainted the source. “In the sense that one assesses the credibility and character of someone who’s talking to you, I found Ehrlichman a credible interviewee, and not a vindictive interviewee.”

***

On August 8, 1974, 61-year-old Nixon resigned the office of the presidency. He was in poor health, exhibiting persistent phlebitis and shortness of breath. In September, he would be admitted to Long Beach Memorial Hospital, where he was given a blood thinner. Scans revealed evidence of a blood clot that had moved from his left thigh to his right lung.

Then, in October, after what one of his doctors later described as “groin pain and the persistent enlargement of the left leg,” Nixon went back to the hospital. He would remain there for three weeks and lose 15 pounds.

Sometime during this period, again according to Hersh, Pat Nixon was taken to a local emergency room. Evidently, her husband had attacked her at their home in San Clemente, California.

I called Hersh to see if he could shed more light on this. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, “I’m not interested. Bye bye.” Mentioning that he had a guest in his office, he hung up.

So I asked Anthony Summers for more information, anything really, about that hospital visit. Did he and Swan attempt to verify Hersh’s source? “I have a very vague memory that we looked for a doctor at the San Clemente hospital.” Did he find the doctor? “I don’t recall.” He suspects the answer is buried in his notes, which aren’t retrievable.

***

Something to consider, when assessing the plausibility of the abuse allegations, is there’s little doubt that Nixon struck others. According to Farrell’s biography, during Nixon’s 1960 campaign for president, on a swing through Iowa, the strained candidate

vented by violently kicking the car seat in front of him. Its enraged inhabitant, the loyal [Don] Hughes, left the broken seat, and the car, and stalked off down the road. At an otherwise successful telethon in Detroit on election eve, Nixon once again lost his temper, and struck aide Everett Hart. Furious, Hart quit the campaign. “I was really mad,” Hart recalled. “I had had a rib removed where I had had open heart surgery, and that is where he hit me.”

Hart, said Farrell, spoke to Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary, over the phone about the incident, and said he could not forgive the man. Woods summarized the phone conversation in a memo currently in Nixon’s archives.

More than a decade later, in the summer of 1973, Nixon, mired in the Watergate scandal, visited New Orleans to give a speech to a veterans group. It was expected to be a friendly audience. As Nixon walked toward the convention hall, reported the Washington Post’s magazine, “he wanted nothing in his way, in front or in back, before he got at the crowd inside.” However, “breathing on him from behind was [Ronald] Ziegler and the clump of TV cameras, mics, and newsmen that inevitably followed.”

An angered Nixon, as Michael Rosenwald wrote last year, “stuck his finger in Ziegler’s chest, turned him around, and then shoved him in the back hard with both hands, saying ‘I don’t want any press with me and you take care of it.’” It was even caught on tape, which was fortuitous because a Nixon aide later denied the incident had occurred at all.

***

The earliest chronological firsthand accusation is also the most shocking. In 1946, Nixon ran against Jerry Voorhis, a five-termer in California’s old 12th congressional district. Despite his incumbency, or perhaps because of it, Voorhis ran a terrible campaign. To boot, there were reportedly phone calls to prospective voters from an anonymous caller inquiring, “Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a communist?”

Nixon destroyed him. In his account of the defeat, Farrell includes a quote from Zita Remley, a Democratic campaign worker of whom a Long Beach paper enthused in 1960 that, were she to ever faint, “it’s certain that she could be immediately revived by fanning her with a political brochure.” Remley found Voorhis “very white and sort of quiet. … He just sort of put his head in his hands.”

Something to consider, when assessing the plausibility of the abuse allegations, is there’s little doubt that Nixon struck others.

Farrell mentions Remley once more in the book, in the endnotes, where he accurately describes her as a “Democratic partisan” who claimed to have “firsthand knowledge of the anonymous phone calls.” However, he writes:

Remley, at least, is a troublesome source: a Nixon hater who fed at least one demonstrably false story about Nixon’s taxes to the press and claimed (more than 20 years later) that Nixon slapped her outside a public function — an assault that, if verified, would have ended his career but that she didn’t report to the police at the time.

Remley talked about the slap in question with Fawn Brodie, who wrote about the knotty tax business:

[Remley] had become a deputy assessor of Los Angeles County with the job of checking veterans’ exemptions. In 1952, just after the election, Nixon sent a notarized letter to her Los Angeles office requesting a veteran’s tax exemption, which was granted only to veterans who, if single, had less than $5,000 worth of property in California or elsewhere, and if married, $10,000.

As Brodie (who misspelled Remley’s first name as Vita) tells it, Remley knew that Nixon bought a pricey home in Washington, D.C., and denied the request. The powerful political columnist Drew Pearson found out and published a damning story.

Nixon was upset about it. In RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, he wrote that Pearson’s column was “teeming with innuendo and loose facts” and claimed that Pearson retracted the column three weeks after the 1952 election.

That sets the scene for what followed later that year. Brodie writes:

When Nixon was speaking in the Long Beach auditorium, Mrs. Remley went to hear him. Arriving late, she listened from near the open door. As he emerged he recognized her. In a sudden fit of rage, he walked over and slapped her. His friends, horrified, hustled him away in the dark. There were no cameras or newsmen to catch the happening, and Mrs. Remley, fearful of losing her job, told only a few friends.

Farrell doesn’t buy it. “She really detests Nixon,” he said. “She could have ended his political career right there by filing a complaint. And yet she never did. There’s no hospital report. There’s no police report from that incident. It’s just her talking, years later, to Fawn Brodie.”

Those doubts are among the reasons Farrell chose to exclude the Remley incident from the book’s text, “to signal to the reader that I didn’t believe it.”

Of the allegations more generally, Farrell continued: “In the period after Watergate, Nixon was accused of everything — some of it quite fanciful — and it’s significant, I think, that you had three of the greatest investigative reporters, Woodward and Bernstein and Hersh, and not one of them put it in print in their long investigations on Nixon.” Neither Woodward nor Bernstein responded to repeated interview requests.


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***

Farrell is right that, given the opportunity to thwack Nixon about this, the otherwise fearless trio declined. Maybe that means something. After all, if “Woodstein” and Hersh couldn’t nail him, who could? But maybe it just says something about the nature of investigative journalism; chasing dozens of consequential stories at any given time, and they don’t all pan out. Which doesn’t, of course, make them false. It just means the threshold for publication — a hospital report or a doctor’s testimony, perhaps — wasn’t met by deadline.

Decades later, we’re left having to deal with a handful of hazy stories, and wondering about the motives of the men and women telling them.

Of all the allegations, it’s Zita Remley’s that really gnaws at me. I am willing to concede, as Farrell contends, that Remley lied about Nixon’s taxes, even if there’s evidence she just made a dumb mistake. What I keep returning to is this: What did this obscure campaign worker stand to gain from accusing the still-living Nixon of slapping her? It certainly wasn’t fame. From what I can tell, Remley’s death in 1985 didn’t even merit an obituary in the local papers.

As we’re seeing now, the women who accuse powerful men — Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes — do not reap windfalls. Their lives do not seem measurably improved by sticking their necks out. (Quite the contrary. Stormy Daniels, for instance, was recently arrested for touching undercover detectives in a strip club — charges that were later dismissed.)

Now, imagine doing this 40 years ago — which is to say, 20 years before Monica Lewinsky was dragged through the mud and Bill Clinton left office with an approval rating of 66 percent.

What’s the upside?

***

“This is an agonizing subject for me, because I heard some of the same stories, from a much earlier period,” said Roger Morris. A source suggested I talk to Morris, who resigned from the National Security Council in 1970 when Nixon ordered the bloody Cambodian “incursion.”

Morris wrote 1991’s Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, which charts Nixon’s life and career through the election of 1952. He heard stories in Whittier, California, where Nixon moved at the age of 9, and Washington. The tales, always off-the-record, were passed along by friends and acquaintances, often elderly Quakers. (I asked if there was anyone I could talk to; Morris said they were all dead.)

As we’re seeing now, the women who accuse powerful men — Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes — do not reap windfalls.

“I had heard stories about the physical abuse of Pat Nixon as early as the Congressional years, which would have been ’47, ’48, ’49, and much of 1950,” Morris continued. “They had these terrible, raging fights, at high decibel.” Per the descriptions he heard of altercations at the Spring Valley home, Nixon had “manhandled” his wife, “not necessarily beaten. It was a violent relationship, in that respect.”

Morris didn’t hear the stories when he was in government, but only much later, starting in around 1983, when he began work on the book. He could never nail down the details, so, while his book includes accounts of the marriage becoming increasingly strained, there’s no reference to physical abuse. “I didn’t have any real, solid verification. I did not have any eyewitnesses.” Which is not to say his sources were bad, or distant; among them, Morris said, were in-laws of the Nixons. “They were plausible people, serious people.” He believed the stories, but lacked what he felt would be necessary for inclusion — eyewitnesses, testimony from doctors, or hospital records. (That’s to be expected, and it’s one of the inherent difficulties in writing about abuse.)

“If you ask me if this is probable — could it have happened? Absolutely. It is consistent with too much testimony of what we know about their relationship. It was stormy. It was given to outbursts of anger, profanity. It was not based on abiding, mutual respect,” Morris said. There had once been a great deal of love between them, “but as in many marriages, it was depleted and exhausted.”

Just before we hung up, Morris added: “We’re living in a very different era now, and I do think historical figures ought to be judged whole, as it were, against the setting of their times, but also against the setting of posterity.”

Elon Green is a writer in Port Washington, New York.

***

Editor: Kelly Stout
Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

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5 Questions for Kristi Coulter About Writing, Humor, and Getting Sober

Photo by: Moritz Vennemann/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

In the opening piece of her new memoir-in-essays Nothing Good Can Come from This, Kristi Coulter meanders through a Whole Foods stocked with displays of rosé and reckons with the demands of her new sobriety. The scene embodies the difficult journey she’s started. Alcohol is everywhere; on billboards, on ice cream, on coworkers’ desks, Worse yet, work meetings frequently involve drinks. Coulter finds ways to not only quit drinking, but to survive as a woman in a misogynistic culture soaked with booze, a culture where, as she describes it, “There’s no easy way to be a woman, because, as you may have noticed, there’s no acceptable way to be a woman. And if there’s no acceptable way to be the thing you are, then maybe some women drink a little. Or a lot.”

An erudite, reflective writer with a winning sense of humor, Coulter’s explorations move beyond drinking to examine feminism, sexism, privilege, happiness, and work. Many readers will see themselves in her, and the book will let those who have never had a substance abuse problem come to better understand friends and family who do—and maybe see the levity in the darker side of life.

When did you start writing about your life and recovery? And how was your experience of that initial process?

I started writing about my life and my recovery via a blog, Off-Dry, that I created in 2013 when I was about 60 days sober. At the time, my impulse wasn’t about writing so much as it was about being part of a community. There’s a vibrant sober blogosphere, and in those early days, I spent at least an hour a night reading posts from people who were far enough along in their sobriety to serve as a lantern for me. I wanted to start recording my own experience, both to process it and to help the newly sober. When I started the blog, I hadn’t written for the sake of writing (much less for art’s sake) in well over a decade. I’d gotten my MFA at 24, and when I had failed to magically become world-famous by 30, I sulkily turned my attention to other forms of achievement. It didn’t take long before I found myself using the blog not just as a way to test out my voice as a sober person, but to shape and experiment with my writing voice, too. I started writing fiction again at about six months sober, and once I’d come out publicly as sober on my second anniversary, I began writing the personal essays that ultimately led to Nothing Good Can Come From This.

What was it that moved you to switch from writing fiction to personal essays? Did coming out publically help you locate both your voice and material?

I think coming out publicly did help me to realize I’d stumbled onto some pretty rich material, yes. As I started to experiment with writing about sobriety — and the topics that float around it, like feminism and pleasure and willingness to live in permanent ambiguity — I found a voice emerging that was more direct and acerbic and edgy than either my fictional voice or my real-life one. Exercising that blunt voice worked for the topic — a lot of recovery writing is pretty earnest — and I wanted room to be funny and irreverent. It also somehow made me a happier, bolder person. Fiction writing is still important to me, but for now, I’m very glad my essay voice and I found each other.

What other essayists have influenced you?

So many! I read Nancy Mairs’s Plaintext in college and was taken by how matter-of-factly she wrote about her body and mental illness and sex. I was nowhere near ready to broach those kinds of subjects myself, but the permission I took from reading her stayed with me. I read David Sedaris for his mastery of tone, particularly the way he can have you giggling out loud and then just stick a knife in you. I read Claire Dederer’s Love and Trouble, which is a memoir but also a collection of essays, and it directly influenced how I approached topics of marriage and sex. Also, I don’t know if they are essayists per se, but I’m intensely interested in the work of writers like Sarah Manguso and Maggie Nelson, who write short, densely packed, aphoristic pieces that live somewhere between essay, prose poem, and memoir.

Between Roxane Gay, Megan Stielstra, Scaachi Koul, Angela Morales, Michelle Orange, Martha Grover, Alice Bolin and Meaghan O’Connell, we live in a golden age of female essayists. Many more commercial presses are publishing women’s essays, but book publishing is still a tough business. What was your experience like getting this book published in today’s market?

My publishing experience was pretty oddball. I had won a few prizes and published some short stories in literary quarterlies in the late 1990s, but my trail stopped there, e.g. I was basically a complete unknown as of 2016. What happened is that I self-published a version of “Girl Skulks Into a Room,” one of the essays in the book, on Medium, and it went very mildly viral. Daphne Durham, a former co-worker who had since become a literary agent, texted me even before she’d read the whole thing: “There’s a book in this.” I thought the notion of me writing a whole book about anything was wildly optimistic, but over a few coffee dates Daphne helped me to see what she saw, and we started working together on a book proposal. Daphne was an absolutely fantastic editor for my work, and in the process of editing me, she realized how much she enjoyed editing. So as we were getting close to having something ready to shop, she accepted an Executive Editor role at MCD/FSG, and after some time she and Sean McDonald spent working through their vision for the imprint, she ended up acquiring my book.

In the interim, another essay I self-published on Medium, “Enjoli,” went hugely viral, and that brought a lot of agent and editor attention my way. It was a life-changing experience. But when it came to finding a home for the book, I didn’t feel a need to play a bunch of angles to maximize that one moment. I knew I wanted to be with an influential but smaller house like FSG, where a debut author wouldn’t get lost in the shuffle, and where they would have an eye on my long-term potential. And I already knew I loved working with Daphne. So it was pretty much a no-brainer to go with FSG. The day I got the offer, I pulled a bunch of FSG books off my shelves — Joan Didion, Frederick Seidel, Ben Lerner, Laura van den Berg ─ and stacked them on my coffee table and just stared at them going “Holy fuck.” And two years later I’m still largely in that “holy fuck” place. So my experience was a bit of a fairy tale. I know how hard it is for even very good work to get recognized in this business, and that it’s on me to take a fairy-tale start and turn it into a sustainable career.

Joan Didion famously said, “Writers are always selling somebody out.” How have loved ones reacted to your book so far?

An advantage of having “Enjoli” go viral is that there are now strangers on literally every continent who have now read or heard me talk about drinking and sobriety. That’s fantastic desensitization therapy. I feel as matter-of-fact about that part of my life now as I do about having brown hair or growing up in Florida. And I’ve also heard countless addiction stories from other people in the last few years, so addiction feels very normal to me now, probably more standard than it actually is. I could hang out and chat about addiction with friends, family, or Dick Cheney (why did he come to mind? I don’t know) all day.

It’s the Other Stuff — about sex, adultery, being kind of a selfish jackass sometimes — that gives me palpitations. My husband, the only person whose permission I sought to tell some of these stories, is fully on board. He’s so on board that he has threatened to have the book cover airbrushed onto the side of his surf van, and to wear a t-shirt with “John” (in quotes) on it to events just so he gets full credit. Friends have also responded with astonishing enthusiasm and acceptance, even nonchalance. I’m only slightly disturbed that people don’t seem to find any of the revelations very surprising. My parents have yet to read the book, and I’ve actually requested they not, because I just don’t think anyone needs to know some of this stuff about their kid. (I was inspired to make that request by hearing Roxane Gay say she’d asked her parents not to read Hunger. “I didn’t know I could DO that!” I thought.) They might still choose to read it, but I’ve let them know I’m not available to process it with them from a content perspective. I’m not going to use the book as a vehicle to relitigate past history. (Same goes for ex-boyfriends, in case any are reading this!) The book is a memoir, yes, but both memoirs and their narrators are constructs. What readers are getting is one truthful view into my life, not a diary.

Your book is deeply reflective and probing, but it’s also hilarious. I laughed countless times, frequently in public. Can you talk about your ideas about the role of humor in personal nonfiction or literature in general?

I’m glad you found it funny! I’m fortunate to have a temperament that can find humor in nearly anything. When I first seriously contemplated getting sober, I had the misconception that it would require a depth of earnestness on my part that would crowd out humor, and that was not an appealing prospect. When I finally got unhappy enough to make the leap anyway, I quickly realized that getting and staying sober demanded seriousness of purpose, which is not the same thing as earnestness or reverence. In fact, I learned that if I couldn’t find humor in sobriety, I probably wouldn’t make it, because I’d be covering up my authentic self, not revealing it. So in writing this book I liked the idea of showing others that you can be dead serious about remaking your life without falling into groupthink or a cult of positivity. (Though I’ll add that, as Leslie Jamison discusses in The Recovering, groupthink can be very useful in its way, especially early on when it’s dawning on you that literally millions of people have been in your shoes and have things to teach you about finding new, better shoes.)

In terms of humor, in personal nonfiction or literature in general, there’s nothing more exhilarating than realizing an author finds the same weird things funny that you do. It’s a tiny but deep bonding moment, like when I meet someone who agrees with me that celery tastes like metal crossed with evil. But that humor has to be organic. I don’t use humor in my writing because I think it should be funny; I use humor because it’s one of my natural ways of coping with my own core desperation and terror and whatnot, so that comes through in my voice. Forced humor, which I can fall into as much as any writer, is just painful. I also think it’s important, at least in books, to be funny in a way that will age well. It’s one thing to make super timely, Shrek-type jokes about pop culture in a blog post or other ephemeral form, but a whole book full of one-liners about, like, This Is Us, or Scott Pruitt’s Ritz-Carlton hand lotion? That makes me feel tired now, and in five years it won’t even sound like English.

Giving Up the Ghost

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Emily Urquhart | Longreads | August 2018 | 19 minutes (4,759 words)

 
After he died, I began to see my brother with surprising frequency. These appearances were not ghostlike apparitions, nor were they dreams. Instead, I saw him in the bodies of strangers. He was waiting for the traffic light to turn so he could cross a busy intersection. A man tipped his hat skyward to read a street sign and my brother’s face hovered beneath the brim. He was the token collector at the entrance to the subway, and he was the lone soup-eater in the basement food court of a downtown shopping mall.

I couldn’t anticipate these visitations. They happened at random and unexpectedly. The people I’d imprinted with my brother’s image were only shades of him — dark hair, a downward slope to their shoulders, a bushy mustache, thick-rimmed glasses. This was fitting because, even in life, I didn’t know him well. My brother was 11 years old when I was born, and we had different mothers. As a child he’d visited on weekends with my other brother. We’d overlapped in adulthood only briefly, so my memories of him are from childhood. They are fleeting and jumbled. It was only after my brother died that I discovered his first name had been Joseph. A name chosen by his mother, but secreted away after birth in favor of his middle name. I learned this from my father when I was tasked with writing my brother’s obituary. I remember feeling awed and somewhat ashamed that I could have spent 24 years in my brother’s orbit but not know his given name. This was just one of the ways I didn’t understand who he was. This unknowing compounded the loss, which was tragic and grim, and I think this is why I bumped into him so often after he died. When he was alive, I never ran into my brother in the city where we both lived.

I was young then, my footing in the world unsure and sometimes timid. When my brother died, I was a few weeks into my second year of a graduate program in journalism. I believed I would never return to school and that I would never write again. I felt suspended among wilted funeral flowers and well-intentioned casseroles with a grief that would last indefinitely. But after two weeks I left my parents’ country home and returned to the city, resumed my studies, and re-entered my life. My upstairs neighbor serenaded me when I arrived at my apartment, assuming all the cards and flowers that had collected at my front door were birthday greetings. I thanked him, gathered the well-wishes, and stepped back into my old life, which was physically and structurally the same, but emotionally rearranged.

I don’t remember the first time I saw my brother in a passing stranger, but I do know that it went on for years. I didn’t investigate why these sightings happened, or if they happened to anyone else. It would take another 17 years for me to do this. Approaching middle age and now a mother, I’m a more confident version of my earlier self. I’m a journalist rather than a trainee, and I’m a folklore scholar. I interview people about their supernatural experiences, respecting their beliefs, no matter how far they stray into otherworldly terrain. In this way, I am now uniquely positioned to turn my gaze inward and question myself.
Read more…

Convenience Store Woman

Photo by Aaron Gilbreath

Sayaka Murata | Convenience Store Woman | Grove Press | June 2018 | 21 minutes (5,652 words)

A convenience store is a world of sound. From the tinkle of the door chime to the voices of TV celebrities advertising new products over the in-store cable network, to the calls of the store workers, the beeps of the barcode scanner, the rustle of customers picking up items and placing them in baskets, and the clacking of heels walking around the store. It all blends into the convenience store sound that ceaselessly caresses my eardrums.

I hear the faint rattle of a new plastic bottle rolling into place as a customer takes one out of the refrigerator, and look up instantly. A cold drink is often the last item customers take before coming to the checkout till, and my body responds automatically to the sound. I see a woman holding a bottle of mineral water while perusing the desserts and look back down.

As I arrange the display of newly delivered rice balls, my body picks up information from the multitude of sounds around the store. At this time of day, rice balls, sandwiches, and salads are what sell best. Another part-timer, Sugawara, is over at the other side of the store checking off items with a handheld scanner. I continue laying out the pristine, machine-made food neatly on the shelves of the cold display: in the middle I place two rows of the new flavor, spicy cod roe with cream cheese, alongside two rows of the store’s best-selling flavor, tuna mayonnaise, and then I line the less popular dry bonito shavings in soy sauce flavor next to those. Speed is of the essence, and I barely use my head as the rules ingrained in me issue instructions directly to my body.

Alerted by a faint clink of coins I turn and look over at the cash register. It’s a sound I’m sensitive to, since customers who come just to buy cigarettes or a newspaper often jingle coins in their hand or pocket. And yes: as I’d thought, a man with a can of coffee in one hand, the other hand in his pocket, is approaching the till. I quickly move through the store, slide behind the counter, and stand at the ready so as not to keep him waiting.

“Irasshaimasé! Good morning, sir.”

I bow and take the can of coffee he holds out to me.

“Oh, and a pack of Marlboro Menthol Lights.”

“Right away, sir.” I take out a pack of the cigarettes and scan the barcode. “Please confirm your age on the touch screen.”

As he does so, I notice him glance at the hot-food cabinet. I could ask him whether he’d like anything else, but when a customer appears to be dithering over whether or not to buy something, I make a point of taking a step back and waiting.

“And a corn dog.”

“Right away, sir. Thank you.”

I disinfect my hands with alcohol, open the hot cabinet, and take out a corn dog.

“Shall I put the hot food and cold drink in separate bags?”

“Oh no, don’t bother. Together’s fine.”

I put the can of coffee, cigarettes, and corn dog into a small-size bag. Until then the man had been jingling the coins in his pocket, but now he suddenly moves his hand to his breast pocket as though something has just occurred to him. Instantly I deduce that he will use electronic money.

“I’ll pay by Suica.”

“Certainly, sir. Please touch your card here.”

I automatically read the customer’s minutest movements and gaze, and my body acts reflexively in response. My ears and eyes are important sensors to catch their every move and desire. Taking the utmost care not to cause the customer any discomfort by observing him or her too closely, I swiftly move my hands according to whatever signals I pick up.

“Your receipt, sir. Thank you for your custom!”

“Thanks,” he says, taking his receipt and leaving.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” I say with a bow to the woman next in the queue. “Irasshaimasé. Good morning!” Read more…

Michelle Tea and the Betrayal of Queer Memoir

Feminist Press

Alana Mohamed | Longreads | August 2018 | 12 minutes (3,094 words)

Michelle Tea has made a career of memoir, and in doing so she has chronicled a generation of queer and punk subcultures. Growing up a lonely and shy teenager, for me Tea’s autobiographical novel Valencia represented freedom. She wrote about sex and friends and death in a way that made me feel alive, kind of like the way watching Party Monster makes some want to do a face full of cocaine. I wanted to be her, or the women she portrayed, who were all so brash and powerful and sexy. With her latest release, Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms, Tea continues to write explosively about her life. But she’s also slowed down and become reflective — while still delightfully contradictory — dissecting the history of the ruptures within the communities which she has documented so well.

Recently, I’ve gotten in the habit of saying people have been “so generous” when sharing their stories. Post-#MeToo, radical disclosure has become typical, if not necessary, to speak frankly about sexual boundaries and trauma. “Thank you for being so generous with your story,” I say to the woman who just described her first fisting experience to contextualize her rape. It feels right, like it acknowledges the spiritually taxing effort that goes into disclosure when someone offers a highly personal narrative. But who talks about their first fisting for the good of the general public? Often, they’re talking about it because no one else will, and someone needs to. It’s not so much a matter of generosity as one of necessity. Read more…

The 17-Year Itch

Longreads Pick

In this personal essay, Laura Jean Baker finds that being a feminist married to a progressive man isn’t a fail-safe against sexism occasionally intruding in their marriage.

Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 7, 2018
Length: 10 minutes (2,590 words)