Search Results for: marriage

My Unsentimental Education

Debra Monroe | My Unsentimental Education, The University of Georgia Press | Oct. 2015 | 14 minutes (3,487 words)

A misfit in Spooner, Wisconsin, with its farms, bars, and strip joints, Debra Monroe left to earn a degree, then another, and another, vaulting into academia but never completely leaving her past behind. Her memoir My Unsentimental Education was published today, and our thanks to the University of Georgia Press for allowing us to reprint the chapter below. Two previous excerpts from the book have been long-listed for The Best American Essays (2011 and 2015), and an early excerpt also appeared on Longreads in 2013.  

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The Radical Pessimism of Dashiell Hammett

The Thin Man

David Lehman | The American Scholar | Fall 2015 | 19 minutes (4,696 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Exclusive comes from the new issue of The American Scholar. Our thanks to them for sharing this essay with us.

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The Jeopardy category is Opening Lines, and the literary answer is “Two Bars, 52nd Street.” You need to ask what works begin in such venues. One comes to mind quickly enough, but if you have only an out-of-towner’s awareness of New York City and you have not paid close enough attention to W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” you may misread yourself 10 blocks down past Times Square. Read more…

The Walkable Multiverse According to Charles Jencks

Alina Simone | Atlas Obscura | September 2015 | 23 minutes (5,747 words)

Atlas ObscuraOur latest Exclusive is a new story by Alina Simone, co-funded by Longreads Members and published by Atlas Obscura. Read more…

Errors Renewed: James Salter on Children, Futurity, and Hope

James Salter’s Light Years (1975) is a generous, intimate portrayal of a family that bends and splinters under the weight of its own differences and desires. This book exacerbated anxieties about marriage that I didn’t even know I had; thankfully, the novel’s emotional devastation is delivered in seductive, glorious prose. In the passage below, a sort of serpentine sense of doom winds its way around what is otherwise a tranquil domestic moment; this is Salter’s skill at play:

Their life was two things: it was a life, more or less – at least it was the preparation for one – and it was an illustration of life for their children. They had never expressed this to one another, but they were agreed upon it, and these two versions were entwined somehow so that one being hidden, the other was revealed. They wanted their children, in those years, to have the impossible, not in the sense of the unachievable but in the sense of the pure.

Children are our crop, our fields, our earth. They are birds let loose into darkness. They are errors renewed. Still, they are the only source from which may be drawn a life more successful, more knowing than our own. Somehow they will do one thing, take one step further, they will see the summit. We believe in it, the radiance that streams from the future, from days we will not see. Children must live, must triumph. Children must die; that is an idea we cannot accept.

There is no happiness like this happiness: quiet mornings, light from the river, the weekend ahead. They lived a Russian life, a rich life, interwoven, in which the misfortune of one, a failure, illness, would stagger them all. It was like a garment, this life. Its beauty was outside, its warmth within.

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Yonkers, Housing Desegregation and the Youngest Mayor in America

Lisa Belkin | Show Me a Hero, Little, Brown and Company | 1999 | 25 minutes (6,235 words)

 

Below is the first chapter of Lisa Belkin’s 1999 nonfiction book Show Me a Hero, which was recently adapted by David Simon into a six-part HBO miniseries of the same title. Belkin’s book (and the miniseries) depict the fight to desegregate housing in Yonkers, New York during the late 1980s and early ’90s, and the story of a young politician named Nick Wasicsko.  Read more…

The Evangelical Fervor for Amish Romance

Photo: Marcy Leigh

There is an inherent paradox in the popularity of Amish-centric novels, or “bonnet books.” “Plain” communities, like the Amish, disparage modern capitalism and the trappings of wealth. But the authors of Amish & Mennonite romance novels aren’t apprehensive, apparently–they have millions of readers, and therefore, a great deal of money. Their admiration for the Amish lifestyle, then, goes only so far, and is superficial at that. In “More Titillated Than Thou,”  Ann Neumann draws on her childhood memories of Lancaster, the findings of inspirational-lit critics, and her knowledge of evangelical purity culture.

While some books may chronicle a young heroine’s agonizing decision to leave the Amish community (or join it), the choice is always an intensely personal one—a matter of knowing God’s purpose for her, not of mulling over the long-standing theological premises the community is based on, like nonresistance, pacifism, and conscientious objection. In actual Amish country, these demanding faith commitments count for far more than this or that individual believer’s spiritual journey. Many Amish and Anabaptist believers have paid for these theological premises with their lives—as children in these communities learn in their typically thorough religious instruction in Amish or Mennonite tradition. Even the everyday burdens of Amish life, such as birthing and feeding an average of seven children, are either unaddressed in Amish fiction or transformed glibly into blessings.

Many readers have told ethnographers or commented on blogs that they are drawn to Amish fiction because the books are “clean,” lacking even the most subtle forms of titillation, another accommodation to evangelical culture. Obviously, the nation’s 90 million evangelicals are having sex, but their community’s preference is to pretend that they don’t—and certainly not outside the bonds of heterosexual marriage. The preferred way to quarantine women’s bodies from illicit ideas and physical contact is not to address male-female power dynamics, provide sex education, or even bolster women’s agency, but to “protect” women, hide them away, and shame their sexuality. The world depicted in Amish fiction is a projection of these strictures. It is the ultimate purity culture.

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The Fierce and Misty Flood: Barbara Comyns on the Quiet Seduction

Barbara Comyns’s novel Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950) follows the doomed marriage of two young, bohemian artists during England’s Great Depression. The excerpt below is a simple, gentle seduction; I love the way in which the protagonist, Sophia, swiftly and casually dismisses her husband and her own sense of identity. The scene strikes me as quietly wild. Its predictability is charming; its comedy, unassuming and disarming:

When we had finished eating and drinking, I played the portable gramophone. He had a lot of foreign records – chiefly Spanish. I hadn’t heard any before and played them every time I came. After a while I became bored with turning the handle, which fitted badly and kept flying out, so we just talked. I sat on the floor, very near the fire, and he sat in a low chair behind me, and I leant my back against him. It was so comfortable, I couldn’t bear the idea of going home and making the flat smell of polish. Then we became silent, and Peregrine came and sat on the floor beside me. Then he began to kiss me; at first I was shy and scared, although I realised now I’d been wanting him to do this for quite a long time. I forgot about being shy and kissed him back. Then I knew I had never loved Charles. I felt I was being carried away in a great, fierce, misty flood.

Some time later, when I realised I had been unfaithful, I didn’t feel guilty or sad; I just felt awfully happy I had had this experience, which if I had remained a “good wife” I would have missed, although, of course, I wouldn’t have known what I was missing. I felt quite bewildered. I had had one and a half children, but had been a kind of virgin all the time. I wondered if there were other women like this, but I knew so few women intimately it was difficult to tell.

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Breaking the Mold

A co-housing community. Photo: Tim Pierce

Jessica Gross | Longreads | August 2015 | 17 minutes (4,402 words)

 

Bella DePaulo, a Harvard-trained social scientist who is now a Project Scientist at UCSB, started her career researching deception. But it was when she delved into singlehood, her personal passion—she describes herself as “single at heart“—that she first felt enormous synchronicity with her research. “The singles work was something entirely different,” DePaulo told me over the phone. “It is really where I live in the literal and the figurative sense.” She has chronicled this work in scholarly papers, blogs for Psychology Today and PsychCentral, and written books including Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After and Singlism: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Stop It.

In her latest book, DePaulo continues to examine lifestyles that don’t quite fit cultural norms. For How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century, she traveled around the United States, looking at alternative—that is, non-nuclear—ways of living. One example of this is co-housing, in which people live in separate dwellings but meet regularly in a shared common house. Another is Golden Girl Homes, an organization that helps “women of a certain age” live together. There’s also CoAbode, a registry for single mothers who want to live with other single-mom families. And there are even multigenerational homes, which function today in very different ways than we might imagine. Throughout, DePaulo stresses the balance between autonomy and community, and how our relative needs for each are so individual. The upshot is that, finally, no matter what our predilections, there is increasing space for us to create lifestyles that suit us.

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You’ve written a lot about being “single at heart” and knowing that you love being and living alone. Why were you drawn to study alternate living arrangements?

Well, part of the interest was other people’s interest: It was a topic that other people just really liked to talk about. There was a blog post I wrote, “Not Going Nuclear, So Many Ways to Live and Love,” that got a genuine response of people wanting to hear each other’s stories. I also noticed that it was a topic that was appearing not just in casual conversations, but in the media, too. It seemed to be something that was resonating.

As for me, I feel so, so committed, and always have, to living by myself. I wasn’t really exploring for myself—although I wonder if, at some level, I was wondering whether, if I ever really couldn’t continue to live by myself, there was some way out there that really would work for me. Read more…

Our Sex Education: A Reading List

Here are nine stories about modern-day sex education and our history with bad sex ed classes.

1. “John Oliver Eviscerates American Sex Ed–But the Reality is Even Worse.” (Dianna Anderson, Rolling Stone, August 2015)

Ready to get angry? In a recent Last Week Tonight segment, John Oliver lambasted abstinence-only sex education, which features celibacy as the only method to prevent pregnancy. Dianna Anderson, feminist blogger and author of Damaged Goods, goes in-depth on the sorry state of sex ed in the United States. Thanks to Title V, tens of millions of dollars are funneled toward conservative teaching methods that do more fear-mongering than educating. Recently, the House of Representatives ratified a bill that will give even more money to abstinence-only “education.” This is federal and state funding, not private revenue. And parents who want their kids to have a holistic, comprehensive sex education in their schools face a bureaucratic nightmare. Read more…

Starring in Japanese Reality TV

Photo by Karl Baron, via Flickr

Nagging questions and doubts remain. Have we somehow prostituted ourselves for the vicarious entertainment of television viewers? Has the private language, the intimate currency of our happy household, been debased by making it public? I had thought it would be ‘fun.’ I was wrong. But somehow it has felt like an education of sorts — perhaps in self-knowledge — however involuntarily acquired, however unwelcome the conclusions.

My husband and I, for example, have been forced to confront difficulties in our marriage. Under the pressure of Y-san’s gentle but probing, seemingly innocuous questions, a fine tracery of cracks mars the pleasant facade: how often do my husband and I actually talk? When was the last time we went out on a date, just the two of us? Do we gladly contemplate living together for the rest of our lives?

Professor Wendy Jones Nakanishi writing in Kyoto Journal about her family’s experience being filmed for a Japanese reality TV show. The show looks at the life of a foreigner in Japan.

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