Search Results for: memoir

My Brother, My Self

Illustration by Eric Peterson

Katie Prout | Longreads | December 2018 | 25 minutes (6,270 words)

Every addict is a lawyer and my brother is no exception. On the first winter day that feels like spring, the boys next-door get too rowdy. Beer cans fall to the ground under a faint February sun. Frat boys slur-shout along to Drake and make my thin walls quake. I huff and puff, and I consider putting on my boots and crunching over through the melting snow to tell my neighbors I have a sick kid (“Will you please turn it down?”), but instead I pull my bathrobe tighter and text Hank. I feel like you know about noise complaints, I write.

Huh? he texts back.

I know it’s only 5:30 and a Saturday, but I’m trying to work on my thesis, I have a deadline, the undergrads next door are having a party. I’m about to cut their wires.

It’s not too early to call in a noise complaint, he writes. It just depends on how loud.

I thank Hank and call in my noise complaint, and as the sun goes down I screenshot our text exchange and go back to writing, as I always do, about him.

Every addict is a pharmacist and my brother is no exception. In June, our mother asks for Hank’s take on a new pain medication before allowing our youngest brother, struck by spina bifida in the womb, to be put on it. I am less inclined to take his advice when it comes to my own medication: “Xanax is as bad as a drink,” he says, and perhaps for him, that’s true. Like my mother, I go to Hank for his take on medicine in general, on how various pills may or may not interact with one another, even if I don’t always follow what he says. As an addict, he’s come to know the law, from its loopholes to its nooses, as intimately as he knows how ADHD meds mix with benzos, or how much vodka can steady withdrawal shakes until he can figure out his insurance for the hospital.

Every alcoholic is an addict, but not every alcoholic is taken seriously as such. I think about this every time I refer to Hank as an addict in conversation with others or on the page by myself: I think about this a lot. “Addict,” I say, and the faces of the people I’m speaking to grow still in sympathy; “alcoholic,” I say, and their faces are blank. The word alcoholic doesn’t mean much to them, or maybe it’s that the word alcoholic could mean anything. “I’m basically an alcoholic,” a man said to me once over drinks, laughing, and then frowning when I didn’t laugh too, when I stood up from my barstool and asked him if he was OK. It’s a joke, he said, you should joke more. But words matter to me, and that one matters in particular.
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American Ghostwriter

Longreads Pick
Source: The Baffler
Published: Dec 1, 2018
Length: 14 minutes (3,500 words)

This Month in Books: Two Sides of the Same Gaslight

Ingrid Bergman holding a book in a scene from "Gaslight." (Photo by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

This month’s books newsletter is a bundle of contradictions, a cornucopia of counterintuitions. “I pursue sleep so hard I become invigorated by the chase,” writes Marina Benjamin in her memoir-cum-treatise on insomnia. “You’re not supposed to identify with monsters. But people are rarely disturbed by things they don’t already recognize in themselves,” says Guy Gunaratne in an interview about his debut novel, which revolves around a real-life act of terrorism perpetrated by someone who reminds Gunaratne very much of himself. And Gemma Hartley, recalling a time when she was sick in bed and her husband failed to prepare their son properly for school before it was time for her (still sick!) to walk him there, explains how different the emotional fallout of the mess-up was for the two parents. She felt guilty that her son would have a bad day at school, whereas her husband easily moved on:

Even though my husband had been the one on duty for the morning, I was the one left with the guilt of taking my son to school ill prepared…. Parenting mistakes aren’t a moral failing for him like they are for me. Dads get the at-least-he’s-trying pat on the back when people see them mess up. Moms get the eye rolls and judgment…. I was still expected to be the one in charge, even when I was incapacitated, because isn’t that just what moms are supposed to do? He wasn’t expected to have the morning routine locked down. He was still a dad — still exempt from judgment.

And as Hartley points out, the problem isn’t just the ‘care gap’ between the genders: It’s that even “talking about emotional labor requires emotional labor.” Moreover, when women do try to make men care, men will twist women’s own needs back on them, asking women to do their caring for them — to care about caring for them:

One woman, upon becoming overwhelmed with the emotional labor she was performing, told her partner the only way they were staying together was for him to go to a therapist. He asked her to find one and make an appointment for him.


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David Montero, meanwhile, marvels that the bigger and perhaps more disturbing part of Watergate is somehow the least remembered. Investigations into Nixon’s slush fund led regulators to the discovery that American firms had been bribing political parties around the world, to the tune of at least $1 billion dollars. The vastness of the wrongdoing left investigators feeling like they lived in an upside-down reality. “It was inconceivable to me,” the director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division Stanley Sporkin recalled, “that companies could be bribing all over the world, and the shareholders not know how they’re making their money.” And it wasn’t just the casual, widespread criminality that shocked everyone, but also the very real geopolitical consequences — entire elections seemed to have been swung (and inevitable subsequent government overthrows ignited) abroad by American corporate money. “Surely the public expects more than to have foreign policy made in the boardrooms of United Brands or Lockheed,” a congressman quipped on the matter. Laws were passed to outlaw international corporate bribery, but over time conservative thinkers reduced anti-bribery law’s purpose from the ideological necessity of preserving democracy to the amoral and quotidian goal of preserving market competition. And, as Tim Wu points out in his book on the subject, a nearly identical rightward shift happened in the interpretation of antitrust laws over the same period of time (and at the hands of the same conservative school of thought). Our reviewer Will Meyer writes:

…by the seventies, a Chicago School lawyer named Robert Bork stood at the center of unmaking the tradition pioneered by Brandeis and Roosevelt. Bork, starting on the fringes, argued that antitrust laws should focus on “consumer welfare” instead of ensuring competition. Explaining how this standard shifted, Wu writes, “the government or plaintiff had to prove to a certainty that the complained-of behavior actually raised prices for consumers.” Wu chronicles how, as Bork moved the goal posts for understanding antitrust laws, their enforcement began to slip as well…. Justice Scalia [wrote] in 2004: “The mere possession of monopoly power, and the concomitant charging of monopoly prices, is not only not unlawful; it is an important element of the free-market system.”

But I think the most counterintuitive statement in this month’s books newsletter comes from Lara Bazelon‘s new book about restorative justice for the wrongfully convicted, in which she writes that “seventy-eight percent of… exonerations did not involve DNA evidence. This finding surprises many people, as it seems at odds with the way that crime is prosecuted on popular television shows and in movies…” The foremost reason that innocent people end up being exonerated, she reveals, is the discovery of police and prosecutorial misconduct, by either one person or a small group of people over many years, which can lead to hundreds or even thousands of convictions being reversed.

And last but not least, in her review of Jean Améry’s recently translated 1978 apologia for the ever-maligned Charles Bovary, Ankita Chakraborty points out that Emma Bovary was a contradiction in terms, the kind of woman who only exists when a man is writing her:

wherever [Emma Bovary] went — and she went all around, everywhere — she was never questioned for her whereabouts or for her absence. In what world is a woman who so freely moves never questioned by society regarding her movements? Only in a world where the woman also happens to be a man.

Which feels to me sort of like the inverse of a remarkable study that Gemma Hartley cites — almost like they’re two sides of the same gaslight:

A 2011 survey in the UK found that 30 percent of men deliberately did a poor job on domestic duties so that they wouldn’t be asked to do the job again in the future.

With that disquieting information in mind during this most busy of emotional labor seasons, happy reading, happy counterintuiting, and happy holidays!

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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Longreads Best of 2018: Essays

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in essays.

Aram Mrjoian
A writer, editor, instructor, and PhD student at Florida State University.

I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye (Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Atlantic)

This fall, I taught my freshman composition classes through a pop culture lens. Many of my students had been indoctrinated with the false promises of the five-paragraph essay and began the year with the certainty first-person point of view had no place in professional or academic writing. After I assigned this personal essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates during week one, most, if not all, of them changed their minds. Coates dissects the celebrity of Kanye West by interweaving personal narrative, meticulous research, and deft cultural and political commentary. It’s a remarkable model for what the personal essay can accomplish. How Coates ties the personal to the societal to the universal is hard to match. Coates’s ease in presenting West’s cross-generational relevance also presented an important point of connection between my students and me. Regardless of the age gap, we had all grown up on Kanye’s music. Our mutual familiarity opened up an important conversation about the divide between art and the artist, as well as the sticky social, cultural, and political complexities of fame. Throughout the semester, I found my students returning to this piece. It became a common point of reference. Certainly this essay was a pleasure to teach, but it also had much to teach me, and for that I am grateful.
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The Longreads 2018 Holiday Gift Book Guide

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Let Longreads help you with your holiday shopping! We’ve made a catalog of books we featured in 2018 that we think would make great gifts for everyone on your list.

Books about being alone and really owning it.

Patricia Hampl on the Ladies of Llangollen, who were famous for wanting to be left alone; Stephanie Rosenbloom on eating alone; and an interview with novelist Ottessa Moshfegh in which she strongly advises against leaning in.


Books about family. 

Meaghan O’Connell and Juan Vidal on the surprise and profundity of becoming new parents; Nicole Chung and Laura June on the complexities of family connection across the generations when grappling with adoption or estrangement; Christian Donlan on the grief and joy of parenting while gravely ill; and Issac Bailey on his family’s resilience in the wake of his brother’s imprisonment.


Books for the women in your life who are mad. 

Gemma Hartley on emotional labor, Brittney Cooper on black women’s eloquent rage, and Rebecca Traister on the political power of women’s anger.


Books of investigations, inquiries, and revelations. 

Karina Longworth reveals how Hollywood’s women were caught in Howard Hughes’ web of lies; Rachel Slade solves the sinking of El Faro; Alec Nevala-Lee unravels the joined-at-the-hip origin stories of Scientology and American science fiction; Susan Orlean investigates the mystery of the Los Angeles Public Library fire; Brantley Hargrove follows in the footsteps of a storm chaser killed by the largest tornado every recorded; and Tim Mohr chronicles the forgotten role of punk rock in the fall of the Berlin Wall.


Books that explore the bounds of physical and mental health, illness and medicine, mind and body.

Porochista Khakpour, in a searing memoir about surviving a misdiagnosed chronic illness, questions the possibility of total recovery; Terese Maire Mailhot, in a lyric memoir about PTSD as a result of childhood trauma, attempts to reclaim her narrative and reconnect with her people; Christie Watson remembers her twenty years as a nurse before becoming a novelist; Kristi Coulter meditates on her newfound sobriety and a culture of silence around women’s addiction; Marina Benjamin ruminates on insomnia, plumbing the depths of sleep and wakefulness; and Michele Lent Hirsch studies the invisible lives of young women with chronic illnesses


Histories that challenge our understanding of the past.

Colin G. Calloway‘s biography of George Washington conscientiously locates him in a very Indian world; Julia Boyd points out that the Third Reich was a popular tourist destination; Linda Gordon explains the sway the KKK held in state governments in the early 20th century; Shomari Wills chronicles America’s first black millionaires; Peter Ackroyd reveals the history of gay London; and Stefan Bradley remembers the fight for civil rights in the Ivy League.


Books about dating and marriage.

Elizabeth Flock on the years she spent living with married couples in Mumbai to better understand their marriages; Kelli María Korducki on the feminist history of breaking up; Viv Albertine on dating again in her fifties. 


Follow the money.

Anand Giridharadas on the elite, Disneyfied world of Ted Talks and philanthropy as self-help for rich people; David Montero on the global corporate bribery network; Sarah Smarsh on growing up rural and working class. 


Fiction and memoirs that reflect on the way we live now, illuminating our present and hinting at possible futures.

Nick Drnaso‘s Sabrina is haunted by the menace of conspiracy theories and fake news; Ling Ma‘s Severance imagines a world in which office drones keep going to work and posting on social media even though it’s the apocalypse; Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah‘s Friday Black points out that being black in America already is a dystopian nightmare; Olivia Laing‘s Crudo was written in real time during — and is about living through — the collective traumatic experience that was the year 2017; Jamel Brinkley‘s A Lucky Man revolves around the lucklessness of black boyhood and manhood; Nafissa Thompson-SpiresHeads of the Colored People is a witty, darkly comic look at a supposedly post-racial America; Kiese Laymon‘s Heavy critiques a nation unwilling to come to terms with its traumatic past; Thomas Page McBee‘s Amateur tries to understand why men fight; and Sharmila Sen‘s Not Quite Not White explores how integral whiteness can be to our idea of Americanness.


Books of journeys, adventures, and migrations.

Laurie Gwen Shapiro on the scrappy New York teen who stowed away on a 1928 expedition to Antarctica; Laura Smith on vanishing as a way to reclaim your life; William E. Glassley on his geological expeditions to Greeland to uncover the world’s oldest secret; Lauren Hilgers on Chinese political dissidents building a new life in New York; Eileen Truax on Mexican immigrants living in fear of deportation in America; and Lauren Markham on Salvadoran teens seeking safety far away from home.


Books about faith.

Meghan O’Gieblyn‘s essays hinge on faith and feeling left behind in the Midewst; R.O. Kwon‘s novel The Incendiaries tests the fault lines of lost faith and violence; Jessica Wilbanks‘ memoir is a search for her childhood faith’s origins.


Cultural studies and criticism.

Maya Rao on the patriarchal mentality in the oil boomtowns of North Dakota; Elizabeth Rush on the first areas of the U.S. affected by rising sea levels; Elizabeth Gillespie McRae on the white mothers who violently opposed school integration in the South; Rowan Moore Gerety on daily life in Mozambique, one of the world’s fastest growing economies; Christopher C. King on Europe’s oldest surviving folk music tradition; Agnès Poirer on the intellectual life that flourished in postwar Paris; Alice Bolin on our obsession with dead girls; Michelle Tea on the perils of queer memoir; and Natalie Hopkinson on art as political protest.


Books that are about just one specific thing.

Susan Hand Shetterly on seaweed, Richard Sugg on fairies, Michael Engelhard on polar bears. 

 

Happy holidays!
* * *

Never Again: A Reading List About School Shooting Survivors

Students hold their hands in the air as they are evacuated by police from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., on Feb. 14, 2018, after a shooter opened fire on the campus. (Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP)

I don’t remember anything of the day leading up to the moment when, in Spanish class, the schoolwide PA system crackled to life. There was a brief moment of static. Then, an administrator — maybe our vice principal — said something like lockdown, lockdown, this is a lockdown, this is not a drill. There was a terse quality to his voice. My teacher turned out the lights, crawled toward the windows I suddenly realized spanned from floor to ceiling, and closed the blinds. I, along with the rest of my classmates, crouched in the corner of the room. We kept close to one another, closer than we ever would be again, the rise and fall of our shallow breaths like a subdued chorus of fear.

The PA system remained silent. We looked at one another with eyes wide open, ears pinned back. My phone off and in my backpack, I sent mental messages to my parents and brother: I love you. I hope you can hear me somehow. Just days before, on the news, an expert on how to protect yourself during a school shooting had said that throwing textbooks or scissors at a shooter when they first stormed the classroom might help disrupt their shooting patterns. I whispered the idea within the huddle, and our teacher crawled to retrieve a box of Fiskar scissors, ones that were “safe” enough to be approved for classroom use, meaning the blades were dull, the plastic light. We pulled textbooks from the baskets beneath desks and held them. My palms sweated.

I do not know how much time passed. I do not remember if I heard the shot or if I only heard about the sound in the hallway in the days that followed. I do not remember if I cried. The thuck-thuck-thuck sound of a helicopter broke the silence, and we peeked through the blinds to watch it land somewhere near the school. My classmates texted messages to their families. We whispered about what might be happening, whether we were safe. No sound emerged from the PA to relieve us. Instead, as time passed, we watched as cop cars and news vans arrived. Parents texted classmates to say we were on CNN. From messages, we learned that someone had been shot on school property. In my mind, I sent another slew of silent messages to my family: I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.

Long after the whir of the helicopter receded, someone, over the PA, told us we would have an early release from school. They didn’t say anything about what had happened, only that we were now safe. I retrieved my phone, called my mom, and wept when I heard her voice on the other side of the line.

The next day at school was supposed to be the statewide standardized test. I thought the administration might find a way to cancel the test, or even school. But they didn’t. Instead, in the halls before the first bell rang, rumors swirled: the student with the gun had ammunition in his backpack; there had been a chase; he had committed suicide because a girl he liked turned him down. I stress that these are only rumors — they have always remained rumors to me, because no administrator ever spoke openly about what happened. Even now, when I look at newspaper clippings of the event, nothing much is said other than that a student shot himself on campus and later died after being Life Flighted to a hospital. I can imagine that part of the reason why information was suppressed was because I went to a school that was only two years old in an affluent part of town.

That morning, instead of handling the subject with sensitivity, instead of reassuring the student population of our safety, instead of pausing standardized testing to talk about gun control, instead of taking time to mourn a member of our school, the administration sent us to our alphabetized classrooms, where a package of off-brand goldfish rested upon each clean desk. And over the PA, the same system that had carried the sound of a breathless warning the day before, James Brown’s I feel good (whoa! I feel good, I knew that I would, now) began to play. I bit my lip to stop myself from crying.

Then, and still now, that song blaring over the speakers strikes me as abhorrently insensitive, as does the way the administration failed and refused to openly discuss the incident with students. We had all crouched in dim corners. We had listened to each other’s shallow breath. We had murmured prayers and sent messages to who we loved. But we were expected to move on as if nothing had happened. To pass our standardized tests. To forget the fear of those moments when we didn’t know who might barge through our classroom door.

In the years since then, I have felt in some ways as though part of me is still there, frozen, like an animal of prey. When I teach, I survey each room for exit points or furniture I might use to block the entrance. I want to tell each student in my class that I will protect them, but I want more safety for all of us than just the promise of my own words. I do not want to see any more school shooting headlines. I do not want students to have to show their bravery after unspeakable horrors. I do not want them to carry that trauma.

Rather than ignore what has happened — and is still happening — to students in too many high schools as the administration at mine did, I believe in the importance of stories of students, teachers, staff, their families, and communities who have borne witness to tragedy, who will carry the weight of their experiences with them for the rest of their lives, and who are advocating for stricter gun laws as a means of sparing others from the same. We must listen.

1. Columbine, five years later (Peter Wilkinson, April 20, 2004, Salon)

At a news conference held just shy of the five-year anniversary of the Columbine High School tragedy, all evidence, “every bomb and bullet,” was placed on display. Peter Wilkinson maps the trajectory of the investigation in this piece, but emphasizes the experiences of survivors such as Brooks Brown, a student who experienced PTSD after the shooting, and Richie Castaldo, a student who was paralyzed because of a bullet that struck his T4 vertebra and “shattered his spinal cord.” Wilkinson chronicles how their lives — and others at the school — were impacted by that traumatic day.

“Ireland was paralyzed on his right side for months after the attack. He walked again in June 1999, though he’ll always carry a bullet in his brain from Klebold’s shotgun.”

2. After Newtown shooting, mourning parents enter into the lonely quiet (Eli Saslow, June 8, 2013, The Washington Post)

Six adult staff members and 20 children were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in December, 2012, their families left to grapple with unspeakable loss. Eli Saslow tells the heart-wrenching story of Mark and Jackie Barden, whose Daniel was killed that day.

“Nobody had touched the foosball table, because Daniel had been the last to play. His books and toy trains sat in their familiar piles, gathering dust. The basement had always been Daniel’s space, and some days Mark believed he could still smell him here, just in from playing outside, all grassy and muddy.”

3. Chardon, Ohio (Libby Copeland, November 18, 2018, Esquire)

Six years after a school shooting at a high school in Chardon, Ohio, Libby Copeland shares the stories of Danny Day, a high school student at the time whose best friends were killed, Brandon Lichtinger, a teacher, Jen Sprinzl, the principal’s secretary who confronted the shooter in the hallway, and others within the community in order to convey the myriad ways that trauma can warp and change a life.

“That was when I started to understand just how deeply something like a school shooting could affect people—people who weren’t even in the school or who didn’t lose someone close to them. That it could be a kind of earthquake that still reverberates, six years later. That a whole town could be marked by this day and could send its young into the world marked, too—some of them drinking, depressed, cutting, suicidal.”

4. The Class of 1946-2018 (As told to Jared Soule and Amelia Schonbek, October 28, 2018, New York Magazine)

Through a portfolio of photographs and a collection of testimonies from survivors of school shootings, Jared Soule and Amelia Schonbek “wanted to conduct an exercise in remembrance…What, we wondered, could their memories teach us about our inattention? The people whose bodies — in many cases — won’t let them forget.”

“There was a girl who was praying in Spanish, and I thought maybe I should pray too. This is a time when you pray. So I did, and then I looked over and saw one of my classmates with her head down. Then I sort of realized that she wasn’t alive anymore.” –Isabel Chequer

“Somebody was running past me and I asked them real quick, “Whose blood is this?” And they said, “It’s yours. It’s yours. You have a bullet hole in your neck.”” –Rome Schubert

“Fragments of bullets are still getting pulled out of my body.” –Colin Goddard

5. The School Shooting Generation Has Had Enough (Charlotte Alter, March 22, 2018, Time)

Charlotte Alter writes about how, after the tragic school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, a group of students organized in the hopes of decreasing gun violence.

“How a movement catches fire is always a mystery, but the Parkland kids seem matched for this moment. They’re young enough to be victimized by a school shooting, but old enough to shape the aftermath.”

Alter notes that the “U.S. only has 4.4% of the world’s population, yet it accounts for roughly 42% of the world’s guns.” Up against startling statistics such as that, through social media engagement, meetings held at a pizzeria or the windowless rooms of the #NeverAgain headquarters, and with a fervent desire for change, Emma González, Jaclyn Corin, David Hogg, Alex Wind, and others hope to change the current state of gun violence in the U.S. through reform.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and illness.

The Case for Letting Malibu Burn

AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu

Mike Davis | Ecology of Fear | Metropolitan Books | September 1998 | 20 minutes (5,921 words)

 

“Homes, of course, will arise here in the thousands. Many a peak will have its castle.”

—John Russell McCarthy, These Waiting Hills (1925)

 

Late August to early October is the infernal season in Los Angeles. Downtown is usually shrouded in acrid yellow smog while heat waves billow down Wilshire Boulevard. Outside air-conditioned skyscrapers, homeless people huddle miserably in every available shadow.

Across the Harbor Freeway, the overcrowded tenements of the Westlake district—Los Angeles’s Spanish Harlem—are intolerable ovens. Suffocating in their tiny rooms, immigrant families flee to the fire escapes, stoops, and sidewalks. Anxious mothers swab their babies’ foreheads with water while older children, eyes stinging from the smog, cry for paletas: the flavored cones of shaved ice sold by pushcart vendors. Shirtless young men—some with formidable jail-made biceps and mural-size tattoos of the Virgin of Guadalupe across their backs—monopolize the shade of tienda awnings. Amid hundreds of acres of molten asphalt and concrete there is scarcely a weed, much less a lawn or tree.

Thirty miles away, the Malibu coast—where hyperbole meets the surf—basks in altogether different weather. The temperature is 85°F (20 degrees cooler than Downtown), and the cobalt blue sky is clear enough to discern the wispish form of Santa Barbara Island, nearly 50 miles offshore. At Zuma surfers ride the curl under the insouciant gazes of their personal sun goddesses, while at Topanga Beach, horse trainers canter Appaloosas across the wet sand. Indifferent to the misery on the “mainland,” the residents of Malibu suffer through another boringly perfect day.

Read more…

Blowin’ Up the ‘90s

Mark Terrill, Associated Press / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | December 2018 | 11 minutes (2,795 words)

The ’90s Are Old is a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.

* * *

The 1990s did not end on January 1, 2000. The monumental anti-climax of Y2K — a computer “bug” that was supposed to screech our Earth to a Scooby-Doo foot-cloud halt, but instead did bupkis — was a truly apt expression of the preceding decade. But even discounting Y2K, I’ve got some serious issues with the alleged “turn of the actual millennium” as the endpoint of the most intentionally underwhelming decade of the 20th century. And not just because 2000 (zero-zero) is so obvious and overplayed — though there is, of course, that.

The actual termination point of the ‘90s required an attitudinal shift that would decentralize the role of Generation X as the admittedly-petulant target of all culture and advertising — the thawing of the winter of the bong-ripping couch-slacker’s discontent; the disappearance of gin and juice from house-party bars; the centering of the hot tub on The Real World; the sobering realization that both men and women were from Earth and just sucked; the demise, for that matter, of Suck itself.

In point of incontrovertible fact, the 1990s would not end in the United States until the aughts’ resurgence of aggressive consumerism and even more aggressive vacuity came to dominate all aspects of sociopolitical and popular culture. So the only question is: When was that? There are more potential answers than squiggles on a Fido Dido sweatshirt.

Was it in 2001, when the original Fast and the Furious premiered? 1996, when Blur released that WOO-hoo song? Was it 2010 — you heard me, two thousand and ten — when enough grandparents had shuffled off the mortal coil to make the primary avenue of written news consumption digital rather than paper?

I have spent an unnecessarily and perhaps questionably extensive amount of time researching in this subfield, and I present my findings to you now in a perplexing new format (I believe it is called a “list-cicle”?) that is apparently the only thing young people are able to read.

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The Need for Distance: Jaclyn Gilbert on Writing and Running

Mikolette / Getty

Jacqueline Alnes | Longreads | December 2018 | 11 minutes (2,773 words)

Early in the morning, the light soft and warm and the air cool after yesterday’s thunderstorms, Jaclyn Gilbert runs a new route. From Grand Army Plaza she makes her way toward the Green Wood cemetery, hugging it through the second mile. Around the fifth mile, she passes over a parkway through a cylindrical barbed-wire tunnel, peering down at cars whirring by on their morning commutes, before continuing down Tenth Avenue back toward the park, finishing at Grand Army for a clean seven miles.

“New routes are always my favorite for the maps they form inside me: a series of sense impressions that filter through my memory as the day passes on. When I sit down to write again, these impressions reappear as remnants of light, color, or feeling, making their way into the imaginings of my characters,” Gilbert writes to me in an email. Though we live half the country apart — she in New York, I in Oklahoma — I feel a connection to her. Both of us are former Division I athletes turned writers. And both of us still run, frequently testing our limits; our writing processes are informed by our fastidious need for distance. Read more…

Seventeen

Kristina Servant / Flickr CC

Steve Edwards | Longreads | December 2018 | 19 minutes (5,135 words)

I don’t remember the therapist’s name, only that he had closely cropped silver hair, a soft voice, and kind, deep-set eyes. He was a postdoc in the psychology department — whatever that meant. He wanted me to know that our sessions would be recorded and could be included in his dissertation — whatever that meant — and would I be OK with that? I said sure. He smiled and studied my face. It was September, a smell of rain in the air. One of those evenings when the dark sets in early and surprises you.

I’d just started my senior year of high school but had already been accepted to Purdue, which was only a half hour from home and where my brother had enrolled two years prior. I’d been to campus once or twice to go to parties with him. But I’d never been there by myself. I’d never been inside the psych building.

My mother set up the meeting. I didn’t know what I wanted to study, and she thought the university would have career counselors. She looked up counseling services in the phone book and made an appointment.

It was an honest mistake. Like the time I told her I needed a cup for baseball and she’d bought me a plastic drinking cup. She hadn’t been to a four-year university. My father, who had earned a degree in chemistry from Eastern Illinois, wasn’t any help with administrative tasks and probably wouldn’t have known any different either. What other kinds of counseling services besides career counseling would there be at a university? And I went along with it because that’s what I did: I floated like a cloud through my life. If my parents thought I needed to be somewhere and do something, I went there and did it. Not out of duty so much as out of a desire to avoid conflict. The thought of fighting over things I didn’t care about depressed me.

And I went along with it because that’s what I did: I floated like a cloud through my life…Not out of duty so much as out of a desire to avoid conflict. The thought of fighting over things I didn’t care about depressed me.

If anything, however, I thought maybe counseling services could help me choose a major, which apparently was important. I’d looked at the lists when we filled out the application, and most of them seemed terrible. Economics. Accounting. Some I didn’t even know what they were. Sophomore year of high school we’d taken a long fill-in-the-blank aptitude test to help us identify future careers. One question asked if we liked to be outside. I said yes and was told I should be a farmer. But even I knew that that wasn’t how farming worked. I felt duped by the test and wrote it off, like I’d already written off most of school. It was all one big time suck, state-sanctioned babysitting until we turned 16. None of my teachers seemed happy with their lives and careers. Better not to even think about it.

The therapist asked me a few questions about myself and I answered them. I’d grown up in a tiny town not far from campus. My folks were still married, and both worked — my mom as a doctor’s assistant and my dad for a pharmaceutical plant — and my brother went to school here. We were in a band together. I played bass.

“You’re interested in thinking more about choosing a major. Thinking about a career,” the therapist said. “Yes?”

“I guess.”

“What sounds good?”

“I want to be a poet,” I said.

He nodded thoughtfully and wrote something in his notebook. When he looked up again, I said if not a poet, a rock star.

“A musician?”

“Sure.”

He nodded again, wrote more in his notebook. I glanced around the room, which was square and sterile, lit by a fluorescent light, the walls a soft neutral tone. I had no idea where the camera that was recording us was located.

Over the next hour, as we kept chatting, the questions got surprisingly personal. But what did I care — I floated. If this was what I was here to do, might as well get it over with. Might as well tell the truth. Did I believe in God? Sure. Was I sexually active? Yes. Or at least I had been. Had I ever considered suicide? Yes. What was the occasion? Some nights, I said, just out driving, I thought about popping my seatbelt and steering into oncoming traffic. What kept you from doing it? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to hurt anybody else. And I guess, honestly, I just wanted to see how everything was going to end. He wrote it all down. This was a far cry from the fill-in-the-blank aptitude test I took sophomore year. I kept looking around the room, my armpits sweating. Wherever they had hidden the camera it was very discreet.


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That I would accidentally end up in therapy was emblematic of my life at 17. Things just seemed to happen to me, and out of curiosity and boredom I went along with them. Other people were such mysteries. I would watch my parents and teachers and kids at school and wonder why they did the things they did or thought the things they thought. It all seemed arbitrary. And no matter how long or deep my ruminations, I got no closer to understanding. The path of least resistance became my mode. I rolled my jeans, wore only certain brands of shoes, combed my hair how everybody else combed theirs. I wasn’t a conformist in hopes of attaining some higher social status. Rather, it was the easiest way not to care. I had music and TV shows and being outside and reading if the book was any good. Maybe someday I’d get motivated.

That I would accidentally end up in therapy was emblematic of my life at 17.

***

I hadn’t known Rachel Thompson well when we started going together the previous spring. She was a grade behind me. She ran cross-country and was a junior varsity cheerleader, and when she and her friend got dumped by their boyfriends mere weeks before prom, they approached my best friend and me about double dating. It was only after agreeing that I learned Rachel had something of a reputation.

“You play your cards right,” my friend whispered to me conspiratorially over the phone one night, “and you could end up getting laid.”

I didn’t hate the idea.

How many times had I paused in the crowded hallways at school and watched girls rushing to and from class, laughing, books in their arms, and wondered — sadly, self-pityingly — if any of them wanted it as badly as I did?

But I wasn’t enough of an asshole to commiserate about something like that with my friend on the phone. Or at least not about a specific person. Or maybe I’m getting it all wrong in the remembering and we were always talking about girls at school, objectifying them, talking up the things we would do if given the chance. Maybe I didn’t commiserate on the phone that night with my friend because this time it was about me.

Rachel Thompson lived in a little farmhouse way off in the country. School consolidation in our rural Indiana county put 25 miles of cornfields and grain silos between us, distance enough that every trip out felt like a journey. Her dad worked at a factory in town and was missing his front teeth but wore partials. Her mom was friendly and frail, a special ed teacher where I’d gone to middle school. They had a biological son who was 21 and already married, and Rachel, who they’d adopted as a baby. They loved each other and were a happy family and they welcomed me as one of their own straight away. The day of prom I came dressed in my tux and with a corsage to pin to Rachel’s dress, and everyone was there, all smiles and warmth and good cheer. Her brother had a camcorder and kept ribbing me about being unable to get the corsage on right until finally her mother stepped in and straightened things out.

I liked the Thompsons, and I liked Rachel. In the weeks after prom, we spent more and more time together. We were both on the track team and would hold hands and talk on the long bus rides home from away meets. On the weekends, I’d drive out to her house and watch movies on TV with her and her folks, and afterwards we’d hang out in the living room alone. They had a piano. She’d play and sing “The Rose” and “From a Distance” by Bette Midler. I loved the warmth of her voice, the way it filled the whole house.

“Play your cards right and you could end up getting laid,” my friend had said. But he didn’t know how she played the piano. Neither did I. I couldn’t have anticipated the intimacy of those performances in her living room. The occasional missed chord followed by a correction. Her voice reaching up for a note.

Being around her made me feel like a different person. Or maybe more like myself. As though I didn’t have to blend in or hide. As though I was worth something for no other reason than that I was here and we were together.

‘Play your cards right and you could end up getting laid,’ my friend had said. But he didn’t know how she played the piano. Neither did I. I couldn’t have anticipated the intimacy of those performances in her living room. The occasional missed chord followed by a correction. Her voice reaching up for a note.

We used to listen to Pink Floyd late at night. We made out to it sometimes, too, down in my folks’ basement. I didn’t understand the meaning of the lyrics, just that they were meaningful. The way a line could lift me out of myself and remake me. The way kissing Rachel could lift me out of myself and remake me. I felt stupidly lucky. Happy. What had I done to make any of this happen? I had no idea. And I didn’t care. I couldn’t see a single advantage to thinking too much and somehow jinxing it all.

I remember one afternoon we were driving some empty county road listening to the radio and talking as the cornfields whizzed past. Rachel reached over and lay a hand on my thigh. I glanced at her, smiling, uncertain. She stared straight ahead. As I kept driving, she inched her hand over until she was holding me with it. Everything got quiet. The music and the fields swam away from us. I pressed on the accelerator — 60, 70, 80 mph. Nothing had ever felt as thrilling. Then she laughed. And I laughed. Finally we came to a stoplight at an intersection with another highway and she took her hand back.

“Don’t think bad of me,” she said.

“Why would I?”

“For that.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I liked it.”

I never thought bad of Rachel — for anything. She knew what she wanted, and people who knew what they wanted fascinated me. How did they know? Was there something they understood about the world that I didn’t? Some anxious part of me always feared I was living life the wrong way. The thought of screwing up paralyzed me. Even as a kid, my family had called me “Lump” because rather than jump into the action, I sat back and studied the other kids and only joined the fun when I knew it was safe.

Rachel didn’t need a career counselor or to take an aptitude test. After high school she was going to enroll in a two-year associates degree and then work as an administrative assistant. She already typed 70 words per minute and with practice could reach 100 or 110. She had a starting salary in mind, a neighborhood where she wanted to live. I’d listen to her tell me these things and marvel at her confidence.

I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t even really know my options. I figured I’d go to college and see what happened. That had been the only real story my parents had pushed on me — go to college. We didn’t talk about what it would be like or what I might do once I was there. One night my mother was helping me fill out my application. I had to check a box for a major as part of the process. I mentioned Creative Writing, the only thing on the list that looked halfway interesting. My mother pointed to the major right above it: Communication. She thought liberal arts majors all took pretty much the same classes and said communication might sound better on a résumé. We were sitting at the kitchen table. She looked up at me, pen poised and ready. “OK,” I said. “Communication.”

Some anxious part of me always feared I was living life the wrong way. The thought of screwing up paralyzed me.

I didn’t want to argue because on some level it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to convince her and I didn’t want go to the trouble of trying. It was easier to concede. But beneath that expedience opened a sinkhole of unacknowledged truth. I didn’t want to share that part of my life — my private thoughts and feelings, my hopes and dreams and vulnerabilities — with her. Or with anyone. It didn’t feel safe. There is plenty of poetry in small-town Indiana but there aren’t many poets there to sing it. For years, on instinct, I stuffed down my emotions, hid my heart away, kept secret the million delicious melancholies a poet perceives before language arrives to set them free. Part of the reason people who knew what they wanted fascinated me was that I couldn’t figure out how they dealt with the pain of being so exposed. Or didn’t they feel what I felt inside? The burden of some fragile, unacknowledged gift. A sense of life’s utter strangeness. Life’s brutality and grace. What I had learned was to blend in, to keep perfectly still. If no one knew me, no one could hurt me.

But at the same time, I was desperate to be known. On long drives through the country, or after we’d made out on the couch in her living room, I’d spill my guts to Rachel, talking music, telling stories about my family, sharing poems I’d written in a journal. And I’d ask questions, too, and listen to her answers. She was kind, thoughtful, funny. That she could so easily be herself had opened up space for me to do the same. And she never judged me. I remember when we finally had sex — my first time — she didn’t laugh at how quickly it was all over. Or she laughed but not in a bad way. She said, “You’re kidding, right?” but seemed more amused than anything, and after a few minutes we tried again with greater success. It was tentative and awkward and fun and sweet.

Afterward, we got dressed and drove to her brother’s house for a family picnic and kept looking at each other, sharing glances. I realized half the fun of sex was knowing you’d had it, the secret in your smile. Though maybe if anyone in her family had really looked at us just then they’d have known. And that was the other exciting part I hadn’t considered — the work of keeping it a secret. Her hulking factory-worker father with the missing front teeth, giant teddy bear though he was to Rachel, could have crushed me like a beer can. But I was too dumb and happy to be afraid. I piled baked beans and hot dogs and potato salad onto a plate.

The one person I told, a friend since kindergarten who I knew I could trust, said, “Have you even told her you love her yet?”

“No,” I said.

“Do you?” he said.

The question surprised me. I hadn’t considered it once in the whole time Rachel and I had been hanging out. It felt beside the point. Of course I loved her. Did I have to say it for her to know? Had I made a mistake by not saying it? Had I broken some unspoken rule? It pained me to think I’d messed something up without even knowing.

The next time we had sex I whispered “I love you” in her ear. She didn’t say it back. She sighed and said, “You’re sweet.”

Of the two of us, Rachel was the sweet one. I remember on her dad’s birthday, she wanted to surprise him at work so we hit Taco Bell and Burger King and McDonald’s, got him a big bag full of his favorite fast food treats for lunch. He worked on the shop floor at Alcoa, an aluminum supplier. When he came out to greet us he was sweating and streaked with grease. And at first he thought something was wrong — what were we doing there? Then she handed him the bag and he looked inside. Tacos. Burgers. A hot apple pie. The look on his face as he realized she’d gone to all those different places for him. I thought he might cry right on the spot.

The next time we had sex I whispered ‘I love you’ in her ear. She didn’t say it back. She sighed and said, ‘You’re sweet.’

My dad worked in a factory, too — a pharmaceutical plant — but I’d never taken him lunch as a surprise. I hardly even knew what he did there all day long. Family meant something more to Rachel. On one of those nights she’d played the piano and sung for me, we ended up snuggling on the couch. She told me about her biological mother.

“All I know about her,” she said, “was that she was morbidly obese. So I have to watch myself. That’s all I really know.”

We’d had sex several times, but I’d never felt closer to her, or more overwhelmed by tenderness, than in that moment. It was how she said I love you back.

One Sunday night in early summer, I went with the Thompsons and some of their friends to a carnival a half hour down the road in Crawfordsville. Rachel had been coming to the carnival, she said, for as long as she could remember. It reminded me of the county fair I’d gone to every summer when I was a kid and would stay for a few weeks with my grandparents in Illinois. It made me think about how inside Rachel was a whole world of memories and experiences, and that I was lucky for a glimpse. That night we walked the fairway holding hands. Barkers called for us to toss softballs into milk canisters, pitch pennies onto plates. Swells of melodic pipe organ music spilled from the carousel. Kids spun themselves dizzy on a Tilt-A-Whirl. I remember looking up at the Ferris wheel — this giant spinning disc of light against the night’s darkness — and how, at the very top, an empty seat rocked back and forth. The poet in me knew it meant something but I wasn’t sure what. For a moment, I felt unaccountably sad and alone, even though there were people all around and I was in love.

***

In mid-July, Rachel and I spent a week apart — and at 17, a week is a long time. Led by my mother and a friend, my church youth group attended the Presbyterian Youth Triennium at Purdue, where some 5,000 kids from around the country swarm campus for seven days of fellowship and singing and sharing ideas.

It was something to do the way going to church was something to do. Every Sunday I dutifully got up, got dressed, and endured boring Sunday school lessons and sermons and droned along with the hymns. I liked some of the stories, like when Jesus turned over the money changers’ tables in the temple, but the supernatural stuff left me cold and I instinctively hated people’s moralism and judgmental attitudes. Part of every service was a prayer the congregation read aloud. The gist was to acknowledge our selfishness and insufficiency, our pettiness, our weakness, the stain of sin made manifest through our desires.

It fetishized shame.

I remember always wondering why we should apologize for being human when we’d never asked to be born. And if God made these bodies of ours, why deny ourselves the pleasure or pain of inhabiting them?

On the first night of Triennium, everyone gathered in Purdue’s Elliot Hall of Music. It was crowded and noisy, more like a rock concert than a church service. “Brown-Eyed Girl” played over the loudspeakers and kids my age — several thousand of them — sang and swayed and hung off each other. I didn’t know what to think, only that I liked it. And whatever it was that allowed them to so freely express themselves — I wanted it.

Over the course of the week, I met kids from California, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Hawaii. They were vibrant and energized. They talked about travel, music, movies, art, poetry, philosophy. Things no one had ever really talked to me about before — or at least not with that intensity. Learning about their lives gave me a glimpse of something beyond Indiana and its cornfields and grain silos and empty railroad tracks, and beyond boring hymns and the weekly recitation of my inadequacies at church. What if instead of being passive and private and cautious, I became joyful and engaged with life like these people I was meeting? What did I have to lose?

What if instead of being passive and private and cautious, I became joyful and engaged with life like these people I was meeting? What did I have to lose?

Rachel and I spoke by phone once or twice that week. It was hard to explain to her what was happening inside of me. I didn’t have the words yet. And I felt guilty. Anxious. A feeling had begun to creep over me that I’d been dishonest with her somehow, that maybe I hadn’t really loved her but only been interested in sex. If I was going to be joyful and free, I had to look at myself clearly. I had to be honest. That I wanted sex at all felt like an indictment enough against my character to prove I was capable of using someone for it. I don’t know. It was irrational. Somehow feeling excited about a new life seemed a betrayal of the old.

I remember driving out to see her the day after Triennium ended. We laid in a hammock in her backyard and I probably sounded like a lunatic trying to convey to her how spiritually enlightened I felt. That night we had dinner and watched a movie with her folks. After they went to bed we made out on the couch.

“Do you think,” Rachel said breathlessly in my ear, “that you’d come right away … I mean, if we just put it in for a second?”

“Yes.”

“You would?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Probably.”

We sat up and straightened our clothes. Her curly hair glinted in the lamp light, the ends all frazzled. She was pretty. She smelled like fresh laundry. It seemed like maybe a thousand years since her mom had helped me pin the corsage to her prom dress.

We broke up at the end of July, during the Tippecanoe County 4-H fair. I don’t recall exactly what Rachel’s involvement had been with the fair but her being there meant we didn’t see each other or talk on the phone much, and with that on the heels of my week away, an inevitable drift set in. I remember feeling secretly grateful for the time apart. Since that night at her house after Triennium, I’d only started to feel more guilty and anxious about our having had sex. It had nothing to do with her but with me. It had nothing to do with sex. Or God. Rather, it was the part of my psyche obsessed with protecting itself from hurt. I don’t know how to explain it, only that it’s always been there, a dark current in my thoughts. The most generous interpretation I can give it is to say that it wielded shame like a weapon in a misguided attempt to save me from myself. It raised doubts. It lied. It preferred the cold certainty of loneliness over the chaos of love. I was too confused to say anything to Rachel, to even try to talk things through. Instead, I said nothing. I stopped acting like her boyfriend and waited for her to break up with me.

The night she called and suggested we hang out with other people, I quickly agreed. She said it just seemed like we were in different places right now. She was confused but not upset, or at least not outwardly so. I said she should enjoy being at the fair. She should have fun and hang out with whomever she wanted.

After we hung up, I waited to feel something, but nothing came. A coldness, maybe. There had been guys in her life before me, and there would be guys in her life after me. That’s what I told myself to assuage my guilt. I had chosen fear over her.

The last time I saw Rachel that summer was in my parents’ kitchen a few weeks before school started. She stopped by to drop off a T-shirt or something I’d left at her house. She talked for a while with my folks and my brother, and then we were alone.

“My period came,” she said.

My cheeks burned.

“Good,” I said.

She had told me when we first started having sex that the physicality of her cross-country training meant that sometimes her period skipped a month but not to worry about it. It startled me to have already forgotten to worry. Meanwhile, the whole last month, she had been wondering if she could be carrying my baby.

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” she said, pushing a glass of iced tea from one hand to another. “To think that we used to do that?”

“No.”

“It’s not weird?”

“It’s not weird,” I said.

But I said it in a way that meant I didn’t want to keep talking about this — not if it was going to hurt. In that moment I was the human equivalent of a closed door. I thought the best thing for both of us was to pretend nothing had happened. I couldn’t look her in the eye. I said again it wasn’t weird, and that she shouldn’t feel bad. She stared into her glass of iced tea. If there was more she wanted to say, she kept it to herself. She said she should probably go. I said OK.

A therapist might have been able to help me sort through the complexity of such a moment and find some compassion for myself. A therapist might have inquired into the circumstances and early life events that made turning into the human equivalent of a closed door seem like my best option. I could also have used a therapist to process my return to earth after the high of my spiritual awakening. Maybe I’d had a vision of some new possibility for a life outside Indiana and the narrow walls of my thinking, but I still had a year of high school to get through. I spent most of it goofing off, playing guitar, pretending I was some kind of poet by reciting “The Waste Land” in speech class. It made me feel important to tell a room of my peers that April was the cruelest month. Who cared what it meant?

In the process, I might have seen Rachel more clearly, too. At 17 I didn’t understand how much our culture hates women, that a woman couldn’t want sex — the same thing I wanted — without paying a price. I thought if I loved her none of that mattered. I thought being nice was enough. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I carefully avoided thinking about those things. Nothing in my training for manhood required it.

At 17 I didn’t understand how much our culture hates women, that a woman couldn’t want sex — the same thing I wanted — without paying a price. I thought if I loved her none of that mattered. I thought being nice was enough. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I carefully avoided thinking about those things.

I remember in the hallway at school one day that fall, Rachel’s ex-boyfriend came up and slapped me on the back and said, “Know why we go out with girls like Rachel? Because they like to fuck.”

He said it matter-of-factly, without a trace of rancor or vengeance. As I recall, he was smiling, practically congratulating me. In my naivete, I chalked it up to his just being an asshole, end of story. Across the years, however, what I see is a boy convincing himself — and trying to convince me — that fucking is all women are for. There aren’t enough therapists in the world to fix what’s wrong with men like that.

I’ve had the good fortune of returning to therapy as an adult — on purpose this time — and one of the questions my therapist likes to ask is what I’d say so my former self if I could. What would I like for him to know in moments of hardship or stress? And I’m always shocked when the answer arrives, some bit of simple wisdom that was inside me all along. That to be human is to hurt. That love is worth the suffering it brings. But really all I want to do is put my arm around him and tell him to buck up, maybe read him a poem by somebody who’s still alive. I want him to know nobody’s perfect and there’s a chance every day to make things right if you fuck up. And I want to thank him for that image of the empty seat at top of the Ferris Wheel, which has become a talisman for my intention to open myself to things I don’t understand. “You did your job,” I want to tell him. “You got me here.”

Not that I know for sure how that all happened. I had maybe three sessions with the kind-eyed “career counselor” at Purdue before I figured out that we weren’t really talking about careers. And I think it surprised him at the end of that third session when I announced I would no longer be coming to see him. He was surprised but didn’t try to convince me to stay. He said he thought I was very mature for my age, and that I had a bright future ahead of me. I felt bad and hoped I wasn’t letting him down. I didn’t want to mess up his research and writing. But I could tell from his questions about my life, and from his genuine interest in the answers, that if we kept talking he was going to make me feel things I didn’t want to feel. I wasn’t ready for that. I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready. What kind of comfort was there in confronting the things that hurt you? The times you’d been cruel or the victim of cruelty? What could possibly be gained by diving into the question of why you wanted the things you wanted? The longer I could put off that conversation the better, even if some part of me knew it was inevitable. What I wanted at 17 was to glide just a little longer in the safety of my childhood. What I wanted was to float. And that’s what I did, out of his office into the dark of another September night.

***

Steve Edwards is author of Breaking into the Backcountry, a memoir of his time as the caretaker of a wilderness homestead in southern Oregon. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and son.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy editor: Jacob Gross