Search Results for: memoir

A Heart-Shaped Life: Twelve Ways of Looking at Amy Krouse Rosenthal

Amy Krouse Rosenthal
John J. Kim/Chicago Sun-Times via AP Images

“What constitutes a life worthy of being remembered? How do you want to be remembered?” These are the kinds of questions Amy Krouse Rosenthal always asked in her work. When Amy died this week at 51, her obituary described her as a “children’s author, memoirist, and public speaker” who found “an extraordinarily large readership this month with a column in the New York Times titled “You May Want to Marry My Husband.” But Amy was far more than her final, heartbreaking column. Amy Shearn details what Amy did with her brief, inspired time, and how she came to inspire others. Read more…

Choose Your Own Rachel Cusk

Longreads Pick
Published: Mar 14, 2017
Length: 13 minutes (3,312 words)

Stand Up For Transgender Equality: A Reading List

Photo: Ted Eytan

I was in the lobby of a theater in Washington, D.C. when I saw the first of the tweets about the Trump administration’s decision to stymie protections for transgender students on the federal level. It wasn’t until the play ended and I was on the Metro home that I had cell service; I began to piece together what exactly had happened. My palms were sweating. I tried to make conversation with my friend, but I felt nauseated and heartsick.

I thought of the transgender and gender non-conforming kids in the youth group where I volunteer and the outspoken, proud, lovely trans kids in our county’s schools. I thought of Gavin Grimm, who’ll stand up against the Gloucester County School Board in front of the Supreme Court on March 28. I thought of how often trans folks have to reduce their stories to make them palatable to cisgender people, smoothing all of our glittering edges into sameness, rather than celebrating our differences, to win over those on the fence.

That night, I felt hopeless and scared. Today, I’m angry. It’s Friday as I finish this post, and the people of Chicago will protest for trans liberation tonight at the corner of Wacker and Wabash. I wish I could be there with them, to celebrate our community’s strength and resilience and to honor the lives of the seven trans women of color murdered in 2017: Mesha Caldwell, 41; Jamie Lee Wounded Arrow, 28; JoJo Striker, 23; Keke Collier, 24; Chyna Gibson, 31; Ciara McElveen, 21; and Jaquarrius Holland, 18. Seven women, and it’s only March. Unacceptable and terrifying.

This Women’s History Month, I implore you: educate yourself and stand up for your trans sisters, not only your cis-ters. Stand up for all of your transgender and gender non-conforming siblings, especially our youth, who need advocacy and protection now more than ever.

1. “Trans Rights Already at Risk in Trump’s Bumbling, Bigoted Trainwreck of a Presidency.” (Rachel, Autostraddle, February 2017)

This article on Autostraddle was instrumental in my understanding of what exactly the Department of Justice put forth two weeks ago:

Under Obama, the Justice Department had been appealing a court injunction that prevents trans students nationwide from accessing the bathroom or other facilities consistent with their gender. Under Trump and Sessions, the first order of business was to cease that appeal, and to allow a lower court injunction to harm trans students unopposed.

Unfortunately, this lack of action? reversal? doesn’t bode well for trans rights. Rachel goes on to quote Mara Keisling of the National Center of Transgender Equality:

“While the immediate impact of this initial legal maneuver is limited, it is a frightening sign that the Trump administration is ready to discard its obligation to protect all students… Transgender students are not going away, and it remains the legal and moral duty of schools to support all students.”

Rachel also describes Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ historical support of anti-LGBTQ legislation, which is unsurprising but scary all the same, and explains how Gavin Grimm’s Supreme Court case could affect the administration’s decision to cease the appeal.

Update 3/6/17: The Supreme Court has referred Gavin Grimm’s case to the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Fourth Circuit and will no longer hear his case on March 28. Read more at NYT and BuzzFeed.

2. “Janet Mock: Young People Get Trans Rights. It’s Adults Who Don’t.” (Janet Mock, The New York Times, February 2017)

Janet Mock, transgender author and activist, is the author of two memoirs: Redefining Realness: My Path To Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More and the upcoming Firsts: A Memoir of the Twenties Experience. In this passionate op-ed, Mock does what she does best: Use her personal experiences to advocate for trans youth. Mock contrasts her different school experiences–one with supportive adults, one without.

It’s adults like those in the Trump administration who don’t realize that pitting young people against one another has consequences. It encourages some to be bullies and turns others into sinister objects.

When trans students are told that they cannot use public facilities, it doesn’t only block them from the toilet — it also blocks them from public life. It tells them with every sneer, every blocked door, that we do not want to see them, that they should go hide and that ultimately they do not belong. When schools become hostile environments, students cannot turn to them. Instead they are pushed out. And without an education, it makes it that much more difficult to find a job, support themselves and survive.

Related: “What Trans Youth Need to Hear Right Now, According to Trans Adults.” (Sarah Karlan, BuzzFeed LGBT, March 2017) This isn’t longform, but it’s rare that trans kids have the opportunity to hear from trans adults who are happy and thriving.

3. “Pseudo-Feminist Trolls are Still Trotting Out Tired, Anti-Trans Ideology.” (Larissa Pham, Village Voice, February 2017)

Transphobia isn’t exclusively conservative territory. There are self-proclaimed progressives and feminists whose philosophies harm trans people in subtle and overt ways. Trans-exclusionary radical feminists, better known as TERFs, are obsessed with the false notion that trans women aren’t really women, and, unfortunately, their illogical arguments continue to appeal to the fearful.

4. Telling Our Own Stories.

The following essays and interviews feature the experiences of trans and gender non-conforming artists, authors, activists, students, cartoonists, administrative assistants, analysts and teachers.

“Telling Trans Stories Beyond ‘Born in the Wrong Body.'” (Meredith Talusan, Tiq Milan, Jacob Tobia, and Nico Fonseca, BuzzFeed LGBT, May 2016)

“Transgender Stories: ‘People Think We Wake Up and Decide to Be Trans.'” (Kate Lyons, The Guardian, July 2016)

“My Life as a Trans Woman Teaching High School in a ‘Bathroom Bill’ State.” (Aila Boyd, Broadly, February 2017)

“This is What It’s Like to Be a Trans Kid in a Conservative School.” (Nico Lang, Rolling Stone, March 2017)

“Tomboys Don’t Cry: Edgar Gomez Interviews Ivan Coyote.” (LARB, December 2016)

“Five Trans Cartoonists Respond to Bathroom Hysteria.” (The Nib, March 2017)

Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London

Lauren Elkin | Flâneuse | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | March 2017 | 26 minutes (6,613 words)

 

Below is the first chapter from Flâneuse, Lauren Elkin’s incisive hybrid book of memoir, cultural criticism, and social history about the female urban walker, the contemplative, observant, and untold counterpart to the masculine flâneur. Our thanks to Elkin and FSG for sharing it with the Longreads community.

* * *

Flâneuse-ing

Where did I first come across that word, flâneur, so singular, so elegant and French with its arched â and its curling eur? I know it was when I was studying in Paris at university, back in the 1990s, but I don’t think I found it in a book. I didn’t do much required reading, that year. I can’t say for sure, which is to say I became a flâneur before I knew what one was, wandering the streets around my school, located as American universities in Paris must be, on the Left Bank.

From the French verb flâner, the flâneur, or ‘one who wanders aimlessly,’ was born in the first half of the nineteenth century, in the glass-and-steel covered passages of Paris. When Haussmann started slicing his bright boulevards through the dark uneven crusts of houses like knives through a city of cindered chèvre, the flâneur wandered those too, taking in the urban spectacle. A figure of masculine privilege and leisure, with time and money and no immediate responsibilities to claim his attention, the flâneur understands the city as few of its inhabitants do, for he has memorised it with his feet. Every corner, alleyway and stairway, has the ability to plunge him into rêverie. What happened here? Who passed by here? What does this place mean? The flâneur, attuned to the chords that vibrate throughout his city, knows without knowing.

In my ignorance, I think I thought I invented flânerie. Coming from suburban America, where people drive from one place to another, walking for no particular reason was a bit of an eccentric thing to do. I could walk for hours in Paris and never ‘get’ anywhere, looking at the way the city was put together, glimpsing its unofficial history here and there, a bullet in the façade of an hôtel particulier, leftover stencilling way up on the side of a building for a flour company or a newspaper that no longer existed, which some inspired graffiti artist had used as an invitation to add his own work, a row of cobblestones revealed by roadworks, several layers below the crust of the current city, slowly rising ever upward. I was on the lookout for residue, for texture, for accidents and encounters and unexpected openings. My most meaningful experience with the city was not through its literature, its food, or its museums; not even through the soul-scarring affair I carried on in a garret near the Bourse; but through all that walking. Somewhere in the 6th arrondissement I realised I wanted to live in a city for the rest of my life, and specifically, in the city of Paris. It had something to do with the utter, total freedom unleashed from the act of putting one foot in front of the other.

I wore a groove into the Boulevard Montparnasse as I came and went between my flat on the Avenue de Saxe and school on the rue de Chevreuse. I learned non-textbook French from the names of the restaurants in between: Les Zazous (named for a kind of jazzy 1940s hepcat in a plaid blazer and a quiff), Restaurant Sud-Ouest & Cie, which taught me the French equivalent of ‘& co,’ and from a bakery called Pomme de pain I learned the word for ‘pinecone,’ pomme de pin, though I never learned why that was a pun worth making. I bought orange juice on the way to class every day at a pretzel shop called Duchesse Anne and wondered who she was and what was her relationship to pretzels. I pondered the distorted French conception of American geography that resulted in a TexMex restaurant called Indiana Café. I walked past all the great cafés lining the boulevard, La Rotonde, Le Sélect, Le Dôme, and La Coupole, watering holes to generations of American writers in Paris, whose ghosts hunched under café awnings, unimpressed with the way the twentieth century had turned out. I crossed over the rue Vavin, with its eponymous café, where all the cool lycéens went when they got out of school, assertive cigarette smokers with sleeves too long for their arms, shod in Converse sneakers, boys with dark curls and girls with no make-up. Read more…

Bird Man

Western Meadowlark (Sturnella Neglecta). (Design Pics via AP)

Eva Holland | Longreads | February 2017 | 10 minutes (2641 words)

 

Noah Strycker spotted the first bird before I made it from the parked car to the edge of the marsh. “It’s a rough-legged hawk,” he said when I caught up to him, gesturing for me to peer through his long, 60-power Swarovski scope. I obliged, and there it was: large, mottled white-and-brown, perched on the bare branch of a distant tree.

The sightings kept coming. Strycker picked out a Western meadowlark (“Oregon’s state bird,” he noted), a group of killdeer — lankier members of the plover family — and nearby, on an open mudflat, an American pipit, and a least sandpiper. He identified a red-shouldered hawk, pointing out the distinctive red-orange bars across its chest, and then two, three, four bald eagles. A red-tailed hawk and three northern harriers joined our growing list of raptor sightings.

“I’m just looking for something that doesn’t look like a tree branch,” he explained, scanning the horizon with binoculars. I imitated him with my borrowed binos, watching for lumps, movement, anything out of place. Around us, there was nothing — to my eye — but a sea of tall dried winter grasses and bare, dead-looking trees, lit up by the slanting winter sun.

It was January 16, 2016. Strycker had been home in Oregon for less than two weeks, after a year on the road. On December 31, 2015, he had completed his global “Big Year” — an attempt to see as many bird species as possible over 365 days. The previous world record, set in 2008 by a British couple, was 4,341 species. Strycker’s goal was to see 5,000 bird species; he finished the year with an astonishing list of 6,042. In one year, he saw more bird varieties than many elite birders will see in a lifetime. But the new record wouldn’t stand for long: a Dutch birder, Arjan Dwarshuis, cleared 6100 species sighted by early November 2016, and announced that he hoped to break 7000 by year’s end. On December 31, he spotted his 6,833rd variety. He had seen two-thirds of the world’s roughly 10,000 bird species.

Strycker and Dwarshuis are extreme practitioners of an extremely common practice. Birding is big business: in 2011, 18 million Americans traveled with the specific intent to see birds, spending an estimated $15 billion on food, lodging, transportation, and guides in the process. Birders are list-makers: they track their species sighted in a day, in a month, in a year, in a lifetime. In doing so, they act on a deeply ingrained human instinct: to classify and categorize the world around us. Animal behaviorists call that instinct our umwelt — the way we navigate the world.

Though he was attempting to complete the biggest Big Year of all time, Strycker’s goal, beyond tallying a massive list, was to build something larger: to both lean on and to nurture a growing global community, and to show the world that birding matters; that it taps into something larger — something human. He wanted, he told me, to sell the world on birds.

Across the marsh, a flock of tens of thousands of dunlins — gray-brown shorebirds from the sandpiper family — had taken flight. Unremarkable on the ground, in the air they became a shifting cloud of light and shadow, flying in tight formation. Their white bellies glinted in the sun when they turned one way, then the whole group seemed to vanish when they turned away again. Strycker kept pointing out new birds on the mudflats, but I couldn’t stop staring at the dunlins, following their zigs and zags through my binoculars. Like millions of other people, I had seen that viral video of a starling murmuration — but here was the real thing, unspooling in front of me. The dunlins flew back and forth in a rippling unison, moving like a flag in a high wind, gleaming in the January sun.

I had to admit: I was sold.

* * *

Modern birding began with Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds, published in 1934. The book was revolutionary: while naturalists had typically killed their specimens and carried them home in order to study them, the portable field guide meant that people — people in North America, at least — could now identify birds on sight, in the wild.

Once bird species were readily quantifiable by anyone who’d studied a field guide, it wasn’t long before birders began competing to see who could spot the most species. Big Days became Big Months became Big Years, and the North American Big Year was the biggest of them all. The original record, set at 497 species in 1939, was broken in 1953 (by Roger Tory Peterson himself, with 572) and again in 1956 (598).

The old style of watching birds — people of means, mostly, taking train or car trips, and eventually flights, to places with known guides, and with plenty of downtime between trips — stood until 1971, when a college student based in Arizona spotted 626 species. Young Ted Parker’s record, in turn, was broken by his close friend, Kenn Kaufman, in 1973. Kaufman was a long-haired teenager who’d dropped out of high school in Kansas to chase birds — he set his new record, 671 species, by spending the full year on the road. He hitchhiked back and forth across the continent, tapping into a network of local knowledge as he went, and sleeping out under the stars. His approach — grassroots knowledge and constant travel over targeted trips and hired guides — was an inspiration for Noah Strycker’s global big year.

* * *

One of the first things we do, from infancy, is learn to categorize the world around us: That’s a dog. That’s a cat. That’s a bird. We gain a more complex understanding as we go: that’s a blue jay. That’s a cardinal. That’s a bald eagle. But while the basic impulse behind birding — categorization and collection — is near universal, we don’t all advance to the level of knowledge or intense attention wielded by active birders. What makes someone take that leap?

To explain themselves, birders talk about “spark birds” — the single bird species, or single sighting, that cements a lifelong addiction. For Strycker, now 31, that encounter came at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge when he was just 14 years old. The refuge is best known as the site of last winter’s armed occupation by an anti-government militia, but back then, it was a quiet, wild corner of eastern Oregon, popular with birders and virtually no one else. A couple of years earlier, Strycker’s fifth-grade teacher had installed bird feeders outside her classroom windows and passed out binoculars for each student’s desk. Her young pupil went home and begged his parents to build birdhouses on their wooded property just southeast of Eugene. He had already begun memorizing the identifying markers and distinctive chirps and calls of his local birds. Eventually he started birding farther afield — and Malheur was an early, favorite destination.

That’s where he spotted them, on a visit with his father during the spring migration: a barred owl and its heavyweight cousin, a great horned owl, brawling on the ground over a snake that each was intent on eating. This wasn’t a passive songbird on its perch. This was primal violence: beaks and talons, feathers and dust. He was hooked.

Barred Owl  -- Mircea Costina/Rex Features via AP Images

Barred Owl — Mircea Costina/Rex Features via AP Images

Since then, Strycker has made a career of watching birds, counting birds, and thinking and writing about birds. At 16, he landed a summer job surveying the bird population at a reservoir outside Eugene. He started submitting articles to birding magazines — they were good enough that one of his first editors initially wondered whether a parent wrote them. At 18, he was named “Young Birder of the Year” by the American Birding Association. While at Oregon State University (where he studied fisheries and wildlife science, with a minor in fine art), he did field research in Oregon, Panama, Michigan, Maine, and Hawaii. He was also hired as a part-time, paid editor at Birding magazine, a job he still holds a decade later. On customs and immigration forms, he lists his profession as “bird man” — as good a way as any to describe his cobbled-together, bird-themed professional life.

The nearly three months he spent in Antarctica after college, at a remote three-person research camp, inspired his first book, Among Penguins, published in 2011. It’s a young man’s memoir (count the penis jokes) that nonetheless established Strycker’s voice as a writer: earnest, light-hearted, informed, and likeable. Then came more field work in Australia, Costa Rica, Ecuador; California’s Point Reyes, and the Farallon Islands, and a side gig as the resident ornithologist/naturalist for a small cruise company specializing in the Arctic and the Antarctic.

…birds have something to teach people – that intensive, intentional observation of birds can reveal truths not just about life as a bird, but about ourselves.

In 2014, Riverhead Books published Strycker’s second book, a well-reviewed collection of essays called The Thing With Feathers. It mixes the latest academic research with Strycker’s own thoughtful observations from the field. Whether he’s discussing how the nesting habits of fairy wrens can illuminate some of human society’s norms, or exploring what nutcrackers can teach us about the limits and possibilities of memory, his premise, broadly speaking, is that birds have something to teach people — that intensive, intentional observation of birds can reveal truths not just about life as a bird, but about ourselves. (“It takes time to get to know birds,” Strycker writes, “as it takes time to get to know anyone.”)

During his Big Year, Strycker spotted an average of 17 bird species per day to hit his total of 6,042. In one hot streak, in Ecuador, he spotted 625 species in 12 days. There was no time to rest, or to contemplate what he was seeing. He crashed in hostels, with friends, and on birders’ couches, and lived out of a carry-on sized backpack. He moved rapidly from place to place — traveling mostly overland, averaging one short-haul flight per week. His carefully constructed around-the-world route took him to 41 countries and all seven continents. The year cost him, all in, roughly $60,000. (Nearly half of that went to flights alone.) A publisher’s advance, for a forthcoming book about the year, footed the bill.

He recalls sleeping past 6:30 a.m. just once in 2015. Most days he was up and on the hunt by 4:30 or five in the morning, often keeping at it until 10 or 11 p.m. that night. He had worried, before he started, about burnout, but instead, he just seemed to get stronger as he went. His ears and eyes got sharper; his list grew and grew.

On January 1, 2016, in India, the day after he’d completed his record-setting Big Year, Strycker woke up at 5 a.m. and…went birding.

* * *

By late afternoon, the sun was setting and the air had turned cool. Strycker suggested that we wait for dusk, in hopes of spotting a short-eared owl as it emerged for the night. I was game.

While we waited, we watched two northern harriers making low, lazy loops above the marsh. A type of hawk, the harrier tends to hunt from flight, Strycker explained. He’s a natural teacher, slipping casually into a clear, explanatory mode without ever seeming to lecture, delving into a memory bank of knowledge about hundreds, even thousands of bird species: their shapes and sizes, their feather colors and patterns, their calls and songs, their movements. In the fading light, and with the birds in near-constant motion, he could still easily identify the harriers by their style of flight.

The owl we were waiting for shared some habits with the harriers. It, too, hunts from the air, he explained: hovering low over the marshes and fields where its prey, small mammals, try to hide.

Then — speak of the devil — the short-eared owl appeared, flying behind one of the harriers, both of them just shadows in the dusk. Through my binoculars I could see its pale face popping out of the darkness — a sign that this was a male bird. Another owl joined the first, and then a third. Soon, with Strycker’s help, I could distinguish between their flight and the harriers’: the owls’ languid, deliberate wing beats reminded me of a ray’s slow underwater flight. I said so, and Strycker complimented me on the comparison. I felt that surging glow of achievement — the feeling you get when you answer a tricky question correctly at pub trivia, or you navigate the subway successfully in a new-to-you city.

Birding fulfills its practitioners on several levels. It can be about activism, or altruism, and about competition: Arjan Dwarshuis, throughout his mission to break Strycker’s record, was also aiming to raise money for BirdLife’s Preventing Extinctions Programme. It can provide the small, specific pleasure I experienced with the short-eared owls — the little thrill of lining up the details to make a correct identification — or moments of abstract, transcendent beauty, like my long drinking-in of the dunlins. Perhaps most importantly, it can feed our bone-deep, soul-deep need to classify and organize the world around us.

The term umwelt comes from the German word meaning, roughly, “environment” or “surroundings.” But in this context it refers to a given species’ way of perceiving the world around it: dogs organize their world by smell, bees by ultraviolet light, and so on. Carol Kaesuk Yoon, a biologist, proposed in her 2009 book, Naming Nature, that we humans, in turn, navigate through and organize our world via a system of ordering and classification of other natural beings, and that this system is remarkably consistent across history, languages, cultures, ecosystems, and societies. Our umwelt is “our shared human vision of life.”

This isn’t merely a vestigial trait from the days when our daily survival hinged on correctly identifying predators and prey. It’s a vital part of our orientation in the world. When brain-injured humans lose access to their umwelt, their ability to navigate the world through a system of classifications, they lose their bearings. One such patient, who otherwise acted and interacted normally, had to be regularly prevented from trying to consume his hospital blankets and other inanimate, inedible objects. Another, a former birder, could no longer distinguish between species of birds in the images shown to him — he told the doctors that they all “look the same.” Think of a musician who’s no longer able to distinguish between notes, or a foodie without taste and smell: their world is cruelly diminished.

The umwelt, Yoon writes, “is so potent, so compelling, and so vivid that we cannot ignore it. We find we simply must and do order and name the living world…We humans can be counted on to do a number of things: breathe, eat, walk, notice organisms, and organize them into a hierarchical classification.”

In Among Penguins, Strycker’s stock response to the inevitable question, “What got you into birding?” echoes that idea: “I sit back, smile, and ask the asker: ‘What got you so interested in eating, sleeping, walking, and talking?’”

What motivated Noah Strycker to spend a year circling the world, seeking out birds for up to 18 hours every day? What drives millions of birders to venture out into the fields and forests every year, ears cocked and field guides in hand? Call it competitive desire, or the collector’s compulsive need to make and complete ever-longer lists. Call it umwelt.

Maybe it’s all those things, or maybe it’s something less complex. When I asked Ted Floyd, Noah Strycker’s longtime mentor and editor at Birding magazine, what he thought drove Strycker, his answer was simple: “He’s just really, really interested in birds.”

That night in the marsh, we watched the short-eared owls bank and hover, glide and bank again, until their silhouettes faded into the deepening darkness — until even Noah Strycker couldn’t see them anymore.

* * *

Eva Holland is a writer and editor based in Canada’s Yukon Territory whose work we’ve featured on Longreads many times in the past. Visit her personal site at evaholland.com.

Editor: Krista Stevens | Fact checker: Matt Giles

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo by SEIU 775 (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

In this week’s Top 5, we’re sharing stories by Michael Hall, Molly McArdle, Mehreen Kasana, Helen Hollyman, and an interview by Kate Harloe.

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The Rise of Roxane Gay

Longreads Pick

A profile of hyper-prolific essayist, novelist, short story writer, comic book author and tweeter Roxane Gay. Author Molly McArdle brings to light Gay’s prominence not only as a brilliant author, but as one of the literary community’s most upstanding citizens, frequently championing under-recognized writers, and tirelessly battling bigotry of all stripes in various ways–most recently withdrawing her forthcoming book, How to Be Heard, from Simon & Schuster because of their now-canceled plans to publish alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos’s memoir.

Published: Feb 22, 2017
Length: 18 minutes (4,651 words)

The Business of Being “Jane Roe”

Norma McCorvey (Jane Roe) and her lawyer Gloria Allred on the steps of the Supreme Court, 1989. Photo by Lorie Shaull, via Wikimedia Commons.

Last week, on February 18th, Norma McCorvey — aka “Jane Roe,” the plaintiff in the 1973 Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court case that legalized abortion — passed away. Four years ago, in February, 2013, Vanity Fair published this fascinating profile of of her. McCorvey, who wasn’t able to actually have the abortion she fought for because of the timing of her pregnancy and the drawn-out case, famously had a change of heart many years later, becoming a pro-life activist. Through most of her adult life, regardless of whether she was fighting for or against women’s reproductive rights, McCorvey managed to monetize her position, not only publishing two memoirs, but forming one sketchy foundation after another, on either side of the argument. Author Joshua Prager had to write around the subject — whom he and all those interviewed portray as mercenary — because she refused to be interviewed without payment of her $1,000 speaking fee.

Young Norma McCorvey had not wanted to further a cause; she had simply wanted an abortion and could not get one in Texas. Even after she became a plaintiff, plucked from obscurity through little agency of her own, she never did get that abortion. McCorvey thus became, ironically, a symbol of the right to a procedure that she herself never underwent. And in the decades since the Roe decision divided the country, the issue of abortion divided McCorvey too. She started out staunchly pro-choice. She is now just as staunchly pro-life.

But in truth McCorvey has long been less pro-choice or pro-life than pro-Norma. And she has played Jane Roe every which way, venturing far from the original script to wring a living from the issue that has come to define her existence.

“I almost forgot i have a one thousand dollar fee,” she texted in August in response to a request for an interview. Told she could not be paid, she texted back: “Then we wont speak.”

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The Humanizing Properties of Depression: Daphne Merkin Talks to Gabby Bess

At Broadly, Gabby Bess — a writer who has depression — interviews life-long sufferer Daphne Merkin, and reviews Merkin’s new memoir, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning With Depression, in the process. Although Bess reports that the book doesn’t offer any prescriptions or promises for relief, she seems to find comfort in identification with the frequently suicidal author.

“…during our call, we agree that life is bad. It’s clear from her own case that money can’t buy happiness—it can only buy the stints in psychiatry units, or therapy sessions, or however you take your self-care. Wanting to die while living among the rich and being one them, perhaps, makes the emptiness of our current setup and its values all the more pronounced.

“There’s a lot that’s terrible about life. I think some people have a guard up against it. They overlook it,” she says. “I think that people who suffer from depression are sort of finely tuned to it. I write somewhere in my book that depression is the loss of necessary illusions. You need a certain amount of illusion to live.” She adds, “Depression can be very humanizing. I’ve thought to myself, If [Donald] Trump suffered from some type of depression, he’d be a different person.”

However, until we change the world, which might be more possible now than ever, we need to take care of ourselves and continue living. Merkin recognizes that life is all she has: “I think [suicide] affords a kind of—this is putting it strangely—a paradoxical relief to a very depressed person, to think there’s one way out of it,” she tells me over the phone. “I would somehow think if I commit suicide then I’ll be happy, but where am I going to be happy?”

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

In this week’s Top 5, we’re sharing stories by Mark MacKinnon, Rachel Cusk, Carmen Maria Machado, Suketu Mehta, and an excerpt from Bill Hayes.

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