Search Results for: memoir

Longreads Best of 2013: Best Old Story That I Didn't Read Until This Year

Is John Lindsay Too Tall To Be Mayor?

Jimmy Breslin | New York magazine | July 28, 1969

 

Mark Lotto (@marklotto) is a senior editor at Medium, and a former editor at GQ and The New York Times Op-Ed page.

In the month since I happened upon Jimmy Breslin’s story about the 1969 New York City mayor’s race, I’ve probably reread it a dozen times; I’ve recommended it to college kids, writers of mine, fellow editors, and when Marshall Sella and I were working on our own story about Anthony Weiner’s tragicomic run, I thought about it every single damn day. My love of it is almost hard to explain, but: It’s an adventure. It starts in a leisurely and apathetic place, ends with a startling announcement, and in between twists and turns through gossip, memoir, poetry, politics, polemic. It’s beautiful; it’s funny; it’s angry; it’s self-lacerating; it looks at the city from 10,000 feet and then zooms in at the ice in a glass. Nowadays, most magazine features hit you with a nut graph somewhere near the bottom of the first section or the top of the second, and then spend 4,000 words fulfilling your exact expectations. But Breslin surprises, again and again. You don’t even know what the story is really about until you’ve read the last line.

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Lust in the Golden Years

“Still, I decided, age alone was no basis for rejection. That’s exactly the basis on which I have been rejected many times. The bank, given my age, refused my request for a loan when, in my first year of renting, I found a small house I wanted to buy. The loan I could get—based on my future earning power—would have been a very small one and the down payment would have had to be enormous. On the street, the eyes of the young and not so young slid by me. I look my age. Nobody but someone even older than I wants to look my age. Nobody wants to be my age. I am too close to death for younger people to want to pay attention to me. People think it a great compliment to say to me, ‘You certainly don’t look your age.’ Well, what should my age look like? And if I did look my age, would I be unbearably ugly? Should I stay inside the rest of my life? Because I wasn’t going to look better, not ever. So, really, was I going to do the same with the men who answered my ad? No. It would take more than the age of the writer for a letter to hit the no pile. So it wasn’t Herb’s ‘Have Viagara, Will Travel’ that consigned him to the no pile; it was its brevity.”

-From A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance by Jane Juska, a memoir based on a simple ad taken out in The New York Review of Books: “BEFORE I TURN 67—next March—I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.” Read more on romance.

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Photo: killerciao, Flickr

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What Happened When We Discovered What Mattered

“Besides nearly killing me, college taught me several things. Namely, that external identity mattered. Being black mattered. It determined where to get off the Boston subway without receiving a baseball bat to the head. Being the biracial child of a single, white mother determined which whites would beg me, breezily to integrate certain spaces and which black would turn their back, stage-whispering about ‘messed-up Oreos.’ Being female determined the number of times I would cross my professors’ minds, and the number of men who would grope me, curious for integration of a sort. Being from the rural Northwest encouraged peers to smile at my accent and unfamiliarity with the New York Times. Being on financial aid meant I spent my vacations huddled in dormitory rooms with the heat turned off, my afternoons serving Faculty Club highballs to pinstripe-suited recruiters who placed their tips wearily in my hand with a whispered confession: ‘You’re probably better off where you are.’ Yes, the outside mattered, and it all mattered more than what I believed did.”

From Meeting Faith: An Inward Odyssey, the award-wining memoir by Faith Adiele, who venures to Thailand on a Harvard scholarship in order to fully understand—well, everything. Read more memoirs.

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Photo: adiele.com

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Longreads Best of 2013: Here Are All 49 of Our No. 1 Story Picks From This Year

Every week, Longreads sends out an email with our Top 5 story picks—so here it is, every single story that was chosen as No. 1 this year. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free Top 5 email every Friday.

Happy holidays! Read more…

The Things They Buried

Longreads Pick

Domingo Martinez, a 2013 National Book Award finalist, recalls Sunday luncheons with his family in South Texas eating pit-roasted barbacoa:

As soon as I was old enough, which in rural Brownsville was around fourteen, it was my job to get up before anyone else those mornings and drive to the barbacoa place for our ration. I was expected to have the food on the table before the rest of the family woke up. Dad would leave $20 on the dining room table the night before, and I would find my favorite mixtape and then zoom off about seven-thirty or so in my sister’s Volkswagen Rabbit. I looked forward to those Sunday mornings—the simple rush of freedom as I pulled away, that transcendental sense of liberation when you lock into fourth gear and hit 55 on a dirt road, as some ageless punk rock blares from the speakers. It should give you a sense of how malnourished the rest of my life was that this was magical to me, this drive to some nearby colonia where Dad knew someone who was making backyard barbacoa in a burst of free enterprise that may or may not have been legal, churning out tortillas in their garage on a tortilla-making machine (I don’t know what those are called). I took my job very seriously, though I didn’t really understand why. I just wanted to take the car out for a spin.

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Nov 24, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,385 words)

A Pivotal Early Moment for the Cheney Family and Gay Marriage

cheney-book

“In 2004, Mary contemplated quitting her job on the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign because of the president’s support for the Federal Marriage Amendment, which proposed to ban same-sex marriage. As Mary recalls in her memoir, when she asked to discuss the matter with her father at the White House, Lynne and Liz joined them, and all three urged her to remain on the campaign—noting that they themselves disagreed with Bush on the issue. But they also told her they would understand and support her decision if she did resign. Mary chose to stay on and, later in that campaign, when Democratic nominee John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, each separately raised the issue of her sexuality during the debates, the Cheneys were furious. Lynne declared Kerry was ‘not a good man’ and denounced his ‘cheap and tawdry political trick.’ When Edwards debated their father, Liz and Lynne went so far as to stick their tongues out at him, while Mary glared at the Democrat and, borrowing one of her father’s famous expressions, silently mouthed the words ‘Go fuck yourself.’”

Jason Zengerle’s in-depth background on the Cheney family, for Politico Magazine. Read more on gay marriage.

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Casey N. Cep on Ariel Levy’s ‘Thanksgiving in Mongolia’

Casey N. Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. She has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review.

There is a kind of loss that our culture does not yet understand. The death of a child is the worst tragedy we can imagine, yet we lack understanding for the hundreds of thousands of women who miscarry every year. Miscarriages are an invisible loss for most women, one they suffer by themselves. Imagine the courage, then, that Ariel Levy summoned to write “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.” She not only shares her experience of pregnancy, but also her miscarriage and the sorrow that followed it. Part travelogue, part memoir, and part grief narrative, the essay is remarkable from its opening memories of Levy’s own childhood to its heartbreaking ending: “But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic.”

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The Winners and Losers in the Book Business

“It begins to dawn on me that if a company publishes a hundred original hardcover books a year, it publishes about two per week, on average. And given the limitations on budgets, personnel, and time, many of those books will receive a kind of ‘basic’ publication. Every list—spring, summer, and fall—has its lead titles. Then there are three or four hopefuls trailing along just behind the books that the publisher is investing most heavily in. Then comes a field of also-rans, hoping for the surge of energy provided by an ecstatic front-page review in The New York Times Book Review or by being selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Approximately four out of every five books published lose money. Or five out of six, or six out of seven. Estimates vary, depending on how gloomy the CFO is the day you ask him and what kinds of shell games are being played in Accounting.”

Daniel Menaker, in a New York magazine excerpt from his memoir, My Mistake, on life in publishing.

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Photo: gpoo, Flickr

What Does the Book Business Look Like on the Inside?

Longreads Pick

Memories and bad math from Menaker’s life in the publishing business, excerpted from his memoir My Mistake:

“We make about $3 for each hardcover sale, $1 for each paperback.”

“So if we sell 10,000 hardcovers, that’s $30,000.”

“Right.”

“And say 10,000 paperbacks. That’s $40,000.”

“Right—so the P-and-L probably won’t work. So we have to adjust the figures. But remember, you can’t change the returns percentage.”

“Increase the first printing to 15,000 and the second printing to 7,500?”

“That ought to do it. Isn’t this scientific?”

Published: Nov 16, 2013
Length: 10 minutes (2,535 words)

Reading List: Amazing People for Desperate Times

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

I have a group of comedian friends; we go bowling every Wednesday and contribute to a magazine called The Annual. In the wake of recent personal misfortune, they’ve been a refuge for me. After spending time with them, I feel inspired. I listen to comedy podcasts, commit myself to books I haven’t quite finished, and make furtive jots in my journal.

Here are four pieces about people I don’t know who do the same thing.

“Tig Notaro And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Yet Somehow Completely Amazing Year.” (Sandra Allen, Buzzfeed, August 2013)

What an utter badass. I’m all about women, and women in comedy, and women in comedy getting the recognition they deserve. Tig had cancer and a breakup and a death in the family and wow, wow, wow, she leads this life of grace and humor. She has a dozen projects going. What a human.

“Now We Are Five.” (David Sedaris, The New Yorker, October 2013)

Weirdly, gay memoirists are my go-to after breakups (by which I mean Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris). My favorite Sedaris essays are about his family. Here, Sedaris forgoes his typical absurdism in favor of a more reflective piece on the recent suicide of his sister, Tiffany. He is funny and tender.

“The Rumpus Interview With John Jeremiah Sullivan.” (Greg Gerke, The Rumpus, April 2012)

I am equal parts inspired and intimidated (actually, far far far more intimidated) by JJS. He’s the “southern editor” for the Paris Review. Is that even a real position? I think the Paris Review invented it just for him, because he was too important to not have on staff. Think about it.

“Tavi Gevinson, Rookie.” (Duane Fernandez, Left Field Project, September 2013)

Is this a “longread?” No, and I don’t care. Tavi is incredibly inspiring, not just because of her youth, but because she Makes Things Happen for herself. She is artistic and energetic and makes me want to Make Things.

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Photo: CleftClips

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