Search Results for: romance

Breaking the Mold

A co-housing community. Photo: Tim Pierce

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

 

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

Our Sex Education: A Reading List

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

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

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

Fox and Friends

Rachael Maddux | Longreads | August 2015 | 21 minutes (5,232 words)

 

The hounds of Shakerag Hounds, the oldest mounted fox hunt in the state of Georgia, are trained as pups to heed every note of their huntsman’s horn. They know a quick double-note means it’s time to head out into the field, three short bursts followed by a sad undulation means they’ve landed on a covert with no quarry, and three long, shimmying notes mean they’ve run their quarry to ground. It’s a fox these hounds are after, in theory—red or gray—but out here, just beyond the furthest reaches of metro Atlanta’s sprawl, they might find themselves on the trail of a coyote, a bobcat, an unlucky armadillo. Whatever they’re chasing, when they hear the horn’s three long, blooming notes, they know what to do. Three means let it go. Three means let it live.

John Eaton, Shakerag’s huntsman, likewise had the horn’s particular vocabulary ground into him at a tender age. He grew up in Somerset, England, the sixth generation of a fox hunting family. His grandfather was a huntsman, too, and his mother was a whipper-in, one of the hunt staff that rides along to keep the hounds (not “dogs,” never just “dogs”) in line. His family did the kind of fox hunting you think of when you think of fox hunting: tall boots, red and black jackets, black helmet, regal horses. The kind about which a character in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance quipped, “The English country gentleman galloping after a fox—the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.”

In the Britain of Eaton’s childhood, fox hunts operated pretty much as they had for half a millennium: as a combination sporting event, social gathering, and elaborate means of pest control. Back then, it was unheard of to call hounds off a quarry the way he now does as a matter of course—like a pinch hitter knocking one out of the park and walking off the field, or a fisherman hooking a big one then chucking his rod and reel into the lake. What’s the point of coming so close and giving up at the last moment? Why even bother at all? Read more…

The Cultural Impact of “A Wrinkle in Time”

Photo: brainwise

My beloved fourth-grade teacher, Miss York, held my class in rapture as she read aloud a chapter of Madeleine L’Engle’s classic, A Wrinkle in Time, every day after lunch. Later, I read it on my own, over and over, and devoured much of L’Engle’s other fiction. I met the Austins, I time-traveled to Noah and his infamous ark, I went up against an insane dictator.

L’Engle’s life–her family, her religion, her motherhood, her career, her writing decisions—have been subject to much speculation. Later in her celebrated, prolific career, she transitioned to writing about religion and family–more memoir, less fiction. But it’s her “children’s” books that remain the most popular. At Mental Floss, Jen Doll explores the magic of A Wrinkle in Time and its effects on the boundaries of genre and powerful women protagonists.

The reception of [A Wrinkle in Time] was far from universally positive, though. It was a weird mashup of genres combining science fiction with fantasy and a quest; a coming-of-age story with elements of romance, magic, mystery, and adventure. There’s a political, anti-conformist message, and at its heart is the importance of family, community, freedom of choice, and, most of all, love. In some ways, there was too much room for interpretation in L’Engle’s themes…

In these fantasy worlds, as in the real world, things can’t always be tied up neatly. Evil can never be truly conquered; indeed, a key to fighting it is knowing that. It’s a sophisticated lesson children thrill to, and one in which adults continue to find meaning.

Read the story

Love, Identity, and Genderqueer Family Making

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Maggie Nelson | The Argonauts | Graywolf Press | May 2015 | 17 minutes (4,137 words)

Published to great acclaim earlier this year, The Argonauts blends memoir and critical theory to explore the meaning and limitations of language, love, and gender. At its center is a romance: the story of the author’s relationship with artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes the author’s account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making. 

A note: In the print edition of The Argonauts, attributions for otherwise unattributed text appear in the margins in grayscale. We’ve tried to recreate those marginal citations here. However, due to the limitations of digital formatting, if you are viewing this excerpt on a mobile device the citations may appear directly above the quotations, as opposed to alongside them.

***

October, 2007. The Santa Ana winds are shredding the bark of the eucalyptus trees in long white stripes. A friend and I risk the widowmakers by having lunch outside, during which she suggests I tattoo the words HARD TO GET across my knuckles, as a reminder of this pose’s possible fruits. Instead the words I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad. You had Molloy by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better? What’s your pleasure? you asked, then stuck around for an answer.

Read more…

The Romantic Comedy Spectrum: A Reading List

Seems like the first movie I ever watched was a romance. It was a Disney movie; obviously, there’s a tortured love and a singalong. The most recent film I’ve seen, Trainwreck, is also a romance. What I’m interested in: the boundaries of the romantic comedy. Romantic comedies can be teen dreams (Clueless), homages to Shakespeare (She’s The Man), stunt-filled action romps (Mr. and Mrs. Smith), or cruel tearjerkers (P.S. I Love You). I’ve been inspired by romantic comedies before to Get My Shit Together, and I think that’s really cool. They can be timeless or comforting or really terrible, or all three. Romantic comedies—the best of them—allow us to project and to process. Here, I’ve collected a handful of stories centering on the creators and aficionados of the romantic comedy. Read more…

Well-Aimed and Powerful

John C. Houbolt at blackboard, showing his space rendezvous concept for lunar landings. // NASA // Wikimedia Commons

Margaret Lazarus Dean | Leaving Orbit | Graywolf Press | May 2015 | 21 minutes (5,246 words)

 

The following is an excerpt from Leaving Orbit by Margaret Dean Lazarus, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, appearing courtesy of Graywolf Press.

* * *

The astronauts walked with the easy saunter of athletes. . . . Once they sat down, however, the mood shifted. Now they were there to answer questions about a phenomenon which even ten years ago would have been considered material unfit for serious discussion. Grown men, perfectly normal-looking, were now going to talk about their trip to the moon. It made everyone uncomfortable.
—Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon

Southern Festival of Books: Nashville, Tennessee, October 10, 2009

Maybe you’ve seen it. Many people have—at least 800,000 have clicked on various YouTube iterations of the same moment. It looks like nothing at first. The video is fuzzy, amateur, handheld. We hear the muffled verité sound of wind against the microphone, of the excited breath of the camera operator. People are standing around, their postures reflecting boredom, their faces and movements obscured by the shaky camera work and low resolution.

On YouTube, of course, this poor video quality, combined with a high hit count, contains an inverse promise: something is about to happen.

We can make out a white-haired man in a blue blazer, partially obscured by a sign. He seems to be talking to another man, in a black jacket, whose back is to the camera. Out of any context, the white-haired man would be unrecognizable because of the bad video quality, but if you know to look for him—and you do, because of the title on the YouTube page—the man is recognizable as astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot of Apollo 11, one of the first two men to walk on the moon.

The muffled audio obscures the voice of the black-jacketed man, who is speaking now. Passion or nervousness makes his voice waver.

“You’re the one who said you walked on the moon when you didn’t,” the man says. He is holding an object out to Buzz. A subsequent Google search reveals that it’s a Bible—he is trying to make Buzz swear upon it.

Overlapping him, Buzz Aldrin’s voice says, clearly and unwaveringly,
“Get away from me.”

“—calling the kettle black. You’re a coward and a liar and a thief—”

At that moment Buzz’s arm comes up and cracks the black-jacketed
man in the jaw. Even with the poor video, we can see that it’s an impressive punch, well-aimed and powerful. We can’t see the punched man’s face, but we see his head recoil backward. The camera recoils too, as if in sympathy. Something has changed in the scene, you can sense it. One public figure’s image has been complicated, another person now has a story to tell, a video to put on YouTube. Read more…

Death Made Material: The Hair Jewelry of The Brontës

Portrait of Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontë, by their brother Branwell (via Wikimedia Commons)

Deborah Lutz | The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects | W.W. Norton | May 2015 | 42 minutes (6,865 words)

Below is an excerpt from the book The Brontë Cabinet, by Deborah Lutz, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor A. N. Devers.

* * *

Long neglect has worn away

Half the sweet enchanting smile

Time has turned the bloom to grey

Mould and damp the face defile

But that lock of silky hair

Still beneath the picture twined

Tells what once those features were

Paints their image on the mind.

—Emily Brontë, Untitled Poem

If the Brontës’ things feel haunted in some way, like Emily’s desk and its contents, then the amethyst bracelet made from the entwined hair of Emily and Anne is positively ghost-ridden. Over time the colors have faded, the strands grown stiff and brittle. Charlotte may have asked Emily and Anne for the locks as a gesture of sisterly affection. Or, the tresses were cut from one or both of their corpses, an ordinary step in preparing the dead for burial in an era when mourning jewelry with hair became part of the grieving process. Charlotte must have either mailed the hair to a jeweler or “hairworker” (a title for makers of hair jewelry) or brought it to her in person. Then she probably wore it, carrying on her body a physical link to her sisters, continuing to touch them wherever they were. Read more…

The Art of Running from the Police

Photo by Joe Thorn

Alice Goffman | On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City | University of Chicago Press | May 2014 | 45 minutes (12,478 words)

 

Below is a chapter excerpted from On the Run, by sociologist Alice Goffman, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Goffman spent six years living in a neighborhood in Philadelphia. In her groundbreaking book, she explains how the young black men in her neighborhood are ensnared in a Kafkaesque legal system which makes running from the police their only option, and how these men have made running into an art. Read more…

A Woman on the Margins

Photo: Mitchell Bach

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 17 minutes (4,223 words)

 

I first encountered the work of the memoirist, critic, and journalist Vivian Gornick in graduate school when we were assigned The Situation and the Story, her handbook on personal writing. Gornick explains that the writer must create out of her real self a separate narrative persona. The narrator has wisdom and distance the writer may not, and can craft a meaningful story out of the raw details of life. This slim book cracked open my understanding of what it means to write.

In Fierce Attachments, her 1987 memoir, Gornick wields her narrative persona to construct an incisive, nuanced portrait of her conflicted bond with her mother. She describes the Bronx tenements where she grew up, the early death of her father, the complex relationship with their neighbor Nettie and, at the center of it all, a struggle with her codependent maternal bond. Her new memoir, The Odd Woman and the City, a collage of interactions in the New York City streets and with her longtime friend Leonard, is a meditation on friendship, her status as an “Odd Woman”—a second-wave feminist—and her place in urban life.

We met at a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Gornick was staying for spring break before she returned to the University of Iowa where she teaches at the nonfiction program. It was sleeting out, and Gornick asked me if her mascara was running, then ordered a mezzo plate and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. She began by telling me how much she hates teaching.

Why do you teach so much?

I don’t do it often at all anymore. In this case, they offered me too much money, and I felt I couldn’t say no. But I was wrong: I should have said no.

Why is that?

I can’t live for four months in a place like Iowa City anymore. I’m really too old for that. I’m not even sure I do need the money, but you always feel you need the money. I always taught just to make a living, and I made myself a good teacher of writing; I certainly made myself a good editor. But this time around I saw that I am so deeply out of sympathy with the whole enterprise that it’s immoral for me to teach. Read more…