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The Truth About Writing Fiction From Your Life

Elisa Albert and Emily Gould talk with Longreads Essays Editor Sari Botton about the decisions involved in writing fiction with autobiographical underpinnings at Rough Draft Bar & Books in Kingston, NY on Sunday, February 11th, 2018.

Sari Botton | Longreads | March 2018 | 17 minutes (4300 words)

I’ve been working on a few different book projects for years — okay, decades — without yet publishing. There are many, many reasons it’s been taking me so long, but one of them is that I keep vacillating between memoir and fiction.

In the early 90s I dabbled in MFA programs, focusing on fiction. What I began writing in those days was somewhat based on my own experiences, yet also very made-up.

Then in the mid-90s, after I dropped out of two different programs in succession, books like Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss and Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club appeared and sparked a memoir boom. As a reader I became a nonfiction junkie. As a writer, I switched gears, started publishing personal essays…and then spent a lot of time freaking out about upsetting people by writing the truth — or my version of it, anyway.

These days I go back and forth, working on both memoir and somewhat autobiographical fiction, and spend a lot of time debating the merits of each with other writers.

On Sunday, February 11th, I turned to two of my favorite authors, Elisa Albert and Emily Gould, for their take on this. I sat down with them at Rough Draft Bar and Books in Kingston, New York, for a conversation ranging from the choices around writing fiction with autobiographical underpinnings, to the differences — mechanically-speaking and otherwise — between memoir and “autofiction.”

This interview was edited for brevity and clarity. Below you can listen to the audio — including Albert reading a passage from After Birth, and Gould reading a passage from Friendship, plus a Q&A with the audience.

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Sari Botton: Elsewhere, both of you have talked a lot about, and written about, writing fiction from your life. I’ve been intrigued, and I thought that other people would want to hear about this too. So, is there a difference in your mind, either one of you, between straight up fiction and fiction that does have autobiographical elements, and what would be the difference?

Elisa Albert: We could do like a one word answer on the count of three, yes, or no. I don’t think there’s a difference. I think it’s like a spectrum, you know? Like a continuum, if you will. We are all bound by the limits of consciousness such as it is. Unless we alter our consciousness, but even altered consciousness is consciousness. It exists, you know? I mean, I can’t get into the physics too deeply, but even if you set something on Mars, you’re still coming from what you have to bring to bear, which is your consciousness. So, is that always necessarily autobiographical? No. But it does come from you. Or the one you, the eternal you, the shared collective you.

Emily Gould: Elisa and I obviously don’t write books that are set on Mars or in 18th century Scotland. No aliens are going to show up at the temp agency where Bev [a character in Friendship] is going to have her interview. There are no fantastical imaginative elements. But that also doesn’t mean that we didn’t make this stuff up. This book is actually so made up. And it’s actually really frustrating sometimes when people are like, “Oh, so what was it like for you when …” [name of my best friend] “decided to have a baby after getting pregnant after a one night stand?” And I’m like, “I don’t know, because that didn’t happen in my actual life.”

At the same time I want credit for being such an imaginative person, but then I look at any individual page of this book, and I’m like, well, yes, I did eat at that restaurant, and have basically that exact same interaction. But you know, then it became fictionalized. And we both have also written a lot of nonfiction, and think there is a shining line in my mind between the two forms.

Botton: You’ve both also written a fair amount of essay and memoir, and so people recognize certain things from your lives, which they can project on to your books, saying it’s totally just your life. But now you’re calling it a novel.

Albert: Change the names and there you go.

Botton: Right, exactly. But a lot of other novelists choose to completely invent worlds and that’s not what you’re doing, so it’s an interesting choice. Emily, I read something that you wrote about where the choice started. That you were having a hard time after writing a memoir, And the Heart Says Whatever. That after that you were having a hard time writing in the first person. Do you want to talk a little bit about that shift?

Gould: Oh sure. Yeah. In order to trick myself into being able to write again at all after the, sort of, critical and interpersonal disaster that was the reception to my first book, I sort of just started writing in the third person as an exercise even though I was still basically writing memoiristically. And then very gradually that became something other than memoir. It just started as a sort of thought exercise, and now this is something that I tell my students.

I’m teaching fiction now, and students come to me all the time and say things like, “I’m just so sick of myself. I’m sick of my perspective. I’m sick of all of my thoughts about everything. I’m sick of my themes. All of my fellow people in this workshop have heard the same story from me a thousand times already, and they’re sick of my shtick too. What can I do to break out of the aspects of me that I’m so bored with?” And I just tell them, “You’re stuck with you. I’m sorry.” They haven’t perfected head transplants yet, so we’re all stuck with ourselves.

But what you can do is just shift your lens. Try a new form even if it’s something that you’re really bad at. Draw a comic book even if you can’t draw at all. Switch point of view, like I did. Write a song or a poem about the stuff that you usually write about instead of just doing whatever it is that you usually do. It sounds so goofy, and 101, but it really works. You can pull the wool over your own eyes. You really can lie to yourself and trick your brain.

Even if you set something on Mars, you’re still coming from what you have to bring to bear, which is your consciousness. So, is that always necessarily autobiographical? No. But it does come from you. — Elisa Albert

Botton: So once you start writing about yourself, or write your story in the third person … although, Elisa, After Birth is in the first person, right?

Albert: Yeah. Because my first novel was in the third person, and I found it was the same thing anyway. Everybody still was kind of like, Oh, well, it’s just you, obviously.

Gould: Which is so weird because you didn’t die of brain cancer.

Albert: Right, I know. The narrator of my first book dies of a brain tumor at the end of the book, so I don’t know how that could be autobiographical. I mean, I think ultimately it’s a compliment. It has to be a compliment, you know? Because what people are saying when they’re sort of assuming those things or projecting, or whatever, is that you have created a world that is so visceral and immediate and convincing that oh, of course it’s you. You know? So you’ve done what you set out to do then. I mean, I wouldn’t want to write a book where people reading it would think, like, geez, this shit’s totally invented. You know?

And the other thing is a novel, anything you write, but a novel especially, just the scope of it, it has to be an obsession. So even if you’re obsessed with 17th century Germany, that’s your obsession, and there are deep-rooted ways in which that’s very autobiographical even though obviously you weren’t there in your current form. So whatever it is, it has to be an obsession. You can’t spend years working on something if you’re not obsessed. So even if it’s not about you, it is encompassing your deep need to think about, look at, explore something.

Botton: So then once you’ve started writing, either in the third or first person — but deciding that it’s fiction — how do you then take the elements of your life and make them into something that isn’t your life? That becomes another story, more than just your life? How do you make that leap? Or does it start with, like, I have this particular story I want to tell?

Albert: Lorrie Moore said in her amazing story, “How to Become a Writer,” which is in the second person, and is very autobiographical, that “it’s like recombinant DNA.” You change one little strand of something, and then watch how that ripples out. Then it’s a very different story suddenly. I like to use things from my own life that I’m not interested in inventing. I’m not interested in inventing an origin story. Like, the thing I’m working on now. It’s a girl from LA. I grew up in LA. I’m not interested in inventing a different origin story. That’s now where my obsession lies, so I’m going to use that. I don’t give a shit.

So that’s autobiographical. I mean, this person is not like me in many, many other ways, but I know that origin story, so I can make use of it. It would be wasteful otherwise. I would be wasting my energy. I’d be reinventing the wheel. I have a pretty deep identification as somebody who was raised in a really religious household. I’m not interested in reinventing that at this point. That’s not what I’m looking at. So that’s a given. I’m going to use that. That’s there. I’m fluent in that, you know?

Botton: That frees you, then, to create the other aspects of the story.

Albert: The things I’m kind of obsessed with looking at or turning over or flipping around or inverting or whatever, that’s what I’m going to spend these years doing. And I don’t have to then waste my energy on the other elements because, you know, maybe in a different book those elements might need tweaking, but yeah. It’s like butterfly wings, right? Like, tsunami on the other side of the globe because, like, one little movement here.

The narrator of After Birth — her mother is dead. My mother’s not dead. She has an unnecessary surgical birth that was like super inhumane and traumatic. That didn’t happen to me. She’s an academic. I’m not an academic. Whatever. But, see, then we get into this weird thing where I’m like, see! Whatever.

Elisa and I obviously don’t write books that are set on Mars or in 18th century Scotland. There are no fantastical imaginative elements. But that also doesn’t mean that we didn’t make this stuff up. ‘Friendship’ is actually so made up. — Emily Gould

Gould: I’m sure this is something that you guys definitely all already thought about before, but I find myself thinking about writing fiction sometimes in terms of almost like method acting a little bit. Like, you can take an emotional experience that you’ve had and transmute it into another form. I’ve never experienced a shattering romantic betrayal, which is one of the things that I write about in Friendship. Yet. But I have experienced betrayal on a deep level in a relationship, but just not, like fucking someone else. You know?

So I was able to use that emotional experience and turn it into something else, the same way that I imagine actors do. I don’t know. I’m a terrible actress, so I actually don’t know how that works. But that’s what people talk about in “The Actor Prepares,” which I totally read in drama class.

Botton: That’s so funny. An article came up in my world today, in my social media world, with a title like “Apply acting techniques to your writing.”

Albert: People come at me sometimes, like about opinions spewed by the character, and they really want to fight me about it, and it’s like, dude, you’re not going to go after Al Pacino for his mafia activities. Like, get your shit straight, okay? This is like a role, this is a performance, okay?

Botton: That’s a good way of putting it. When I emailed you guys and was asking like, “Are we talking about autofiction?” Emily, you were like, “Well, I don’t write autofiction.” And then Chloe Caldwell [who had to bow out of the event] was like, “I write autofiction.” It’s a really hard thing to get a handle on. What exactly is autofiction? Emily, I know that you’re a big fan of Chris Kraus, and her stuff kind of falls into that category, maybe? So I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about what it is and why it isn’t what you’re doing.

Gould:  Well, I mean, the most straightforward, I think, contemporary example of autofiction that probably the most people in this room have read, just based on the bestseller list is Knausgård. Has anyone read any of those My Struggles? All of the struggles? Yeah, there were a lot of them. But what he does, I think, is — it’s just this amazingly super detailed tracking the movements of his own consciousness thing, but filling in the gaps in his memory with imaginative detail, I assume, and that’s what makes it a novel rather than a diary. So, for example, there’s a famous scene at the end of the first My Struggle volume that’s just this virtuosic scene where he is cleaning out his disaster alcoholic, hoarder, dead father’s house for days on end. Just like, you’re there. You are in the house, smelling the smells, moving the specific objects from room to room with him, like almost in real time, for as long as it takes. That, to me, is autofiction. That form. And that’s just so, so different from what either of us have done, even though we have written about characters who are our same ages who have our same hair colors.

Botton: I was also thinking about Lisa Halliday’s new book, Asymmetry.

Gould: Ooh, yeah, that one’s good.

Botton: It’s about a relationship with a Philip Roth-like character. That’s part of it. And the author did have a relationship with Philip Roth, and she was interviewed in the Times and she talks about how she uses the basic details from her life to just kind of set up the universe, and then she makes a story and works from there.

Albert: Well, then there’s the idea that, is there such a thing as nonfiction? You know, its arguable. Even if you’re trying to write a memoir, somebody else who was there might have a very different memoir.

Gould: I think there are formal distinctions that we just have to make. It’s like the difference between painting oils or painting watercolors or something? And for some reason that’s really important to me to draw those distinctions. And I also have incredibly strong feelings about “nonfiction” that is written without faith, you know? Like A Million Little Pieces-style stuff. That bugs me.

I like to use things from my own life that I’m not interested in inventing. I’m not interested in inventing an origin story. Like, the thing I’m working on now. It’s a girl from LA. I grew up in LA. I’m not interested in inventing a different origin story. — Elisa Albert

Albert: Well that was written as a novel.

Gould: Oh, but published as a memoir.

Albert: Right.

Gould: So then we’re also talking about market forces and marketing categories informing what gets called fiction and what gets nonfiction. But we don’t have to bring commerce into this room tonight.

Albert: Let’s not bring the market into this.

Gould: We can just keep this in the lofty realm of art for now.

Albert: But you know that old line about how if you say it’s a memoir, they’ll say you made it all up, and if you say it’s fiction, they’ll say every word is true.

Botton: I was just going to say that. Yeah, so then why does somebody write autofiction as opposed to a memoir? It’s so close.

Gould: It’s not. It’s totally different!

Botton: It is? Okay.

Gould: Yeah, like a memoir has all these imaginative story elements and structures, and autofiction is really about living inside someone else’s mind, no matter how boring it gets there. It’s really trying to just transport you into someone else’s consciousness, which to me is like a super fascinating, trippy experience.

Albert: Done well, it’s, like, the best.

Gould: It’s transcendent when it’s done well. When it’s done badly, of course, it’s as boring as being someone boring is. And that’s just a world away from what we do as memoirists. Which is so much to do with eliding the boring part of the story and getting into the propulsive part of the narrative. That’s the craft of memoir. Sorry that I’m like, Duh, Sari.

Botton: That’s okay. I’m here to learn. But I have writers in my studio who talk to me all the time about what to do with what their writing. They are writing stuff that feels like memoir, but they want to explore different outcomes. I’ve been sharing Michelle Tea’s The Black Wave with people. There’s magical realism in there. I just love the way she goes from stuff that is so recognizable to, like, she’s just out there in another world. And so, I can never specifically know what is the best way for anybody to go, and this is kind of what this conversation came out of. I’m really trying to always get a handle on what are the differences. And I guess for different writers, it’s different things.

In order to trick myself into being able to write again at all after the, sort of, critical and interpersonal disaster that was the reception to my first book, I sort of just started writing in the third person as an exercise even though I was still basically writing memoiristically. And then very gradually that became something other than memoir. — Emily Gould

Once upon a time, everything was called a novel. There wasn’t the memoir category, and people wrote stories from their lives and called them novels, and so it got more confusing actually when the memoir genre got added. But I think for you, you’re very clearly writing fiction.

Albert: Well, I think I’d be out of material pretty quick. I mean, stories from our lives can be really interesting, and many of us have lived intense lives, but there’s only so much of it. Whereas, if you’re willing to sort of go off on little digressions and make up little details and see how that spins out, and bring your perspective to bear on things that are not your experience. Or try to inhabit somebody else’s perspective on something that maybe you have experienced, you have endless material. Then there’s just no end to it.

I think I would get bored. I mean, I write nonfiction sometimes, but it’s not as fun for me. It’s like a good muscle to exercise, but it’s like that playfulness, that kind of mischievous kind like, what can happen? What could I get away with? What if I push it this way?

Gould: Whereas, I feel like actually for me, nonfiction is where I started, and it’s my comfort zone, and fiction is a lot harder, and it comes a lot less easily. It is this arduous process whereas, it just is easier to come up with a halfway decent first draft of something memoiristic for me, at least. Whereas to come up with a halfway decent first draft of something fictional is just … My shitty first drafts of fiction are like so shitty. I think also there’s the hard, cold, horrible reality that just because something comes more easily to you doesn’t meant it’s good. God, that’s sad.

Botton: I mostly write nonfiction, memoir, essay. But I dabble in fiction. I started graduate school to write fiction. I published one short story on a website, which had autobiographical underpinnings, but also a lot of made up shit. But I started writing something like a year ago, and I was having so much fun doing it, but when I went back to it, I had to keep reminding myself — and it was also based on a character similar to me — but I had to keep reminding myself of the rules of this universe that this person lives in. That this person’s boyfriend is 18 years older and Italian. Having to orient myself again and again in this fictional world, I find hard. That doesn’t mean, though, that it isn’t something worth putting more time and effort toward and trying harder at, but for me it’s like a harder exercise to remember the rules of the universe I’ve created. Do you ever run into that?

Albert: Sometimes. I mean, like, plot mostly. Just to be like, okay, this happened, this happened. I can sort of hang out in a voice for a long time, but then to just keep the facts straight. But that’s administrative stuff, you know? A couple index cards.

Gould: Yeah. Those aren’t structural things, so if you’re thinking of it like a physical project? Like if you’re building something, that’s more like — the rules of the universe stuff you can always straighten out at the end in the same way that if you’re renovating a house, you can fix up the door frames and the windows. I don’t know anything about this metaphor.

Albert: It’s like curtains.

Gould: I’m going to stop. Yeah, it’s like you’re going to put in furniture and decorate and the wall paper and stuff, and that’s like the fun stuff that you do at the end. Also, copy editors will do some of it for you. And good line editors. Friendship was written a long time ago in my life, and I had never been pregnant. And now I’ve been pregnant a bunch, and I think the character who gets pregnant in Friendship was pregnant in the first draft, like the draft that sold, for like 11 months. Like an elephant. And no one caught it. A copy editor caught it. It was like, oops. And all I had to do was change some details about the weather, and it was fine, you know?

But that’s the kind of thing that — if you get bogged down in that stuff in the first draft, you’re going to prevent yourself from ever moving forward.

People come at me sometimes, like about opinions spewed by the character, and they really want to fight me about it, and it’s like, dude, you’re not going to go after Al Pacino for his mafia activities. Like, get your shit straight, okay? This is like a role, this is a performance, okay? — Elisa Albert

Botton: One of my obsessions that I’ve written a lot about, and interviewed people a lot about, and I’ve interviewed both of you about, is people getting pissed off at you for what you’ve written that has to do with them. And sometimes, when I’m working on memoir and afraid of people being mad at me, I think, All right, I’m just going to change my name. That’s one solution. The other is, All right, I’m totally going to fictionalize, and it will be more fun. But they’re still going to recognize themselves. Is this something that you run into or care about, or does fiction solve that?

Albert: I don’t think fiction solves it. People just tend to then pick out people who are not remotely related to them and be offended by stuff that they’re imagining might have something to do with them. I don’t tend to have a lot of people in my life who I need to protect that way. That’s been a long process, but I find it useful to have pretty honest relationships so that anyone I actually have in my life is a) not somebody I’m going to feel the need to fucking burn in literature, and b) not somebody who’s going to come at what I’m doing with a narcissistic vengeance. But that takes time, and not everybody has the luxury of narrowing down their intimate circle in such a way. But it’s served me pretty well so far.

Botton: I think, Emily, you’ve had a different experience, at least with memoir, yeah.

Gould: Well, yeah, there are definitely sacrifices involved in being honest always, for anyone. Not just writers, I think. And like Elisa, I think the list of people whose opinions I give a fuck about at all has been winnowed down over the course of my life from like, you know when I was in my 20s, it was like everyone. And now it’s just people I care about. So yeah, I think this has always been really hard for me, and it continues to be hard for me. I definitely don’t have all the answers about it at all, but like the tattoo on Sari’s arm says, there comes a point when it becomes harder for the flower to stay in the bud than it is to bloom. I’m paraphrasing her tattoo badly, sorry.

So, it’s like you choose between two different kinds of pain, right? It’s like the pain of keeping whatever it is inside versus the pain that you’re going contend with when you have to deal with the consequences of having written your story. And it’s a personal choice.

Botton: Incidentally, Emily was my tattoula. You know, like a doula. She went with me. She brought me gluten-free cookies so I wouldn’t faint.

Gould: It’s really important to eat before and after you get a tattoo.

Botton: And for those of you who can’t see, my tattoo, I recently learned, does not quote who I thought it did. So, yes. It’s that quote that you see on mugs and candles. “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Usually it says it’s by Anaïs Nin, and it is very much not, which is fine.

Albert: Are you going to edit it on the tattoo?

Botton: I didn’t attribute.

Albert: Oh.

Botton: It’s actually a woman [a playwright now] who was a publicist in California for an adult ed college in the 70s. She’d put that on a press release to encourage adults to go back to school. So, go back to school. That’s what we’re doing here. Yeah, so. I still like it.

Gould:  Me too. It’s great!

Botton:  It’s a good one, right?

Gould Yeah.

Botton: And then I got cherry blossoms on my other arm, so we’re all blossomed out here. I actually interviewed that woman. One of these days I’ll write about it…

Audio:

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Elisa Albert is the author of After Birth, The Book of Dahlia, and How This Night is Different, and the editor of the anthology Freud’s Blind Spot. She has taught at Columbia’s School of the Arts, The College of Saint Rose, and is currently Visiting Writer at Bennington College.  She lives in upstate New York with her family.

Emily Gould is the author of And The Heart Says Whatever, Friendship, and the forthcoming Perfect Tunes. With Ruth Curry, she runs Emily Books, which sells and publishes books by women as an imprint of Coffee House Press. She is a contributor to Bookforum and The Cut. She teaches writing in New York City, where she lives with her family.

Sari Botton is the Essays Editor for Longreads. She edited the anthologies Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving NY  and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for NY.

Recording by Brian Macaluso of Clandestine Productions. Event sponsored by Kingston Writers’ Studio.

 

The Creator of Bitcoin Comes Clean, Only to Disappear Again

A bitcoin mine in Sichuan, China. This summer, the cryptocurrency reached a record high of $4300 per coin. (Paul Ratje/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Andrew O’Hagan | The Secret Life: Three True Stories of the Digital Age | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | October 2017 | 24 minutes (6,575 words)

The Raid

Ten men raided a house in Gordon, a north shore suburb of Sydney, at 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, December 9, 2015. Some of the federal agents wore shirts that said “Computer Forensics”; one carried a search warrant issued under the Australian Crimes Act 1914. They were looking for a man named Craig Steven Wright, who lived with his wife, Ramona, at 43 St. Johns Avenue. The warrant was issued at the behest of the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). Wright, a computer scientist and businessman, headed a group of companies associated with cryptocurrency and online security. Wright and his wife were gone but the agents entered the house by force. As one set of agents scoured his kitchen cupboards and emptied out his garage, another entered his main company headquarters at 32 Delhi Road in North Ryde, another suburb of Sydney. They were looking for “originals or copies” of material held on hard drives and computers; they wanted bank statements, mobile-phone records, research papers, and photographs. The warrant listed dozens of companies whose papers were to be scrutinized, and thirty-two individuals, some with alternative names, or alternative spellings. The name Satoshi Nakamoto appeared sixth from the bottom of the list.

Some of the Wrights’ neighbors at St. Johns Avenue say they were a little distant. She was friendly but he was weird — to one neighbor he was “Cold-Shoulder Craig” — and their landlord wondered why they needed so much extra power: Wright had what appeared to be a whole room full of generators at the back of the property. This fed a rack of computers that he called his “toys,” but the real computer, on which he’d spent a lot of money, was nearly nine thousand miles away in Panama. He had already taken the computers away the day before the raid. A reporter had turned up at the house and Wright, alarmed, had phoned Stefan, the man advising them on what he and Ramona were calling “the deal.” Stefan immediately moved Wright and his wife into a luxury apartment at the Meriton World Tower in Sydney. They’d soon be moving to England anyway, and all parties agreed it was best to hide out for now.

At 32 Delhi Road, the palm trees were throwing summer shade onto the concrete walkways — “Tailor Made Office Solutions,” it said on a nearby billboard — and people were drinking coffee in Deli 32 on the ground floor. Wright’s office on level five was painted red, and looked down on the Macquarie Park Cemetery, known as a place of calm for the living as much as for the dead. No one was sure what to do when the police entered. The staff were gathered in the middle of the room and told by the officers not to go near their computers or use their phones. “I tried to intervene,” one senior staff member, a Dane called Allan Pedersen, remarked later, “and said we would have to call our lawyers.”

Holed up in the Meriton World Tower, Ramona wasn’t keen to tell her family what was happening. The reporters were sniffing at a strange story — a story too complicated for her to explain — so she just told everyone that damp in the Gordon house had forced them to move out. The place they moved into, a tall apartment building, was right in the city and Wright felt as if he was on holiday. On December 9, after their first night in the new apartment, he woke up to the news that two articles, one on the technology site Gizmodo, the other in the tech magazine Wired, had come out overnight fingering him as the person behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, who in 2008 published a white paper describing a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” — a technology Satoshi went on to develop as bitcoin. Reading the articles on his laptop, Wright knew his old life was over.

By this point, cameras and reporters were outside his former home and his office. They had long heard rumors, but the Gizmodo and Wired stories had sent the Australian media into a frenzy. It wasn’t clear why the police and the articles had appeared on the same day. At about five that same afternoon, a receptionist called from the lobby of Wright’s apartment building to say that the police had arrived. Ramona turned to Wright and told him to get the hell out. He looked at a desk in front of the window: there were two large laptop computers on it — they weighed a few kilos each, with 64 gigabytes of RAM — and he grabbed the one that wasn’t yet fully encrypted. He also took Ramona’s phone, which wasn’t encrypted either, and headed for the door. They were on the sixty-third floor. It occurred to him that the police might be coming up in the elevator, so he went down to the sixty-first floor, where there were office suites and a swimming pool. He stood frozen for a minute before he realized he’d rushed out without his passport.

Ramona left the apartment shortly after Wright. She went straight down to the basement car park and was relieved to find the police weren’t guarding the exits. She jumped into her car, a hire vehicle, and, in her panic, crashed into the exit barrier. But she didn’t stop, and was soon on the freeway heading to north Sydney. She just wanted to be somewhere familiar where she would have time to think. She felt vulnerable without her phone, and decided to drive to a friend’s and borrow his. She went to his workplace and took his phone, telling him she couldn’t explain because she didn’t want to get him involved.

Meanwhile, Wright was still standing beside the swimming pool in his suit, with a laptop in his arms. He heard people coming up the stairs, sped down the corridor, and ducked into the gents’. A bunch of teenagers were standing around but seemed not to notice him. He went to the farthest cubicle and deliberately kept the door unlocked. (He figured the police would just look for an engaged sign.) He was standing on top of the toilet when he heard the officers come in. They asked the youngsters what they were doing, but they said “nothing” and the police left. Wright stayed in the cubicle for a few minutes, then went out and used his apartment keycard to hide in the service stairwell. Eventually, a call came from Ramona on her friend’s phone. She was slightly horrified to discover he was still in the building and told him again to get out. He, too, had a rental car, and had the key in his pocket. He went down sixty flights of stairs to the parking lot in the basement, unlocked his car, and opened the trunk, where he lifted out the spare wheel and put his laptop in the wheel cavity. He drove toward the Harbour Bridge and got lost in the traffic.

***

As Ramona drove along she began texting the mysterious Stefan, who was at Sydney Airport, having already checked in for a flight to Manila, where he lived. Stefan had to make a fuss to get his bag removed from the plane. He then headed back into Sydney and he spoke en route to Ramona, telling her that Wright would have to get out of the country. She didn’t argue. She called the Flight Centre and asked what flights were leaving. “To where?” asked the saleswoman.

“Anywhere,” Ramona said. Within ten minutes she had booked her husband on a flight to Auckland.

In the early evening, Wright, scared and lost, made his way to the shopping district of Chatswood, an area he knew well and in which he felt comfortable. He texted Ramona to come and meet him, and she immediately texted back saying he should go straight to the airport; she’d booked him a flight. “But I don’t have my passport,” he said. Ramona was afraid she’d be arrested if she returned to their apartment, but her friend said he’d go into the building and get the passport. They waited until the police left the building, then he went upstairs. A few minutes later he came back with the passport, along with the other computer and a power supply.

They met Wright in the airport parking lot. Ramona had never seen him so worried. “I was shocked,” he later said. “I hadn’t expected to be outed like that in the media, and then to be chased down by the police. Normally, I’d be prepared. I’d have a bag packed.” As Ramona gave him the one-way ticket to Auckland, she was anxious about when she would see him again. Wright said New Zealand was a bit too close and wondered what to do about money. Ramona went to an ATM and gave him six hundred dollars. He bought a yellow bag from the airport shop in which to store his computers. He had no clothes. “It was awful saying goodbye to him,” Ramona said.

In the queue for security, he felt nervous about his computers. His flight was about to close when the security staff flagged him down. He was being taken to an interview room when an Indian man behind him started going berserk. It was just after the Paris bombings; the man’s wife was wearing a sari and the security staff wanted to pat her down. The man objected. All the security staff ran over to deal with the situation and Wright was told to go. He couldn’t believe his luck. He put his head down and scurried through the lounge.

Back at Wright’s office, Allan Pedersen was being interviewed by the police. He overheard one of them ask: “Have we got Wright yet?”

“He’s just hopped a flight to New Zealand,” his colleague said. Wright was soon 30,000 feet above the Tasman Sea watching the programmer Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) being chased by unknowable agents in The Matrix. Wright found the story line strangely comforting; it was good to know he wasn’t alone.

At Auckland Airport, Wright kept his phone on flight mode but turned it on to Skype with Stefan using the airport’s Wi-Fi and a new account. They had a discussion about how to get him to Manila. There was a big rock concert that night in Auckland, and all the hotels were full, but he crossed town in a cab and managed to get a small room at the Hilton. He booked two nights, using cash. He knew how to get more cash out of ATMs than the daily limit, so he worked several machines near the hotel, withdrawing five thousand dollars. He ordered room service that night and the next morning went to the Billabong store in Queen Street to buy some clothes. He felt agitated, out of his element: normally he would wear a suit and tie — he enjoys the notion that he is too well-dressed to be a geek — but he bought a T-shirt, a pair of jeans, and some socks. On the way back to the hotel he got a bunch of SIM cards, so that his calls wouldn’t be monitored. Back at the Hilton he was packing up his computers when the dependable Stefan came on Skype. He told Wright to go to the airport and pick up a ticket he’d left him for a flight to Manila. His picture was all over the papers, along with the story that he was trying to escape.

Within hours of Wright’s name appearing in the press, anonymous messages threatened to reveal his “actual history.” Some said he had been on Ashley Madison, the website that sets up extramarital affairs, others that he’d been seen on Grindr, the gay hookup app. During a six-hour layover in Hong Kong, he killed his email accounts and tried to wipe his social media profile, which he knew would be heavy with information he wasn’t keen to publicize: “Mainly rants,” he said later. When he got to Manila airport, Stefan picked him up. They went to Stefan’s apartment and the maid washed Wright’s clothes while he set up his laptops on the dining room table. They spent the rest of Saturday wiping his remaining social media profile. Stefan didn’t want any contact to be possible: he wanted to cut Wright off from the world. The next day he put him on a plane to London.

 

Mayfair

Technology is constantly changing the lives of people who don’t really understand it — we drive our cars, and care nothing for internal combustion — but now and then a story will break that captures the imagination of the general public. I was one of the people who had never heard of Satoshi Nakamoto or the blockchain — the invention underlying bitcoin, which verifies transactions without the need for any central authority — or that it is the biggest thing in computer science. It was news to me that the banks were grabbing on to the blockchain as the foundation of a future “internet of value.” If it hadn’t been for my involvement with Assange, the story of this mythical computer scientist might never have come my way. I’m not much detained by thoughts of new computer paradigms. (I’m still getting the hang of the first one.) But to those who are much more invested in the world of tomorrow, the Satoshi story has the lineaments of a modern morality tale quite independent of stock realities. There are things, there are always things, that others assume are at the center of the universe but don’t make a scratch on your own sense of the everyday world. This story was like that for me, enclosing me in an enigma I couldn’t have named. A long-form report is a fashioned thing, of course, as fashioned as fiction in its own ways, but I had to overcome my own bafflement — as will you — to enter this world.

A few weeks before the raid on Craig Wright’s house, when his name still hadn’t ever been publicly associated with Satoshi Nakamoto, I got an email from a Los Angeles lawyer called Jimmy Nguyen, from the firm Davis Wright Tremaine (self-described as “a one-stop shop for companies in entertainment, technology, advertising, sports and other industries”). Nguyen told me that they were looking to contract me to write the life of Satoshi Nakamoto. “My client has acquired life story rights …  from the true person behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto — the creator of the bitcoin protocol,” the lawyer wrote. “The story will be [of ] great interest to the public and we expect the book project will generate significant publicity and media coverage once Satoshi’s true identity is revealed.”

Journalists, it turned out, had spent years looking for Nakamoto. His identity was one of the great mysteries of the internet, and a holy grail of investigative reporting, with writers who couldn’t dig up evidence simply growing their own. For The New Yorker’s Joshua Davis the need to find him seemed almost painful. “Nakamoto himself was a cipher,” he wrote in October 2011:

Before the debut of bitcoin, there was no record of any coder with that name. He used an email address and a Web site that were untraceable. In 2009 and 2010, he wrote hundreds of posts in flawless English, and though he invited other software developers to help him improve the code, and corresponded with them, he never revealed a personal detail. Then, in April, 2011, he sent a note to a developer saying that he had “moved on to other things.” He has not been heard from since.

Davis went on to examine Satoshi’s writing quite closely and concluded that he used British spelling and was fond of the word “bloody.” He then named a twenty-three-year-old Trinity College Dublin graduate student, Michael Clear, who quickly denied it. The story went nowhere and Clear went back to his studies. Then Leah McGrath Goodman wrote a piece for Newsweek claiming Satoshi was a math genius called Dorian Nakamoto, who lived in the Los Angeles suburb of Temple City and didn’t actually know, it turned out, how to pronounce “bitcoin.” When Goodman’s article ran on the magazine’s cover, reporters from all over the world arrived on Dorian’s doorstep. He said he would give an interview to the first person who would take him to lunch. It turned out that his hobby wasn’t alternative currencies but model trains. Someone calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto, and using Satoshi’s original email address, visited one of the forums Satoshi used to haunt and posted the message “I am not Dorian Nakamoto.” Other commentators, including Nathaniel Popper of The New York Times, named Nick Szabo, a cool cryptocurrency nut and the inventor of digital money called Bit Gold, but he denied it profusely. Forbes believed it was Hal Finney, who, the blockchain irrefutably showed, was the first person in the world to be sent bitcoins by Satoshi. Finney, a native Californian, was an expert cryptographer whose involvement in the development of bitcoin was vital. He was diagnosed with motor neuron disease in 2009 and died in 2014. It came to seem that the holy grail would remain out of reach. “Many in the bitcoin community … in deference to the bitcoin creator’s clear desire for privacy … didn’t want to see the wizard unmasked,” Popper wrote in The New York Times. “But even among those who said this, few could resist debating the clues the founder left behind.”

US-JAPAN-BANKING-FOREX-IT-BITCOIN

A man walks past the home of 64-year-old physicist Dorian S. Nakamoto in suburban Los Angeles. In 2014, a Newsweek reporter suggested Nakamoto was the creator of bitcoin, a lead that turned out to be false. (Frederic J. Brown /AFP/Getty Images)

As with every story I’ve ever worked on, I checked the background and made a number of calls before I got back to the lawyers representing the mysterious client. The client’s idea, I then discovered from the lawyers, was that I would have full access to their man, Satoshi, to write a book and have it published as I saw fit. I listened carefully and I took some advice; I wanted to be careful. I had to find out exactly what these clients were looking for and why they’d come to me. This information came slowly, and I let the deal remain vague, I signed nothing, while I worked out who they were. The “Stefan” who was hovering during the raid on Craig Wright’s house and office is Stefan Matthews, an Australian IT expert whom Wright had known for ten years, since they both worked for the online gambling site Centrebet. In those days, around 2007, Wright was often hired as a security analyst by such firms, deploying his skills as a computer scientist (and his experience as a hacker) to make life difficult for fraudsters. Wright was an eccentric guy, Stefan Matthews remembered, but known to be a reliable freelancer. Matthews told me that Wright had given him a document to look at in 2008 written by someone called Satoshi Nakamoto, but Matthews had been busy at the time and didn’t read it for a while. He said that Wright was always trying to get him interested in this new venture called bitcoin. He tried to sell him 50,000 bitcoins for next to nothing, but Matthews wasn’t interested, he told me, because Wright was weird and the whole thing seemed a bit cranky. A few years later, however, Matthews realized that the document he had been shown was, in fact, an original draft of the now famous white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto. (Like the governments they despise, bitcoiners deal — when it comes to ideas — in “white papers,” as if they are issuing laws.)

In 2015, when Wright was in financial trouble — his companies were facing bankruptcy and he was at the end of his wits — he approached Matthews several times. By then, Matthews had become friendly with Robert MacGregor, the founder and CEO of a Canada-based money-transfer firm called nTrust. Matthews encouraged MacGregor to come to Australia and assess Wright’s value as an investment opportunity. Wright had founded a number of businesses that were failing and he was deeply embedded in a dispute with the ATO. Nevertheless, Matthews told MacGregor, Wright was almost certainly the man behind bitcoin.

Matthews argued that since Satoshi’s disappearance in 2011, Wright had been working on new applications of the blockchain technology he had invented as Satoshi. He was, in other words, using the technology underlying bitcoin to create new versions of the formula that could, at a stroke, replace the systems of bookkeeping and registration and centralized authority that banks and governments depend on. Wright and his people were preparing dozens of patents, and each invention, in a specific way, looked to rework financial, social, legal, or medical services, expanding on the basic idea of the “distributed public ledger” that constitutes the blockchain. The math behind the technology can be mind-boggling, but bitcoin is a form of digital money where the flow and the integrity of the currency are guaranteed by its appearance on a shared public ledger, updated and refreshed with every single transaction, a “public history” that cannot be corrupted by any single entity. It works by consensus, and is secured by a series of private and public encryption keys. It is like a Google document that can be used and updated by anyone linked into the “chain.” The blockchain can do many things, but the revolutionary aspect is that it takes authoritarianism and sharp practice out of the banking system, embedding all power over the currency within the self-cleansing software itself and the people who use it. Blockchain technology is a hot topic in computer science and banking at the moment, and hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in such ideas. Thus: Matthews’s proposal.

MacGregor came out to Australia in May 2015. After initial skepticism, and in spite of a slight aversion to Wright’s manner, he was persuaded, and struck a deal with Wright, signed on June 29, 2015. MacGregor says he felt sure that Wright was bitcoin’s legendary missing father, and he told me it was his idea, later in the drafting of the deal, to insist that Satoshi’s “life rights” be included as part of the agreement. Wright’s companies were so deep in debt that the deal appeared to him like a rescue plan, so he agreed to everything, without, it seems, really examining what he would have to do. Within a few months, according to evidence later given to me by Matthews and MacGregor, the deal would cost MacGregor’s company $15 million. “That’s right,” Matthews said to me in February 2016. “When we signed the deal, 1.5 million dollars was given to Wright’s lawyers. But my main job was to set up an engagement with the new lawyers … and transfer Wright’s intellectual property to nCrypt” — a newly formed subsidiary of nTrust. “The deal had the following components: clear the outstanding debts that were preventing Wright’s business from getting back on its feet, and work with the new lawyers on getting the agreements in place for the transfer of any noncorporate intellectual property, and work with the lawyers to get Craig’s story rights.” From that point on, the “Satoshi revelation” would be part of the deal. “It was the cornerstone of the commercialization plan,” Matthews said, “with about ten million sunk into the Australian debts and setting up in London.”

The plan was always clear to the men behind nCrypt. They would bring Wright to London and set up a research and development center for him, with around thirty staff working under him. They would complete the work on his inventions and patent applications — he appeared to have hundreds of them — and the whole lot would be sold as the work of Satoshi Nakamoto, who would be unmasked as part of the project. Once packaged, Matthews and MacGregor planned to sell the intellectual property for upward of a billion dollars. MacGregor later told me he was speaking to Google and Uber, as well as to a number of Swiss banks. “The plan was to package it all up and sell it,” Matthews told me. “The plan was never to operate it.”

***

Since the time I worked with Julian Assange, my computers have been hacked several times. It isn’t unusual for me to find that material has been wiped — at one point 30,000 emails — and I was careful to make sure the Los Angeles lawyers’ approach wasn’t part of a sting operation. Not long after their initial approach, the lawyers had mentioned that the company behind the deal was called nTrust. I did some research and the lawyers then confirmed that the “client” referred to in the initial email was Robert MacGregor. I was soon in correspondence with MacGregor himself. On Thursday, November 12, I turned up, by appointment, at his office near Oxford Circus, where I signed in under a pseudonym and made my way to a boardroom wallpapered with mathematical formulae. MacGregor came into the room wearing a tailored jacket and jeans, with a blue-edged pocket square in his breast pocket, a scarf, and brown brogue boots. He was forty-seven but looked about twenty-nine. There was something studied about him — the Alexander McQueen scarf, the lawyerly punctilio — and I’d never met anyone who spoke so easily about such large sums of money. When I asked him the point of the whole exercise, he said it was simple: “Buy in, sell out, make some zeroes.”

MacGregor described Wright to me as “the goose that lays the golden egg.” He said that if I agreed to take part I would have exclusive access to the whole story, and to everyone around Wright, and that it would all end with Wright proving he was Satoshi by using cryptographic keys that only Satoshi had access to, those associated with the very first blocks in the blockchain. MacGregor told me this might happen at a public TED talk. He said it would be “game over.” Wright’s patents would then be sold and Wright could get on with his life, out of the public eye. “All he wants is peace to get on with his work,” MacGregor told me at that first meeting. “And how this ends, for me, is with Craig working for, say, Google, with a research staff of four hundred.”

I told MacGregor that there would have to be a process of verification. We talked about money, and negotiated a little, but after several meetings I decided I wouldn’t accept any. I would write the story as I had every other story under my name, by observing and interviewing, taking notes and making recordings, and sifting the evidence. “It should be warts and all,” MacGregor said. He said it several times, but I was never sure he understood what it meant. This was a changing story, and I was the only one keeping account of the changes. MacGregor and his coworkers were already convinced Wright was Satoshi, and they behaved, to my mind, as if that claim was the end of the story, rather than the beginning.

I don’t mean to imply anything sinister. The company was excited by the project and so was I. Very quickly we were working hand in hand: I reserved judgment (and independence) but I was caught up in the thought of the story unfolding as planned. At this point, nobody knew who Craig Wright was, but he appeared, from the initial evidence, to have a better claim to being Satoshi Nakamoto than anyone else had. He seemed to have the technical ability. He also had the right social history, and the timeline worked. The big proof was up ahead, and how could it not be spectacular? I went slowly forward with the project, and said no to everything that would hamper my independence. This would become an issue later on with MacGregor and Matthews, or the men in black, as I’d taken to calling them, but for those first few months, nobody asked me to sign anything and nobody refused me access. Mysteries would open up, and some would remain, but there seemed no mystery about the fact that these people were confident that a supremely important thing was happening and that the entire process should be witnessed and recorded. My emails to MacGregor took it for granted that what would be good for my story, in terms of securing proof, would also be good for his deal, and that seemed perfectly true. Yet I feel bad that I didn’t warn him of the possibility that this might not be what happened, that my story wouldn’t die if the deal died, that human interest doesn’t stop at success.

It was at this point, four weeks after my first meeting with MacGregor, that Wired and Gizmodo reported that Wright might be Satoshi. The news unleashed a tsunami of responses from the cryptocurrency community, and most of it was bad for Wright’s credibility. Had he left artificial footprints to suggest his involvement with bitcoin had been earlier than it was? Had he exaggerated the number and nature of the degrees he’d accumulated from various universities? Why did the company that supplied the supercomputer he claimed to have bought with amassed bitcoin say it had never heard of him?

“The smell,” as one commentator said, “was a mile high.” The nCrypt people were unfazed by this mudslinging, believing that every one of the charges made against Wright could be easily disproved. Wright produced an impressive paper — for internal use only — showing that his “footprint” wasn’t faked and that the “cryptographic” evidence against him was bogus (people continue to argue on this point). The accusation of fraud didn’t seem to bother the nCrypt people. I was a bit confused by the mudslinging, but I kept listening. Wright produced a letter from the supercomputer supplier acknowledging the order. Charles Sturt University provided a photocopy of his staff card, proving he had lectured there, and Wright sent me a copy of the thesis he’d submitted for a doctorate his critics claim he doesn’t have.

***

I had arrived five minutes early at 28º–50º, a wine bar and restaurant in Mayfair. It was just before 1 p.m. on December 16 and the lunchtime crowd, men in blue suits and white shirts, were eating oysters and baby back ribs and drinking high-end wine by the glass. A jeroboam of Graham’s ten-year-old tawny port stood on the bar, and I was inspecting it when MacGregor arrived with Mr. and Mrs. Smith. That’s what he’d been calling them in his emails to me. Craig Wright, forty-five years old, wearing a white shirt under a black jacket, a pair of blue chinos, a belt with a large Armani buckle, and very green socks, wasn’t the kind of guy who seems comfortable in a swish restaurant. He sat across from me and lowered his head and at first he let MacGregor do the talking. Ramona was very friendly, chatting about their time in London as if they were a couple of holidaymakers who’d just blown into Mayfair. She wasn’t drinking, but the rest of us ordered a glass of Malbec each. When Wright lifted his head to laugh at something, I noticed he had a nice smile but uneven teeth, and a scar that climbed from the top of his nose to the area just above his left eyebrow. He hadn’t shaved for a week, since he’d left Sydney.

Wright told me he was rubbish at small talk. He, too, wanted what I wrote to be “warts and all”; he felt he was being misunderstood by everybody, and normally that wouldn’t bother him but he had to consider the respectability of his work, and his family’s rights. He appeared to ponder this for a moment, then he told me his old neighbors at the house in Gordon hadn’t been friendly.

“They barely even knew your name,” Ramona said. “They do now,” he replied.

I found him easier to talk to than I’d expected. He said his father had worked for the NSA (he could provide no further information), but that, to this day, his mother thinks he worked for NASA. “The few people I care about I care about a lot,” he said, “and I care about the state of the world. But there’s not much in between.” He said he was happy I was writing about him because he wanted “to step into history,” but mainly because he wanted to tell the story of the brilliant people he had collaborated with. He and Ramona were both jet-lagged and anxious about things back home. “We should have been having our company’s Christmas party today,” Ramona said.

MacGregor asked Wright if being a libertarian had influenced his work, or if the work had turned him into a libertarian. “I was always libertarian,” he replied, and then he told me his father had more or less kidnapped him after his parents got divorced. He hated being told what to do — that was one of his main motivations. He believed in freedom, and in what freedom would come to mean, and he said his work would guarantee a future in which privacy was protected. “Where we are,” he said, “is a place where people can be private and part of that privacy is to be someone other than who they were. Computing will allow you to start again, if you want to. And that is freedom.” In fact he never stopped imagining different lives for himself. That afternoon he seemed preoccupied by the case people were making against his being Satoshi. He shook his head a lot and said he wished he could just get on in silence with his work. “If you want to stay sane through this, ignore Reddit,” his wife told him.

The next day, December 17, we met again, in a private room in Claridge’s. You could see outside, over the rooftops, cranes garlanded in fairy lights. Ramona came in looking tired and totally fed up. From time to time, especially when exhausted, she would resent the hold these people had over them. “We have sold our souls,” she said to me in a quiet moment.

MacGregor said he would spend the evening preparing paperwork to be signed by Wright the following day. This would effectively be the final signing over to nCrypt of the intellectual property held by Wright’s companies. This was the main plank in the deal. MacGregor was confident the work was “world historical,” that it would change the way we lived. He regularly described the blockchain as the greatest invention since the internet. He said that what the internet had done for communication, the blockchain would do for value.

MacGregor explained that Wright’s Australian companies were being signed over to nCrypt and that he’d extended an “olive branch” to the ATO, which had responded quickly and positively. A lot of trouble with the ATO had to do with whether bitcoin was a commodity or a currency and how it should be taxed. It also had doubts about whether Wright’s companies had done as much research and development as they claimed, and whether they were therefore entitled to the tax rebates they had applied for. The ATO had said it couldn’t see where the spending was going. Some critics in the media claimed Wright’s companies had been set up only for the purpose of claiming rebates, though not even the ATO went that far.

Wright told me that thanks to the tax office they’d had to lay out all the research for their patents, which had been useful since the nCrypt team was in a hurry: the banks, now alert to crypto-currencies and the effectiveness of the blockchain, are rushing to create their own versions. At that moment, Bank of America was patenting ten ideas for which Craig and his team told me they had a claim to “prior art.” Governments spent a long time denying the value of bitcoin — seeing it as unstable, or the currency of criminals — but now they were celebrating the potential of the technology behind it.

“They’re behaving like children,” Wright said of the ATO.

MacGregor looked at his watch. He straightened his cuffs. “I see this as a pivotal moment in history … It’s like being able to go back in time and watch Bill Gates in the garage.” He turned to Wright. “You released this thing into the wild. Some people got it right and some people got it wrong. But you’ve got a vision of where it’s going next and next and next.”

“None of this would have worked without bitcoin,” Wright said, “but it’s a wheel and I want to build a car.”

Ramona looked depressed. She was worried that her husband, as the person claiming to have invented bitcoin, might be held liable for the actions of those who’d used the currency for nefarious purposes. “He didn’t issue a currency,” MacGregor assured her. “This is just technology — it is not money.” Ramona was still anxious. “We’re talking about legal risk … I’m giving you the legal answer,” MacGregor said. “I would stake my career on the fact that the creation of bitcoin is not a prosecutable event.”

Right to the end, the Wrights would express worries about things Craig did as a young computer forensics worker. Much of his professional past looked questionable, but in the meeting room at Claridge’s he simply batted the past away. “It’s what you’re doing now that matters. I’m not perfect. I never will be … All these different people arguing about what Satoshi should be at the moment, it’s crazy.”

* * *

Excerpted from The Secret Life: Three True Stories of The Digital Age by Andrew O’Hagan, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. © 2017 by Andrew O’Hagan.

Atomic City

Justin Nobel | Longreads | September 2017 | 12 minutes (2,920 words)

In the middle of Idaho’s Lost River desert is a green street sign that reads “Atomic City” with an arrow pointing to a lonely gravel track. One evening, some years back, I followed it. As purplish storm clouds swallowed the sun, I came across a cluster of scraggly trees and weather-beaten trailer homes. Beside an abandoned speedway sat an antiquated ambulance and across the street a neon Bar sign twinkled in the dusk. Inside the bar, I met drifter lovers from Colorado and a potbellied man in a hunting cap who worked as a spent-fuel handler for the nearby Idaho National Laboratory. We discussed nuclear energy, of which he was, not surprisingly, a fan. Then I asked the question that had brought me to Atomic City: What caused the 1961 nuclear disaster?

The spent-fuel handler ordered a shot of Jägermeister. “Have you heard of the love triangle?” he asked. I hadn’t. All I knew was there was something fishy about the disaster. Earlier that day, when I tried bringing it up at Pickle’s Place, in Arco, Idaho, thirty miles away, I received cold stares. “You won’t find much on that,” a brawny man with a girl at his side told me as he exited the restaurant. I heard the same thing at the gas station next door, and at the fleabag motel I checked into. People aggressively knew nothing, which seemed to imply there was something to know.

“One guy’s wife was messing around with another guy,” said the fuel handler, after downing his Jäger. “He got pissed off and messed up…I shit you not.” He then reenacted how the disaster might have happened: “You fuck my wife, I fuck you up” — and with fingers clenched he yanked his hand upward, making the motion of pulling a control rod out of a reactor core. Boom.

Read more…

Between Life and Death, There’s San Francisco: A Reading List

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

They came in the tens of thousands, pushing baby carriages and packing roller skates. All in all, an estimated 200,000 pedestrians crossed the Golden Gate Bridge on May 27, 1937, its first day in business. The bridge was already a San Francisco landmark—a flaming, burnt-orange beacon conceived a decade earlier by Leon Moisseiff, who had engineered the Manhattan Bridge. It was a graceful design, but suspension bridges still weren’t entirely safe—the engineer’s Tacoma Narrows Bridge would fail spectacularly only a few months after it opened in 1940.

The Golden Gate also has a dark side. To afford a view of the city, the bridge has a low barrier that is easy to scale. (In “Jumpers,” the New Yorker’s Tad Friend meditates on the bridge’s reputation for death—for the families and friends of those who succeed in their jumps, it’s an indelible monument to their loved ones’ pain.) This month, city workers will finally begin the installation of a new barrier, a grey netting that will blend into the water without obscuring the view. Officials hope it will finally reduce suicide rates on the deadly bridge.

Read more…

Writing Our America

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Scott Korb | Longreads | February 2017 | 32 minutes (8,200 words)

 

The following essay is adapted from a talk presented at Pacific University’s MFA in Writing Program. It includes advice from writers of “YA fiction, writers for television and stage, of novels and essays, investigative journalism, and criticism” on how we might produce meaningful work in the next four years.

* * *

I often teach a piece of writing by David Foster Wallace, included originally as the introduction to the 2007 edition of The Best American Essays. He called the piece “Deciderization—2007,” a title that jabbed at the then-current president, George W. Bush, who, in the midst of his second term—in the midst of the Iraq war, which as fought had been lost—reminded the country during a press conference insisting he would not fire Donald Rumsfeld, whom he would later fire, that he, George W. Bush, was “The Decider.”

The moment seems far away now, but Bush’s choice of words here, it was said at the time, “struck the national funny bone.” Writing in the New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg said,

On the Internet, it was memorialized to the tune of “I am the Walrus,” by the Beatles. (“I am me and Rummy’s he. Iraq is free and we are all together.”) On late-night television, the Decider emerged as a comic-book hero, courtesy of Jon Stewart, host of “The Daily Show.”

In other words, in making fun of Bush, Wallace was not alone and, as he was well aware, was far from the most high-profile or widely observed jabber. Opening the book’s introduction, he wrote, “I think it’s unlikely that anyone is reading this as an introduction.”

Most of the people I know treat Best American anthologies like Whitman Samplers. They skip around, pick and choose. There isn’t the same kind of linear commitment as in a regular book. … There’s a kind of triage. The guest editor’s intro is last, if at all.

This sense of being last or least likely confers its own freedoms.

When I’ve taught his introduction before I’ve tended to highlight how Wallace considers and reconsiders the essay form itself—“one constituent of the truth about the front cover,” he writes, “is that your guest editor isn’t sure what an essay even is.” This confusion is fun in a way that Wallace is often fun. It does what this particular writer tends to do—puts his own subjectivity front and center in an effort to pull a rug out from under us. What do you mean you don’t know what an essay even is?

Continuing on, Wallace then addresses his lack of both confidence and concern with the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction—more fun for us—only to change course a moment later, explaining that he does care about such differences, but conceding that they’re “hard to talk about in a way that someone who doesn’t try to write both fiction and nonfiction will understand.” At which point he dives into the part of the essay I’ve always been most interested in talking about with writing students, who tend—as I am—to be interested in how to do what writers are trying to do. What is writing supposed to feel like?

Writing-wise, fiction is scarier, but nonfiction is harder—because nonfiction’s based in reality, and today’s felt reality is overwhelmingly, circuit-blowingly huge and complex. Whereas fiction comes out of nothing. Actually, so wait: the truth is that both genres are scary; both feel like they’re executed on tightropes, over abysses—it’s the abysses that are different. Fiction’s abyss is silence, nada. Whereas nonfiction’s abyss is Total Noise, the seething static of every particular thing and experience, and one’s total freedom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and why, etc.

The intergenre debates that go on in our culture have been a great pleasure to me over the years. I like what journalist Jeff Sharlet says on the point: “Fiction’s first move is imagination; nonfiction’s is perception.” And to be sure, I’m always delighted to hear from someone about the abyss under poetry’s tightrope. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2016: Under-Recognized Books

We asked our contributors to tell us about a few books they felt deserved more recognition in 2016. Here they are.

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Christine Hyung-Oak Lee
A writer whose memoir, Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember, is due from Ecco/Harper Collins in February.

Him, Me, Muhammad Ali (Randa Jarrar, Sarabande Books)

These are stories that don’t compromise—that stand their ground and say come here, because I won’t come to you. And that’s the most valuable thing to read—to go somewhere other than where you are. The characters are dark and twisty; she’s an Arab American Roald Dahl—the world they inhabit likewise whimsical yet treacherous. Her lively staccato use of language is the perfect foil to this darkness, keeping the reader suspended and engaged throughout. It never plods. Never holds your hand to the fire for longer than a few seconds at a time. The title story, “Him, Me, Muhammad Ali,” is one of the strongest in the collection, interweaving ancestry and tradition with contemporary conflict. There’s not a minaret in sight. Not even on the cover.

The story, “A Sailor,” dissects a marriage. A husband refuses to become angry with his wife for having had an affair. The following excerpt shows you what Jarrar’s writing is like. If you don’t like curse words, this isn’t for you. I like curse words done well. Jarrar does them well:

“She fucks a Sailor, a Turkish sailor, the summer she spends in Istanbul. When she comes home to Wisconsin, it takes her three days to come clean about it to her husband.

“He says this doesn’t bother him, and she tells him that it bothers her that it doesn’t bother him. He asks if she prefers him to be the kind of man who is bothered by fleeting moments, and she tells him that yes, she prefers that he be that kind of man. He tells her he thinks she married him because he is precisely the kind of man who doesn’t dwell on fleeting moments, because he is the kind of man who does not hold a grudge. She tells him that holding a grudge and working up some anger about one’s wife fucking a sailor is not the same thing. He agrees that holding a grudge isn’t the same as working up some anger about one’s wife fucking a sailor, but he adds, one’s wife, specifically his own, would never leave him for a sailor, and not a Turkish sailor. In fact, he says, she did not leave him for the Turkish sailor. She is here. So why should he be angry?”

Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Ocean Vuong, Copper Canyon Press)

Poetry is often under-recognized—and while Ocean Vuong’s has been recognized by Whiting, poetry needs every opportunity to be read. So I’m laying it down here. This is the one to read. Every poem beats with exigency and passion, and his work is complicated—spanning history and time and blood and heartbreak and hope. And yet there is meaningful silence in the words, too—gaps and pauses in the line breaks and spaces filled with guesses and anticipation and questioning. Vuong is a fan of Li-Young Lee and like Lee, Vuong investigates fathers, mothers, country, and historical pain. But it very well could be that he will make a mark bigger than Lee’s.

From Daily Bread:

“He’ll imagine the softness of bread
as he peels back the wool blanket, raises
her phantom limb to his lips as each kiss
dissolves down her air-light ankles.

& he will never see the pleasure

this brings to her face. Never

her face. Because in my hurry

to make her real, make her

here, I will forget to write

a bit of light into the room.

Because my hands were always brief

& dim as my father’s.

& it will start to rain. I won’t

even think to put a roof over the house—

her prosthetic leg on the nightstand,

the clack clack as it fills to the brim. Listen,

the year is gone. I know

nothing of my country. I write things

down. I build a life & tear it apart

& the sun keeps shining. Crescent

wave. Salt-spray. Tsunami. I have

enough ink to give you the sea

but not the ships, but it’s my book

& I’ll say anything just to stay inside

this skin. Sassafras. Douglas fir.

Sextant & compass…”


Ruth Curry
Co-publisher of Emily Books; writer, whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed, the Paris Review Daily, Nylon, Bookforum, and n+1; and author of the newsletter Coffee & TV.

Surveys (Natasha Stagg, Semiotexte)

If Marshall McLuhan rewrote “Cinderella,” the result might come out looking something like this novel, Stagg’s first. Colleen, an aimless 23 year old who works administering marketing surveys in an anodyne Arizona mall, lives a bleak and listless life, online when she’s not drinking or avoiding the advances of the peeping Tom in her shabby apartment complex. Then she meets Jim, a minor celebrity, “online, it doesn’t matter how…Describing it would be pointless and anyway, you can look it up.” Colleen and Jim fall in love and quickly, as a unit, become rich and very famous. The specifics aren’t clear, and they never need to be: Stagg lays out the truths and the falsehoods of the attention economy brilliantly without them. At the height of her fame, Colleen becomes obsessed with Lucinda, Jim’s ex, her obsession growing more desperate as Colleen’s notoriety inevitably wanes. “I curled around my computer, searching for all the things I’d seen a million times. The views were not growing as steadily, but they were growing, and would always grow, never diminish… I grabbed my phone and muscle memory led me to look up Lucinda’s Twitter. It looked as if all of it had been deleted. How stupid is she? I thought. You can’t really delete any of it.” Stagg’s dark wit, her accurate-to-the-millimeter rendering of the physical and psychological experience of consuming and being consumed by social media, and the emergence of Lucinda as someone whose power comes from her ability to be completely sustained by her own inner life — or at least, appear that way — makes Surveys really special.

The Black Wave (Michelle Tea, Feminist Press)

The DMV is no longer issuing driver’s licenses and the names of the fish that have gone extinct are crossed out on the walls of sushi restaurants: this is how we know the apocalypse is coming to San Francisco in 1999. There’s the thick perma-smog and a vegetable shortage too, but it is the driver’s license issue that grabs our narrator Michelle’s attention in Black Wave, the latest book from Michelle Tea. She needs a driver’s license to drive her getaway van to Los Angeles and escape the codependent relationships, drugs, and squalor (captured in all their pre-gentrified post-nostalgized charm) of the Mission in the late 90s. When Michelle gets to Los Angeles Black Wave bifurcates: LA Michelle, now sober, is attempting to adapt her unruly, unpublished 500-pg memoir called Black Wave into a screenplay. She is struggling, with sobriety, with the ethics of writing about her life and her loved ones, haunted by her past and by people she has yet to meet (in memoir-land, at the computer where she works every day — yes, there’s an element of metafiction at work). But then the apocalypse comes to contemporary Los Angeles too, the actual irreversible accelerationist climate one we’ve all been in denial about since 1999, in a series of tsunamis that will take out the entire West Coast. The mass suicides begin in New York. Michelle’s brother calls in a panic, begging an incredulous Michelle to turn on the TV and see for herself: “Michelle knew once she turned on her television it would remain on for a very long time.”

While telling a literal apocalypse story, Tea also interrogates other life-ending moments with the warmth and humor she’s known for: sobriety, the loss of a love, the practice (metaphorical suicide, if not real relationship-cide) of narrating one’s life for an audience. But it is the ‘real’ apocalypse that allows ‘real’ Michelle to finally finish her memoir, on the last day of the world: “She could, after all, write only the stories she was meant to write. She could write nothing more than that, nothing more or less perfect. As it turned out, time could not be wasted.” Perhaps it’s too on-the-nose to recommend an apocalypse story right now, but not this one. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2016: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2016. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free weekly email every Friday. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Image via Flickr user Agustin di Luciano

Below, our favorite stories of the week.

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‘I Have No Choice but to Keep Looking’

Longreads Pick

Five years after a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, a husband is still searching the sea for his missing wife, joined by a father looking for his daughter.

Published: Aug 2, 2016
Length: 24 minutes (6,140 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo by James West for Mother Jones

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Read more…