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Lisa Whittington-Hill | Longreads | January 16, 2024 | 16 minutes (2,000 words)

The Go-Go’s signed to Miles Copeland’s label I.R.S. on April 1, 1981. It’s fitting that the band would sign their record deal on April Fool’s Day since for many record execs the idea of women playing music was nothing more than a joke. After signing their deal, the Go-Go’s headed to New York City to record their debut album. Copeland hired Richard Gottehrer to produce the album. Gottehrer was a songwriter and producer who had success with songs like “Hang on Sloopy,” “My Boyfriend’s Back,” and “I Want Candy” by the Strangeloves. Gottehrer also started Sire Records with Seymour Stein and the label had helped launch the careers of bands like Blondie and the Ramones, which appealed to the Go-Go’s and their punk roots. Gottehrer had even produced Blondie’s 1976 self-titled debut album.

Gottehrer wanted to polish the band’s sound, slow down their songs so you could hear the lyrics, and make their music more accessible to a pop audience. “I told them they had to slow down, put the songs into a groove. The songs deserved to be treated with respect,”¹

Gottehrer told Billboard in 2016. He had a small budget of $35,000 for the recording and ended up going over budget by $7,500, which he paid for out of his own pocket (not to worry, he later made it back in royalties). The Go-Go’s didn’t want to record a new version of “We Got the Beat” for the album. They argued they already had the Stiff Records version and people seemed to like it, but Gottehrer felt Beauty and the Beat needed a new recording of the song and finally convinced them. The album also included the hit single “Our Lips Are Sealed” for which Wiedlin wrote the lyrics and music. The song’s lyrics were based on lines from a love letter sent to Wiedlin by Terry Hall from the Specials, as Wiedlin and Hall had been romantically involved, while the Specials and the Go-Go’s were touring with Madness in the UK. Hall’s band Fun Boy Three would also end up recording a version of the song.

While Gottehrer tried to slow down the band’s songs, what he couldn’t slow down was the Go-Go’s partying. The girls made the most of their time in NYC, taking advantage of the city’s nightlife and everything it had to offer. “This was when I learned that girls can be as disruptive and dirty as boys. Who knew? It might have been drinking, it might’ve been going out, looking for booty—I’m not sure if they were into their drug phase yet. But that energy and personality came across on the record,”² Gottehrer told Billboard. When the Go-Go’s heard Beauty and the Beat for the first time they cried, but they weren’t exactly tears of joy. They thought they were making a punk record and expected the record to sound like the band did live. Their punk sound had been given a pop polish by Gottehrer. “A couple of us were concerned about how our peers in L.A. perceived us. With the small amount of success we’d had, people said we sold out, we weren’t punk after all, blah, blah, blah. Hearing the album made us feel like they were right—we sounded like we sold out,”³ Carlisle told Billboard in 2016. The Go-Go’s were not the only ones who were upset upon hearing the album. Copeland thought Gottehrer had ruined the band by delivering a pop album. Like the band, Copeland was under the misconception that Gottehrer was delivering a punk album. Later, when the album went to the number one spot all was forgiven. Suddenly, Gottehrer was being heralded as a genius and the best producer ever by both the band and Copeland.

When it came time to shoot the cover for Beauty and the Beat, photographer George DuBose got the job, accidentally. DuBose wanted to shoot the band for Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine but was told the Go-Go’s didn’t have time because they needed a cover for their new album. He ended up photographing the cover. The band wanted a timeless feel to the Beauty and the Beat cover. They also wanted a cover concept that would save them the trouble of having to decide what to wear; the cover featuring the girls in white bath towels and face masks achieved both these goals. They tried several things on their faces but ended up with Noxzema because it was the only thing that didn’t crack immediately. The back of the album featured individual shots of the band members in the tub, shot in the bathroom of Wiedlin and Caffey’s room at the Wellington, the hotel they were staying at while recording Beauty and the Beat. The cover received criticism from journalists like New York Rocker’s Don Snowden who wrongly assumed record execs, and not the Go-Go’s, had developed the concept. “It’s a long way from the motley crew pictured on the Stiff single but if the Go-Go’s want to come across as new wave cutie-pie heart-throbs, that’s their business . . . But c’mon, the images—pouring bubbly in bubblebath, chocolates and trashy novels, hand on the telephone, the phallic rose—strike me as some 40-year old marketing exec’s fantasy,”⁴ Snowden wrote of the images on the album’s back cover.

The album cover was the first time I saw what the Go-Go’s looked like. I could finally put faces to my new heroes. In the days before social media, videos, and the internet, it was a lot harder to learn about your new favorite band. MTV would soon change that, but it wouldn’t launch until a month after Beauty and the Beat was released. Years after I first discovered the Go-Go’s, I was packing some records to move and noticed the similarities between the Beauty and the Beat cover and the cover of Cut, the debut album from the Slits. The Slits were naked except for loincloths and covered in mud, not Noxzema, but there was still the idea that both bands wanted to rebel against stereotypical, hypersexualized notions of what women should look like on an album cover. They were both powerful images that the bands chose themselves, which subverted the idea of how women should market their music. There was also the idea that the women wanted to conceal themselves, whether with face masks or mud, to keep a part hidden, especially from a music industry that wanted women to reveal themselves, and all of themselves, if they wanted to sell records.

As soon as the album was done, the Go-Go’s hit the road. The tours and the venues kept getting bigger. The band went from being the house band at the Whisky and playing small clubs to opening for the Police for their Ghost in the Machine tour in less than a year. Miles Copeland also happened to be the manager of the Police. His brother, Stewart Copeland, was the drummer for the band. Not only would the Go-Go’s end up on tour with the Police, but some extra money left over from the budget for a music video by the Police—$6,000 to be exact—paid for the Go-Go’s first video, “Our Lips Are Sealed.” The Go-Go’s didn’t understand the importance of video at the time; but when MTV launched in August 1981, they saw the difference it made. The girls goofed around in the video, driving around Los Angeles in a convertible, and splashing in a fountain. They hoped to get arrested for playing in the fountain, which they thought would make an exciting end to the video. The police didn’t care, but the video would be played nonstop on MTV.

While the band was opening for the Police and playing sold-out stadiums, Beauty and the Beat went to number one on the Billboard album charts and would stay there for six weeks. Beauty and the Beat had passed Ghost in the Machine by tourmates the Police, which was at number six. Sting brought the girls a bottle of champagne to celebrate. Finally, the police were paying attention to the band, just not the ones they had hoped when they frolicked in that fountain in the “Our Lips Are Sealed” video. “We Got the Beat” went to number two and “Our Lips Are Sealed” to number twenty. The Go-Go’s were everywhere, and Beauty and the Beat would go on to sell more than two million copies, making it one of the few debut albums to top the charts and putting the band on the same level as the Beatles and Elvis. Beauty and the Beat made the Go-Go’s the first, and to date only, female band to have a number one album, who not only wrote their own songs but also played their own instruments. The album was not only a success, but “also a harbinger of what rock would become, and a bridge between punk, the movement whose rebelliousness had quashed the excesses of classic rock, and the genre-fusing music of the 1980s,”⁵ said Hilary Hughes in her introduction to NPR’s oral history of Beauty and the Beat.

On November 14, 1981, the Go-Go’s appeared on Saturday Night Live with host Bernadette Peters and Billy Joel. Having to wait around the studio all day to play, the Go-Go’s passed the time with alcohol and cocaine. By the time they took the stage, they were so drunk they could barely play. A clip of the performance is available online and worth the watch. The girls could not only hold their liquor on live TV, but the performance helped them sell a lot of records. All this attention helped to move the band’s fan base beyond just college radio listeners and new-wave clubgoers. The band’s fan base was now younger, especially attracting teen and pre-teen girls, who worshipped the band and didn’t know what punk was, let alone about the band’s punk roots. When the Go-Go’s started they dreamed of spitting on Valley Girls, but those girls would soon be part of the band’s fan base and the band would be part of a film that featured those girls they wanted to spit at. “We Got the Beat” would end up being the opening theme to the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a film that would popularize Valley Girls, mall culture, and Southern California teenage adolescence in the 1980s. The film launched Amy Heckerling’s career, as well as the teen comedies of the 1980s from Sixteen Candles to The Breakfast Club.

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A 1981 Village Voice poll put Beauty and the Beat in the number ten spot. Revisiting the album for an October 2019 review, Pitchfork gave it an 8.3. “Though it was a far cry from The Canterbury, Beauty and the Beat is about what’s underneath the surface of pop music. Rather than relishing the California sunshine, the Go-Go’s evoke their Los Angeles, a glittery, gritty place where punks rule the streets after dark.”⁶ Reviewing Beauty and the Beat in November 1981 for Musician magazine, Toby Goldstein said, “Beauty and the Beat is the album those of you who were embarrassed by pop music can use to say that pop’s okay.”⁷ Wiedlin agreed with Goldstein’s assessment. “One of my great quotes that I ever said, if I can quote myself, was I once compared The Go-Go’s to Twinkies. I said, ‘Everybody loves Twinkies, but they’re ashamed to admit it,’”⁸ she told Songfacts in 2007.

“I remember thinking if we sell 100,000 copies, that would be amazing. We had no idea it would do what it did. I look back even now and say wow. We went from zero to one hundred in about two years. And what happened with the album—its success—was beyond any of our expectations,”⁹ said Carlisle. And while I don’t like reducing the Go-Go’s to sugary, sweet baked goods, that’s a lot of Twinkies.

1.  Rob Tannenbaum, “The Go-Go’s Recall the Debauched Days of Their Hit ‘We Got the Beat’ 35 Years Later,” Billboard, May 20, 2016.
2. Tannenbaum, “The Go-Go’s.”
3. Tannenbaum, “The Go-Go’s.”
4. Don Snowden, “The Go-Gos Go!!,” New York Rocker (1980). The Go-Go’s. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed July 13, 2022.
5. Hilary Hughes, “How The Go-Go’s Perfected Pop-Punk,” NPR, August 5, 2020.
6. Quinn Moreland, “Beauty and the Beat: The Go-Go’s,” Pitchfork, October 20, 2019.
7. Toby Goldstein, “The Go-Go’s: Beauty and the Beat (IRS),” Musician (1981). The Go-Go’s. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed August 1, 2022.
8. Carl Wiser, “Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s,” Songfacts (2007). The Go-Go’s, Jane Wiedlin. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed July 13, 2022.
9. Audrey Golden, “The Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat: A 40th Anniversary Celebration,” Louder than War, July 8, 2021.

© Lisa Whittington-Hill, 2024. From The Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat by Lisa Whittington-Hill published by Bloomsbury Academic on September 7, 2023.

Hadi’s arrest brought the marriage to breaking point. If Ismail refused to pay for a lawyer, Huda felt, he was no longer willing to act as a father, and she no longer wanted him in her life. Quoting a passage from the Qur’an in which Khader, a servant of God, parts with Moses, she asked for a divorce. If you refuse to grant it, she said, I will tell everyone that you’re not a nationalist and you won’t support your son. Huda saw that she had frightened him and Ismail agreed to give her the divorce.

After two weeks, the lawyer called to say that Hadi was being held at a detention centre in Gush Etzion, south of Bethlehem, and would soon have a hearing at the military court at the Ofer prison, between Jerusalem and Ramallah. He was lucky to get a hearing so early, she was told. Other parents waited for three, four and five months before their children were brought to trial and they could see them.

Huda was instructed to come early for a thorough security check. After waiting for several hours, she entered a cramped courtroom. Only the military judge, the prosecutor, Hadi, his lawyer, a translator and a few soldiers and security officers were present. The chances of Hadi being released were nonexistent; the military court’s conviction rate was 99.7%. For children charged with throwing stones, the rate was even higher: of the 835 children accused in the six years following Hadi’s arrest, 834 were convicted, nearly all of whom served time in jail. Hundreds of them were between 12 and 15 years old.

It was no accident that the young boy who would become known as the father of the atomic era was reared in a culture that valued independent inquiry, empirical exploration and the free-thinking mind—in short, the values of science. And yet, it was the irony of Robert Oppenheimer’s odyssey that a life devoted to social justice, rationality and science would become a metaphor for mass death beneath a mushroom cloud.

Because young Robert himself was frequently ill as a child, Ella became overly protective. Fearing germs, she kept Robert apart from other children. He was never allowed to buy food from street vendors, and instead of taking him to get a haircut in a barber shop Ella had a barber come to the apartment.

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Joseph Lezza | I’m Never Fine: Scenes and Spasms on Loss | March 30, 2023 | 22 minutes (4,014 words)

Ask me how I am. Go ahead. Ask. But only if you’re interested. Trust me, I know what it’s like to put forth that question with the expectation of a concise, if not ambiguous, response, which I would plan to use as a segue into the real reason behind any one conversation. Often, that’s just what I’d get. After which, I’d springboard faster than an Olympic diver. It’s gotten to be that our inquiries into the wellness of others result from good manners more than genuine curiosity. My withdrawal from that cooperative was formally submitted immediately following the death of my father.

People tend not to ask how you are in the abruption, the days between bereavement and burial. Not, perhaps, for a few weeks. In that bubble, even the most imperceptive can draw the obvious conclusion. When it does begin, the inquiries are fewer than you might imagine. Some—always those you never expect—will find the circumstances too foreign and too treacherous to approach, choosing instead to retreat from your life until a period of indeterminable appropriateness has elapsed. Those who do reach out may be no better equipped to empathize than the previously mentioned grouping, only they make up for their deficiency with a surplus of courage. In either event, there exists a strong subset of the dispossessed that find themselves loath to air their true feelings. However sincere the design of the inquisitor, it does not facilitate the level of preparedness necessary to wade through a sewer system teeming with nipple-high emotional gunge. Anticipating this, the besought often opt for ambiguity, relying on responses gauzy enough to pacify while ushering in a swift change of subject. For some, the hollow, well-meaning sympathy proves too harsh to stomach. Others may just be plain tired of talking about it. Whatever the reason may be, a great comfort can be derived from adopting the passive position, allowing others to dominate the conversation, if only because of the supplemental schadenfreude that comes with learning that everyone’s drawing the short stick of life in some capacity.

Essential to whitewashing discourse is the employment of a verbal accelerant, some turn of phrase just vague enough to respect the investigation while prompting no follow-up. Each individual has his or her own preference, a concerted interval of trial and error revealing the most successful, nondescript clapback that sits in their holster just so. In my case, market research and focus groups had narrowed the list down to a single, four-letter f-word: fine. Other candidates had seen themselves considered but quickly eliminated due to practical inefficiency. Okay, for instance, was a contender. But it lacked the acceptable ration of positivity. Okay was how you described yourself after face-planting off a curb and managing not to lose any teeth. Okay meant “alive, but not great.” In essence, it begged further questions. Also in consideration, for a short spell, was the tried-and-true tagline of the dogged stalwart: hanging in there. Initially, I’d been drawn to it due to its innate suggestion of the fighter mentality. Yet, whereas the expression was intended to evoke the spirit of perseverance and conviction, in reality, it was received all too literally. Listeners alike found it impossible to picture me as anything but a helpless figure, dangling precipitously off some sharp edge, my blistered fingers the only things keeping me from being tenderized upon the craggy ravine below. The impression was all wrong, prompting the crinkle of a nose bridge, the pout of a lip, or worst of all, the extension of a clammy hand. People are going to pity those hanging in there; they’re going to want to help. Expecting anything less is like expecting indifference when one decides to roam the streets in cowboy boots and a Stetson with nothing but a guitar obscuring their privates. Outside of Times Square, that’s an explicit cry for help.

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Fine, though. That did the trick. Without fail, it injected the right amount of menthol and honey for someone to suck on, soothing their burning curiosity without coming on too strong. Its effectiveness, I’ve learned, is conditioned on its malleability. It’s what I classify a beige term, words like “terrier,” “follow-up,” or “economy plus.” It’s khaki, buff, sand, granola, fawn, shortbread; different shades of the same thing that no one really clamors for yet, at the same time, no one purposely tries to avoid. It’s just enough. There’s plenty to go around. So much so, in fact, that the more comfortable I became using it, the easier it was to give away. The sentiment was a lie, of course, no more sterling than a counterfeit bill. But, because of its illegitimacy, there was little remorse in spending it. Before long, I was papering the town like a seasoned money launderer.

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Indiebound

It does buy things, the word. Time, privacy, distance, maybe even a little comfort. Though only short increments. The dollar never stretches quite as far as one might want. So, we pay and pay in greater quantities until we’ve fooled ourselves into believing it’s some sort of luxury. To a degree, we are responsible for our own misperceptions. However, I can’t help thinking some of the blame lies in how it’s been sold to us. In 1964, the Beatles, arguably one of the most iconic bands of all time, had just solidified their standing as a worldwide sensation by owning the top five slots of the Billboard charts. On one of their more B-side tracks released that year, the foursome—then at the dawn of their reign—sang about Baby; Baby who was good to me, Baby who was happy as can be, Baby who so much said it out loud and, owing to Baby’s darling admission, the boys from Liverpool were moved to croon—at the close of every verse—the same three words: I feel fine. Whether this much-junketed “Baby” was, in reality, a lover or an abstract term meant to represent the broader idea of music and newfound success is anyone’s guess. Yet, there they were, declaring their irrefutable gaga for someone or something, equating the ideas of love and fineness in a solitary lyric. And that’s how the world bought it. Not a single person questioned how antithetical it seemed for one to espouse their devotion, and in the same breath, feel just fine about it. While this is certainly not a defining example and I can only make inferences regarding each of the men’s relationships, history is telling. At the time, John Lennon, occupied in marriage to a woman he believed had trapped him, was still two years away from meeting the avowed love of his life. Paul McCartney was nestled somewhere between girlfriend number two and wife number one. George Harrison was similarly on the cusp of meeting the woman whom he would marry and later divorce due to his rampant infidelity. And Ringo Starr was a year off from wedding a woman he’d admittedly cheat on, abuse, and perhaps accordingly, drive into the arms of one of his already married bandmates. Considering all this, there might be a reason why that particular single failed to earn gold, bronze, or even limestone.

Why, then, have we come to doubt fine? Why, after prolonged exposure, does the word lose its power to persuade? My running theory has to do with the lack of a clear identity. Fine tries to be too many things. Per Google Dictionary, the term has four separate variations, with an aggregate of twenty unique definitions. Most frequently it is used as an adjective, at other times a verb, adverb, even a noun in some instances. It is a thing on Monday, an action on Tuesday, a state of being on Wednesday, and on Thursday, it takes a day off to rest. It is an object “of high quality” or “(of a person) worthy of or soliciting admiration.” Yet, by some magic, it is synchronously “good; satisfactory” and “used to express one’s agreement with or acquiescence to something.” It is remarkable yet it just scrapes by. It is a contradiction. Yesterday it was “of imposing and dignified appearance or size.” Today it is “sharp, consisting of small particles.” Still tomorrow, it is a discipline, a “sum of money exacted as a penalty by a court of law or other authority.” It is great and small. It is a burden. Fine silverware can be found in your grandmother’s hutch, fine powder in your grandson’s sock drawer. Fine brandy is available at your local liquor store, but only if it’s from France and only if it’s made from distilled wine rather than pomace. You can eat with it, snort it, and get drunk on it. Fine is everything at once while nothing really at all. It is the Swiss Army knife of words; fun to hold, but really, what are you going to do with it? Think about the last time you were in a hotel; think about that tiny bottle of all-in-one shampoo and conditioner. Think about how convenient it was, how you reached for it, and how it did its job in the moment. Then remember how, in just an hour’s time, you could have easily been mistaken for one of the Mötley Crüe front men. That’s what fine’ll get you.

The question then remains: How did fine become indefinable? To understand this, one must trace the word back to its starting point. And for this peculiar specimen, things are tricky from the get-go. While each iteration of the modern-day fine has roots in ancient Latin, etymology reveals its multitudinous fate was preordained, having been born of not one but two independent terms: finire and finis. From the outset, records defined finire as an act—“to finish.” Over the centuries of adoptions and adaptions—Old French, Middle English—some letters fell away and some were restored, but the meaning remained constant. That is, until contemporary English saw fit to separate the two, establishing finish as a word in its own right and leaving fine as an abstract term, open to interpretation. By a similar process, France likewise appropriated the Latin finis (“end”), holding on to its original meaning while confusing matters—in a way only the French could—through the interpolation of a second: “payment.” Seeking to simplify, Middle English ditched the old and kept the new, leading to the “license and registration” precursor to the fine we abhor to this day. Overall, it was the Italians who managed to preserve the purest sense of the term, evolving finis to the fine whose black-and-white text would announce the close of every melodramatic art house feature and overambitious student film everyone’s been dragged to at some point in their life.

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Stripped to its studs, clutter cleaned away, the word can be seen the way it was meant from the first, the way the architects had outlined. With nothing left to trick the eye, epiphany comes as a realization that, despite my efforts to exploit fine for purposes of deflection, I had been unintentionally speaking the truth all along. From its germ, the expression has been emblematic of a conclusion. And true to form, its users apply it in order to hasten a finish. For me, I was finished talking about death, trying to answer questions about it, trying to explain it. I was done living in its contours, being defined by it. So, I sought to end the conversation in the most efficient way possible. But, like its present-day understanding, the privilege was not without its price. Each deferral was an ignorance, an act of self- sanction with penalties that only compounded with interest. Much as I’d like to take some helping of credit for my accidental honesty, it doesn’t forgive the debt. For one, because the objective was always to lie. For another, because the receiver still wound up misled. Yes, by downright coincidence, I’d maintained the authenticity of the word, but not a soul read it that way. To claim any sort of victory would be delusion.

Fooling yourself is much more straightforward when you choose not to examine all the facts. That way, when things go belly-up, you weren’t flagrant, just uneducated. I, on the other hand, have done the exploration, the fact-finding. I’ve exposed my own verbal misappropriation, of which I was both the victim and the sole conspirator. Believing I was performing some service by not unloading upon my confidants, I swept past the topic, having dismissed their attentiveness as the child of formality and not of good faith. Not only did that reveal me as an individual short of trust, it left me as one heavy with discomfort. To continue then, with everything I knew, would make me a flat-out hypocrite. As a proponent of transparency, especially one who stands in opposition to the demonization of feeling, I can’t—I won’t— use the word anymore. Not until everyone agrees on what it means. Until that day arrives, let me tell you how I am.

I’m not over it. I won’t ever be. I won’t sanction the fact that my father got a raw deal. I can’t stomach the likelihood that his own country killed him. I don’t understand how a government can send soldiers to a warzone dusted with pesticides knowing their own men would breathe them in. I fail to see how something meant to kill trees and expose snipers could be harmless to the boys making bathtubs out of its emptied barrels. I reject the excuse that no one could have known or that it was all some big cover-up; no admission of negligence or duplicity will undo the damage. I abhor that my father fulfilled his part of the bargain and got cancer for it. I’m sickened at the thought that, somewhere, in some broken-down government office, a nameless, faceless peon had to distill his worth down to a dollar amount. I hate that blood money is no longer a foreign concept. I want them to know that a monthly check is not an absolution. I need to come to terms with what is out of my control. I’m getting better. But I’m never fine. I’m acknowledging the fact that I’ll never be done talking about this. I accept that anyone I allow close to me will eventually ask about my father, and I will have to tell them. I’m also fortunate that there’s much more to discuss about his life than there is about his death. I choose to see it as a way of keeping him around. I’m astounded at what I’ve been through, body and mind. I’m equally shocked that, after it all, most of the days are good. I still hope for a way to conceal the path that no one else becomes its unwilling traveler. I grasp how naïve that sounds. I promise to never see a cure as “too late,” and to celebrate every life it saves. I concede that it will still be painful. I’m making peace with that. But I’m never fine. I’m grateful for the weird little joys that make waking up exciting. I enthuse over a blue energy drink, a short run on a fall morning, and the fat, little beagles with their fat, little butts at the park more than is probably necessary. I recognize that, on the ride there, I probably flipped off someone’s elder for driving too slow. I’m immediately remorseful if it helps. I’m working on separating criticism from ambition and maybe, just maybe, taking it easy on myself once or twice a century. I wish I could believe those who offer praise, but fear of conceit has me firmly by the haunches. I’d rather take the business end of a horsewhip than a compliment. I will say I want to connect with people, and then hide behind my couch when the doorbell rings. I’m sure whoever’s out there is selling something and I can’t bear to turn them down. I’d like to introduce my younger self who yearned for love to the cynic whose system handles affection like an organ transplant. I think there’s a whole person somewhere in-between. I’m lonely one day and self-contained the next. But I’m never fine. I can’t stand still, yet I wish everything would stop moving so fast. I keep my blinds closed and enjoy a dark room. I write by candlelight. I buy too many candles, yes, but my electric bills are twenty dollars and I’m definitely surviving the first few waves of zombies. I adore the way the skin buzzes after a day spent out in the sun. I’m cool as anything in a crowded city or a bar yet my chest starts to tighten if I’m in the grocery store for more than fifteen minutes. I begrudge the fact that I’ll always be some level of anxious. I seize up whenever my mother so much as coughs. I check her calendar for doctor names I don’t recognize, yet I’m somehow amazed when she resists if I ask about them. I accept the waves because I know how; with each one that passes, I get better at riding them. I miss piloting jungle boats down artificial rivers under a night sky of controlled explosions. The exhaustion, the simplicity of it all. I blame myself for frittering Dad’s last good years by indulging some childish lark, even if there was no possible way to have foreseen. I called him every day. I felt his warmth and support. I realize the guilt is one-sided and entirely of my own making. I’m trying to ease up. But I’m never fine. I laugh again, more than I’d ever thought feasible. I laugh like him, big and high-pitched. I do a lot of things like him: eat his weird foods, listen to forties jazz. I even have his squared-off toes. I’ve begun to wonder if a piece of him didn’t latch onto me before he left. I pray it was the adhesive piece, the piece that glued the family together by force of sheer existence. I aim to be glue, but I feel I’m more like Sticky Tack. I count on the good, no matter how much it makes me sound like a T.J. Maxx affirmation. I prepare for the bad because I have to cover all the angles. I eagerly anticipate a two o’clock coffee run because depending on work, it might be the one time a day I get to step outside. I drink so much coffee my moisturizer needs moisturizer. I used to drink more, but then friends started forwarding me articles about kidney failure. I meander between thoughts that are seemingly unrelated and take far too much pleasure in mapping the tangent back to its bewildering jump off. I debate my own brand of weirdness: intriguing or screwy. I’m going to leave that one alone. But I’m never fine. I’m a walking refutation. I turn down invites to barbecues because small talk is crippling but watch me Uber into some dingy corner of San Jose to split a Pisco Sour in the living room of a Peruvian I’ve just met. I’m unable to explain it. I suppose I prefer to do things that make me feel alive. I fancy the idea of being meaningful in a way that’s noble and not contrived. I distrust those who fawn— them and their signature scent. I’m overly vigilant about the way I speak; meanwhile, my fear of ineloquence trips me up more than anything else. I play with humor when recollecting pain, not to mask it but because you either find the funny bits or lose yourself to the gloom. I’m rarely brief with a story. I dawdle on the details. I drive the point home, mostly because the point is drunk. I’m more honest with myself on the page than I am anywhere else. I’m indebted to the writing, for the collectedness that comes with a finished piece, for providing better therapy than any prescription or couch session ever could. But I’m never fine. I share work with my best friend, fight to trust her approval, fret when she says, “That was a punishing read.” I’m uncertain as to what she refers, my prowess or my life. I’m only bothered by one of those options. I’m confident you can figure out which. I am certain that, by now, a good number of you figure I’m a basket case. I surmise that, if you’ve made it this far, it is by the grace of charm or dismay. I decline to get caught up in the particulars. I’m just trying to tell you how I am. I told you I would. I’m a man of my word. I could go on, but I’ll leave it there. I’m good for now. But I’m never fine.

To be sure, I’m not lobbying for sticking a finger down the emotional gullet at the slightest provocation. That’d strip the crust off anyone’s warm rolls. What I am suggesting is that we start suspecting this word fine. That we pay closer attention to the users among us, with a particular focus on those who deploy it at high frequency. This is not an invitation to pry or to prod. Do that and you’ll find yourself headed home with a lifetime supply of less ambiguous four-letter words. This is an imperative to be present, to take extra care. Every fine is a trip wire. Step with intent. To circumvent the minefield is to neglect the person who somehow sleepwalked their way to its center. No one’s asking to be carried out. Just stay nearby. Talk about anything. Anything else. Anything but the ground. The distraction could be lifesaving.

As for myself, I can’t say for certain if I’ve managed my way free of hazardous terrain. The moment I stop minding my stride is the moment something blows up in my face. I like that. For once, I’ve painted myself into a corner and I’m in no rush to leave. By coming out so unapologetically against an expression, I’m bound by my own declaration of independence. Attention must always be paid. Dialogue deserves contemplation. Words have to mean something. It doesn’t mean unloading my dirty laundry on those with a predilection for pressing. It means being conscientious about my word choice—choosing terms that do justice to my frame of mind without soliciting a symposium. For too long, I conflated honesty with an obligation to full disclosure, forgetting that to be succinct is not to be disrespectful. No one’s ever faulted me for feeling shitty and not wanting to talk about it. At the very least, the admittance endorses anyone at the table struggling with their own sense of fineness. At most, it authorizes the dispensation of their grievances—grievances I’m happy to drown in.

It must sound like sadomasochism, this relief that can be extracted from the ordeals of others. But, let me be clear, my relief comes in recognizing that anyone willing to discuss it is actively attempting to work it out. To talk about pain, however briefly, is to acknowledge not only that things have been better, but also that we expect the pendulum to swing back that way. To that end, I hope no one I know is fine. I hope no one reading this is fine. Much as I wish you cotton candy clouds and a life written by Nancy Meyers, I understand that there will be heartache and how, if that is the way of things, this might come across as insensitive. Before you burn this, however, I ask you to remember the last time you felt truly happy. Remember what it was exactly that brought about such feeling, how lucky you were to have something wondrous to misplace, how the joy would be meaningless without the necessary pain. Now, remember the last time things felt as hopeless as they might in this very moment. Then remember how it only became a memory because, in order to do so, it must— in some way—come to an end. 

“I’m Never Fine” is an excerpt from the book I’m Never Fine: Scenes and Spasms on Loss ©2023 by Joseph Lezza, published by Vine Leaves Press on February 21, 2023.

***

Joseph Lezza is a writer in New York, NY with an MFA in creative writing from The University of Texas at El Paso. His debut memoir in essays, I’m Never Fine: Scenes and Spasms on Loss (Vine Leaves Press), was a finalist for the 2021 Prize Americana in Prose and was named by Buzzfeed LGBTQ and Lambda Literary as a “Most Anticipated 2023 Release.” When he’s not writing, he spends his time worrying about why he’s not writing. His website is www.josephlezza.com and you can find him on the socials @lezzdoothis.

Sandhill cranes are monogamous birds; during courtship, the male valiantly tosses vegetation or mud into the air and fans its wings above the body, before dancing with abandon and letting out a unison call. Then the pair throw their heads back—the male at a deeper angle—and the female lets out two calls for each call the male emits. Lifelong pairs rely on this short, sharp unison call for relationship maintenance—it’s a pair’s shorthand to stay connected, or to alert a mate to a threat in their breeding area. Dancing, too, is used not only in courtship rituals, which are said to be infrequent in lifelong pairs, but also as a communal activity. These cranes have at least ten different types of dances and as many calls; their dances are so lively, with leaps, bows, and head pumps that I wonder whether this is why a group of cranes is also referred to as a dance or swoop of cranes.

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Jason Guriel | On Browsing | November 2022 | 4,361 words (15 minutes)

Let’s browse a bookstore—a Platonic one, a composite. Let’s wander an aisle, running our fingertips across a wall of spines. One spine, thick and black, juts out: the recent NYRB Classics reissue of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. It’s a block of a book, though you’d never know that, scrolling online. The back cover even features a blurb by Don DeLillo. Let’s linger on it.

I remember the bookstore, long gone now, on Forty-Second Street. I stood in the narrow aisle reading the first paragraph of The Recognitions. It was a revelation, a piece of writing with the beauty and texture of a Shakespearean monologue—or, maybe more apt, a work of Renaissance art impossibly transformed from image to words. And they were the words of a contemporary American. This, to me, was the wonder of it.

There’s a lot to like about this blurb. There’s the spectacle of one great novelist plumping for the work of another. There’s the real-time search for the right words (“or, maybe more apt”) and the wonderful ones arrived at (“a work of Renaissance art impossibly transformed from image to words”). There’s the subtext of a green writer, a budding DeLillo, stumbling on the kind of writing he hadn’t thought was native to his American soil, something he didn’t even realize he was searching for. “And they were the words of a contemporary American,” he tells us, in awe. “This, to me, was the wonder of it.” There’s a bildungsroman buried in DeLillo’s blurb.

But then there’s that opening bit, which the blurb could reasonably live without. “I remember the bookstore, long gone now, on Forty-Second Street,” writes DeLillo, eating up precious back-cover real estate.

Why recall the bookstore where he first read the opening paragraph of The Recognitions? Perhaps the paragraph was so brilliant it imprinted the moment on DeLillo’s memory as if on film. Perhaps it was a Proustian madeleine, a prod to memory. Or maybe the bookstore itself played a part in DeLillo’s first encounter with The Recognitions. Maybe something in the very plaster pulled him to Gaddis’s book. Whatever the case, the bookstore had stuck with him. Stuck to him. Paragraph and place had fused in the novelist’s mind.

I can certainly remember where I was when I first encountered a great many of my favourite books. I never meant to keep these memories; I seem to have had no say in the matter. The bookstores, my mind decided, were important: the setting for a bildungsroman.

For instance, I remember standing in Toronto’s World’s Biggest Bookstore—“long gone now,” to lift DeLillo’s line. It was around 1996, and I was considering a paperback copy of Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. The cover, you see, had cried out to my teenage self. A ninja type, sword raised, stands before an arch of ancient brickwork, bulging with duelling bulls in relief. But beyond the arch, across a plain of circuitry, a futuristic skyline awaits. Above the title, a header declares the book to be “THE #1 SCIENCE FICTION BESTSELLER,” the definite article doing some work. Below the title, a blurb from something called Los Angeles Reader (also “long gone now”) is blunt: “Stephenson has not stepped, he has vaulted onto the literary stage with this novel.”

On the back cover, there’s a vote of confidence from William Gibson no less, maybe my favourite writer, plus other appealing endorsements. “A cross between Neuromancer and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland,” says one blurb. A “gigathriller” sporting a “cool, hip cybersensibility,” says the publisher’s copy. Hey, it was the 1990s.

I stood there, holding the paperback. The World’s Biggest Bookstore was low-ceilinged and harshly lit, with many rows of orange shelves. The building itself had two floors, one entrance, and a long approach, and there was usually a homeless person right by the doors, so you had time to root for change or steel yourself, especially if you were a shy, naive kid from the suburbs. It wasn’t as obviously welcoming as the tony megastores of today, like Indigo, which dedicate a lot of space to pillows, candles, and Starbucks (though I seem to recall the World’s Biggest, late in its life, grudgingly attempting a café—a counter with a few tables).

Still, you could linger there for hours because of the sheer volume of books. Tongue in cheek, the store marketed itself as an admirably shabby foil to its competitors: “We occasionally have soft mood lighting. But then we replaced the burnt out fluorescent tubes.” World’s Biggest was about the books, shelves and shelves of them. When my father and I were downtown, we’d often arrange to split up for an hour or so, then meet at the bookstore. If one of us was late, the other would have more than enough to occupy himself with. This was before smartphones, when killing time took creativity.

Anyway, perhaps I looked like I was on the fence, because a passing employee paused long enough to inform me that the book I was holding was excellent. I remember a thin, middle-aged woman with jet-black hair, bearing a stack of books. I want to say she was wearing the sort of apron bookstores foist on their staff, and black shoes, maybe even Doc Martens. She gave off the vibe of a mostly reformed Goth, someone who’d dabbled in dark arts or, at least, Neil Gaiman comics. I immediately decided she was childless, a serious reader, trustworthy, and very cool. I bought the book.

As I grew older and spent more time with friends, I tried to continue the practice of arranging to meet at large bookstores, where the early worm might browse for a bit. But World’s Biggest—which was owned by Coles, a chain eventually absorbed by Indigo—was torn down in 2014. You could buy a latte at the newer, upscale stores. You could retreat to a comfy chair or even listen to live music on an actual piano. But standing around under strong lighting— basically loitering as you waited for ex-Goth angels, clad in dark raiment, to descend and offer guidance—was off brand and off the table.

I’ve never thought about a book I own and then recalled where I was when I ordered it off a website. Perhaps I was sitting at the dining room table. Perhaps I had my laptop on the sofa. Screens absorb and disperse us. When we’re online, we’re everywhere—and nowhere.

It could’ve been otherwise. When William Gibson minted the term “cyberspace” in his 1982 short story “Burning Chrome,” he imagined something like an internet, but in spatial terms. You “jacked in” using an Ono-Sendai VII deck and a pair of trodes, the trodes held in place by a “white terry sweatband.” Here is one of Gibson’s characters, a hacker, describing cyberspace.

A silver tide of phosphenes boiled across my field of vision as the matrix began to unfold in my head, a 3-D chessboard, infinite and perfectly transparent. . . . Legitimate programmers jack into their employers’ sector of the matrix and find themselves surrounded by bright geometries representing the corporate data.

Gibson’s vision of linked computers was prescient, but quaint too. Cyberspace was still a “somewhere,” a grid populated with “bright geometries,” a terrain to navigate, to move through.

A decade later, in Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson refined Gibson’s idea and proposed the “Metaverse” (no relation to Mark Zuckerberg’s). Accessible via goggles, the Metaverse is organized around the so-called Street, a “grand boulevard going all the way around the equator of a black sphere with a radius of a bit more than ten thousand kilometers. That makes it 65,536 kilometers around, which is considerably bigger than the Earth.” You can customize your avatar, but be warned: “cheap public terminals” produce a “jerky, grainy black and white.” There are “vast hovering overhead light shows” and “free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other.” You can “write car and motorcycle software” and take your “software out and race it in the black desert of the electronic night.” In the Metaverse, the code’s the limit.

We didn’t get these sci-fi internets, of course. We didn’t even get the internet as originally advertised. (The early, buzzy metaphors—“information superhighway,” “surfing”—promised dynamic motion.) Instead, we got an endlessly metastasizing stack of two-dimensional pages—and browsers to sort them. But then the language of “browser” is a feint as well. You don’t “browse” the internet. You don’t move through it. It’s a galaxy’s worth of content with none of the space. It’s infinite density. You either already know what you want to see (and duly type in the URL) or you try the search bar, which can bring up millions of possibilities. You can keep many different browsers open at once, fanned out like cards from decks of different provenance, a bespoke set specific to your needs. Miraculous, sure, but you’re never quite somewhere. There are no aisles, no vistas, no long views.

We’ve grown used to this atomized, blinkered arrangement, each of us in our carousel, fed by our feed. We’ve acclimated to online shopping, to typing in the title of a book and being hustled straight away to its unique page. We’ve given up the journey for the destination. We’ve achieved two-dimensional teleportation.

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There was something steadying, though, about standing in an actual, cavernous bookstore and taking it all in. Your fellow customers shared a room and a set of options. The scale was human, and the stock was present. Some of it disappeared from day to day as people purchased books. But you had to walk past the stuff you thought you didn’t want to reach the stuff you thought you did. Thus, you could stumble on something you hadn’t set out for. (I’d never heard of Snow Crash the day I picked it up.)

Or you could cozy up to a title slowly, over time, flirting with the idea of it. I remember visiting a copy of the novel Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon, over and over. It resided at The Book Company in Sherway Gardens. I’d won a high school English prize, and my teachers had arranged a gift certificate for the store. Thirty dollars, if I recall. A fortune for a teenager in the 1990s.

There’s plenty of information about the World’s Biggest Bookstore online, but there are only two hits on the entire internet that remember, by name, The Book Company at Sherway Gardens. The store seems to fall within what writer Tom Scocca calls

the Internet Event Horizon, the gap between those things that were around to be incorporated in real time into the eternal present of the World Wide Web, and those pre-Web things that were old enough that the World Wide Web reached back and made note of them for their nostalgia value.

The first hit, a blog post, features a digitized Polaroid snapped at a 1990 Douglas Adams book signing. The blog’s text describes the store as “a lavish, decadent shrine to literature, swathed in dark, classy forest green”—a shade purple, that, but it confirms my memories. The second hit, on Reddit, is about the exact same signing and references “a now-extinct bookstore in Sherway Gardens, The Book Company.” Worryingly, both blog and Reddit post are by the same author. Are we the only two who remember? (It turns out there were a few other Book Companies, including one in Ottawa which the Indigo Empire gobbled up and eventually shuttered.)

In any case, my teenage self had judged The Book Company in “dark, classy forest green” a serious store, and Gravity’s Rainbow a serious novel. I’d been eyeing it for some time, the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition, with mint green spine, V2 rocket blueprints for a cover, and that iconic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt quote on the back, which might’ve invented the very idea of desert islands:

Fantastic! . . . Fantastically large, complex, funny, perplexing, daring, and weird . . . If I were banished to the moon tomorrow and could take only five books along, this would have to be one of them.

“Weird,” indeed; the plot summary described a book whose main character’s “sexual conquests” are correlated to “V-2 rocket bombs . . . falling on London . . .” Clearly, Gravity’s Rainbow was a classic of some kind, but kooky too. Contraband hiding in plain sight. Words for a high school student to get high on.

I’d been circling the book for some time. (I’d also been circling the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics Ulysses, with the cover shot of James Joyce in Shakespeare and Company, the Paris bookstore that published the novel’s first edition.) The Gravity’s Rainbow was in mint condition—except for a small white crease in the upper right-hand corner of its cover. Sign of in-store manhandling? Minor mishap at the printer? I was fussy about my books, and the crease had been bothering me, which is why I’d been reluctant to close the deal. The crease was a barrier to cross.

Nearly twenty-five years later, the book is still with me. It’s yellowed some, and the corners have lost their crisp points. The spine stayed smooth (I never crack a spine if I can help it), but I worry about the cover, which is beginning to show signs of detaching. The crease is still there, of course, a little creek I’ve learned to live alongside. Surely every Gravity’s Rainbow should have one.

A few years later, I was browsing in Pages, an independent bookstore in downtown Toronto. By this time, my passion had passed from fiction to poetry. And yet I’d struggled to admire Canadian poetry or, rather, the attenuated version my profs had been pushing in university. A species of free verse bordering on plain speech, Canadian poetry waved o the metaphor and music—too florid. Instead, it counted itself direct and unshowy. It even seemed to take perverse pride in its lack of vision. “The animals / have the faces of / animals,” says one Margaret Atwood poem, coolly, as if avoiding description were a positive; as if conjuring a blank in the reader’s mind were an act of courage. Canadian poetry was as scrubbed of formal texture as a prairie.

But there seemed to be an embargo on saying as much. Canadian poetry was a duty read. A pity read. It demanded patriotism and kid gloves. Book stores gave the frail stuff its own shelf, isolated from the other poetry. Anthologies like Gary Geddes’s 15 Canadian Poets x 2 kept Canadian poetry on life-support. Homegrown garlands, like the Governor General’s Award, were gently placed.

All of this I understood half-consciously, somewhere in my gut, where the acidic feelings churn. But a military-educational complex had arisen around the work of Atwood, Al Purdy, Michael Ondaatje, Anne Carson, and so many other socially approved mediocrities. A campaign of bad opinions—reinforced by journalists, prize committees, and academics—can buffet one’s confidence. You can start to second-guess yourself. It’s not the poems, it’s you.

It was in this mental climate that I lifted Carmine Starnino’s book of essays A Lover’s Quarrel off the new releases table at Pages, leafed through it, and felt a crackle of kinship. Here are the first few sentences:

I want to do this right, and the best way to begin is to fess up to reservations. Luckily, I have a few. Chief among them is whether these previously published reviews, stacked a decade deep, are interesting enough to survive the second life I’ve forced upon them. Such resurrectionist strivings have always seemed suspect to me. Past its occasion, a review’s relevance isn’t likely to run very high, and it’s a rare opinion that, appearing imperishably robust on first print, doesn’t evaporate into vapidity when invited back for a permanent stay between covers. I can only hope that’s not the case here. I’ve also been put on notice by the fanaticism with which others have fattened similar collections.

It was the style that struck me—the image of “published reviews, stacked a decade deep,” the barely concealed rhyme in “evaporate into vapidity,” the wicked alliteration of “fanaticism” and “fattened.”

I hadn’t been looking for A Lover’s Quarrel that day—I hadn’t even known it existed. But Pages had armed me with an IED of a book. Here was a critic exploding pieties and expressing the very doubts I’d long kept contained in my mind. Here was a critic dragging Canada’s past for the worthy poets we’d cast off, the poets whose work hadn’t fit our narrow definition of Canadian poetry. Surely someone had erred in placing Starnino’s subversive book in plain view.

That was the joy of an indie like Pages; it stacked the Starninos on the sort of precious prominent real estate a larger chain reserves for the bestsellers that need no help finding readers’ hands. That is, Pages stacked the deck in favour of the quirky, the prickly, the heroically uncommercial. In favour of discovery. A Lover’s Quarrel never shifted that many units; it was never going to be a Heather’s Pick. But its dissident sensibilities riled and reshaped a generation of poets and critics.

Sadly, Pages vanished a few years later, in 2009, a victim of Toronto’s swelling rents. But Starnino’s book had left its blast crater.

Imagine a version of the contemporary web laid out before us, like Gibson’s cyberspace or Stephenson’s Metaverse. Picture an endless plateau, planed flat, with aloof skyscrapers: a gleaming city in draft, a Dubai dispersed. That giant #1 on the horizon is YouTube, that tower of shipping boxes, Amazon. Smaller structures suggest modest websites: businesses, blogs, and more. The buildings roll away, as regular as dominoes, around the horizon. Occasional fissures, venting steam, allude to the catacombs of the dark web.

In this vision, your browser is a pod. You punch in coordinates and zip around at light-speed, passing smoothly through other browsers, whose hulls turn transparent at your approach, as in the Metaverse. Hyperlinks are wormholes: tunnels of swirling light.

One wormhole wings your pod across a digital Atlantic and deposits you in front of a quaint green building on the banks of a pixelated river. Other quaint buildings surround it but are spaced apart to accommodate pods. (It’s as if someone clicked on the edge of a city and dragged it, distending space itself.) You are now at the online shop for Shakespeare and Company, on the banks of the Seine in Paris. It’s never closed, and the door is decoration: you float cleanly through it.

Inside, your pod hangs like a wasp, scanning spines. You move down the centre of aisles like a Steadicam shot in Kubrick. You alight on the roof of a stack of books, rising from the new releases table. The store senses that you’re squinting at something—the new Sally Rooney. The cover sharpens. Text boxes bloom in midair—blurbs, hot takes, a JPEG of the Irish author, a throbbing BUY NOW button. You look away, and the book dims, the boxes closing like tulips.

Time travel is an option here. You toggle to a 1922 version of the store, managed by the long-gone Sylvia Beach, and scrutinize a first edition of Ulysses, with blue cover, the one James Joyce’s first reviewers likened to a phonebook. In microseconds, Shakespeare and Company’s invisible AI, lurking on some server, has worked up a précis on the available copies, including prices and comps from recent auctions.

Perhaps this is what browsing bookstores will be like in the future. Still, I’d give up my vision of aerodynamic pods and virtual aisles for a few more afternoons among the grubby orange shelves of the World’s Biggest Bookstore.

I’ve bought plenty of books online, books that have come to mean something to me. But location matters to our minds. We all have personal associations—individual, inner text boxes—which float above certain objects. They can’t be swatted away. “I remember the bookstore,” begins Don DeLillo. He will never forget it.

Writing this essay, I was surprised to find myself growing emotional. Google’s supply of images of the World’s Biggest Bookstore conjured a lost civilization and its peoples, including memories of teachers I adored, my late father, and other ghosts. What had I been doing while the civilization crumbled? I’d been busy, I suppose—with grad school, a failed marriage, career, a new marriage, kids, poems, essays. By 2021, many of the bricks-and-mortar bookstores I’d browsed in my youth were gone.

But some, like Bakka-Phoenix Books (an indie specializing in sci-fi and fantasy) and Book City (an indie chain), survived. Plus, new shoots have sprung up: Ben McNally Books in 2007, Queen Books in 2017, a Type Books here and there. The stores tend to be in high-density, gentrified, and walkable neighbourhoods. (The suburb I grew up in will likely never draw a Type, with its trendy totes, to the local plaza.) And the new stores aren’t as desirably dingy as, say, Pages. I’m glad they exist, though. They’re offering sanctuary and succor to the next generation.

Consider Ben McNally Books, which started out in Toronto’s financial district, in the sort of high-ceilinged, chandeliered, and ornately columned space once reserved for banks. (It has since decamped east.) Ben McNally offers a thoroughly grownup browsing experience, with beautiful wooden shelves, excellent non-fiction and poetry sections, and book launches. (It has even launched yours truly.)

But the shop’s most valuable contribution is its calm, authoritative curation. I recall the Ben McNally shelf dedicated to the NYRB Classics imprint—the very same imprint that revived The Recognitions. (NYRB Classics is to literature what the Criterion Collection is to film: a prestige label addressed to connoisseurs.) What a delight to discover a bookstore that had corralled the imprint’s individual titles in one section. (What an innovation: curation by publisher!) Different but brilliant books that demand discovery—like Arthur Schnitzler’s Late Fame and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts—always make more sense grouped together. A well-curated indie like Ben McNally helps you make those connections. It hyperlinks its wares the old-fashioned way.

Or consider the new bookstore in the east end of my city, the Scribe. Defiantly launched during the pandemic by Justin Daniel Wood, the Scribe is a vintage concern devoted to the exquisitely old: to first editions, signed books, and antiquarian delights. What I’ve most enjoyed, though, is turning up affordable books that have gotten harder to source in bricks-and-mortar shops, like, say, Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather, a 1994 sci-fi novel about tornado chasers (which I remember first spotting at World’s Biggest). The first edition I picked up at the Scribe happens to be signed, but I was happy just to have found a reading copy.

You can’t scroll through a formal catalogue, but the Scribe updates online photos of its shelves every week so that, in the words of its website, “you can browse from your living room couch.” But there’s no substitute for standing on the Scribe’s antique hardwood floor and hefting a beautifully preserved, out-of-print book in your hand. Plus, you can’t always believe your eyes when scrolling—someone might’ve already borne away the book you’re eyeballing—but you can believe them when browsing. The real world never struggles to load content. The real world never freezes.

Whether you choose to visit the Scribe in vintage flesh or shelter at home and squint at pixelated spines, Wood’s store is selling something special: a product we want precisely because it occupies space, because it came from a printing press and survived its early handlers. It’s a relief, really, to encounter something that doesn’t have a digital doppelgänger—a digital solution. The point is the paper, the poignantly musty smell of the past. E-books and NFTs have yet to figure out how to yellow handsomely with age.

Still, Toronto’s renaissance aside, it’s hard not to miss the specific stores that once offered my young self sanctuary and succor. They weren’t just stores, after all; they were hothouses that helped me grow into a reader and writer. How often the aisles, back then, steered my aimless mind. How often I simply stood around, still, as if I were potted, thumbing through a book I knew nothing about. Sometimes I was waiting for someone, sometimes I was on my own. But there was no way for anyone to reach me. How wonderfully subversive it was to feel like I was alone in a city. No alerts, no pop-ups. Just the press of books all around, the world distilled to words on a page.

There’s a postscript to the Snow Crash story. Not long after buying it, I loaned it to a high school classmate. The book came back a mess: cover scuffed, spine cracked, edges blunted. The classmate wasn’t a fetishist—just a reader. My (eternal) bad: handing the book over, I had failed to convey my fussiness.

The book stayed with me, but the state of it needled. So, a few years ago, I decided I’d try to source a new copy of the same nineties-era edition. A mint copy to supplement the mangled one. Snow Crash had since wriggled into and out of several cover designs, but I didn’t want any of them. I wanted the one commended to me by the ex-Goth angel.

I tried different websites. None was very promising. You could certainly find a copy, but I couldn’t seem to secure a mint specimen, and anyway, I didn’t trust these faceless sellers’ descriptions of the state of their stock. This was a mass-market paperback from over twenty years ago. How many decent copies had even made it into the twenty-first century?

Reader, after many months of searching, having abandoned the internet, while browsing She Said Boom! (exclamation point theirs), a used book and record store in Toronto, browsing in the flesh, alone, just before the pandemic—I found my out-of-print Snow Crash. Not only was it in pristine condition, but it also seemed to have been opened exactly once when its original owner had slipped the receipt in the inside cover. I know this because the receipt was still there; it had left a rectangle of white on the browned cardstock, indicating where it had turned back the slow creep of light and air.

The receipt was dated 1995. Printed at the top, in ink that had dried a quarter of a century ago, were the words “World’s Biggest Bookstore.”

This essay appears in Jason Guriel’s collection On Browsing, which will be published on November 15, 2022, by Biblioasis Publishing.

Jason Guriel is also the author of Forgotten Work (Biblioasis 2020) and other books. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Air Mail, Slate, ELLE, and elsewhere. He lives in Toronto.

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Christian Livermore | We Are Not Okay | October 2022 | 5,780 words (21 minutes)

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
— James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

***

I am rummaging through the junk drawer in my father’s kitchen, looking for clay, or putty, or caulking. I am twelve years old, and I have an assignment due the following day for Earth Science. I have to make a working volcano. Most of the time there is no mustard, so I don’t know how I’m going to find the ingredients for a working volcano. Even now, years later, the bar for financial security is mustard. And paper towels. If I can afford both mustard and paper towels, I feel I’m doing pretty damn well. But on the night in question, my father has said he can’t afford the Plaster of Paris I need to make this working volcano, so I’m looking for anything I can use instead.

I call it my father’s kitchen. It’s my father’s apartment, really. I live there, I suppose, but it would be more accurate to say that I occupy the back bedroom of the place. I use the bathroom, and forage food from the kitchen cupboards and refrigerator; cereal and bread and government cheese and whatever else I can find, but mostly I keep to my room and my father keeps to his, lying on his bed listening to Frank Sinatra albums or watching Tarzan movies.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen tells us that shame lies at the core of poverty. Anyone who grew up poor instinctively knows this to be true. She feels that shame every minute of every day, in the background if she is feeling good, in her face if she is not. The shame I already felt was about to get worse, and it would be ground into my bones forever.

It is early in my seventh-grade year. Until now I have been in class only with students from my side of town, the poor side. But it’s a small town, so the rich kids and the poor kids are now funneled into one junior high school, and I find myself sitting next to classmates sporting all the markers of wealth: Straight teeth and sandy hair, Izod T-shirts and madras skirts and boat shoes. My father bought me two new school outfits, from Caldor. A pair of corduroys and a flowered peasant top (for the first day), jeans and a button-down collared shirt that makes me look like a security guard. I am desperate for a pair of boat shoes and have found some at the Salvation Army that are a size too small. I buy them anyway with three dollars I got somewhere, I don’t remember where, and I jam my feet into them and wear them until a bony bump emerges on my heel. Eventually I can’t take the pain anymore and give up wearing them. The bump is there to this day.

I find nothing in the kitchen, so I move to the bathroom, picking through the mounds of cotton balls and razors underneath the sink. My gaze descends the row of shelves in the bathroom closet, and finally, on the floor, settles on an unopened bag of kitty litter. This is the last place in the apartment. There’s nowhere else to look. I take the bag, turn to the sink and remove the plastic top from an empty mouthwash bottle that’s been sitting there for months. I gather cleaning supplies, go to my room, and get to work.

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I stir the litter into a sluice held together with flour, water and glue until it resembles a melting ice cream sundae. I hollow out a cavity at the top, insert the mouthwash cap and smooth the slurry around it to hold it in place. When it comes time for the volcano to erupt, I will pour a mixture of the cleaning supplies into the mouthwash cap, they will react and overflow like lava. I’ve tested it. It isn’t what I’d hoped to bring in, but it will work.

In class the next day I arrive before anybody else and set my volcano on the windowsill. Bits of kitty litter shake loose onto the tray and I quickly take my seat. My classmates file in and place their exquisitely constructed volcanos alongside it, painted, some snow-capped, with tiny trees dotting the landscape below, some even with miniature villagers who will be swallowed up in the impending eruptions. As they set down their volcanoes they cluster around mine and laugh, and I sit in my seat pretending to be engrossed in a book. The teacher arrives and class begins. One by one my classmates demonstrate their volcanoes, which spew and sputter and send lava flowing down their perfectly crafted slopes.

When we are down to one volcano—mine—Mr. Brown calls on me to take my turn. I picture the volcano behind me, kitty litter pebbles skidding off its sides, and I feel my face bloom red and say I haven’t done the assignment. There is only one volcano left, and all the other students have demonstrated theirs, so Mr. Brown knows I’m lying and so do all my classmates, but Mr. Brown is a prince among men and pretends he doesn’t. He pretends to scold me for not doing my work and says that just this once, because I’m usually such a good student, he’ll give me extra time.

At home I tell my father what happened and give him a note from Mr. Brown. I don’t know what it says but I think my father is embarrassed by it. He drives me to the store and buys me Plaster of Paris, and I work all weekend to finish my volcano, and demonstrate it the following Monday.

The shame of this episode is with me even now. It’s like a piece of gut I’ve coughed up into my throat, and it will be there until the day I die.

***

The more research scientists do on people who grew up in poverty, the more they realize that living in poverty is like being in a war. People who have grown up poor can have PTSD, and many don’t have the mental bandwidth that other people have for normal life stressors. Or at least I don’t. I become frustrated very easily. If I can’t get the lid off a jar, I feel like throwing the thing across the room. I once heard somebody say to an easily frustrated person, “Who do you think you are? Everybody has to deal with these inconveniences. Why do you think you’re so special that you don’t have to?” They have completely misunderstood, at least if it were me they were talking to. It’s that I had already experienced so many normal life stressors by the time I was ten, I used up more than most people deal with in a lifetime. Ironically, that has also left me all out of fucks. I am frustrated and out of patience, so I am ready to dispatch with certain normal life stressors very quickly. I usually do this with the phrase ‘Let me explain something to you,’ and very calmly and deliberately explain to the person why they had better stop whatever they are doing. It’s a strange amalgamation of emotions, and I don’t always understand it myself.

Some things never leave you. You carry them forward to the third and fourth generation. Those things can be good, or they can be bad. When James Baldwin wrote the words in Giovanni’s Room that begin this chapter, he was writing of social isolation, and one of the things he was grappling with was ‘passing.’ In Giovanni’s Room, the scholar Valerie Rohy wrote, for Baldwin and millions of black and gay people, ‘passing’ had to do with racial and sexual identity. For me, passing means something different. It is a highly freighted term for a cis white person to use, I know, but I can think of no other way to describe it. For me, passing means trying to be anything other than what I was, and what I fear so desperately I always will be: poor white trash.

***

I am leaning against the wall in a game arcade watching another girl play pinball. A group of us are standing around her. The other girls have taken their turns and are waiting for the girl to use up her quarter so they can go again. The ball pings against the sides of the machine and bells trill and lights flash. I am desperate to play, but I don’t have any money.

The girls are part of the drum corps I also belong to. We are at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, on the tail end of a ten-day trip to perform at Disney World. I spent weeks selling candles and chocolate bars to raise money for the trip. That fund-raising covered the cost of gas for the bus and the other travel costs. But it didn’t include any spending money. The other kids have received cash from their parents, enough to play arcade games and buy T-shirts and candy and souvenirs. Before I boarded the bus the morning we left, my father gave me $20. I spent it by the end of the third day. I do not belong here.

The girl’s quarter shows no signs of giving out. She has kept the same ball in play for about five minutes, bouncing it off the sides, batting it away with the levers whenever it ricochets back. The director of the corps, Mr. Johns, comes up. He watches the game a minute, then looks at the other girls, their quarters ready, then at me. I lean against the wall, trying to look disinterested.

“Don’t you want to play?”

“I’m fine.”

“Don’t you have any money?”

“I had $20, but I spent it.”

“Your father gave you $20 for ten days?”

I don’t answer. I feel the heat rising on my face. I manage a shrug.

Mr. Johns takes out his wallet and finds a $100 bill and offers it to me. I thank him but decline.

“It’s okay,” he says. “Take it. I’ll get it back from your father.”

I know I shouldn’t. I think of how angry my father will be that I told. How angry he’ll be that he’ll have to repay the $100. But I am nine years old and the pinball machine is ringing and the lights are flashing and I want to play. I take the $100 and thank Mr. Johns, and run to the change machine to get quarters.

I know I am lucky to have gone at all. But that’s part of the shame. The other kids belonged there. I was lucky to have been included. I am a charity case.

***

I don’t know exactly when I gave up on America. I only know that it was long after America gave up on me. There are many stories of America, but this story is one we don’t hear so often. It’s the version of ourselves we don’t like to think about, the one where poor people can’t always pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, where not every smart kid makes it out of the ghetto. The one where the American Dream is a lie. How do I tell it? How do I tell it so you will understand? Not for sympathy, just so you will understand what it has done to us, growing up poor.

John C. Calhoun said, “The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black.” With that pronouncement, he told one lie to hide another. He asserted one divide that does not naturally exist and denied one that does. There is no natural division between black and white or brown. Indeed, as James Baldwin and Toni Morrison and Ta-Nehisi Coates and others have pointed out, there is no black or white. The artificial division between black and white was invented by white people in the early days of America’s formation through the court system, specifically, by wealthy white people. They needed a reason to justify their right to profit from the labor of others, so they invented labels. Black and white. There absolutely is a division between rich and poor, but the rich would prefer to pretend it doesn’t exist. Otherwise, it would be clear that they have taken far more than their fair share and left the rest of us without.

From the outside, I am the story we like to tell ourselves. At the age of 54, by any reasonable standard, I have ‘gotten out.’ I have a PhD, I’ve lived in Europe for more than ten years, I was a journalist, I won awards. But on the inside, I am still the little girl in the projects eating government cheese. I dropped out of high school and still managed to get a PhD, but sometimes I don’t remember how far I’ve come. I’m up here, but in my mind I’m still down there. It’s not only that there are external barriers, although there are; I still have severe money problems and have never managed to achieve financial security. The barrier is internal, and it affects nearly everything I do and every interaction I have. I suspect it is the same for many Americans.

People don’t want to hear about poor whites for many reasons. One is that it threatens their ability to perpetuate the same old racist narrative that poverty is a ‘black problem.’ If black people are poor, goes the racist trope, it’s because of something they did, so there is nothing society can do about it. If people acknowledge that there are also poor whites, they will have to acknowledge that it is not a ‘black’ problem. It is a problem with how we reward work, the kind of work we reward most generously, and how we conceive of society’s responsibility for its poor and not just to them—in other words, people are poor because society makes them that way and keeps them that way, because it is more important to most of America to pay millions of dollars to bankers than it is to pay a decent salary to teachers and sanitation workers and store clerks, and because they need to keep people poor enough to accept work they may not want to do. If people admitted all these things, then they might have to do something about it.

The term poor white trash serves the same purpose—to dismiss, to deny, to denigrate. If you’re poor, it’s because of something you did. If people acknowledge that there are poor whites, they must acknowledge that they themselves could also be poor at any moment—if they think about it, perhaps they already are. This threatens the narrative of American exceptionalism, that anybody can get rich in America if they work hard enough. That is not true. It has never been true. But people fervently believe it; some so that they can view their own success as a sign of virtue and the result of their own hard work, others so that they can imagine their struggles as temporary, a bump in the road to their own eventual American Dream.

Contrary to the national narrative, we have always had class in America, and there have always been poor people. The nation was designed that way. As historian Nancy Isenberg, the author of White Trash: The 400-year Untold History of Class in America, has written, when the English were establishing colonies in Virginia and New England, they envisioned the poor as an expendable labor pool that would till the soil and husband the animals and build the colonies. They shipped them—the working poor, ex-soldiers, beggars, and criminals—to Jamestown, the Colony of Virginia and the Massachusetts Bay Colony and, in exchange for their passage, they would work to build the New World. They called them ‘waste people.’

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Nobody wants to hear about poor whites, unless those whites are what people call rednecks and they voted for Donald Trump. I don’t know any poor person who is a Republican. All the poor people I know are Democrats. And I mean yellow dog Democrats, an expression which means we would vote for a ol’ yella dog before we would vote for a Republican. I can only ever recall meeting one poor person who voted for Donald Trump, and he had brain damage from an IED in Iraq. We vote Democrat, that is, when we vote, because we sometimes have trouble getting to polling stations, for lack of transportation, a lack of childcare, an inability to get the time off work, disabilities, and other problems.

We don’t have the generational wealth of home ownership that allowed many working-class whites to move up to the middle class. It was also denied to black people because of redlining to keep black people out of ‘white neighborhoods,’ another way that black people and poor whites are in the same boat. Poor whites are kept out of those white neighborhoods, too, just in different ways; minimum credit scores we can’t meet and down payments we can’t save up or borrow from family. Another way we are not quite white. We are Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, agnostics, atheists. We are of English heritage and Irish, Italian and Portuguese, German and Polish and French and Greek and Hungarian and Scottish and Dutch.

I grew up in Groton, Connecticut. The way I grew up conflicts with the idea people have of Connecticut as nothing but big houses and leafy neighborhoods and clench-jawed bankers with Brahmin accents, the narrative you see in films, on television and in books. Unlike some working-class communities where factories that had formerly employed a whole town shut down and threw an entire community of working-class people into poverty, Groton had—and still has—two thriving major employers, Pfizer and Electric Boat, which employed a large part of the town and the surrounding towns besides, but no one in my family worked there. Hardly anyone in my family worked at all.

My father blamed a teenage dive off a dock into shallow water for a neck injury and worked less and less until he stopped working altogether and went on welfare. He continued to cut hair in the kitchen and used the money to buy the first VCR as soon as it hit the market, as well as a stereo and every Frank Sinatra tape he could find. When he couldn’t pay the rent anymore, he went on welfare and we moved to the projects. My mother had moved herself and my brother Adam there years before, along with my sister Jennifer, who she had after marrying my stepfather. My sister Charity would come along much later, from another man my mother lived with for several years.

The truth is, we couldn’t stay where we were. We did not belong in a middle- or working-class neighborhood. It would not allow us to be who we were. So, we moved down, and down, and down again, until we settled in a place where our family’s antics would be tolerated by our neighbors because they had no choice. No one had anyplace else to go.

No matter how much we cleaned, the apartment was crawling with cockroaches. One night as I lay awake in bed, I looked up and saw one crawling on the ceiling directly above me. I launched myself out of the bed and slept on the couch that night. The next day I prowled my room with Raid, but I never found that cockroach.

In the projects, every time I went outside, there was a need to be on guard. The scowl, arms at the ready, casual but alert, show that I was watchful, ready to go, that I couldn’t be caught unawares, either by a girl who wanted to jump me or a boy who wouldn’t accept no. Years before, when I was seven years old, an older boy of about twelve stole our kickball as friends and I played. I went to retrieve it, and he slammed it into my stomach so hard he knocked me to the ground. As I sat on the tar, catching my breath, I heard a voice above me.

“Did you hit my sister?”

I looked up. I don’t know why he was there, he didn’t even go to that school anymore, but there stood my brother. Adam’s reputation preceded him, and the boy began stammering and apologizing.

“Oh, is that your sister? Sorry, man, I didn’t know, I wouldn’t have—”

But before he could finish the sentence, my brother punched him in the stomach. After that, he taught me to fight. The elbow is the hardest bone in the body. Use it. A hand to the nose will knock somebody out cold, but be careful or you might kill them. If they have hold of you from behind, a headbutt to their face will break their nose.

I also began to realize that I could use things in my environment, so when a school bully picked on my friend on the playground and began shoving her, I tapped him on the shoulder, and when he turned, I knee’d him in the groin, spun him around, and slammed his face into a metal maypole. He later went to prison for rape.

But if you got caught out in the open, you had to front. A girl got in my face in the school parking lot one day out of the blue, throwing arms, her face up in mine. Her breath had that stale quality of someone who didn’t brush her teeth regularly. A crowd gathered to watch. I didn’t even know what I had done to her. Act casual. Eye the field, see what you can use. But we were in the wide open.

“Look,” I said, my voice casual, my arms at my sides, but flexing, ready. “We can go if you want, but I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t even know what you’re mad about.”

She fronted a little longer and I held my ground, my heart pounding, that click of dread in my throat. Then I guess she decided I might be able to take her.

“You’re all right,” she said, offering her hand. “I thought you’d chicken out, but you ain’t no punk. You’re a good kid.”

I shook for an hour afterward.

You become hard. Don’t smile. Don’t show weakness. That is with me still. I never stroll. Part of me is always on watch, waiting for the unexpected launch, the assault, the confrontation, the male on the hunt. I catch myself doing it and relax my arms, then a little while later I notice I’m clenching again, my shoulders tight. The need to do this is exhausting. The need to hide it even more so, to hide it from friends and colleagues who think I’m another kind of person, that I’m like them, that I’m comfortable in my own skin.

When I talk about poor people, I do not mean working class. It’s important to stress that. There are many ways to explain the difference. It is in the shame a poor child feels in the cafeteria line for his free school lunch, in the face of a single mother as she tries to hide her food stamp card from the person behind her in the check-out line, in the worry of a man who has just finished another 12-hour shift and still doesn’t know if he’ll have enough to buy groceries for his children.

One way to explain it is in a conversation I had recently with a friend. He insisted that, until recently, America was guided, to its benefit, by middle-class values, that there was an understanding that education was important, knowledge was important, that you went to work, did your job, came home, kept your yard clean, respected your neighbors. Poor people do that, too, I said. My grandmother did that. It struck me, then, that we were talking about the same things; we were just using different terminology.

When my friend talks about the middle class, he mostly means the working class. Teachers make $30,000 to $50,000 a year. Teachers are middle class. Garbage collectors make $60,000, but nobody would call a garbage collector middle class. Garbage collectors are working class. My friend was talking about his grandparents. His grandfather was a groundskeeper; his grandmother worked in a ball bearing factory. He wanted to laureate their values, but saying that somebody is working class speaks of a lack of sophistication, so he spoke of middle-class values. The values were the same, but he had grown up absorbing the American idea that the middle class are better than the poor. Nobody ever talks about the values of poor people as though they’re a good thing.

Working-class people can, for the most part, keep their lights on. They can at least know that they will be able to buy groceries. They probably are not college educated, but they have steady jobs, jobs they may have had for years, jobs with benefits and a pension, however much they have shriveled in recent years. Or they have been laid off from one of those jobs but they have a skill, and that skill conveys pride. As well it should.

Poor people work two or three jobs, unskilled work that doesn’t require a trade. Or they don’t have the wherewithal to hold down a job and are on welfare. Their parents were poor and their labor wasn’t valued, or they were mentally ill or addicts, and their children imbibed that hopelessness. Maybe they have dropped out of high school. Maybe they have bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Maybe they have an addiction. Mental illness, substance abuse and poverty can go hand in hand, as they did in my family. Which begets which? It’s not always that simple. It is not correct to say that drug use causes mental illness or that all those who are mentally ill are poor by choice; the same is true for those who are disabled. Indeed, in my experience, substance abuse is often done for self-medication. My mother did it, my brother did it, many people in my family did it, because they had undiagnosed mental illnesses and were ignored by the system because they were poor. My mother’s bipolar disorder went undiagnosed for years, so she lived with the misery of the depression and the crazed ideas fomented by the mania, and we, her children, lived with the outcomes. That is not my mother’s fault. It is the fault of the people who saw her behavior and its results as her own fault, a perception colored by the fact that she was poor, and didn’t look past that to recognize that she had a mental illness. Other people are just ignored because they’re poor. Waste people.

People may pick up the drug or the bottle, and certainly we are all responsible for our own choices, but what has America offered them instead? The idea that we are waste people is older than the country, and that knowledge that you are not valued by society wears you thin. In the housing project where I grew up, we were a bike ride away from the beach. But nobody I knew from the projects went there. Working class people did. But they had cars. There was no public transportation where I grew up. No bus to the beach from the projects. Or to any place of work, significantly. You needed a car or a bicycle. Most people in the projects didn’t have a car, except the drug dealers, and they slept during the day. Hardly anyone had a bike. Maybe they had enough money to give their kids a dollar for the ice cream van, but not enough for a bike, not for their kids and certainly not for themselves. And even if they did, they couldn’t conceive of the energy it would take, biking to the beach. It’s easier to sit on the porch, fan yourself in the heat and take comfort from an ice cream bar. This is the despair of poverty.

I have never owned a home, and I probably never will. Part of the reason for that is that I have never made enough money to make home ownership an attainable—or practical—goal. There was no down-payment loan available from a parent and I couldn’t save the money on my own. I could barely pay my bills. Once, when I was living in New York City, a friend called asking if I wanted to split a summer house in the Hamptons. My share would be $2,000. I desperately wanted to go, to get out of the city, to feel the sea air and hear the marsh grass flutter in the breeze and make smoothies and drink them on the deck, to spend time with my friend, but I didn’t have the money. Friends went on expensive holidays, ate at upscale restaurants, lived in apartments in Manhattan; I lived in a studio apartment in a condemned building. I had a degree from a prestigious university. I had a professional job. But I have never been successful at saving money.

That is also a consequence of growing up in poverty: the need for immediate gratification. If I get money, I spend it immediately, as though somebody might take it away from me. Because my whole childhood, people did. When I was nine years old, I had saved about $400 from working in my grandmother’s lunch shop. Syl’s Food Shop, it was called. It had been serving breakfast and lunch to the workers at Electric Boat for years when my grandmother and aunt bought it from Syl, and they kept the name because the Electric Boat workers knew it. My mother convinced me to open a joint bank account. She would keep the money safe, she said. My father warned me not to do it, but I was drawn by the lure of the bank account as a connection to my mother. So I did it. When I went to withdraw $20 a month later, the account had been cleaned out. When I was twelve, I had saved up more money from working in my grandmother’s shop. This time I was smart. I came home every afternoon and hid the bills in my books. A few dollars in each book. One day when I came home, the books were spilled out all over the floor, splayed open, all the money gone. My brother had found it. When I was in my early twenties, I bought a plane ticket to Italy and was waiting for a check to arrive to use as spending money. They sent it to my mother’s house, and she convinced a bank teller to cash it.

So, when I get money, I spend it quickly. Psychologists tell us that people who grew up in poverty have trouble controlling impulses, especially the impulse to buy. Being poor can have a permanent detrimental effect on your decision-making. If I had left the house with a dollar in my pocket, I would have spent it by the time I got home. This decision-making continued into adulthood. I once paid $600 for a set of Calphalon cookware when I was about to take custody of my baby sister, even though I only made $23,000 a year. My reasoning was that I had to have enough pots and pans to make a complete Thanksgiving dinner at all times. It’s something I’m working on, and I’m much better than I used to be, but not too long ago I bought a skirt on credit for £175 because I thought I would look cool in it at readings.

A few years ago, a friend of mine, in a well-meaning attempt to understand the impoverished diets of poor people, ate a Food Stamp diet for a week. On the last day of the diet, he talked about what he had learned and spoke philosophically about his renewed appreciation of healthy food as he prepared to end his restricted diet with his first good meal of the week: homemade vegetable pizza. He thought about what he had learned as he kneaded the pizza dough. He had already sliced the vegetables, and they sat piled high on the cutting board. While he had the best of intentions, what he said made me sad. He had misunderstood.

In his week of eating like poor people, he had missed two crucial ingredients: fear and shame. While he was looking forward to breaking his fast that night, poor people don’t get to do that. They don’t get to look forward to the end of impoverishment, to a good meal. My friend would eat a healthy meal that night, and he had known throughout the week that he could stop whenever he wanted, that all he had to do if he missed healthy food was open his refrigerator. Poor people never know when their next good meal will come. They look in the refrigerator on the 25th and maybe they only have enough food for a couple more meals but they don’t get paid for a week. And vegetables are expensive. Most poor people can’t afford them. All of this causes great shame. Shame that they don’t make enough money, shame that they can’t give their kids decent food, shame that they must rely on government assistance, shame that they can’t afford the restaurant their friends want to go to on Saturday night. That shame never goes away. It is not my friend’s fault that he does not know this. He doesn’t know it because society does not talk about such things, does not want them talked about. The result is that my friend would never understand how poor people feel—never understand me—and I felt sad and alone.

How do I tell it? How do I tell it so you will understand? Not for sympathy, just so you will understand what it has done to us, growing up poor. Because you have to understand. We are not okay.

***

We Are Not Okay was published on October 1st, 2022 by Indie Blu(e) Publishing.

***

Christian is also the author of a fiction chapbook, Girl, Lost and Found (Alien Buddha Press, 2021), and her stories and essays have appeared in anthologies and literary journals including Santa Fe Writers Project, Salt Hill Journal, The Texas Review, Meat for Tea, and Witch-Pricker. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews in Scotland with an academic focus on medieval English literature and has taught creative writing at Newcastle University and medieval literature at the University of St Andrews. She worked for ten years as a journalist.

Looking for a gift for the reader in your life? Here are eight books we featured on Longreads this year: the memoir of a teen environmentalist, an essay collection on dance and illness, a refugee family’s story, and more.

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Diary of a Young Naturalist | Dara McAnulty 

In this debut memoir, autistic climate activist Dara McAnulty writes about his immersive, intense connection to nature and wildlife with lyrical, evocative prose. The book’s entries, centered around McAnulty’s encounters around his home in Northern Ireland through the seasons, show a teenager’s deep appreciation for the natural world, science, and conservation.

Unfortunately, for me, I’m different. Different from everyone in my class. Different from most people in my school. But at breaktime today I watched the pied wagtails fly in and out of the nest. How could I feel lonely when there are such things? Wildlife is my refuge. When I’m sitting and watching, grown-ups usually ask if I’m okay. Like it’s not okay just to sit and process the world, to figure things out and watch other species go about their day.

Read an excerpt: ‘The Fledglings Are Out!’

The Other Mothers: Two Women’s Journey to Find the Family That Was Always Theirs | Jennifer Berney 

When Jennifer Berney and her wife Kelly embarked on the journey to start a family, they found that the options available did not accommodate lesbian couples like them. Part-memoir, part-history of fertility and the LGBTQ+ community, Berney’s book explores feminism, outdated notions of heredity and paternity, and queer family-building.

As I was coming of age as a lesbian and considering my future, it had never once occurred to me that the medical industry could legally withhold services from me or anyone else, that they could say yes to straight couples and no to queers, but in fact they did just that. Most sperm banks and fertility clinics turned away any woman who wasn’t conventionally married. Sperm banks weren’t made for lesbians.

Read an excerpt: Binders Full of Men

Beyond the Sand and Sea: One Family’s Quest for a Country to Call Home | Ty McCormick 

Asad Hussein grew up in Dadaab refugee camp complex in Kenya, which was established in the early 1990s as families from Somalia fled the country’s civil war. When he was 9, his older sister Maryan was able to resettle in Arizona, but he and the rest of his family had to wait for years before they could come to America. Their story, told beautifully by Ty McCormick, is ultimately a hopeful one, while also revealing the absolute brokenness of the U.S. refugee resettlement program.

Many new arrivals in Tucson who had come from Dadaab, including Yussuf, had never lived outside of a small rural village. Some of the children had never seen the outside of a refugee camp. Maryan was unique in that she had lived alone in Nairobi. She also spoke decent English, and was used to a level of independence that was unusual in conservative Somali communities. This was a source of constant friction in her marriage, but it was also a font of opportunity in America.

Read an excerpt: When Refugee Families are Separated, Women Carry the Burden

Up to Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town | Colin Jerolmack

Colin Jerolmack spent eight months living in rural Pennsylvania, in the greater Williamsport area, among communities caught in the middle of a fracking controversy. His book is a deep dive into the wider fracking debate, U.S. property rights, and the conflict between America’s notions of liberty and personal choice and the public good.

Thanks to land leasing, George had finally broken free of a lifetime of relative deprivation. Though he was hardly alone in turning to the fracking lottery in an effort to escape hardship, George certainly made out better than most. Of course, those who didn’t own any mineral estate couldn’t participate in the fracking lottery.

Read an excerpt: The Fracking Lottery

Fierce and Delicate: Essays on Dance and Illness | Renée K. Nicholson 

What does life look like for a ballet dancer with rheumatoid arthritis? This essay collection from Renée K. Nicholson explores the world of professional dance, the discovery of one’s body, and living with chronic disease.

The rest of my life will always be entwined with rheumatoid arthritis. But it’s my choice to also be something more, to not feel sick, to still find those shadows of a dancer, which is to say tiny flecks of magic, within me. Like anyone who is hopelessly in love, I will always be the keeper of a flame.

Read an excerpt: Happy is a Relative State

The Nation of Plants | Stefano Mancuso

Plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso presents a whimsical discussion of the lives of plants, and the many lessons they can teach us about living and thriving on this planet — together. A manifesto of sorts, it’s playful, informative, and inspiring, reminding us of the interconnectedness of all things and urging us to take action in a time of climate change.

Playing with something whose working mechanisms are not well known is clearly dangerous. The consequences can be completely unpredictable. The strength of ecological communities is one of the engines of life on Earth. At every level, from the microscopic to the macroscopic, it is these communities, understood as relationships among the living, that allow life to persist.

Read an excerpt: Why Bumblebees Love Cats and Other Beautiful Relationships

 Adrift | Miranda Ward

In her memoir, Miranda Ward reflects on pregnancy loss, infertility, and the unique place of almost-motherhood: an uncertain landscape characterized by waiting, wanting, hoping, and not-knowing. A writer and geographer, she asks questions of geography on the most intimate scale and discovers the wilderness of her own body.

The idea of the miscarriage in progress perplexes the part of me that imagined that this is a thing that can only happen privately, violently, suddenly, because it is a thing that is happening without much noise at all, and meanwhile here I am transcribing an interview, here I am meeting with a freelance client, wearing a new skirt I bought yesterday from the charity shop, here I am buying groceries and planning dinner, with nothing but a question mark inside me.

Read an excerpt: The Geography Closest In

The Kingdoms | Natasha Pulley 

Natasha Pulley’s genre-bending and time-twisting novel is an original and entertaining adventure, blending history, speculative fiction, a love story, and a wartime tale into one.

Most people have trouble recalling their first memory, because they have to stretch for it, like trying to touch their toes; but Joe didn’t. This was because it was a memory formed a week after his forty-third birthday.

He stepped down off the train. That was it, the very first thing he remembered, but the second was something less straightforward. It was the slow, eerie feeling that everything was doing just what it should be, minding its own business, but that at the same time, it was all wrong.

Read an excerpt: Even the Steam Had a Shadow

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Natasha Pulley | The Kingdoms | May 2021 | 1516 words (6 minutes)

***

1
Londres, 1898 (ninety-three years after Trafalgar)

Most people have trouble recalling their first memory, because they have to stretch for it, like trying to touch their toes; but Joe didn’t. This was because it was a memory formed a week after his forty-third birthday.

He stepped down off the train. That was it, the very first thing he remembered, but the second was something less straightforward. It was the slow, eerie feeling that everything was doing just what it should be, minding its own business, but that at the same time, it was all wrong.

It was early in the morning, and cursedly cold. Vapour hissed on the black engine right above him. Because the platform was only a couple of inches above the tracks, the double pistons of the wheels were level with his waist. He was so close he could hear the water boiling above the furnace. He stepped well away, feeling tight with the certainty it was about to lurch forward.

The train had just come in. The platform was full of people looking slow and stiff from the journey, all moving towards the concourse. The sweet carbon smell of coal smoke was everywhere. Because it was only just light outside, the round lamps of the station gave everything a pale glow, and cast long, hazy shadows; even the steam had a shadow, a shy devil trying to decide whether to be solid or not.

Joe had no idea what he was doing there.

He waited, because railway stations were internationally the same and they were a logical place to get confused, if there was ever a logical place. But nothing came. He couldn’t remember coming here, or going anywhere. He looked down at himself. With a writhe of horror, he found he couldn’t even remember getting dressed. His clothes were unfamiliar. A heavy coat lined with tartan. A plain waistcoat with interesting buttons, stamped with laurel patterns.

A sign on the wall said that this was platform three. Behind him on the train, a conductor was going along the carriages, saying the same thing again and again, quiet and respectful, because he was having to wake people up in first class.

‘Londres Gare du Roi, all change please, Londres Gare du Roi …’

Joe wondered why the hell the train company was giving London station names in French, and then wondered helplessly why he’d wondered. All the London station names were French. Everyone knew that.

Someone touched his arm and asked in English if he was all right. It made him jump so badly that he twanged the nerve in the back of his skull. White pain shot down his neck.

‘Sorry – could you tell me where we are?’ he asked, and heard how ridiculous it sounded.

The man didn’t seem to think it was extraordinary to find an amnesiac at a railway station. ‘London,’ he said. ‘The Gare du Roi.’

Joe wasn’t sure why he’d been hoping for something other than what he’d heard the conductor say. He swallowed and looked away. The steam was clearing. There were signs everywhere; for the Colonial Library, the Musée Britannique, the Métro. There was a board not far away that said the Desmoulins line was closed because of the drilling below, and beyond that, elaborate iron gates that led out into the fog.

‘Definitely …

London in England?’ he asked eventually.

‘It is,’ the man said.

‘Oh,’ said Joe.

The train breathed steam again and made the man into a ghost. Through all the bubbling panic, Joe thought he must have been a doctor, because he still didn’t seem surprised. ‘What’s your name?’ the man asked. Either he had a young voice, or he looked older than he was.

‘Joe.’ He had to reach for it, but he did know; that was a thump of a relief. ‘Tournier.’

‘Do you know where you live?’

‘No,’ he said, feeling like he might collapse.

‘Let’s get you to a hospital then,’ the man said.

So the man paid for a cab. Joe expected him to leave it at that, but he came too and said there was no reason why not, since he wasn’t busy. A thousand times in the following months, Joe tried to remember what the man had looked like. He couldn’t, even though he spent the whole cab ride opposite him; all he remembered later was that the man had sat without leaning back, and that something about him seemed foreign, even though he spoke English in the hard straight way that old people did, the belligerent ones who’d always refused to learn French and scowled at you if you tried to call them monsieur.

It was maddening, that little but total failure of observation, because he took in everything else perfectly. The cab was a new one, all fresh leather and smelling of polish that was still waxy to touch. Later, he could even remember how steam had risen from the backs of the horses, and the creak of the wheel springs when they moved from the cobbles outside the station to the smoother-paved way down Rue Euston.

But not the man. It was as though the forgetfulness wasn’t so much an absence of memory, but a shroud that clung to him.

The road looked familiar and not. Whenever they came to a corner Joe thought he knew, there was a different shop there to the one he’d expected, or no building at all. Other cabs clopped past. Brown fog pawed at the shop windows. The sky was grey. In the background, he wondered if the man wasn’t being kind at all but taking advantage of things somehow, but he couldn’t think what for.

Not far away, monster towers pumped fumes into that gun-metal sky. They were spidered about with gantries and chutes, and in the flues, tiny flames burned. On the side of an enormous silo, he could just make out BLAST FURNACE 5 stamped in white letters in French. Joe swallowed. He knew exactly what they were – steelworks – but at the same time, they filled him with the dream-sense of wrongness that the Métro signs at the station had done. He shut his eyes and tried to chase down what he knew. Steelworks; yes, London was famous for that, that was what London was for. Seven blast furnaces up around Farringdon and Clerkenwell, hauling steel out to the whole Republic. If you bought a postcard of London, it always looked amazing, because of that towering tangle of pipework and coal chutes and chimneys in the middle of it. It was a square mile that had turned everything black with soot: the ruin of St Paul’s, the leaning old buildings round Chancery Lane, everything. That was why London was the Black City.

But all that might as well have come from an encyclopaedia. He didn’t know how he knew it. He didn’t remember walking in those black streets or around the steelworks, or any of it.

‘Did you get off the same train as me?’ he asked the man, hoping that if he focused on one particular thing, he might feel less sick.

‘Yes. It came from Glasgow. We were in the same carriage.’

The man had a clipped way of talking, but his whole body was full of compassion. He looked like he was stopping himself leaning forward and taking Joe’s hands. Joe was glad about that. He would have burst into tears.

He couldn’t remember being on the train. The man tried to tell him things that had been memorable, like the funny snootiness of the conductor and the way the fold-down beds tried to eat you if you didn’t push them down properly, but none of it was there. He confirmed that Joe hadn’t fallen or bumped anything, just started to look disorientated early this morning. It was nine o’clock now.

Joe had to let his head bow. He’d never been scared like it. He opened the window, just to inhale properly. Everything smelled of soot. That was familiar, at least. On the pavements, droves of men in black coats and black hats poured from the iron gates of the Métro stations. They all looked the same. The cab stopped for a minute or so, waiting at a railway crossing. The train was a coal cargo, chuntering towards the steelworks. The whistle howled as the driver tried to scare off some kids on the line; there were ten or twelve, foraging for the bits of coal that fell off the carriages.

‘You’ll be all right,’ the man said quietly. It was the last thing he said; while Joe was seeing the doctor, he vanished. None of the nurses had seen him go, or seen him at all, and Joe started to think he had got himself to the hospital alone, and that the man had been a benign hallucination.

***

Excerpted from Natasha Pulley’s novel The Kingdoms, published by Bloomsbury.

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Renée K. Nicholson | Fierce and Delicate: Essays on Dance and Illness | May 2021
1,977 words (7 minutes)

***

Imagine, once you had performed splits in midair. Now, sitting in a doctor’s office chair, you’re shown an X-ray that confirms you no longer have any cartilage in your right knee. For years, you’ve hobbled around with the aid of a cane, but now even that’s not an option. You have two choices. You either have a total knee replacement or you figure out how to get around with a walker or wheelchair.

You are thirty-six years old.

One of the few times I’ve cried in public was that day in my rheumatologist’s office. I guess it wasn’t so public, but it wasn’t alone. I hate that I broke down like that, but finally I couldn’t keep my composure. My rheumatologist is a kind man, with a no-nonsense way about talking about RA. The choices were limited, and I had to accept that. I already had, of course. By this time, putting weight on my leg was more pain than I could hide, and relying on a cane was not enough. I could barely walk, but I did, perhaps by sheer willpower, to get from one place to another.

Instead of telling me not to cry, my rheumatologist let the sobs flow, until there was a break, and then he brought me into his business office and called the orthopedic surgeon he thought was the best in town. He took such a personal interest in making sure I was going to do this thing I didn’t want to do. I think he knew I’d already decided to have the knee replacement surgery, but both my rheumatologist and the orthopedist gave me the option of calling back with a decision. I slept on it, but I didn’t toss or turn a bit. I knew I had to get the surgery, so first thing in the morning, I called and asked for the next available appointment. Once I made the decision, I was determined to get it done as soon as possible. No waiting around or mulling it over. Once again, I moved on quickly.

Though I was able to get in for surgery within a couple of weeks, I still needed a way to get around in the meantime, and so I found myself in a medical supply store, shopping for a walker. I wanted something basic, because I was hoping that I wouldn’t need it all that much—just pre- and post-op. Strangely, this view betrayed optimism I hadn’t dared to feel in a long time.

There were two elderly ladies in the store with me. Onechecked out a high-end walker with wheels and hand brakes like a bike. The salesperson had tried talking me into a similar model, but I wanted the cheaper one, without wheels, without bells and whistles. Basic worked for me. It seemed weird to think of walkers as having bells and whistles, but they do. The other elderly lady in the store bought a walker organizer—a fabric caddy with various pockets—that fits over the bar across the front of the walker so you can keep things like keys and cell phones handy. The lady suggested I also get a walker organizer. She showed me the fancy ones made of zebra-, cheetah-, and leopard-print fabrics.

I decided right there I would just use a backpack or my pockets. It was too much for me to consider a cheetah-print walker organizer. It certainly didn’t seem fashion forward, and I’d only just accepted the need for the walker. I was not
ready to give in to accessorizing, making the apparatus into a statement, not even when the salesperson asked if I might also like the see the giraffe print.

Before my surgery, my mother came to stay with me to help with the day-to-day stuff around my house. She cooked, cleaned, and drove me to appointments. My father also came for regular visits, both to be with my mom, who he missed at home, and me, as I prepared for surgery. During one of these visits, Dad went to see the orthopedist with me. He always carried a small notebook and a maroon Montblanc pen, and he took notes on what I needed to do and what I could expect, all of the details that only partially sunk in as I sat in the white examination room trying to be brave, or at least to not look nervous. When my father asked the doctor what I would not ask—what were the chances of success?—the orthopedist told
him he would do his best, but certain things were for God to decide. He did say he thought I would be free of pain, but there had been a lot of damage. He explained that many patients could do much more after surgery than before, and in spite of all the hope that had quietly slipped away over the years, I felt like maybe things would get better. Maybe I had to feel this way so that I didn’t feel like a thirty-six year-old getting a surgery usually meant for a senior citizen. And so I could believe it was, in fact, the best choice.

At this point, perhaps you’re thinking, yes, the happy ending is coming. This might make you sigh with relief, or become disenchanted with the story, feeling the happy ending wasn’t earned. There’s some judgment at the prospect of happiness, just as this entire story opens me up for scrutiny. Even though the surgery would help with the pain I had in my right knee, even though it partially restored what had been destroyed, it did not, of course, cure my RA. I never thought it would, and you shouldn’t think that either. I still have swelling, fatigue, fever, aches, joint damage. I can also get around in a fairly normal way now.

Happy is a relative state.

The night after my surgery I got very little sleep because I had intense pain. The night nurse had already threatened to catheterize me if I didn’t urinate, and so I willed myself to pee, only to be left atop a full bedpan. So things didn’t start off great that evening, and once the meds wore off, I felt like my thigh muscle was being slowly shredded with a cheese grater. My dad stood vigil by my bedside, getting only sporadic sleep in an easy chair. Luckily, I didn’t have to share a room with another patient. My father tried desperately to get the nurse to give me something for the pain, and perhaps she did, but I honestly can’t remember. I remember him holding my hand so maybe I wouldn’t feel so alone, and I remember squeezing because it hurt that bad.

Dancers build muscle memory from the day-in, day-out study of technique. Over the years, my thigh muscle had learned a new muscle memory, trying to pull my kneecap
up from my deteriorating joint. My orthopedic surgeon told me that even under full anesthesia my thigh muscle would not relax at first—the only time he’d ever seen this. The muscle still tried to manipulate the kneecap to avoid painful grinding in the joint. The body’s ability to adapt to protect itself is quite remarkable in this way. Though my orthopedist finally did get it to relax, my muscles retained a dancer’s memory. What could have been a minor curiosity signified to me a small connection to my former self.

After the first night, things did get better, but it was slow going. My leg was strapped into a machine that helped stimulate the new joint by continually keeping it in motion, as if pedaling or walking. I could lie down as this happened or sit propped on pillows, and many times I’d get calls from friends, which were welcome distractions, as the machine churned my leg. I learned exercises I would have to perform daily and made arrangements for physical therapy. When I was released from the hospital, I was given strong pain pills, but within a few days, I stopped taking them because I wasn’t hurting so much, not compared to how much I’d hurt before the surgery, and I worried about becoming dependent on them. Pain, by then, was one thing I knew how to contend with.

In the weeks immediately following my surgery, I still needed the walker. My wound needed to heal, and I had to learn to walk again. I’d limped for so long, accommodating a joint that continued to fall apart, that my legs literally needed retraining on how to correctly put one foot in front of the other.

Dance had taught me how to train. So even though it took three physical therapists and some unconventional approaches, like a Pilates reformer and manipulation of the joint under anesthesia by my orthopedic surgeon, I finally made progress. First, though, a remarkable thing happened. As the wound from the surgery healed, I stopped hurting for the first time in what felt like forever. I felt nothing, and it was bliss. My father said he watched my facial features loosen and soften, too. He said I looked younger because I no longer carried the pain on my face. I didn’t know it was so evident. Perhaps I’d never hidden my anguish at all, that it was there, on display, the whole time.

I’ve never regained full mobility with my prosthetic knee, but I’m able to do things now I thought I might never do again. Take the good with bad, the saying goes, or is it the other way around? The ending isn’t simply happy or sad. It isn’t really an ending.

This past June I had the opportunity to renew my handicap placard for my car. But as the date for this renewal came and slipped by, I’ve yet to have my doctor sign the papers I’d need to file at the DMV. I can walk from any space in the lot to where I need to go. I can walk without the aid of a cane. I can walk at a normal pace and move with relative ease.

Once a week I slip the needle of a prefilled syringe into the fleshier parts of me, dispensing medicinal liquid that helps to balance my whacked-out immune system. During the week, I spend several hours in a studio, in the presence of dancers as their teacher. Twice a day, anti-inflammatories. All this give and take, but I’ve found an uneasy peace. I’ve given you a version of my story, the best I have to give. I crafted it with words I chose and plucked so carefully, shaped through revision. I’ve given you this tale and you will decide what to make of it, what to make of me. I have no control over that. You may judge or feel or discount. Perhaps a concoction of all three. I accept that, once written, my story is no longer wholly mine. Still, I give it to you.

Today I am sick, and tomorrow I will be sick, as I will be every day until I die. I may not like it, but that’s how it is. The rest of my life will always be entwined with rheumatoid arthritis. But it’s my choice to also be something more, to not feel sick, to still find those shadows of a dancer, which is to say tiny flecks of magic, within me. Like anyone who is hopelessly in love, I will always be the keeper of a flame.

***

Excerpted from Renée K. Nicholson’s Fierce and Delicate: Essays on Dance and Illness, published by West Virginia University Press.