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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.

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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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Sorayya Khan is a Pakistani-Dutch writer. Her new book, We Take Our Cities with Us, is a multicultural memoir of grief and the immigrant experience that illuminates the complexities of identity and inheritance in a global world. It will be published on November 7th, 2022 by Ohio State Press / Mad Creek Books. Her 2017 Longreads essay, “Raising Brown Boys in Post-9/11 America” was adapted for the book. We spoke with Sorayya about what it means to live “in between” cultures and how those experiences shaped her as she mothered her own sons, years later.

* * *

In the opening of the book, you describe the light and dark skin your mother and father had respectively and you note that “I am in between.” Can you tell us more about what it means and what it has meant to you to be “in between”?

My father used to tell my siblings and me that being half Pakistani and half Dutch meant that we had the best of both worlds. My parents were a product of the heady post-World War II moment that shaped them, which made possible a marriage that combined such different worlds, one in Lahore, the other in Amsterdam. It has taken my parents’ passing for that moment to come into focus for me — to see the risks and fullness with which they lived their lives, a belief in the future and themselves that is hard to comprehend in our current moment. I can’t be sure what my father had in mind, but as a child, I used to think of his “best of both worlds” mantra as a place which, if I could ever find it, is where I’d belong.

There have been times in my life when being in-between meant not fitting in smoothly or entirely or at all. Most were when I was younger, coming to the US for college at seventeen, for example. Those feelings were tied to a time in my life when I longed to fit in seamlessly somewhere, to be fully one thing or another, to be rooted. In college and graduate school, where I studied political science and international studies, I discovered the reach of history and our interconnectedness, and I began to think of being in-between as coming from multiple places with a shared global history.

Writing rooted me. Drawing on different worlds and gathering them in a single place — on the page — helped me make peace with my in-betweenness. In fact, my mixed background (and all those cities!) gave me my subject matter. As a writer, I explore the interconnectedness of our world, how place and history shape us. My novels and memoir reflect on what it means to belong, whether neighbors in post-Partition Lahore, a soldier returning home from war, a young girl coming of age, or parents who’ve raised children far from their homes. While writing has been a home for me, having a family, too, changed everything. With my husband and children, I’m at home, I belong.

Your mother — someone who was Dutch and light skinned, was considered an outsider. What does it mean to be mothered by someone who is an outsider?

I suppose there are many ways to be an outsider. For some, there’s an urgency to rid yourself of the reality by assimilating as quickly as possible, a frequent immigrant response to enormous social pressures faced in making a new home. That was not the case for my mother. There was a time in our first year after we moved from Austria to Pakistan that I recall her completely out of place, but not imagining the same of myself or my siblings, as if we had escaped what she could not. But my mother was a person of conviction and, as I say in a scene in the memoir where my aunt teaches her how to buy meat at the market, She did not look away and she did not pretend. In some ways, her outspokenness made her an outsider wherever she lived.

My mother made a home for us in two countries that were not hers, Austria and Pakistan. In both places, although especially in Islamabad, my mother subsumed her life to the one she was building with my father. Doing so relegated her heritage to the background which, perhaps, she didn’t mind as much as you’d think– for reasons I discovered while writing the memoir. Even so, raising children is filled with all sorts of compromises, and when cultural and national identities are at stake, parents make decisions about balancing them (or not) in the process. My mother was an example of how to make a home and raise a family far from your own. She taught us to navigate multiple worlds — home, school, country — and that although the process was challenging and complex, it was possible.

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My mother was a voracious reader and her hunger for books meant we shared recommendations and discussed recent reads. I’d already been a writer for many years when my mother passed away, but during her illness, when I’d begun for the first time to think about writing memoir, I was struck by her need to read, as if her hunger for worlds extended to the realm of books — in all genres. I wonder now if the ways in which she navigated belonging led me to books and writing. Regardless, she passed along her love of stories to my siblings and me, and when she died, we divided up her books between us, loath to give up even one. Now I have her copy of Agha Shahid Ali’s The Half-Inch Himalayas, not just the photocopy that she made for me decades ago when the book was difficult to find in Islamabad.

Above all, the experience of being raised by an outsider gave us the gift of locating ourselves in the world. My mother was forever interested in the world around her, turning on the news first thing in the morning and last thing at night, as if knowing what was happening around us all kept her grounded. She passed on this way of being, as if she knew that our home was the entire world.

In some ways America will always treat you as an outsider, simply because you have roots in Pakistan. I read that prolifically throughout the first section of the book, with the awkwardness at the bus stop, the anecdote about Nick, the questions you fielded about life in Pakistan. Sometimes you’re treated as an outsider, even though you are not an outsider. How do those experiences of being treated like an outsider when you were younger affect how you mothered your sons later in life?

They gave me a certain (unwelcome) familiarity with some of the challenges my sons faced as school children, and made me sympathetic to their travails, although even then I was sometimes slow to understand what they faced. But my own experiences also kept me off balance, making me question my sense of belonging and my status in this country. I worried about what repercussions we might face. Every so often, in the midst of my sons’ difficulties, I had a sneaking, secret suspicion that ignoring what was happening might be the better response, which doesn’t make me proud. Defending our children drew attention to us and, lacking my mother’s courage, I would have rather not been in the spotlight. But between my husband being a political scientist (not to mention his own international background) and my parents’ emphasis on the larger world, it was natural to encourage our children to think about their context in it and, also, to think about the forces that produced the harm they were experiencing.

Your two sons are adults now. How has growing up in a post-9/11 America shaped them? How has it shaped your family? How has it shaped you?

My children’s complex selves are a result of their post-9/11 lives. They were introduced to racism as children and learned early to think about the social and political conditions that perpetuate injustice, both in the US and abroad. One of our goals as parents raising our children far from our own families and where we grew up, was to impress upon our children that the world we are a part of is much larger than our New York college town. While our children might have had that sense without their childhood experiences, I think the aftermath of 9/11 drove home the point.

It’s hard to say how it shaped our family because I don’t know what our family might have looked like if we hadn’t shared those experiences. It gave our children a greater appreciation for their father’s lifetime work of thinking about the larger structures that produce the behavior that clouded our lives. Ironically, we understood that our situation was comparatively mild with respect to the violence that was unleashed elsewhere, here and abroad, and appreciated that luck. Certainly, there was a sense of us all being in that moment together, and that sharing it as a unit would help us get to the other side.

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The events around 9/11 confirmed that I was an outsider in this country, a sense that was re-confirmed with the Trump years when Muslim bans were put in place, hate speech proliferated, and the US became even less tolerant of its minorities, which is where it remains today. But I don’t believe 9/11 shaped me. The event and the retribution, both at home and the wars abroad, were shocking, but not unexpected. As open as this country presents itself as being, it has a history of turning against its citizens, and whether domestically or internationally, it does not value human beings equally. But as a parent, it’s always difficult to watch your children go through tough times, and there were many confusing and sleepless nights for us all. That constant worry, shared by so many of us, of how our children might fare in interactions with authorities, whether school administrators, police, or immigration officers, is the background hum of parenting and I imagine it would be less insistent had history unfolded differently.

***

Sorayya Khan is the author of We Take Our Cities with Us: A Memoir, and the novels, Noor, Five Queen’s Road, and City of Spies which received the Best International Fiction Book Award, Sharjah International Book Fair, 2015. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @SorayyaKhan

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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.

* * *

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)

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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)

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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.

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Lisa Whittington-Hill | Longreads | May, 2021 | 29 minutes (7,916 words)

I blame Drew Barrymore for two things: the amount of money I have spent on celebrity memoirs and an unfortunate attempt to dye my hair platinum blonde in 1993, inspired by Drew’s locks in a Seventeen magazine Guess Jeans ad.

Little Girl Lost, Barrymore’s 1990 account of growing up as a child star in Hollywood, was my first celebrity autobiography. It ignited my love of celebrity memoirs, especially those by women. My dog-eared copy has survived numerous book purges and cross-country moves. I am not alone in my appreciation for it. The coming-of-age tale was a New York Times bestseller and although the book is now out of print, it has achieved cult-like status. It was even the subject of a 2018 New York Times Magazine Letter of Recommendation.

Barrymore was just 11 months old when she got her start in a television commercial for Puppy Chow. At 7 she starred as Gertie in Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster 1982 film E.T. and that same year became the youngest person ever to host Saturday Night Live. Barrymore’s drug and alcohol use began shortly after E.T. phoned home. The first time she got drunk she was 9. Barrymore started smoking weed at 10 and by 12 had moved on to cocaine. The actress entered rehab at 13; during her second stint in rehab she completed Little Girl Lost, which was published when she was just 16.

Gossip and juicy stories about nightclubbing with Jack Nicholson definitely make for a good read, but what initially drew me to the book was that Barrymore wrote it to counter stories about herself in the National Enquirer. “[I]magining the godawful headlines — ‘Drew Barrymore Cocaine Addict at Twelve Years Old’ or ‘Barrymore Burns Out in Teens’ — and the impression people would get of me was all my worst possible fears come true. I would’ve been the last person on Earth to deny my problems, but I wanted to have the option of confessing them,” Barrymore writes in Little Girl Lost. She wanted to come clean on her own terms. Barrymore’s desire to control her own life story compelled me to read the book and has made me return to it over the years.

Barrymore wanted to redirect her life’s narrative and that’s a popular reason why celebrities embrace the genre, but it is not the only reason. Some stars write their book to revive a stalled career and return to the limelight. For others, memoirs extend their 15 minutes of fame. This is a popular motivation for reality show stars. (Will you accept this rose and this six-figure book deal?) Memoirs also settle old scores. In André Leon Talley’s The Chiffon Trenches: A Memoir, the fashion journalist and former Vogue creative director works through his issues with Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Memoirs can also promote the brand a star has built around their celebrity. Reese Witherspoon’s Whiskey in a Teacup, which markets the star’s Southern Lifestyle to y’all, or any book from one of Queer Eye’s Fab Five are great examples.

For readers, celebrity memoir appeal lies in the juicy gossip and name dropping, and the chance to peek inside and live, if only for 500 pages, the glamorous lifestyles of the rich and famous. Social media, reality television, celebrity gossip blogs, and the popularity of TMZ-style tabloid journalism have created an insatiable desire to know more about our favorite celebrities. Celebrity memoirs help fulfill this desire. Sometimes, unfortunately, we learn a little too much about our favorite stars. After reading Carrie Fisher’s The Princess Diarist, her third memoir, I am unable to watch Star Wars without thinking about all the coke Fisher said was consumed on set. I imagine the film’s stars hollowing out lightsabers to use like giant straws to blow rails with. (That’s not how the force works!)

While it’s easy to dismiss celebrity memoirs as guilty pleasure reads or unworthy of serious literary consideration, you cannot deny the genre’s popularity. One of the bestselling celebrity memoirs of all time, former first lady Michelle Obama’s 2018 release, Becoming, is still on the The New York Times bestsellers list and has sold more than 10 million copies. Recent months have seen new books from everyone from singer Mariah Carey to actor Matthew McConaughey to soccer star Megan Rapinoe. Celebrity memoirs are big business and we have Rolling Stones co-founder and guitarist Keith Richards to thank for that. His bestselling memoir Life was published in October 2010 and more celebrity autobiographies were published in the four years that followed than had been in the previous 15.

Life, for which Richards received a $7 million dollar advance, sold over one million copies in its first year. Following the success of Life, memoirs by male musicians from Duff McKagan to Steven Tyler were all bestsellers and it is not just men penning the hits. Remember when we all got together and decided women were funny after Bossypants came out? Tina Fey’s 2011 bestselling memoir preceded an onslaught of popular memoirs by funny ladies, including Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) and Amy Poehler’s Yes Please.

***

Since first reading Little Girl Lost at 20, I have devoured memoirs by female celebrities from punk singer Alice Bag’s Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, A Chicana Punk Story to Jersey Shore star Snooki’s Confessions of a Guidette. I’m interested in how women write their stories, what they leave out, what they focus on, and how much of what they reveal is a reaction to the image of them we have from watching their movies or listening to their music or seeing them stumbling out of nightclubs in Us Weekly.

“How do we edit our life into a decent story? That’s the rub with an autobiography or memoir. What to reveal, what to keep hidden, what to embellish, what to downplay, and what to ignore? How much of the inner and how much of the outer?” says punk icon and Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry in her 2019 memoir, Face It, of a process that is scrutinized and critiqued much more if, like Harry, you’re a woman.

And while there is no shortage of male celebrities spilling their guts all over my poorly constructed Ikea bookshelf, the fact that they share shelf space with celebrity memoirs written by women is about all they have in common. When it comes to celebrity memoirs there’s a distinct gender bias in everything from how the books are marketed to the type of topics female celebrities are expected to write about and the amount of themselves they are expected to expose to sell books.

The gender divide bias becomes even more problematic, and downright depressing, when you read the reviews and see how critics and the press receive female celebrity memoirs. Rather than celebrate women and their amazing stories, reviewers revert to stereotypes and tired clichés and, in the process, miss the actual story. Women can spend chapters talking about their accomplishments, their awards, and their accolades and reviewers will still only focus on the sex, the scandal, and the bombshell reveals that are expected from female-penned celebrity memoirs if they want to actually sell books. From memoir titles to book blurbs, when it comes to celebrity memoirs by women, sadly, we haven’t come a long way baby.

***

Debbie Harry’s Face It was one of the most anticipated celebrity memoirs of the recent past. In the book, Harry chronicles everything from her adoption at only 3 months old, to her days in the hippie band Wind in the Willows and all-girl group the Stillettos, to forming both Blondie the band and Blondie the persona. For Harry, Blondie was very much a character she played, one inspired by the “Hey, Blondie!” catcalls she received from construction workers after bleaching her hair, as well as the 1930s Blondie comic strip character who was a “dumb blonde who turns out to be smarter than the rest of them.” Marilyn Monroe was also an inspiration; Harry describes Monroe as “the proverbial dumb blonde with the little-girl voice and big-girl body,” who despite her appearance has “a lot of smarts behind the act.”

Face It also covers Harry’s acting in films like Videodrome and Hairspray, her time training as a professional wrestler for a role in the Broadway play Teaneck Tanzi: The Venus Flytrap, as well as her activism and philanthropy work. (Fun fact: She was almost Pris in Blade Runner, but her record company made her turn it down.) There is certainly no shortage of great material for reviewers to discuss. Unfortunately, they responded with the same tired sexist tropes that greet memoirs written by women.

“In her memoir, Debbie Harry proves she’s more than just a pretty blonde in tight pants,” read the headline on The Washington Post’s review of Face It. The headline was later changed to, “In her memoir, Debbie Harry gives an unvarnished look at her life in the punk scene” after social media responded less than kindly to the sexist headline choice. The Washington Post admitted they botched the headline and appreciated the feedback, but the headline was not the review’s only problem.

The review opens with: “Even if Debbie Harry, of the band Blondie, isn’t to your taste—her voice too smooth, her sexiness too blatant, her music too smooth—you can’t dismiss certain truths about her.” While this sentence is a great example of disdain, it is not a great review opening. I read Bruce Springsteen’s 2016 memoir Born to Run at the same time as Harry’s and tried to imagine the Post opening a review of Springsteen’s book in the same way. To be fair I do find his sexiness far, far too blatant.

So how does the Post open Springsteen’s memoir review? “Why, one might ask, would Bruce Springsteen need to write an autobiography? Haven’t we been listening to it for the past half century? Hasn’t he been telling us his story all along?” says Joe Heim in the review’s first paragraph. Springsteen, a talented songwriter, has already shared so much through his music, what more could he be required to give us? It is okay if you want to sit this one out Bruce, I have heard Atlantic City, and do not require any further emoting from you at this time.

The Post’s review of Face It just goes from bad to worse, with criticism that Harry “sometimes comes across as self-interested” to a focus on the more sensationalist aspects of her story like sex and drugs. (This is an autobiography, right? I didn’t see them complaining about the 79 chapters in Springsteen’s book.) “She had a hookup with an Andy Warhol protégé in a phone booth in Max’s Kansas City and began what she blithely calls ‘chipping and dipping’ in heroin,” reads the review. The Post points out that “Harry is quite explicit in her descriptions of her drug use and sex life,” which they seem to interpret as permission to exploit the more sensationalistic aspects of her life and use them as a focal point in their review.

The review also offers a great example of how media likes to promote and celebrate the idea of women as trailblazers, praising Harry for being candid about the realities of being a female musician (an “unvarnished look”), while also painfully reinforcing the realities of being a female musician by using a sexist, stereotypical headline that focuses only on Harry’s appearance and sex appeal.

Control is a central theme of Harry’s book, whether it be of her image, her band, or her art. Early in the book Harry recounts a record company promoting Blondie’s first album using posters with an image of her in a see-through blouse, despite early reassurances that the posters would only feature headshots and would include all band members. She was not happy with the marketing decision, saying, “Sex sells, that’s what they say, and I’m not stupid, I know that. But on my terms, not some executive’s.” And while doing things on her own terms is a source of pride for Harry, reviewers have a serious problem with it.

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For Harry control empowers, for memoir reviewers it threatens. “You can’t control other people’s fantasies or the illusion they’re buying or selling,” says Harry early in Face It when talking about people having posters of her on their bedroom walls. While Harry resigns herself to her lack of control, reviews of her work never want to relinquish theirs. Harry’s insistence on doing things on her own terms is panned by reviewers who call her guarded and closed off.

Reviewers want to read a book by a female celebrity and have her completely figured out by the last page. “[W]hat’s a memoir for, if not to pull back the curtain and check out the lady who is pushing the buttons?” asks Harry in Face It. But when the curtain doesn’t pull back as much as reviewers want, they become resentful, sullen, and offended, reacting with “how dare you?” to any resistance on the part of the woman to give them everything they want, every piece of her. The Atlantic’s review reads almost like it’s giving Harry permission to tell her story on her own terms, saying “holding back is an understandable maneuver for someone who’s been stared at so much.”

One way or another, the reviewers keep the sexist treatment coming when discussing Face It. The Guardian was also annoyed that Harry did not give enough of herself in the book. “It’s a shame that Harry passes up the chance to dig deeper into her experiences of objectification and the nature of fame, but more disappointing is that we learn so little about her interior life, and how she really thinks and feels.” I guess talking about being raped at knifepoint by a stranger is not enough for the reviewer. What’s with the heart of glass Debbie? Give us more of your pain! And on page five, not 105!

The headline of Rolling Stone’s piece on Face It highlights how Harry’s book “looks back on what she learned from Andy Warhol and David Bowie.” The media loves to position women in relation to the men in their lives as if the only way we can understand work by women is in the context of the men who orbit them. Despite writing 368 pages about herself, according to Rolling Stone, the only interesting thing about Harry is the famous male company she kept.

The New York Times continues the tired pop culture gender bias with a review that manages to make it all the way to the fourth paragraph before it mentions her age. It also talks about the number of memoirs by female rockers being released at the same time as Harry’s book. (“[T]here’s a bit of a pileup of female rockers getting reflective this season.”) I smell a trend. Ladies, they be writing! The review mentions the fact that Harry’s “face is unlined” and talks about her “crisp red collared blouse with white polka dots and red leggings.” I think Bruce was wearing the exact same thing when they wrote their piece about him and Born to Run. How embarrassing.

Two weeks after Face It came out another musical icon released a memoir. Me by Elton John covers the singer’s childhood in the London suburb of Pinner, his early musical days in Los Angeles, his songwriting partnership with Bernie Taupin, successful solo career, and marriage and family with husband David Furnish. Keen celebrity memoir readers might also be quick to point out that the title of John’s memoir is the same as that of actress Katharine Hepburn’s. Is there anything men will not just unapologetically lay claim to?

The review mentions the fact that Harry’s “face is unlined” and talks about her “crisp red collared blouse with white polka dots and red leggings.” I think Bruce was wearing the exact same thing when they wrote their piece about him and “Born to Run.” How embarrassing.

While Rolling Stone’s book review name-checked Harry’s famous male friends in the headline, not surprisingly, John’s does not. “Elton John’s Me Is A Uniquely Revealing Pop Star Autobiography. The long-awaited book covers his hard childhood, struggles with addiction and road to recovery.” It ends with “Elton has never been one to hold back difficult truths, and Me — while a little skimpy on revelations about his brilliant, ground breaking music — is essential reading for anyone who wants to know the difficult road that he walked while creating it.”

Entertainment Weekly’s description of Me is also glowing: “While Me is as colorful as you’d expect from an artist famous for his outlandish stage costumes and outsize temper tantrums, it is also so much more than simply a dishy sex, drugs and, rock ‘n roll tell-all.” The Entertainment Weekly review shows that when it comes to male celebrity memoirs there may be sex and drugs, but no review should reduce their work to just these scandalous and juicy elements.

Can you feel the love tonight? Not yet? Never fear, here comes The Guardian to continue the praise. Their review opens with, “Choosing one’s favourite Elton John story – like choosing one’s favourite Elton song – can feel like limiting oneself to a mere single grape from the horn of plenty.” Reading reviews of the book you have to wonder if John is still standing because he is unable to sit down from all the ass kissing. The Daily Mail calls it “the rock memoir of the decade” while for The Washington Post it is an “unsparing, extravagantly funny new memoir” and “bracingly honest.” It’s hard to find criticism and scrutiny in the reviews of John’s work because there is not much negativity. John’s book is not better than Harry’s; in fact, I think Harry’s is much stronger. She’s more self-aware and can deconstruct the misconceptions and preconceptions that fans, the media, and other musicians have of her.

“You think you’re being difficult, my little sausage? Have I ever told you about the time I drank eight vodka martinis, took all my clothes off in front of a film crew, and then broke my manager’s nose?” he writes of being a father reacting to his son’s temper tantrums. There are plenty of stories about famous friends like Stevie Wonder, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Andy Warhol, and Neil Young. The anecdotes leave readers feeling like they never get to peek behind the shiny veneer of the celebrity that is Elton John. At times it’s all surface and that’s fine, but reviewers do not criticize him for it in the same way they would if he were a woman.

John’s book reviews do talk of his well-documented addiction to cocaine (“If you fancy living in a despondent world of unending, delusional bullshit, I really can’t recommend cocaine highly enough,” he writes), but they are quick to follow it up with redemption stories, which is a standard formula in memoirs written both by and about men.

“Now that he’s sober, there’s the more conservatively dressed, happily married elder statesman of British pop, a proper establishment figure,” writes The Guardian. Not only do they give him a redemption arc and treat his addiction very much like a phase, but they also give his addiction issues a free pass, writing “while his extraordinary talent justified his personal excesses, it is his self-awareness that has counterbalanced the narcissism and made him such a likable figure.”

***

Redemption comes up often in male celebrity memoir coverage, but examine the media’s reaction to another celebrity memoir and it becomes painfully clear that this narrative is strictly for the boys.

Actress, producer, and director Demi Moore’s memoir Inside Out was released a few weeks before John’s. Moore and her book were soon all over the media and it was not for her redemption story. Like John, Moore struggled with addiction, but unlike John the media never lets her forget it, along with other parts of her story.

“Demi Moore drops shocking revelations about Ashton Kutcher, sexual assault and sobriety,” reads the headline of an L.A. Times piece about the memoir. The story proceeds to break down Moore’s childhood pain, her miscarriage, Ashton Kutcher cheating on her, and her struggles with alcohol and drugs.

Unlike In Touch Weekly, they skipped the “Ashton and Bruce Are in Good Places Too” sidebar because like with Debbie Harry, we cannot talk about Moore without mentioning the famous men in her life. More than one review talks about how Willis and Kutcher must feel about Demi airing their dirty laundry. Was Bruce mad? What does Ashton really think? Dude, where’s my sound bite?

Entertainment Weekly’s piece ran with the headline, “Celebrities react to Demi Moore’s revealing memoir Inside Out. From Jon Cryer’s affectionate follow-up to Ashton Kutcher’s cryptic non-response.” They forgot to add “male” in front of “celebrities” though as all the celebrities quoted in the piece were men. Also, if one more reviewer mentions how great Moore looks for her age, I will make them watch that awful scene in St. Elmo’s Fire where Rob Lowe’s character passionately details the origin story of St. Elmo’s Fire while performing pyrotechnics with a can of aerosol hairspray and a lighter on repeat until they beg me for mercy.

Most of Moore’s memoir coverage focused on the tabloid aspects of it. Read the headlines to see if you can spot a trend and how many you can read before you want to just set shit on fire (you can borrow Rob’s aerosol can).

“7 Biggest Bombshells From Demi Moore’s Explosive Memoir” (accessonline.com)

“Demi Moore: 8 Biggest Bombshells From Her Memoir Inside Out” (popculture.com, also, take that accessonline.com)

“Demi Moore’s raw Inside Out reveals rape, why marriage to Ashton Kutcher crumbled” (USA Today)

“Demi Moore Gets Real About Her Painful Childhood, Drugs, Ashton Kutcher and Other Exes in New Book ‘Inside Out‘” (Stay classy, Us Weekly)

“Why Demi Moore Fulfilled Ashton Kutcher’s Threesome Fantasies” (E! Online)

The unfortunate thing about these headlines, which would be vastly different if they were referencing a man’s memoir, is that, like Harry, they reduce Moore’s story to only its most scandalous and juicy elements. Moore got her acting start in 1981 as Jackie Templeton on General Hospital (Luke and Laura forever!), the number one show on daytime television at the time. She followed that up with roles in films like the Brat Pack bonanzas St. Elmo’s Fire and About Last Night.

Then she got what many, including Moore, consider to be a turning point in her career. “This could be either an absolute disaster, or it could be amazing,” she writes of reading the script for Ghost, which ended up being a big hit in 1990, grossing over $500 million. It was nominated for five Oscars and four Golden Globes, including a Golden Globes best actress nomination for Moore.

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Moore followed the success of Ghost with A Few Good Men, Indecent Proposal, and Striptease, a film for which she was offered over $12 million, an amount no other woman in Hollywood had ever received. Moore became the highest paid actress in Hollywood. “But instead of people seeing my big payday as a step in the right direction for women or calling me an inspiration, they came up with something else to call me: Gimmie Moore.” It is worth noting that at the time her husband Bruce Willis had just been paid $20 million for the third Die Hard movie. (Yippee ki yay indeed!)

“She became a movie star in this time where women didn’t naturally fit into the system,” said Gwyneth Paltrow, a friend of Moore’s, in the The New York Times piece on Inside Out. “She was really the first person who fought for pay equality and got it, and really suffered a backlash from it. We all certainly benefited from her,” says Paltrow.

And while it pains me greatly to side with someone who talks a lot about vagina steaming, Paltrow’s right. Moore is an inspiration and fighting for equal pay in Hollywood should be one of the things the media focuses on when they talk about Inside Out, but, sadly, it is not. It is unfortunate that when Moore is discussed it is in the context of Ashton Kutcher and threesomes, at the expense of the many other empowering and interesting parts of her life.

Remember her iconic Vanity Fair cover? Shot in 1991 by Annie Leibovitz when Moore was seven months pregnant with her second daughter Scout, it’s considered one of the most influential magazine covers of all time. Legendary Esquire art director George Lois describes it as, “A brave image on the cover of a great magazine — a stunning work of art that conveyed a potent message that challenged a repressed society.” Let’s talk about that!

Or her intense training for her role in G.I. Jane, a 1997 film Moore both starred in and produced. “I was emotionally invested in the story, the message and the provocative questions it raised,” she says of the film. The film was panned by critics and Moore talks at length in Inside Out about her disappointment at the reception to a project that meant so much to her.

The parts of the book where Moore talks about Hollywood’s double standard, whether it be the pay gap or reactions to the age difference between her and Kutcher, are some of the best parts of the book. Unfortunately, they are the parts covered least.

The last line of Inside Out is, “we all suffer, and we all triumph, and we all get to choose how we hold both.” It is a great line for a memoir to end on, but in Moore’s case, while she may get to choose how she holds both, the media will only ever focus on the suffer part.

There is the emphasis on opening up, on fighting, on bravery, on revealing — “Demi Moore Lets Her Guard Down,” reads The New York Times headline. This is the way memoirs by women are positioned and even if it isn’t explicitly spelled out, it has become the expectation so much so that when female celebrities don’t expose themselves completely they are resented for it. The reception to Harry’ book Face It offers proof.

***

Jessica Simpson released her memoir Open Book in February 2020. It reached number one on The New York Times bestseller list, but like Moore’s, Simpson’s book soon became tabloid fodder. “Jessica’s Shocking Confessions,” reads the headline on Star’s piece on the book, which focuses on Simpson’s struggles with drug and alcohol abuse and her famous exes from Nick Lachey to John Mayer. Like Moore, Simpson is now sober.

Simpson was signed to Columbia Records in 1997 at 17 as the label’s answer to Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and went on to release six bestselling records. She also starred in the MTV reality show Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica, which featured Simpson and then husband and 98 Degrees singer Nick Lachey, who at the time was the more successful of the two. If you don’t remember Lachey from MTV you might know him from his recent gig hosting Netflix’s Love is Blind where he greets contestants with “Obviously, I’m Nick Lachey,” which seems to overestimate his place in both pop culture’s canon and our general consciousness.

Newlyweds, a ratings success, aired for two years and while it made the couple a household name, it was Simpson who stole the show with her ditzy, dumb blonde antics. Her confusion over whether Chicken of the Sea was chicken or tuna earned her a place in both reality television and pop culture history. The most interesting parts of Open Book are when Simpson talks about her reality television persona and the identity crisis it led to. “How was I supposed to live a real healthy life filtered through the lens of a reality show? If my personal life was my work, and my work required me to play a certain role, who even was I anymore?” she writes.

Open Book is Simpson’s attempt to distance herself from her Newlyweds role and change perceptions of her, a common reason people write memoirs. Some get it —“You Remember Jessica Simpson, Right? Wrong,” reads the headline on The New York Times piece about her memoir — but, unfortunately, most of the reviewers discussing her book don’t. Simpson has moved beyond her Newlyweds character. She’s built a billion-dollar fashion and licensing business and is a mom to three kids, but the media seem uncomfortable embracing Simpson in her new roles, preferring to keep her forever stuck in 2003, in her UGG boots and pink Juicy Couture tracksuit, confused about tuna.

Simpson talks about the effect this identity crisis had on her and her struggles with her weight and body image, as well as her sexual abuse at age 6, and her addiction to alcohol and pills. She started to increasingly rely on alcohol during her relationship with Mayer in 2006, insecure that she wasn’t smart enough to date Mayer. My heart breaks when I think of Simpson wasting time worried about being the intellectual equal of the man who gave us the musical depth that is “Your Body is a Wonderland” and later referred to sex with Simpson as “sexual napalm.”

It is also troubling that after talking about how Mayer brought out her insecurities, the media thinks it is a good idea to focus on Mayer’s reaction to Open Book. I know you thought you were never good enough for this guy and that he was always judging you, so let’s get him to judge you some more by asking what he thought of your book!

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Simpson’s attempts to challenge the dumb blonde perception of her are not the only example of a female celebrity going off script or off brand in their memoir and failing to give the media, and readers, what they want or expect. Singer and songwriter Liz Phair’s Horror Stories says “a memoir” on the front cover, but the book is more a collection of essays and stories by Phair than a straightforward linear memoir. Reviewers did not respond well to Phair’s artistic license with the storytelling form.

“It’s hard to tell the truth about ourselves. It opens us up to being judged and rejected,” Phair writes in Horror Stories and that may be one reason she chose to tell her story the way she did. Through stories about blizzards, blackouts (from lack of electricity, not drinking), marital infidelity, giving birth to her son, and getting dressed up to go to Trader Joe’s, Phair reveals a lot about herself and about identity, insecurity, fame, and regret. “In the stories that make up this book, I am trusting you with my deepest self,” she writes in the book’s prologue. Her deepest self just might be a bit harder to find for those fuck and run readers who are too busy complaining about the book’s nontraditional memoir style to actually read it.

Horror Stories does not talk a lot about her music, including Phair’s critically acclaimed, influential 1993 album Exile in Guyville. A song-by-song reply to the 1972 Rolling Stones album Exile on Main St., it was the number one album in year-end lists from Spin and The Village Voice and was rated the fifth best album of the 1990s by Pitchfork. “At the time, it was a landmark of foul-mouthed, comprised intimacy, a tortured confessional, a workout in female braggadocio, and a wellspring of penetrating self-analysis and audacity,” reads The New Yorker’s piece on the 20^th anniversary of Exile in Guyville’s release.

“Frankness is Liz Phair’s brand. Her 1993 breakthrough album, the brilliant and profane Exile in Guyville, chronicled her post-college experiences in Chicago’s male-dominated music scene. Phair’s new memoir Horror Stories makes little mention of the album or her artistic life,” reads The Washington Post’s review. Remember how the Post thought that Bruce Springsteen did not need to write Born to Run because he had already revealed so much in his songs already? Why doesn’t Phair get the same consideration?

“Though there are anecdotes about flopping on live television and scrapping a record after learning of a collaborator’s abuse, the absence of concrete stories about Exile in Guyville is palpable,” writes Pitchfork. Just give us the hits, Liz! “Her relationship to music seems to have been the longest and maybe the most demanding love of her life, the one for which she has been willing to get lost, to fail, and to try again over and over for decades. Call me a selfish fan, but I have to say that is one story in all its horror and passion I would love to hear,” reads the review in The New York Times.

Reviewers spend so much time focused on what’s missing from Horror Stories that they miss what’s there. Well, maybe not all of what’s there. In chapter 14 of Horror Stories, called “Hashtag,” Phair writes about waking up one morning to headlines about the rock star who was supposed to produce her next album. Multiple women had come forward to accuse him of sexual harassment and emotional abuse. The FBI was also investigating him for exchanging sexually explicit communications with an underage fan.

Phair never specifically names Ryan Adams, but, in February 2019, seven months before Horror Stories was released, The New York Times broke the story about multiple women, including his ex-wife Mandy Moore, coming forward to accuse Adams of manipulative behavior, sexual misconduct, emotional and verbal abuse, and harassment.

In the chapter, Phair talks about her own experiences with sexual assault, sexual harassment, stalkers, and the sexism she experienced in the music industry. She writes about being instructed by a record label president to let radio programmers “feel her up a little” because it would help boost her career or about being told that she would never work again if she didn’t go along with sexy photo shoots. But her personal stories are not what the press focused on when she was promoting Horror Stories.

Phair was frequently asked about Adams and her experience working with him. “I don’t want every headline about this book that is so important to me to be about Ryan Adams,” she tells Entertainment Weekly. She becomes understandably annoyed with a male reporter from New York Magazine who asks her several questions about Adams, including one about his process as a producer. (I know when I hear about a man accused of sexual misconduct the first thing I wonder about is his artistic process.) “Out of everything in the book, why is the Ryan Adams thing such an interesting topic?” Phair asks him. “You’re not the only one singling out Ryan Adams as a hot talking point, and it’s sad. It does need to be talked about, but so do the larger issues.”

It’s unfortunate that Phair shares intimate details about herself, and her own experiences with sexual harassment and assault, and the media takeaway from that is that they don’t like the format of her book and would rather talk about the famous man in her life. Congrats on your book Liz, did Ryan ever send you inappropriate texts?

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While Phair is criticized for not talking about what is expected of her in her memoir, men who follow the same course do not hear “how dare you?” The reaction to Acid for the Children, the 2019 memoir by Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea (aka Michael Balzary), proves that.

Acid for the Children details Flea’s childhood growing up in Australia, his relationship with his older sister Karyn, his family’s move to the U.S. when he was 4, his first crush, how Kurt Vonnegut Jr. changed his life, and his love of basketball and the Sony Walkman. He talks about meeting Red Hot Chili Peppers lead singer Anthony Kiedis in 1976 at Fairfax High School, about learning to play bass, about his first band Anthym, about shooting coke and taking speed, his time in the California punk band FEAR, and about acting in the 1983 movie Suburbia. There are also lists of the concerts that changed his life, books that blew his mind, and movies that grew him. Lots of great material, right? You know what’s missing? Anything about the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the bestselling, Grammy-winning, Rock-and-Roll-Hall-of-Fame-inducted band he founded, plays bass in, and is most strongly associated with.

Flea’s book ends just as Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem, what would later become the Red Hot Chili Peppers, play their first show at the Grandia Room in Los Angeles to 27 people in February 1983. This performance comes up on page 375 of the 385-page book. There’s no mention of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, his movie roles beyond Suburbia (My Own Private Idaho being one of his most famous), his role as a father of two girls, how he founded the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, or his work with other musicians from Thom Yorke’s Atoms for Peace to Alanis Morissette. (Flea played bass on “You Oughta Know,” her hit single from 1995’s Jagged Little Pill.)

The book is about Flea’s journey to the band, rather than with it. Surely, reviewers were as outraged by this omission, as they were when Phair failed to talk about Exile in Guyville in Horror Stories. It will not surprise you to know they were not bothered at all. Rather than focus on what was missing from Acid for the Children, the coverage focuses on what’s there and praise for it. Reviews focus on Flea’s gift and skill as a writer and fail to mention that if you want to dream of Californication, you will have to do that somewhere else. Reviewers can see, and appreciate, Flea as something other than just the bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. There is a very distinct set of rules female celebrities writing their memoirs must follow. The more tell all, the more trauma and the more tabloid, the better. They are not free to write about what they want. They must bare it all, page after page. Men like Flea have the freedom to operate by a very different set of rules. He can leave his scar tissue out and reviewers have no problem with it. Book coverage focuses on Flea the writer, rather than Flea the bassist. This same courtesy, and basic level of respect, is never extended to women telling their stories. Female celebrities like Debbie and Demi are never just human beings writing about their lives. Reviewers are unable to abandon their preconceived notions, their ideas of who these women are, their celebrity personas and just see them as people who should be allowed to tell their stories their way.

“[H]e’s actually a lovely writer, with a particular gift for the free-floating and reverberant. He writes in Beat Generation bursts and epiphanies, lifting toward the kind of virtuosic vulnerability and self-exposure associated with the great jazz players,” reads the review in The Atlantic.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly Flea said that his goal with Acid for the Children was that “it could be a book that could live beyond being a celebrity book or a rock star book and just stand on its own as a piece of literature.” I can only imagine the outrage if Debbie Harry wrote Face It and the book ended with, “And then I started this band Blondie. See you later!” Or if Demi Moore ended Inside Out with, “Then I got the part in this movie St. Elmo’s Fire. The end.” Or if Courtney Love wrote her memoir (please do this, Courtney) and the last page read, “And then I met this guy Kurt, but I have to go be the girl with the most cake now. Peace out.” The fact that Love and her accomplishments are forever tied to her husband is a whole other gender bias problem all together.

Of course, Flea is not the first Red Hot Chili Pepper to give it away in a celebrity memoir. In 2004, lead singer Anthony Kiedis wrote Scar Tissue, a New York Times bestseller about his life, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and his time in and out of rehab, as well as in and out of various women. If you have ever thought, “I bet Anthony Kiedis does well with the ladies but would really like to get a better sense of his success rate,” then this is the book for you. In his memoir Kiedis gets away with writing about debauchery, depravity, and drug abuse in a way that reads like a Behind the Music episode on steroids. (See any book by a current or past member of Mötley Crüe or Guns N’ Roses for a further look at this style.) A woman would never get away with writing about drugs like Kiedis does.

When women write about their addiction there’s an apologetic, self-aware tone male memoirs don’t have: “I know I am a drug addict, and I keep messing up, but I’m really sorry, and please stick with me cause I am gonna sort this out.” (See How To Murder Your Life by fashion and beauty journalist Cat Marnell and More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction from Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel, who passed away in 2020, for great examples of this.) Also, I would like to point out the blurbs on the backs of Scar Tissue by Kiedis and How To Murder Your Life by Marnell in case you still doubt there’s a gender bias when it comes to how celebrity memoirs are received.

“Hot Bukowski” —Rolling Stone on Marnell

“A frank, unsparing, meticulous account of a life lived entirely on impulse, for pleasure, and for kicks” —Time on Kiedis

Oh, and, if you’re reading this and in charge of greenlighting Red Hot Chili Pepper memoirs can you please get John Frusciante working on his? Frusciante is known for talking at length about both his connection to spirits (he might already have a ghostwriter!) and different dimensions and worlds. If there’s a book by a band member to be written this is the one.

It is also impossible to talk about Flea’s book without mentioning the title, which comes from the song by a band called Too Free Stooges. A man can get away with calling his memoir Acid for the Children, while a woman certainly cannot. I would like to see Demi Moore title her memoir Whippets for the Wee Ones and see how far she gets. If I look at memoir titles by women on my bookshelves there is Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, by Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, The Girl in the Back by 1970s drummer Laura Davis-Chanin, Girl in a Band by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, and Not That Kind of Girl by actress and Girls creator Lena Dunham.

All the titles mention “girl” as if there is a need to announce that early on and get it out of the way, before the book has even been opened. Let us compare these with titles of the celebrity memoirs by dudes that I own. There’s Life by Keith Richards, Slash by Slash, The Heroin Diaries by Nikki Sixx, and In the Pleasure Groove by John Taylor. I do not know what the pleasure groove is, but I do hope it is also the name of the kick-ass yacht in Duran Duran’s “Rio” video.

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Acid for the Children is not the only recent celebrity memoir by a man to resist the traditional memoir style and not receive criticism for it, although in the case of singer and songwriter Prince’s The Beautiful Ones, named for the song from Purple Rain, it’s understandable why it lacks the typical style of a life story given that its subject died just one month after the book’s publication was announced.

“He wanted to write the biggest music book in the world, one that would serve as a how-to-guide for creatives, a primer on African American entrepreneurship and a ‘handbook for the brilliant community,’” he told Dan Piepenbring, an editor at The Paris Review, who was writing the book with Prince. Notoriously private, to the point that reporters were not allowed to record their interviews, many were surprised Prince would want to write his life story at all. He wanted his book contract to state he could pull it from shelves if he felt the work no longer reflected him, which just seems like a very Prince thing to do.

Prince had completed just 30 handwritten pages before he died of an accidental fentanyl overdose on April 21, 2016. The pages detailed his childhood and his early days as a musician. Piepenbring returned to Prince’s Paisley Park compound months after the singer’s death to find additional material that could be used in the book. This material includes personal photos, drawings, song lyrics, and a handwritten synopsis of Purple Rain, Prince’s 1984 film that marked his acting debut. The addition of personal artifacts to round out the story means The Beautiful Ones is more scrapbook than memoir. “The Beautiful Ones does not offer a clear-eyed view of who Prince really was — he would have hated that, but it illuminates more than it conceals,” reads The Washington Post’s piece on the memoir.

Reading reviews of The Beautiful Ones, I wondered if the book would have even been finished and released if Prince were a woman or would it have been indefinitely shelved because of the death of its star. Maybe it would have focused on the singer’s drug use, final days, death, and the reaction to his death. The media has a way of making a female celebrity’s story about her death, not her life, which was noticeably lacking when the media talked about Prince and The Beautiful Ones.“It’s up to us to take what’s there and make something out of it for ourselves, creating, just as Prince wanted,” said NPR in their piece on the memoir. Prince’s life ended with respect and a beautiful tribute in book form, and glowing reviews for it. This respect is definitely missing when we pay tribute to female celebrities who have died. Their deaths provide another opportunity for the media to pick them apart and let their scandals overshadow their contributions. Following Prince’s death there were no pieces like the gossip-heavy Vanity Fair piece from 2012 on the late singer and actress Whitney Houston, “The Devils in the Diva,” which “investigates Houston’s final days: the prayers and the parties, the Hollywood con artist on the scene, and the message she left behind.” Or the, at times, less-than-respectful movies made about female celebrities after their deaths that focus more on their personal lives and troubles than they do on their art. Even in death, women like Houston and Amy Winehouse are still expected to bare all even though they are no longer with us.

This year will give us new memoirs from actresses Sharon Stone, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and Julianna Margulies, as well as singers Brandi Carlile and Billie Eilish. We are also getting a Stanley Tucci memoir and I think we can all agree he is the sexiest bald man (sorry, Prince William). Women are not just turning to books to tell their truths, with recent documentaries from the likes of Paris Hilton and Demi Lovato giving female celebrities the opportunity to tell their truths, clear up misconceptions, and control the narratives around their lives. We can only hope the way these stories are received starts to change, and that women can be free to tell their stories the way they want to (embrace your inner Flea, ladies!) without fear of negative reviews, sexist reviews, or questions about Ryan Adams’ artistic process. And please, no one ask John Mayer for his opinion.

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Lisa Whittington-Hill is the publisher of This Magazine. Her writing about arts, pop culture, feminism, mental health, and why we should all be nicer to Lindsay Lohan has appeared in a variety of magazines.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Dara McAnulty | Diary of a Young Naturalist | May 2021 | 1,979 words (7 minutes)

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Prologue
This diary chronicles the turning of my world, from spring to winter, at home, in the wild, in my head. It travels from the west of Northern Ireland in County Fermanagh to the east in County Down. It records the uprooting of a home, a change of county and landscape, and at times the de-rooting of my senses and my mind. I’m Dara, a boy, an acorn. Mum used to call me lon dubh (which is Irish for blackbird) when I was baby, and sometimes she still does. I have the heart of a naturalist, the head of a would-be scientist, and bones of someone who is already wearied by the apathy and destruction wielded against the natural world. The outpourings on these pages express my connection to wildlife, try to explain the way I see the world, and describe how we weather the storms as a family.

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Tuesday, 5 June
The garden has blossomed in the warmth of these late spring days. So much light and sunshine, compensating for the heaving tiredness and exasperation that comes, for me, at the end of the school year. Friendship has always eluded me – what is it anyway? A collection of actions and words between two people or more, people who grow and change anyway. It’s a good thing, apparently. That’s what some people say. I don’t have any experience, though. I mean, I play board games with a group at my school. We play, we deconstruct the game. We don’t ‘talk’. What is there to say? Sometimes, I feel that if I start, I might not shut up. That has happened, lots of times. It doesn’t end well. Kids in my class, they walk around town together, they might play football together or whatever other sport takes their fancy. They don’t talk, though. They smirk and snigger at anyone who is different. 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. Wildlife never disappoints like people can. Nature has a purity to me, unaffected. I watch the wagtail fly out and in again, then step a little closer. Peering in, I see that last week’s eggs are now chicks. Tiny bright-yellow beaks, mouths opening and closing silently. This is the magic. This bird, which dances and hops at everyone’s feet in the playground, unnoticed by most. Its liveliness and clockwork tail, ticking constantly, never touching the ground. It appears again, and the squawking starts in earnest. I giggle inside, in case someone sees. I have to hold so much in, phase so much out. It’s exhausting.

At home, I mooch around the garden and notice the first herb robert flowers, pink wild bloom amongst the verdant. I note it down on my list of firsts in the garden and feel good. I hear Dad come back from work, and with him an injured bat. She’s the first of the year and we tend to it – females only have one pup a year, such precious cargo. We feed it mealworms and put water in a milk-bottle lid. The bat’s mouth is so small I use one of Bláthnaid’s paintbrushes to put droplets on its tongue, hoping it will be something like lapping dewdrops from a leaf or puddle. Dehydration is the main killer of an injured bat, so it’s important to get it to drink. But as they’re getting better they’ll chew up a mealworm like a piece of spaghetti.

They’re such innocuous and timid creatures, not worthy of the silly hype that surrounds the movies and Hallowe’en. They’re insect-controllers: a single pipistrelle eats 3,000 midges a night. Can you imagine the swarms really ruining your camping holiday if we didn’t have healthy numbers of bat populations? It’s unimaginable.

The bat sleeps in my room. They always do because it’s quiet away from the hustle and bustle of the rest of the McAnulty family. I always sleep so soundly when I have a bat staying in my room. I hear it scratching about in the night and am never afraid, I am comforted.

Friday, 8 June
I trudge to school with a leaden heart: the bat didn’t make it through the night, and we didn’t lose just one bat, we’ve lost every generation that could have followed. Her injuries, caused by a cat, were too much and she died, Dad thinks, from infection. I feel so heartbroken. I’ve finished all my exams but that isn’t enough to lighten my spirits.

After school, Lorcan and I arrive home to squeals of delight from Mum and Bláthnaid. ‘The fledglings are out! The fledglings are out!’ Mum roars with all the childish delight that many of the kids I know have lost before they’re eight or nine. The excitement is intoxicating, and it spreads into me and I feel a little airy. We watch through the window as a just-emerged coal tit, blue tit and sparrow rest on the branches of the pine trees, open-mouthed, noisy and boisterous and splendiferous.

Watching the discordant gang, I realise that I won’t see them when they’re fully grown. Not if we move house. I’ve been in complete denial about moving house. Tomorrow, though, we’re going house-hunting in County Down, in Castlewellan – a small town six miles from our new school in Newcastle (which Mum and Dad say is too expensive for us to live in). I’m not sure if I feel really annoyed about the whole thing, or whether that tickle I sometimes get thinking about it is a sign of the excitement there might be in starting over again. The opportunity to reinvent myself.

Mum notices my mood shifting. I give her my best broad grin and a hug. It’s not easy for any of us, but she and Dad will do most of the work – and the worrying.
Every day, ever since I can remember, Mum has sat me down, sat us all down, and explained every situation we’ve ever had to deal with. Whether it was going to the park, to the cinema, to someone’s house, to a café. Every time, all manner of things were delicately instructed. Social cues, meanings of gestures, some handy answers if we didn’t know what to say. Pictures, social stories, diagrams, cartoons. Many people accuse me of ‘not looking autistic’. I have no idea what that means. I know lots of ‘autistics’ and we all look different. We’re not some recognisable breed. We are human beings. If we’re not out of the ordinary, it’s because we’re fighting to mask our real selves. We’re holding back and holding in. It’s a lot of effort. What’s a lot more effort, though, is the work Mum did and does still, so light-heartedly. She tells us it’s because she knows. She knows the confusion. That’s why she and Dad will be doing the worrying about moving, and why Mum will be doing all the planning and mind- mapping, and will somehow know how everything fits together. I’m lucky, very lucky.

Many people accuse me of ‘not looking autistic’. I have no idea what that means. I know lots of ‘autistics’ and we all look different. We’re not some recognisable breed. We are human beings.

Saturday, 9 June
The day is glorious. It’s summer weather, I have a new Undertones T-shirt (the ‘My Perfect Cousin’ one) and I feel good wearing it. I don’t know why I love T-shirts with some part of me brandished on them. Maybe it’s because it will either scare people away or start a conversation without me having to do anything. Well, either way, that hasn’t happened yet!

We arrive at the first house for viewing and Mum hates it, I can tell. I don’t like it either. Everything about it is squashed, though we can see the Mourne Mountains from upstairs. The second house is much better but needs a lot of work – the views are extraordinary. Neither of them lights a fire in anyone’s belly, though, so that’s it for today, thankfully. And because it’s still morning we’re going to explore the Castlewellan Forest Park, a government-owned forest with native woods, conifer plantation and red kites. It even has a lake and a mountain path. Lorcan and Bláthnaid have already been but it’s a first for me. It’s so beautiful. I feel a swell of anticipation – if we move here we could live beside a forest. We could be near trees! We might not be crammed in by suburbia anymore. I could ride my bike without worrying about cars.

You see, this is a big deal for us kids. We can’t access nature the way my parents’ generation could. Our exposure to wildlife and wild places has been robbed by modernity and ‘progress’. Our pathways for exploration have been severed by development and roads and pollution. Seriously, you take your life into your own hands if you choose to cycle anywhere in Enniskillen. The roads are congested, busy and unfriendly, especially if, like me, you want to stop and stare. We always have to travel to forest parks or nature reserves for our dose, returning to the starkness of concrete and manicured lawns. To think we could live beside a forest!

The thought keeps echoing and I feel euphoric, almost delirious. We all feel it in the glow of the sun with swallows, house martins and swifts above us, dancing everywhere. So many. I’ve never seen so many all at once. Not all three together. It’s heady and intense. We’re all springing, bouncing off one another with sideway glances and controlled smiles. Hoping and holding it all in.

We find a peace maze in the park, created after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. It has 6,000 yew trees and was planted by 5,000 school children and others from the nearby community. We rage through it until we come to a rope bridge. I stop and get out my binoculars: red kites, three of them, wheeling and soaring, ascending, dropping right over our heads. It’s staggering. We gawp at the sky and you can feel our family agreement travelling through us, silently: this might be a good place to live.

Exhausted after the long drive and the day’s events, we head back to Granny’s house in Warrenpoint, where we’re staying tonight. My Granny Elsie has amazing views from her back garden. We can see Carlingford Lough and the Mournes and the Cooley Mountains. Every day looks different there, with subtle changes of colour or the way the clouds sit then disperse on the mountains. Today, the sparrows are chattering and the sun is still high. We decide we need another walk along the beach before we get dinner.

We do a beach clean as we go, but not too much today, which gives us plenty of time for exploring. Lorcan has the best find of the day: a cuttlefish bone smoothed by the sea, silk-soft. The bones, which are not really bones at all but a shell, are usually from the females who die a few weeks after breeding, and the dead cephalopods’ skeletons are later washed up on the beach. Lorcan’s find has the kind of piddock holes that we normally see in soft rocks and clays, and there still seems to be life inside them so we carry it back to the sea before it dries out. We find another, bone-dry, which we bring back to Granny Elsie’s.

Later that night, in the darkness, sharing a room with Lorcan, we talk about the move in hushed tones and excitement, until we both sink like stones into sleep.

Excerpted from Diary of a Young Naturalist. Published by Milkweed Editions.

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Dara McAnulty is the author Diary of a Young Naturalist, forthcoming in Spring 2021. He is the recipient of the Wainwright Prize for nature writing. Dara lives with his mum, dad, brother Lorcan, sister Bláthnaid and rescue greyhound Rosie in County Down, Northern Ireland. Dara’s love for nature, his activism and his honesty about autism, has earned him a huge social media following from across the world and many accolades: in 2017 he was awarded BBC Springwatch ‘Unsprung Hero’ Award and Birdwatch magazine ‘Local Hero’; in 2018 he was awarded ‘Animal Hero’ of the year by the Daily Mirror and became ambassador for RSPCA and the iWill campaign; in 2019 he became a Young Ambassador for the Jane Goodall Institute and became the youngest ever recipient of the RSPB Medal for conservation.

Blake Bailey’s 900-page biography of Philip Roth had been on shelves a matter of days when women began stepping forward to accuse Bailey of sexual assault, harassment, and grooming. Bailey, who has denied the allegations, was quickly dropped by his literary agency. His publisher, Norton, announced this week that it is permanently putting the Roth biography out of print and donating the equivalent of Bailey’s book advance to “organizations that fight against sexual assault or harassment and work to protect survivors.”

In the case of Bailey’s alleged predations, some of the survivors are his former students.

In a deeply reported piece, three authors at Slate — Josh Levin, Susan Matthews, and Molly Olmstead — describe how, as a middle-school English teacher in New Orleans, Bailey encouraged kids to bear their souls to him in class journals, won their trust, and then exploited it:

The teacher’s massive stack of teenage diaries gave him a kind of classroom omniscience, which he didn’t hesitate to deploy. “If you mentioned a crush in your journal,” Sam says, “there was a chance that Bailey would think it was a good match and drop a note to her.” That worked for Sam. Nothing he could possibly say or do, he felt, carried nearly as much weight as an endorsement from Mr. Bailey.

Some students were not as keen to have their private information shared. “The journals were kind of like emotional blackmail,” says Amelia Ward, who was in eighth grade in 1996 and 1997. “He knew a lot about what was going on with the kids, socially.” Jessie Gelini, who took Mr. Bailey’s class in 1998 and 1999, remembers the teacher publicly airing a negative journal comment—something a male friend of Jessie’s had written about her boyfriend. “Here’s this adult, getting involved, and making it a class discussion,” Jessie says. She was humiliated.

While Mr. Bailey told Sam that he was just like him, Jessie remembers hearing the teacher say something very different to eighth grade girls: “I would have been your boyfriend in high school.” At the time, the casualness of that kind of remark felt thrilling, even though she knew it wasn’t quite right. “I was grossed out by him,” Jessie says now. “But at the same time, I was enamored.”

Bailey kept in touch with former students, and more than one has now alleged that, when they became adults, Bailey initiated sexual relationships with them, or raped them. One of them is Eve Crawford Peyton, whose personal essay accompanies the Slate article:

The one line I keep reading in different news accounts is a line that’s haunted me since the night he raped me in June 2003. As he dropped me off that night, while I was still shaking all over, he looked over at me, his eyes sad and sort of pleading, and said: “You really can’t blame me. I’ve wanted you since the day we met.”

At the time, that line almost broke my heart more than anything else. I couldn’t fathom that he could possibly have actually wanted me since the day we met—because I was 12 the day we met. Instead, I thought, he was just using the line on me that he used on all women.

“I’ve wanted you since the day we met,” I could imagine him slurring as a Tulane frat boy, pulling a young coed into his bedroom. I could hear him saying it to a colleague after weeks of courtship and flirtation. I figured it must be a habit, and the fact that he said it to me—someone he met when I was a child and he was in his 30s—made me feel like he didn’t even know who I was, like I was just some nameless, faceless woman.

That was hurtful. The truth was worse.

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