Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.
With Mother’s Day on the horizon, I chose “mothers/relationship with moms” as the theme of my list this week:
1. My Mom (Mary H. K. Choi, Aeon, April 2013)
A deceptively simple title belies a gorgeous, funny, sometimes dark essay in which Choi attempts to communicate her strange affection for her mother.
The indomitable Strayed explores the unexpected intersection of sex, death, grief, marriage, and, above all, her overwhelming love for her mother.
Andy Marra returns to Korea to find her biological family and ponders whether or not to reveal that she’s transgender.
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What are your favorite stories about mom? Share them in the comments below.
(Photo: Böhringer Friedrich, Wikimedia Commons)
UPDATE: Here are some additional Mother’s Day recommendations from you:
Thomas Rhiel and Raphael Pope-Sussman are the founding editors of BKLYNR, a new online publication that features in-depth journalism—including more than a few #longreads—about Brooklyn.
Thomas’s pick: “Brooklyn: The Sane Alternative,” by Pete Hamill in New York magazine
It’s 2013—three long years since New York magazine asked “What was the hipster?”—and yet there are still people for whom Brooklyn means Bedford Avenue. It’s depressing that so played out a trope could displace, in the popular imagination, everything else that the borough is: more populated than Manhattan and three times as massive; a patchwork of neighborhoods, some of which, incredibly, aren’t Williamsburg or Park Slope; and a place whose history stretches as far back as the country’s.
A restorative for the trend piece du jour is Pete Hamill’s “Brooklyn: The Sane Alternative,” a New York magazine cover story from 1969. It’s an oldie but goodie, a look at the borough’s bounce back from what Hamill sees as its postwar (and post-Dodgers) decline. As a snapshot of an evolving Brooklyn from decades ago, the story’s a fascinating read today. And Hamill’s wide-angle view of the borough’s complexities, as well as his celebration of its energy and diversity, still rings true.
Raphael’s pick: “Gentrified Fiction,” by Elizabeth Gumport in n+1
There’s a story many Brooklynites tell in which the moment of their arrival in a neighborhood coincides with the last breath of its “authentic” life. Those who came after, this story goes, never knew the “real” neighborhood. They missed the junkies who hung out on the stoops down the block, the bodega on the corner that sold 40s, the drop ceilings and vinyl siding and linoleum. It’s a seductive story, to hear and to tell. But it’s also a destructive story—really a myth—that valorizes an arbitrary authenticity at the expense of a more complex understanding of the place we call home. What is the “real” Brooklyn—what is the “real” anywhere?
If you’re interested in interrogating that question, I strongly recommend Elizabeth Gumport’s 2011 essay “Gentrified Fiction,” which explores the fixation on authenticity in contemporary literature about Brooklyn.
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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.
For this week’s Member Pick, we’re excited to share “My Body Stopped Speaking to Me,” a personal story from GQ writer and National Magazine Award winner Andrew Corsello about a near-death experience. The piece was first published in GQ in 1995. Corsello explains:
I was circling the drain in the spring of 1995—convalescent, out of money, literally within days of quitting the business—when David Kamp, a friend from college who’d become a senior editor at GQ, called to ask if I’d be interested in a staff-writing job. ‘You know I’m damaged goods, right?’ I asked. He didn’t, but made things happen anyway. The day I arrived at GQ, David introduced me to the mag’s longtime editor, Art Cooper, an old-school manly man’s man who’d have insisted on christening my arrival with a hard drink or three (even though it was 11:00 a.m.) had David not preempted it. ‘Now, Art,’ David explained as Art took my hand, ‘you can’t take it personally when Andrew declines the drink you’re going to offer him—he’s been told by doctors he can never drink again.’ Art asked why. Over the next 15 minutes, I told him the bizarre story of my near-death from liver failure six months before. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘That’s your first piece for the mag!’ At which point I reflexively wondered, ‘But what’s the angle?’ And, answering myself, said, ‘How about, “If I were in an HMO, I’d be dead”’? Before I could finish my next sentence, Cooper said, ‘Nah, just write the story.’ But what about, you know, the health care angle… ‘Huh?’ Cooper said. ‘Forget that. Just…write the story, like you just told it.’ But what about… We went back and forth several more times, with me burping up inane buzz-crap like ‘nut graf’ and ‘policy relevance’ and Cooper saying ‘Write the story.’ Finally, half laughing, half pissed, he growled, ‘Just write the fucking story.’ So I left his office, sat at my new desk, created a new file, sat staring at the screen for several minutes and then realized: The story was already written, and written as well as it ever could be (at least by me), in my journal. Creating this piece, which Kamp edited, was almost entirely a matter of splicing journal entries together.
Even now it amazes and annoys me: that until the moment Art Cooper told me to write the fucking story, it had never even occurred to me to use in my published work the voice in which I had been speaking to myself for years. That is, it hadn’t occurred to me to publish work…in my own voice. How stupid is that? All this is to say that this story, or rather the editorial injunction that birthed it, taught me that a vivid writing voice is less a matter of talent—far less—than license. Dave Kamp’s headline for this piece plays at multiple levels.
Read an excerpt here.
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Illustration by Kjell Reigstad
Meaghan O’Connell is the editor-in-chief of meaghano.com:
“I regard novel-writing with a heady combination of awe and dread, so when debut novelist Ted Thompson wrote about his book’s eight (eight!) year journey to completion last week, I opened it in a tab and walked away from my desk immediately. ‘The Evolution of a First Novel’ is as fascinating as it is generous, and takes us along as his book about a retired Connecticut divorcee went from plausible deniability, to short story, to MFA application, to self-doubt, despair, long dog walks, and longer grant applications. The story ends as all real stories should, with an air of peaceful resignation and a book deal. The people mentioned (Thompson most of all, I suppose) seem to be from a bygone literary era, but aren’t—or so we’ll keep hoping. I took from it what is either a reminder, a threat, or a revelation, depending: that people will forgive you when you get in your own way, and make way for you when you get out of it.”
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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.
(photo by teejayfaust, Flickr)
This week’s Member Pick is “Yellow,” a story by Antonia Crane about the days following the death of her mother. The piece will be featured in Black Clock #17 this summer and is adapted from her forthcoming book Spent. We asked her to tell us how the story first came together:
“‘Yellow’ actually began as a love letter to Cheryl Strayed’s essay ‘The Love of My Life’ (The Sun, Issue #430) which begins ‘The first time I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week.’ I had become fixated on that essay because in it, Strayed’s palpable sorrow contained a sexually reckless rhythm that I related to as a dancer and sex worker. My own mother died of cancer two months into grad school and I was raging with grief. At that time, I quit my half-assed personal assistant jobs and chose to sit in the dark for two years at ‘Pleasures.’
“A lifelong dancer and athlete, I was more comfortable hurling my body at the world than eating or buying toothpaste. I remember that I could go strip or meet a client for money, but I could not remember to pick up toothpaste no matter how many times I wrote in on my hand with a black Sharpie. I came home one afternoon to a Walgreens bag on my doorknob with Crest in it and bawled.
“Strayed’s essay modeled the utensils I sought to stir up my own concoction of rage and loss that was tearing at my skin. I’m grateful she allowed me to cook in her kitchen. I was mourning my mother. I was dancing; and I wrote like a motherfucker.”
Read an excerpt of “Yellow.”
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Today’s guest pick comes from Emily M. Keeler, a writer, critic, and the editor of Little Brother Magazine. She recommends two stories, “To Err, Divine, so Improvise” by Kaitlin Fontana in Hazlitt and “Afterlife” by Chris Wallace in The Paris Review:
“This past week was one of several missteps; headlines and cover lines and tweets let us down even though we already were so low. Breaking news is broken. Steven Saideman put it another way in The Globe and Mail: ‘It is natural that we are impatient and curious, but we must be conscious that false steps may do much damage to innocents along the way.’ Sometimes it’s better to wait for the longreads.
“Here are two things I read while I waited:
“1. On the topic of shortcomings, Kaitlin Fontana has a wonderful three-part essay on Hazlitt this past week, describing the evolution of failure, and it’s eventual adulation, in the public imagination. For the time pressed, I’d jump to the final section—or do it right and space parts one, two, and three out over a few days, give yourself over gradually to your own failures.
“2. While it’s not fiction—the place I’m most likely to find solace, this essay on self mythology, the interaction between a name and a story, and Big Poppa nonetheless does the trick. After all, one particular Chris Wallace would go so far as to say that ‘Biggie was a fiction—not so farfetched as to court incredulity, but idealized, a romanticization of the writer.’”
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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.
This week’s Member Pick comes from Antonia Crane, the Los Angeles-based writer whose work for The Rumpus has been featured on Longreads in the past. We’re excited to feature “Yellow,” a story about her relationship with her mother, about stripping, and about loss. The piece will be published in Black Clock #17, due out this summer, and it’s adapted from her forthcoming book Spent. Thanks to Antonia and Black Clock for letting us share this story with our members.
Read an excerpt here.
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Illustration by Kjell Reigstad
