Original illustration by Anne Osherson

I cannot locate the day that I finally meant it, this heretofore speculative suicide think, but by some point, not long ago, it seemed I had only two choices: get a hysterectomy, or die. I would not die from endometriosis alone, though it is often called benign cancer, but neither could I bear to live with it.

This past summer, I reached a breaking point. A choppy cross-country move disrupted my medical care, requiring new referrals, specialists, a primary care physician, a new medical cannabis card in a state with a completely different policy, a renewed opioid prescription until I could get the medical cannabis card, refills of antidepressants. A lost social security card stuck on a moving van that arrived two weeks late delayed my ability to get a New York State ID, which I needed in order to see a doctor who could authorize my medical card. All this in the middle of nonstop travel I had scheduled months in advance, as part of my book promotion and visits to universities and festivals.

Three nights before a trip to Europe, where I was up for a prize, I messaged a suicide hotline. I’d missed too many medications at once and needed immediate care. I made it through, but microaggressions in Edinburgh and Paris pushed me into a full depressive episode. The entire ride from Disneyland Paris to my hotel, I considered jumping from the moving Lyft. But it would be too complicated for my husband to retrieve my body internationally, I reasoned. I’d wait until I returned to Ithaca. My period started, and, along with the chemical withdrawals, contextualized some of my increased depression. I took Xanax and Trazodone and Cymbalta and returned to that old devil, Percocet, and fell asleep. I stayed in my Paris hotel room for days, only coming out for Uber Eats orders that turned to gravel in my mouth. I returned to the States and slept and cried. Major crisis temporarily averted; hopelessness still on high; suicide watch on the down-low; hysterical stereotype achieved. Read More

Crystal Lucas-Perry and Jonathan Hadary in A Bright Room Called Day (2019). Photo: Joan Marcus.

Upon hearing I was seeing the new production of Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day, a friend asked if I thought the playwright would be in attendance. I pictured him back in the sound booth scribbling notes, some kind of light playing on those perfectly round glasses. I pictured him there, not basking—for Christ’s sake, he’s a writer—but questioning. Kushner, after all, is an indefatigable rewriter, and the temptation of tinkering with a major revival at the Public Theater could have proved impossible to resist. Kushner wasn’t in the wings that night, though. He did his rewrite from the stage.

In this divisive revision of his first play, Kushner has inserted a version of himself, played by the actor Jonathan Hadary. Written in 1985 when Kushner was twenty-six, A Bright Room Called Day is, according to the program materials, what first caught the eye of Kushner’s artistic director and longtime collaborator Oskar Eustis. It’s clear why: the play is near catastrophic in its precocity. But it is also a young man’s play. It is didactic and referential, polemical and pedantic; the reviews over the years have said as much.

A Bright Room Called Day presents a group of liberal, bohemian, and decidedly human friends in Berlin in 1932, just as the noose is beginning to tighten. They are Marxists and Trotskyites, some more than others. There is plenty of ideological ping-pong, which is great if you love Marxist ideology or ping-pong. But, as though it wasn’t Brechtian enough, the action is interrupted by a character named Zillah, who makes clear the connection between the Reagan era and the twilight years of the Weimar Republic: the heartbreaking swing of the working class from the Left to the Right. Zillah serves as a metafictional commentator who engages Kushner’s fascination with verfremdungseffekt, the Brechtian antitheater craft of undoing the “magic” of the stage. Read More

Albert Aublet, Selene, 1850

In most stories, the moon is a woman. Often, the sun is a man. Greek mythology has Apollo and Artemis, Roman mythology has Luna and Sol, Slavic mythology has Dazhbog and Jutrobog. In Bali, there’s Dewi Ratih, whose sexual rejection of the giant Kala Rau led to him becoming an immortal floating head that chases the moon across the sky, swallows her whole, and spits her out again. The Mayas thought the phases of the moon were associated with phases of a woman’s life. Chinese mythology includes tales of a lunar deity named Changxi, who gave birth to twelve beautiful daughters who became the twelve months.

Although I’ve come across moon gods as well as moon goddesses, it’s clear to me that the moon is a woman. Her her-ness is right there in the word, full of round letters, soft as breasts and wombs. It sounds like a mother cooing to her baby.

I do not believe womanhood is located in the body. I believe womanhood is a state that one can opt into and out of, that it is culturally coded and culturally enforced. And yet, my own experience of womanhood is tied to my breasts, my womb, my menstrual blood, my mother, and my motherhood. As my body changed from a girl’s to a woman’s, it softened and opened. For a long time, I resisted this—I wanted to be angular and sharp with elbows like arrows and collarbones that cut. I didn’t like the idea of being reduced. That’s what I believed my body was trying to do: reduce me to a biological statement about fertility and purpose. I didn’t know, until I experienced pregnancy myself, how much you can gain from your body, how much beauty and joy it can give. I didn’t know that I could be like the moon. I didn’t realize I could wax and wane.

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© Jiri Hera / Adobe Stock.

As the year 2011 drew to a close, while I was still teaching in New York, Mary Ann Caws asked me for four recipes, two cocktails without alcohol, and two desserts. Mary Ann Caws, a professor of French literature and modern art at the City University’s Graduate Center, is one of the most extraordinary women I have met. She is a brilliant speaker and can talk engagingly on André Breton, Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Robert Desnos, and René Char. She uses the same talent to write about the novels of Virginia Woolf, literary manifestos, and Provençal cuisine. This time she was compiling a book of painters’ and writers’ recipes for an English publisher under the title Modern Art Cookbook. My first reaction was, Why me? She merely replied: “Because your cooking is one of the best I have ever tasted.” I was flattered to no end. But as days went by I felt sad that such a book was going to be published in America and England. Couldn’t we imagine a similar publication in France?

I became so obsessed with the idea that once back in Paris, I discussed it with Otis Lebert, the owner of the restaurant Le Taxi Jaune, which sits opposite my apartment in the Marais district. By dint of comparing recipes, we had become friends. On my initiative, we decided to write a book of recipes together. After a series of long and heated discussions, we invited Laurent Laffont, my editor, for lunch in order to inform him of our project. I was convinced I could easily win his approval since our friendship dated back to the time when I published my first novels with Robert Laffont, his father. He had welcomed me with open arms when I indicated I would like to be on the authors list of the publishing house he had just taken over with his sister. To my great surprise, Laurent gave a categorical refusal to the recipe book. Not only did he have no interest in the project but mainly, according to him, cookbooks belonged to a specialized field of publishing and distribution. He was so adamant that there was no point insisting. Although Otis accepted the decision somewhat indifferently, I myself was so disappointed that it forced me to think about the meaningful role cooking had played throughout my life. Together with literature it had been my dominant passion for years. Read More

Dovey Johnson Roundtree.

We have all heard that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, but during dark and difficult times, it’s sometimes a challenge to see it curving in the right direction. History tells us the stories of the great men—charismatic, brave, and doomed—who gave their lives to the struggle for racial equality. While these men earned our praise, we know that they did not change the world alone. Mighty Justice is the story of a great woman, Dovey Johnson Roundtree, who dedicated her life to moving the United States closer to ideals outlined in the Constitution. Born in 1914 in Charlotte, North Carolina, Dovey Roundtree came into this world with her mind stayed on freedom, as the sixties protest song goes.

Mighty Justice is a love story. Dovey Johnson Roundtree was a patriot, in love with a flawed, unfair, and often cruel nation. One of her earliest memories was the sight of her grandmother’s feet, misshapen and gnarled as a result of violence at the hands of an angry white man. But along with her memory of the damage done to her grandmother’s body, she recalls herself on bended knee, kneading and massaging the same feet, providing comfort to the woman who had been brave enough to say no in the face of power and paid the price. Even as a small child, Dovey Johnson Roundtree understood that the ultimate act of love is service.

I wonder how Dovey Johnson Roundtree would want this work to be discussed. I am sure many will read her story, as I did, and marvel that her name and contributions are not better known. Still, I resist the impulse to call her a “hidden figure,” the term coined to honor the black women whose unsung contributions to NASA helped put a man on the moon. But I can’t imagine that Ms. Roundtree would cotton to such a description. While she was no doubt aware that hers was not a household name, I am not convinced she would consider that a tragedy. There is a hymn well-loved in the African Methodist Episcopal Church that proclaims, “Let the work I’ve done speak for me.” Read More

Tehran skyline

On the morning of November 16, 2019, we, the exiled Iranians, woke up and like billions of other internet addicts in the world immediately checked our phones, only to realize that Iran had been cut off from the global internet.

Many of us are members of family group chats on WhatsApp and Telegram, used to receiving a “good morning to my children” from a parent, a “did you finally go to the doctor?” from the other parent, a picture of the overdue first snow in Tehran from an aunt, and a joke about the president from an uncle. Over the years, these short messages have served as daily reminders of where we come from and who our people are. Above all, they have been our daily reassurance that our families were fine. The internet had functioned as the umbilical cord that kept alive the part of our soul still dependent on the motherland. That morning, the cord was cut.

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The internet blackout, we learned, was the Iranian government’s response to the protests that broke out after it announced a 300 percent increase in the price of gas. The decision was made and implemented at midnight, with no advance warning given.

Thanks to the state of Iran under sanctions, the news of the price hike was like a lit match in a barrel of dynamite. Protests spread very wide, very fast. The protesters moved beyond the gas price issue to target the entire status quo. The Iranian government let loose its police and militia. The crisis became so deep and so serious, the bloodshed so vast and the heap of corpses so high, that the government cut off the internet to keep people from organizing and to stifle the distribution of videos of its brutality, which included numerous instances of indiscriminate shooting at unarmed protesters.

For us, the Iranians abroad, desperate and in the dark, the savagery was nothing new. Everyone who has paid attention to Iran, a country beleaguered by ruthlessness of sanctions and brutalized by its own vicious, paranoid government, expected an explosion of violence. But the internet blackout came out of nowhere. None of us had ever thought that one day Iran would become a digital black hole, a dark void on the blindingly glittering map of the global network. We found ourselves locked out of the house whose windows, we had thought, we would always be able to look through.

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