October 9, 2018

Usually it is a woman who asks the question—always the same question. She sits near the door in the last row of the auditorium, where I have spent the last hour talking about what it means to have been kidnapped and raped by a man I loved, a man with whom I lived. He was a man who, even before the kidnapping, had already violated me in every way you might imagine, especially a man like him. Someone else in the audience asks what happened to the man who did this to me, and I explain how he got away, how he is a fugitive living in Venezuela, raising a new family. This is not the ending anyone expects.

Now the woman has a question, always last. She raises her hand and when I call on her, she stands and speaks in a clear, assertive voice: “What do you want to have happen to him, to the man who did this to you?” By “this” I know she means not only the actual crime that the man committed, but also all of the therapy, the nightmares and panic attacks, the prescribed medication and self-medication, the healing and self-harm. “I mean, you probably want him dead, right?”

No, I think. “No,” I say aloud. Her expression crumples; she looks confused. Everyone in the audience looks confused. This isn’t supposed to be how the story ends; it’s not the ending they want for me, or themselves. Read More

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August 20, 2018

First Person

The Most Selfish Choice

By Jessie Greengrass

Justine Siegmund, Diagram of a Fetus, Lying on Its Side, in an Opened Womb, 1723.

I am not by nature a decisive person. Anxiety freights each choice with the potential for disaster, and where possible, I defer. It ought to come as no surprise, then, that I struggled with the decision to have a child—except that even to acknowledge the existence of such a decision is routinely considered a sign of failure. We talk about clocks. We talk about cycles. We talk about diminishing fertility, the prioritization of career over family, the horror of having left it “too late,” as though it were possible that half the population might be suffering a kind of culpable ignorance with regards to their own biology. I was embarrassed at the thought of discussing my uncertainty, as though anyone I confided in would snap back, Who are you, then, to have a child? I was humiliated by how hard it felt. That my future as a mother didn’t seem to me to be a given seemed related to those other ways in which I was not as I should be: my dislike of heels and holidays; my discomfort in dresses; the way my body failed to conform, growing larger than it ought to grow. It was my excess and my lack. The link between childbearing and femininity is such that feeling myself to be deficient in the latter, I felt disqualified from the former—or vice versa.

What is a woman who might choose not to have a child? I wanted a child because I wanted a family. Because I wanted to feel secure, a part of a structure. Because I wanted, in some slight way, to be necessary. Because I wanted to be loved. None of this seemed good enough. All of it was about me. I wanted a child because I wanted one. Read More

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August 9, 2018

First Person

The Sad Boys of Sadcore

By Kristi Coulter

Peter Milton Walsh performing with his band the Apartments.

“I liked my shirt a few hours ago, but now I feel bad about it,” Mark Eitzel said from the tiny stage at (Le) Poisson Rouge. He was smiling but not joking. He’d been forgetting lyrics and false starting songs throughout the set, and I thought the fringed shirt might be the last straw—that he might flee and vanish into Bleecker Street, just one more shuffling man in a porkpie.

Powers engage, I said and then unconsciously assumed the position: wineglass down, torso tilted ten degrees forward, my entire body utterly still. I turned all the life in me toward making Eitzel know there was love in the room—that from time to time, we all lose a word, trip on a cord, put on a cowboy shirt and bolo tie that we truly have no business wearing. He got through the song, then another. Once the crisis point passed, my body downshifted, but it didn’t fully clock out until after the encore—then I slumped like a B-movie medium after a séance that had gotten out of hand.

Propping up collapsing men is one of my talents. In a business meeting, I can produce boring data to bolster whatever shady-sounding claim the man next to me makes. If a guy asks, Am I ready to do this job / kiss this girl / give this speech? I can smile slightly and say, in a way that makes him think he believes in himself: I think you already know the answer to that question. I’m so good that I can even work remotely: via email, text, sext, DM, IM, marginalia, playlist, or windshield Post-its. But I’m at my best in the darkness of a club, twenty feet from the locus of disintegration. Read More

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July 31, 2018

First Person

Like You Know Your Own Bones

By Crystal Hana Kim

On memory, inherited trauma, and my grandmother.

Crystal Hana Kim and her grandmother.

When I was almost two years old, my grandmother flew from Hongcheon, South Korea, to Flushing, Queens, to take care of me. For a few years, while my parents worked, I spent my hours with Halmuni. I do not remember how we colored our days, but I press my thumb onto the photographs of that time. I smudge their borders and try to return to a forgotten past.

In one glossy, blurry photograph, I am paper-crowned with a waxy yellow Burger King wrapper laid out before me, a rounded bun raised to my open mouth. Halmuni does not eat; instead, the camera catches her watching me. A tender, unsmiling gaze. When I examine this picture, I am convinced I remember. That crown, I think. Yes. I remember the thick gold paper with the Burger King logo, the jewels on the rounded arches. But the crown in the photograph is blue, and that unexpected color unbalances me. My confidence slips. Perhaps I am remembering a different day. Perhaps I am remembering the last time I looked at this photograph. Memory warps and stretches and shifts to fit the strictures of your life.

As my mother and I share a bottle of wine, she recalls my first years. She tells me that I had no understanding of mother-daughter love when I was young, that my world revolved around Halmuni. I wanted to sleep in her room. I wanted my mother to return “our” chopsticks when she used them in the kitchen. The edges of my mind seem to prickle with recognition. A white linoleum floor, my hand on Halmuni’s knee as I demand my mother leave us alone. Read More

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June 28, 2018

First Person

What Comes After Idealism?

By Heather Abel

“Class of ’36, I guess we did something wrong.”

This is what my grandmother wrote to her Barnard College classmates fifty years after they had all graduated. My grandmother was charismatic and uncompromising, equally critical of capitalism and sentimentality. In her life as a Westchester housewife and radical leftist, she’d planned protests, played tennis, and published mystery novels. When her children were grown, she moved to Manhattan, waking every morning at five to walk briskly around Central Park (she was mugged only a few times). She spent the rest of the day writing and tending the ivy she’d planted to beautify the trees along her block. Every Saturday, she organized against U.S. atrocities in Central America.

Days before she died in 1992, while attached to an IV, a blood transfusion, and oxygen, she dictated the final paragraph of her eighteenth book to my mother. The book was, she explained, the first in a new series she planned to write. At her memorial a week later, held in a classroom at Barnard College, her five children yelled and laughed and interrupted one another. She’d taught them to rebel against society’s mawkish ceremonies, like memorial services, as well as its unjust institutions. Her children all inherited her radical politics, and they raised us, her twelve grandchildren, in the same mode. You can be anything, they joked, as long as it’s a public defender. Interpreting this broadly, we complied. Read More

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June 27, 2018

First Person

On Writing Letters to Famous Strangers

By A. M. Homes

John Templeton Lucas, The Letter Writer, 1877.

As a teenager, I wrote letters to strangers. I was trying to write my way out of my parent’s house, where I was psychically trapped. Like an alien seeking contact, I started by doing research. I went to the Bethesda Library, where they had phone books from all over the country. I remember being surprised by the number of well-known names one could find in a New York phone book in the 1976–1978 time period: Art Garfunkel, Mikhail Baryshnikov—those are just two I recall, but I know there were dozens.

My inability to leave home, my separation anxiety, was all-encompassing. It wasn’t just about leaving my mother, though that would have been enough. It was about house and home—family—in the largest most literal sense. If I left the house, something might happen. It might not be there when I got back. This soul-crushing sense of impending doom was crippling. It started in nursery school, when my mother would drop me off at the little house at the top of the hill. They’d have to hold me back while my mother drove away, never looking in her rearview mirror at her sobbing child. I didn’t write to strangers because they were famous. I didn’t want an autographed eight-by-ten. I wanted to tell them about my life, my day at school. I wanted to drive a wedge between my childhood and the larger world that I hoped I might join one day. I wanted a way out. Read More

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I Want a Reckoning

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