June 7, 2022 First Person New Eyes By Charlie Lee Francisco de Zurbarán, Saint Lucy, 1625–1630; Francesco del Cossa, Saint Lucy, 1473. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Maybe you know this, if you’re Catholic or hang around in churches: in paintings of Saint Lucy, she’s usually holding a pair of eyes. In most cases they’re on a plate, like some sort of local delicacy she’s about to serve up to a tourist. These are her old eyes, the ones she plucked out when a man wanted to marry her, because she wanted to marry only God. She looks down at them with her new eyes, the ones God gave her to say thanks. The version I like best is Francesco del Cossa’s, from 1473. In it, Lucy’s eyes hang drooping from a delicate stem, a horrible blooming flower. She pinches them gingerly, pinkie out like the queen. To me they look like the corsage I vaguely remember wearing at prom; later, who knows, she might put them in the man’s lapel, a consolation prize. I have been drawn to this painting for nearly a decade, though my feelings toward it, toward Lucy and her two sets of eyes, have changed over the years. The first feeling was a slightly delusional but sharp sense of envy. I was seventeen or eighteen, seeing the painting for the first time in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and for as long as I could remember I’d wanted what Lucy had: to pluck out my eyes and get new ones. I believe this is the sort of fantasy often held by people with certain ailments, a childish notion that makes no sense but is still somehow grippingly tantalizing—like how the chronically congested dream of one triumphant nose-blow that clears them out for good, or those with bad backs imagine some kindly giant pulling them apart until every vertebrae gives a magical crack and their pain is banished at last. Read More
May 26, 2022 First Person The Family Is Finished: On Memory, Betrayal, and Home Decor By Menachem Kaiser The author’s parents at his grandmother’s home, celebrating their engagement. (All photographs and videos courtesy of Menachem Kaiser.) A couple of years ago, I sent my parents a chapter from the manuscript of a memoir I’d written. I couldn’t not send it, though I waited—partly out of cowardice and partly to prevent them from claiming a bigger editorial role than I could tolerate—until the copyediting stage, when it was too late to make substantive changes. While working on the book I’d been able to suppress any anxiety over what my family might think or feel about it, but once it was finished I remembered (you really do forget) that those it describes are not merely characters in a story but people in my life. And then, suddenly, everything I’d written about them was available for preorder. Read More
May 11, 2022 First Person Flight Paths By Omar El Akkad Francisco Anzola, Old Cairo Skyline, licensed under CC0 1.0. 1. 2010 The word for invoice is the same in Arabic and Italian: fattura. We learned this, my mother and I, on the outskirts of a cemetery in Naples, as we tried to navigate the final arrangements for the transfer of my father’s body. It was a beautiful day, sunny, the sky Riviera-blue, and somewhere in the periphery of my vision, focused on this undertaker in his ill-fitting suit, there was a family mourning their own newly dead. They were of this place. We were not. Helplessly, my mother struggled to make the man from the funeral home understand what she was asking for, until finally, exasperated, she blurted out the word in Arabic, and the man nodded. By chance, our languages overlapped; we were understood. The man disappeared into a nearby office and, a couple of minutes later, returned with the bill of sale. In a few days we would need to show this document to a military inspector at the Cairo airport, when we returned to bury my father in the city of his birth. For the last twenty-eight years of his life he had been a migrant and now, in death, he would go home. Read More
May 4, 2022 First Person Notes on Nevada: Trans Literature and the Early Internet By Imogen Binnie Imogen Binnie at Camp Trans in 2008. Photo courtesy of the author. Almost ten years ago, I published a novel called Nevada with a small press called Topside that doesn’t exist anymore. You may or may not have heard of it, but if there are trans people in your life who are readers, they probably have. It became a subcultural Thing. It’s been out of print for a few years, but in June, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will bring it back into print. People have called Nevada “ground zero for modern trans literature,” and while I get that—before it was published, I don’t think I’d read a novel with a trans character who I didn’t at least sort of hate—I don’t really feel like a genius visionary who invented literature centering marginalized experiences. At the very least, this idea occludes the work other people had done that made Nevada possible. So instead of celebrating myself, I want to use this opportunity to say thanks, and to think through some of the influences and experiences that shaped the novel. Read More
March 28, 2022 First Person My Friend Goo By Deb Olin Unferth Illustration by Na Kim. In March 2020 the entire human world was out walking. I, too, was walking, longer and farther than I’d ever gone on foot from my house. When I wasn’t walking, I was watching clips of people walking—of hundreds of thousands of workers laid off in the cities of India and setting out on foot across the country toward home. And I watched clips of people not walking—as in Italy, where, we read, people could not go outside for a month and they stood at their windows and sang. Here in Texas we did not have to walk, but we could if we wanted, and walk we did, everyone out on the street, waving from a distance. I found places near my home I had no idea were there, including a tiny forest a couple of blocks wide, and the Colorado River, which—if I’d ever looked at a map—I would have known was right there. Read More
March 7, 2022 First Person To the Son of the Victim By Sophie Haigney Santa Rosa–Tagatay Road in Don Jose, Santa Rosa, California. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons. Santa Rosa, California I met you the day your father was shot and killed. I’d been in Oakland for a pink sunrise, watching police sweep a homeless encampment, gathering what we called “string” from residents who had nowhere—yet again—to go. I felt more outraged than usual and also maybe more useful. This was journalism, I suppose I was thinking, making sure the world knew what was happening right here. I wrote three hundred words for my newspaper’s website in a café and was preparing to drive back across the Bay Bridge in brilliant golden morning light. Then I got a call. Read More