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NonfictionHistory

Hiroshima

In this careful recording of the experiences of Japanese atomic bomb survivors, M.G. Sheftall provides a crucial service for our collective memory of Hiroshima.
In this careful recording of the experiences of Japanese atomic bomb survivors, M.G. Sheftall provides a crucial service for our collective memory of Hiroshima.
NonfictionMedicineBiography

The Story of a Heart

Rachel Clarke’s powerful The Story of a Heart braids the true story of a pediatric organ transplant with a rigorous history of transplant science.
Rachel Clarke’s powerful The Story of a Heart braids the true story of a pediatric organ transplant with a rigorous history of transplant science.
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Mary Pipher

In Mary Pipher's inspiring new book, Women Rowing North, she considers the psychological effects of aging on women. Women face many challenges as they age: misogyny, ageism, loss and physical changes. Yet Pipher shows that most older women are more content than their younger selves. Here, Pipher answers a few questions about her new book.
Memoir

Dani Shapiro

Interview by Alice Cary

Dani Shapiro has been thinking about secrets all of her life, exploring the theme repeatedly in five novels and four memoirs. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that she unwittingly uncovered the biggest secret of all: Her beloved, late father wasn’t her biological father.

“I needed every single brain cell to focus on this discovery and to try to understand what it meant,” she says, speaking from her home in the Connecticut countryside.

Growing up as an only child in 1960s and ’70s New Jersey, Shapiro couldn’t help feeling partially like an outsider as the pale, blue-eyed, blond-haired daughter of her darker, Jewish parents. In fact, a family friend and Holocaust survivor was so startled by her unlikely features that she peered into her eyes and announced, “We could have used you in the ghetto, little blondie. You could have gotten us bread from the Nazis.” The dramatic proclamation made a searing imprint on Shapiro.

“All my life I had known there was a secret. What I hadn’t known: the secret was me.”

When Shapiro was 23, her father died from injuries he suffered in a devastating car crash, a tragedy she chronicled in her 1998 memoir, Slow Motion. Years later, when Shapiro’s husband decided to order a DNA kit, he asked her if she wanted one as well. She gamely agreed, and gave it little thought until several months later, when the kit’s shocking results showed that she was only half Jewish. Furthermore, she wasn’t biologically related to her half-sister, her father’s child from a previous marriage. An offhand remark made decades earlier by Shapiro’s now-deceased mother provided a clue to the puzzle: She told Shapiro that she had been conceived in Philadelphia.

With astonishing speed, Shapiro and her husband unraveled the mystery. Her parents had traveled to Philadelphia for artificial insemination; an anonymous sperm donor was Shapiro’s biological father. The DNA results and some internet sleuthing allowed Shapiro and her husband to track down the identity of her father, a now-retired physician who specialized in, of all things, medical ethics.

“All my life I had known there was a secret. What I hadn’t known: the secret was me,” Shapiro writes in her mesmerizing account of that revelation and its aftermath, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love.

“You can’t make this stuff up; I could never write this in a novel.” Shapiro says. She also explains that there was no way she could’ve made sense of the experience without writing through it. “Thank God it’s my 10th book. I had a toolbox. I had a set of skills and craft, both as a writer and someone who teaches writing, to be able to shape it and understand that it needed to be shaped. I recognized that it was an astounding story, and I wanted to do it justice.”

Shapiro contacted and eventually met her donor father, Ben, and his family, whose names and identifying details have been changed to preserve their privacy. As a medical student, Ben had donated his sperm at the Farris Institute in Philadelphia, which was operated by Edmond Farris, a renegade scientist who was practicing medicine without a license. Farris mixed Ben’s semen with that of Shapiro’s father—not an uncommon practice at the time. Ben went on with his life, forgetting about the procedure, never imagining a future in which his role could be identified.

As strange as this story is, Shapiro explains that it’s not that uncommon. “There’s no anonymity anymore,” she says. “These stories are happening. They’re just tumbling out. Because of DNA testing, many people are having to reimagine family to some degree. . . . One of the beautiful things about this whole story is that ultimately it’s about people being kind to each other. Doing the right thing by each other. Ben and I have a relationship for which there is no playbook. He doesn’t feel like he’s my father. I don’t imagine that I feel to him like I’m his daughter. And yet we do share a very powerful bond.”

The question that haunts Shapiro is how much her parents knew. “To me, the story is not about what happened,” she says. “The much richer part is about what’s underneath all that—the lies, what did my parents go through, what they know, our shared lives together, what was the truth of that? Everything thrumming underneath was what I wanted to really be the heart and soul of the story.”

Shapiro recognizes that she’ll never have definitive answers to these questions, but she does have some ideas. She characterizes her mother as “not entirely mentally well” and “capable of bending reality to her will.” She concludes, “I think she decided from the moment that she was pregnant that I was my father’s child and that was that. I believe she would have passed a polygraph.” As for her father, to whom she dedicates the book, Shapiro believes that he may have thought he was her biological father during his wife’s pregnancy but thinks he undoubtedly realized the truth over the years.

“I don’t think he cared,” she says. “I know he loved me, but I think that was part of the knowledge that he carried around.”

So far, she hasn’t uncovered any additional half-siblings besides the children of Ben and his wife. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there are a few out there,” she admits.

Might Inheritance help turn some up?

“I think a lot of people, when they hear the story, will immediately go order a DNA kit,” Shapiro acknowledges. Noting that unlike her, most people make “fairly benign discoveries” with such kits, but the author cautions, “It’s powerful stuff. You have to decide whether you’re open to the potential of a big surprise.”

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Michael Maren.

Dani Shapiro has been thinking about secrets all of her life, exploring the theme repeatedly in five novels and four memoirs. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that she unwittingly uncovered the biggest secret of all: Her beloved, late father wasn’t her biological father.

NonfictionEssays

Pam Houston

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

Pam Houston takes readers to her Colorado ranch in her new memoir, Deep Creek. 

How long did you spend working on this book? How does that compare to your others?
This book took longer than any other book I have written so far. Like every book, it started out fast, and during the first year, I thought, wow, I am going to knock this out in no time. And then I hit the wall I always hit around page 100, but it took me longer to get around the wall with this book. There are a few reasons for that. I had said to myself early on, I am not going to rely on all of my old tricks with this one. God knows what exactly I meant. God knows why I wanted to torture myself that way. I meant something about motion and quick changes. This book was about staying put, and none of my others have been. I kept saying I wanted to write deeply into the tall grass. This book is my most earnest book by far, in a career of fairly earnest books, and I was afraid that earnestness would bore people to death. Without the flash. Without the motion. It took every bit of six years to write. That is two years longer than pretty much all of the others. 

Did this writing process change you? 
Sure. Every book changes me. I told myself I wasn’t going to rely on my old tricks, so I learned some new ones. Or maybe I learned it was OK to be a little more generous with myself, with my thoughts and feelings. Maybe I completed another chapter in the lifelong lesson in how it is better to be kind than cool, less important to be smart than sincere.

What prompted you to begin this self-exploration?
My whole career has been about self-exploration. Every book. This particular self-exploration happened because Alane, my editor, suggested I go on a book-length adventure. She wanted a memoir from me for a change. Not autobiographical fiction. Not something in the middle, as Contents May Have Shifted was. I thought about an adventure. I have always wanted to sail the entire coast of Turkey. I have always wanted to complete a long journey on a dog sled. There were several options. Then one day I was driving home to the ranch after 10 weeks of teaching in California. The drive is 18 hours, and the dogs and I get so happy at hour three, when we get back over to the leashless side of the Sierras. We are elated to be coming home. I got halfway across Utah and thought, wait a minute. The ranch is my book-length adventure. My life-length adventure. This ranch. Sitting still. Becoming responsible for something over the long haul. So I proposed that to Alane, and she accepted. 

Any public self-expression is a vulnerable act, but memoir seems especially so. How do you process this?
Telling the truth, the deepest truth, or as close as I can get to it, has always been my objective, whether the book is called fiction or nonfiction. I honestly don’t see any way to be a writer without being vulnerable, and without telling your most delicate and dangerous truths. I guess I just think of it as the price of admission, and when bad things happen because of it, when I get hurt or threatened or shamed, that is just part of that price. There are a lot of benefits to it, too. Like a really great job and sanity. 

You’ve spent years living part-time on the ranch, part-time on the road, speaking and teaching. Does the split still feed both your desires for metropolitan amenities and connection to the land? 
Yes. As much as I love the land—and I do—I still love an adventure. (I am writing to you from far eastern Uruguay right now, surrounded by Criollo horses, in the middle of a lightning storm.) I also like sushi and bookstores and mass transit. I imagine I will take some version of this split with me to the grave. 

Have your neighbors in your small community read the book? How do you think they’ll feel about it?
I can’t speak for my neighbors. I have read the portions of it to those folks who figure in it directly, and they are OK with how they are portrayed. As for the others, a few of them will like it, and more of them won’t like it, and some of them will ask me, if the book is called “Deep Creek,” why is the dog on the front standing in an inch and a half of water.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Deep Creek.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Pam Houston takes readers to her Colorado ranch in her new memoir, Deep Creek. 

Isaac Mizrahi

Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi discusses his anticipated memoir, I.M., his love of New York City, his favorite designs from his collections, creativity and more.

LiteratureEssaysBlack History

Emily Bernard

Interview by Vanessa Willoughby

Author, professor and academic Emily Bernard answers questions about storytelling, her writing process and the real-life experiences behind the essays in her latest collection, Black Is the Body.

In your introduction to Black Is the Body, you quote the author Zora Neale Hurston. Did her artistic legacy inform or shape the overall narrative of your collection? And if not, who are some of the writers that helped solidify your vision?
Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, as well as her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, excited and inspired me when I first read them many years ago. Throughout her career, Hurston was writing against the grain and defying expectations of what a woman writer—what a woman in general—was supposed to be doing. Their Eyes Were Watching God looks like a love story, but it is really about a woman learning to tell the story of her life. I read it when I was very young, and the deep lesson of that book didn’t occur to me until much later. I didn’t realize how much and how precisely Their Eyes had influenced me and shaped what I was going for in my own book until almost the very end of writing the final draft. What I love about Zora Neale Hurston is her ability and willingness to surprise, which is something she does a lot in her autobiography. Good writing, I think, should surprise the reader. When we get what we expect, we don’t have a chance to consider life in a different way, which is what all meaningful stories should enable us to do.

As both a writer and a reader, how does the act of storytelling provide freedom or resolution from trauma—both personal and generational?
As a child, I watched my mother, who was a poet, use writing as a way to remember, understand and master the past. For me, writing is freedom. Freedom from pain, rage and memories that haunt me. Writing enables me to discover resources of strength that I didn’t even know I had.

I don’t believe that storytelling really provides relief from trauma. I used to think it did. I actually thought writing “Scar Tissue” would dilute, if not completely obliterate, the trauma that I describe in the essay. Years after its publication, however, I was in yet another emergency room facing down another bout of adhesions in my bowel. It had been 10 years since the last hospitalization; I truly thought that I had written myself well. I was wrong. So, I no longer think that writing can provide absolute liberation from pain. What it can do is enable a person to learn to live with pain and transform it into something meaningful.

In the essay “Scar Tissue,” you write, “If my story is about pain, it’s also about rage. Rage is a physical condition.” How does rage, in the aftermath of a tragedy or violent situation, form a lasting scar in either the physical or emotional sense?
Rage is a symptom of helplessness. It’s normal, it’s predictable, it’s human, but it’s not productive in the long run. It can overtake you if you’re not careful and corrode you to the core. Rage helped guide me to the writing of “Scar Tissue,” it’s true. But in the end, I consider the essay a kind of love letter to the entire experience of being a victim of random violence. It is my attempt to honor the rage and offer it a civilized, humane place to live. Writing is a means of confronting rage with love.

Many of your essays touch upon pain—what it means to sit with it and also deal with it head-on. If pain can be weaponized against a victim, how can it be used as a tool on behalf of the victim to seek justice?
One thing I wanted to explore over the course of writing this book is how pain can be utilized, maybe not so much in a search for justice (which is ultimately so subjective) but in a search for truth. As for me, I was satisfied with what happened to the man who stabbed me, but I know that other victims felt that he should have suffered more. Personally, I felt acutely aware that there would never be true vindication because the damage caused by his knife could never be corrected, not really. I did not feel triumphant at his sentencing; I did not feel angry at him. I still don’t. He was sick; 25 years later, that still feels to me like the beginning and the end of the part of the story that involves him. My own pain is my own story. Ultimately, the degree to which it defines me is something I cannot control. Above all, I believe it is important not to let pain shame or silence you.

Your essay “Teaching the N-Word” is a powerful recollection of your attempts to get your all-white honors class at the University of Vermont to say the word in question and the complicated social politics surrounding the word. When responding to Sarah, a student who refuses to say the word, you tell the class, “I’d just like to remind you all that just because a person refuses to say ‘nigger,’ that doesn’t mean that person is not racist.” How does the concept of “wokeness” or “being woke”  contribute to racial politics? What does it reveal about our current political landscape and the way in which America handles race?
I am suspicious of handy terms like “woke” which, like “diversity,” looks like an answer to a problem—the problem of racism—when in fact there is no easy solution. Racism is durable; like a cancer, it adapts to its environment and changes shape over time. Language can’t cure a sickness; racism won’t be eradicated by a term like woke or any term at all. I like that the term has gotten people to aspire to be alive to the problem, but I think there is a huge possibility that becoming fluent in the language of wokeness can lead a person to a sense of self-satisfaction that does nothing toward actual social justice. In so far as wokeness seems to suggest a state of being, it is the polar opposite of action, which is the only way change can be achieved. True and lasting change happens incrementally, through the mundane, puny choices that we make every day.

“Teaching the N-Word” is a study in ambivalence, which is why I tell it in fragments. The spaces in between the episodes are there to give the reader room to imagine and insert their own experiences. Even though the books and articles I bring into class make it impossible to ignore the “n-word,” I am impressed by the students who have a philosophy about why they won’t say it, Sarah in particular. It looks like I want the students to say the word out loud, and maybe I do, but I desperately do not want them to do that at the same time. So much is going on inside of me that I cannot share with the class because I worry it will conflict with the linear aim of teaching, which is to make sure my students have something concrete to take away at the end of class. In my writing, I feel free to tell stories rather than give lectures. Readers will use them how they see fit.

In the essay “Interstates,” food is mentioned as both a way to access familial memories and a way to unite people across different cultures. If there was one dish specific to your family that represents you, what would it be? Why?
I am a little sheepish about answering this question since I still don’t cook well. When I do cook, I wind up serving meals that have no personality. I don’t as much make meals as put a bunch of different ingredients together. Despite my distant relationship with cooking, it is in kitchens and around dining tables that I have experienced heartiest and most intimate relationships of my life. I miss my mother every day, but most piercingly around the holidays. I miss her Thanksgivings; I miss watching her prepare squash casserole with onions and sour cream, and green beans with bacon and almonds. For New Year’s Eve, she would create the Caribbean meals my father grew up with, like ambrosia with Cool Whip and souse, which is pickled pig’s feet. These days, my daughters and I agree that my husband’s broccoli cavatelli brings us all to the table faster than any other meal he prepares for us.

A combination of guilt and stubbornness sends me back to the kitchen periodically, despite my culinary insecurities. The problem is, when I get close to mastering a dish, my husband comes around with his kitchen magic and turns it into something a million times better than what I could come up with.

The title essay, “Black Is the Body,” begins with the line, “My brown daughters became black when they were six years old.” Can you tell me a bit more about what that line means to you? Looking back at your own personal history, was there ever a similar moment for you?
That line captures, for me, what it means to raise my daughters and witness the profound and yet utterly mundane process of their growing up. Writing that essay was a way of accounting for the experience of watching them truly become their own people, making sense of the world in their own language. Eavesdropping as they revealed to each other their growing understanding of what race meant left me feeling exhilarated and sad at the same time. I felt I hadn’t done my job to guide them into the world of race. I had left them to figure it out on their own. But the lessons my elders tried to share with me during my childhood I rejected out of hand immediately, if only because I didn’t want to be told how to understand myself; it was as if they were trying to tell me how to feel about my own body. In the end, in not doing my job maybe I’ve done my job, at least as I see it, which is to allow them the space to define themselves.

The essay “Her Glory” discusses the politics of black hair and what it means to have so-called “good hair.” How does the concept of “good hair” relate to respectability politics and the policing of the black, female body?
It floors me, how many stories are contained on the tops of our heads, particularly when it comes to women, and even more particularly for black women. “Good hair” is a shorthand that I try to avoid using because of the way that it seems to condone an unforgiving standard of beauty. It is a concept that menaced me during my adolescence, another way I knew my body was being evaluated by others. Regrettably, as I got older, I started to make direct connections between the way I put my hair together and the way I thought others would perceive me as a black woman. I’ve recently begun getting my hair braided in cornrows, and it’s a completely liberating experience, more than I expected it to be. For me, it’s a way of turning my back of the burden of respectability politicking.

How do you practice the concept of self-care as a black woman, a writer and an academic?
I think I’m pretty bad at self-care, and I admire others who practice it well. I tend to run headlong into scary things, the same way I do in “Scar Tissue.” I can’t seem to help myself. It is the goal of my life to find a balance, to practice recklessness in a smart and safe way. Writing allows me to lean into fear and pain in a way that is productive and enriching, not only for myself but for other people, or at least I hope so.

What is one major misconception about being a writer that you wish people would understand?
There is no magic to writing, only labor. Well, there’s always magic involved in anything that comes about as the result of love, but just like true love, there are no shortcuts on the road to good writing. It takes time.

Writing is rewriting. It’s a simple lesson, and it’s a lesson that I have to keep relearning every time to sit down to write anything. It is only after I get sentences down on the page that a story begins to emerge, and only then after I’ve made my way through multiple drafts. For me, the terror and anguish that accompany almost every writing effort diminish only after I’ve put in the work. The good news is that if you stick with it, the labor itself can turn out to be the most satisfying part of all.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Black Is the Body.

Author photo by Stephanie Seguino

Author, professor and academic Emily Bernard answers questions about storytelling, her writing process and the real-life experiences behind the essays in her latest collection, Black Is the Body.

Mallory O’Meara

With The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick, horror film producer Mallory O’Meara sets the record straight about the talented and glamorous Milicent Patrick, one of Disney’s first female animators and the only woman to have designed a classic movie monster—the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

NonfictionHistory

Monica L. Smith

Interview by Alden Mudge

Monica L. Smith is an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at UCLA. Her fascinating new book, Cities, looks at the 6,000-year-old phenomenon of urbanism. She draws on her fieldwork at archaeological sites worldwide as well as on scholarship and contemporary observation to produce a thought-provoking look at cities. Naturally, we had some questions.

You say that this book was a lot of fun for you to write. What are the top two or three things that made it so much fun?
First of all, writing the book was a chance to relive many exciting moments that I’ve experienced at the ancient (and modern) cities I have known and loved. And it was possible to go from one to the other in my mind and on the page in ways that wove together a story about continuities and similarities. Secondly, as an archaeologist I’m accustomed to solving puzzles in which there are a lot of missing pieces. Through a comparative approach, even if a piece is missing in any particular ancient city—some cities have historical documents but others don’t, and some cities have been thoroughly excavated while others have not—we can put together an urban picture by creatively examining the parts that are preserved. And searching for images was enjoyable, too, because I found some amazing things in my research like Juan de Solórzano Pereira’s drawing from 1653, in which he fancifully placed eyes on the city walls—300 years before the invention of CCTVs!

You write that your favorite place in Rome is not among the usual tourist sites but instead an ancient trash dump. Where’s the fun in that?
Archaeologists aren’t driven just by the romance of ruins but by the sheer thrill of putting together a story of the past through the bits and pieces that we find. The trash dump of Monte Testaccio is at first glance nothing particularly special, but then you look closely at the hill and realize that the whole thing is made up of potsherds. Just think of all of the wine and olive oil that was shipped and spilled there! There must have been lively chitchat 2,000 years ago about whether Falernian or Sardinian or Cilician wine was best (just like the conversations that you have in your local Trader Joe’s about the relative merits of vintages from France, Italy and Argentina). Another fun aspect is that Monte Testaccio is much less crowded than the usual tourist sites, where it’s sometimes hard to contemplate the past because there are so many people trying to get the perfect angle on a selfie.

You are a professor in UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Yet in this book you more or less sing the praises of consumption and ancient takeout food. Aren’t consumption and sustainability at odds?
That’s a great question, and one that I’ve also been thinking about. As ecologically minded global citizens, our approach to consumption might be all wrong if we try to stop consumption rather than figuring out why we want to consume in the first place. For the past million years, our species has been focused on getting more stuff, which is not an impulse that we are going to be able to stop or turn around very easily. Having “stuff” is a marker of what it means to be human. (Even Marie Kondo isn’t trying to get us to give up all of our stuff but to focus on things that are meaningful and joyous!) As for takeout food, it’s probably more sustainable in terms of food waste than preparing meals at home. Just imagine that you want a kale salad for dinner: If you buy a whole head of kale and a jar of garlic dressing, much of it will go bad in between tonight and your next kale craving. But if a restaurant buys that head of kale, then it will be used up by a whole variety of consumers and thus not go to waste. And takeout food has a certain kind of social justice encoded in it, because of the jobs that enable a vast diversity of people to make a living.

You note that most ancient cities were not built in “paradisiacal locales.” In a nutshell, why do cities seem to prosper in challenging environments?
Most cities are really great for something (like being a trade port or a ski capital or a manufacturing place), but few cities are all-purpose, and some of them are downright illogical in their placement—like New Orleans because of floods or Tokyo because of earthquakes or ancient Rome because of malaria that was at the time endemic to the swampy lowlands of the Tiber. Yet their residents are happy to overlook a city’s deficiencies because other characteristics make it worthwhile to dig out from disaster, over and over again. And once you get a population in a densely occupied area like a city, there are opportunities for new kinds of jobs that keep people there. Richard E. Ocejo (Masters of Craft, Princeton 2018) has recently written about cities in the U.S. that were once manufacturing hubs but have evolved into centers for the knowledge economy (information management, finance and technology). Even though there are “growing pains” such as gentrification associated with those transformations, the cities themselves don’t lose populations and just keep right on going.

You write of humans as migratory beings and of the vibrancy of cities being in part due to their mixture of people and cultures. In what way, if at all, does that shape your opinion of our contemporary debates on refugees and “illegal” immigrants?
Cities are intricately bound up in national discussions of migration and ethnicity around the world. We know that when immigrants can choose their destinations, they tend to head toward cities to maximize their employment and continuing-education opportunities. (Remember that immigrants include professionals as well as manual laborers.) In the U.S., programs of refugee resettlement target cities as places that are already diverse. So we shouldn’t be surprised that cities are front and center for discussions about all types of migration.

At one point, you write that we need an archaeology of the disenfranchised. What would that look like and mean?
Most archaeologists have focused on elite residences, tombs and temples, which makes it appear as though ancient societies were somehow richer or more prosperous than ours. Low-income people and slum dwellers are part and parcel of every urban center in the modern world, and increasing amounts of archaeological research show that they were omnipresent in ancient societies as well. We can study these low-income populations by digging in areas on the “backsides” of fancy houses to find servant quarters and makeshift housing, and by looking at the health and well-being of the whole population as archaeologists in Rome and Mesopotamia have started to do. That research can make us a little uncomfortable with our assumptions about ancient behavior, because mortality profiles and habitual violence as revealed by skeletal evidence show that urban life has always come with haves and have-nots. If we want to combat that trend in our own cities, we have to recognize that we need to work harder on equalizing urban opportunities instead of assuming that everyone will do well on their own.

Most of your current fieldwork is in India. What are you discovering?
Along with my Indian colleague Rabindra Kumar Mohanty and our many faculty collaborators and students, we have been digging at both a large urban center and smaller village sites in eastern India. The village sites are particularly interesting to study because they are quite modest: there are very few consumer goods, and the housing was made of perishable materials like bamboo and thatch. Once the city was started, it seems that people—especially young people!—ran away to the “bright lights” of urbanism where they could experience things that seem very mundane to us now but that would have been new and exciting to them: brick and stone buildings, formal marketplaces where they could get ready-made food, new types of construction work on projects like the mighty city wall and the opportunity to spend their earnings on cheap but stylish trinkets like beads and terracotta ornaments.

You cast many of your descriptions of ancient cities and activities within those cities in surprisingly contemporary terms. Why did you decide to write about the long-ago past in this way?
Actually, it’s the data from the past that provide a compelling first-person realization that people in ancient cities had the same experiences and perspectives that we do. When you read in 2,000-year old poetry from India that “bejewelled dames in sky-high mansions live, whose fine clothes wave about their waists,” you can’t help but think about Beverly Hills. When you read a text from ancient Mesopotamia about 350,000 goats and sheep, you can’t help but think about the Chicago Board of Trade. And when you read about Juvenal complaining that he can’t walk in the street without being bumped by some clumsy guy with a barrel, you can’t help but think about the way that you dodge delivery people on the sidewalk whether you’re in Manhattan, Mumbai or Mombasa.

I’m curious about your observation that “the excess of anxiety is not a flaw of urbanism but a design feature.” How is something unpleasant like anxiety helpful to city life?
Most of the anxiety that we face in cities isn’t necessarily debilitating or unpleasant but simply a result of calculating the benefits of the increased choices of food, work and goods that we have in an urban setting compared to rural places. When we have an examination or a job interview or are simply buying a new appliance or trying out something different for lunch, what we are really doing is engaging in a process of risk and reward as we try to have something “better,” even if we are not quite sure how it is going to work out. In cities our choices are amazingly varied, and at every scale: what neighborhood to live in and what school for your kids, but also, “If I buy those cool shoes, will I finally start running again?” And on a serious note, when we do face significant and debilitating anxieties, there are more facilities and experts to treat them in cities than in the countryside. (Many studies have observed that the suicide rate in rural areas is higher than in cities.)

With our largely interconnected planet today, isn’t almost every person a city-dweller, even if they live in the sticks?
Well, there’s still a difference between being affected by cities (which practically everyone in the world is) and actually living in one. One telling example is the way in which tech companies such as Google and Facebook are sticking with the urban form even though they have to pay much higher prices for office space. If they were being logical about costs, they would locate themselves “in the sticks,” as you say. (They are digital corporations after all!) But instead they are going right into the heart of cities because they want to attract the kinds of workers who thrive on the amenities and diversity that only cities can offer.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Cities.

Monica L. Smith is an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at UCLA. Her fascinating new book, Cities, looks at the 6,000-year-old phenomenon of urbanism. She draws on her fieldwork at sites worldwide as well as on scholarship and contemporary observation to produce a thought-provoking look at cities. Naturally, we had some questions.

Jennifer L. Eberhardt

Stanford University social psychologist Jennifer L. Eberhardt’s enlightening new book, Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the challenging and painful interactions that surround issues of prejudice and racial bias.

NonfictionTrue Crime

Casey Cep

Interview by Alice Cary

Casey Cep discusses her new book, Furious Hours, which explores the true case of an Alabama serial killer who fascinated Harper Lee.

Harper Lee has obviously captured your imagination. What keeps you and so many others fascinated? Do you have any prized possessions related to Harper Lee or her writing?
I think some great works of literature are so widely read and so deeply embedded in a culture that they become a kind of secular scripture, helping us revisit and interrogate our shared values generation after generation. That’s what happened with To Kill a Mockingbird; if anything, the questions it raises about difference and tolerance have become more urgent as our society has become more diverse. I suppose that’s why, despite all the exciting things I uncovered in the course of reporting this book, my most prized possession is still the novel itself.

What was it like for you to first read To Kill a Mockingbird, or “The Bird,” as Lee called it? How old were you? Did you have any idea then how important the book would become in your life? Did publication of Go Set a Watchmen change your attitudes at all?
I first read To Kill a Mockingbird as a kid, and like a lot of tomboys, I identified strongly with Scout. She’s adventurous and brave, but also fiercely intelligent and bookish. My father isn’t a lawyer, but I love him dearly, and although I have two sisters rather than one brother, I was moved by the way that a sibling relationship is so integral to the plot. My parents indulged my love of Mockingbird so much that they got me a pocket watch that I carried around everywhere. If you’d told me all those years ago that I’d be publishing this book, I don’t think I would have believed you; I probably wouldn’t have even believed I’d get to write any book at all, much less one about Harper Lee.

If you could spend a day with Lee, what would you have liked to do? What questions would you ask her?
It’s hard to know whether it would be most revealing to spend a day with Harper Lee in New York or Alabama, the two places she called home, but if it’s Alabama, I’d want to go to church with her in the morning and then take her fishing. She was extremely astute about the role of religion and spirituality in Southern life, and I’d love to sit through a Sunday service with her, but she also loved fishing, and so do I, so then I’d demand that we head to the river to talk about it all. If we met up in New York instead, I’d want to do what she let almost no one do: visit her apartment on the Upper East Side and pore over every single book and scrap of paper inside it.

Why do you think Lee guarded her privacy so fiercely? What might Lee have thought of your book and your research about her?
This is such a central question to any consideration of Lee’s life and work. A lot of writers love publicity and enjoy the attention to their process and persona, but Lee was not one of them. She put up with a few years of interviews and profiles after Mockingbird came out, but then she stopped answering questions about her work. Some people are just private, but in Lee’s case that privacy was almost certainly fueled by her struggles with writing, which were in turn fueled by—and fueled—her struggles with perfectionism, addiction and identity. There’s a letter of hers I quote in the book in which she says, “Harper Lee thrives, but at the expense of Nelle,” and I found that notion of a split self to be heartbreaking. I doubt that Harper Lee would have been happy to know I was looking into her life, but I hope she would be pleased by the result: a book that takes her seriously as a writer and an intellectual.

The true crime story that Lee hoped to write―about Reverend Willie Maxwell, accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in Alabama in the 1970s―is a wild, convoluted and fascinating saga. What do you think most prevented Lee from completing her book? Was it because, as she noted, “I do not have enough hard facts about the actual crimes for a book-length account”?
It’s true that some of the facts of the Maxwell case were hard to come by, even back then, but plenty of great books have been made from a lot less, so I don’t think a shortage of information was the only thing stymieing Lee. In addition to her general struggles with writing, she also felt pressure from her agent to write something pulpy, from her publisher to produce a bestseller, and from her fans to produce another wholesome novel—incompatible goals that she never found a way to square with each other, let alone with her own vision for the book. I definitely worried at the start of Furious Hours that I was a fool for thinking I could write the book that Harper Lee never could, but then I realized I was writing the book she never would: a version of the Maxwell case that included her own story.

Did she confer with Truman Capote about the Reverend Maxwell story?
Certainly In Cold Blood must have been on her mind as she researched and wrote. Might worries about comparisons between the two stories have paralyzed her? One of the great losses to literary history is that, so far, no letters between Lee and Capote have ever been found. They almost certainly exchanged them—not only as children after he left Monroeville but when she first moved to New York and in all the decades that followed—but not a single one has turned up, so we don’t know what, if anything, they said to each other about the Maxwell case or anything else. Some other letters of hers reveal how critical she was of In Cold Blood, so she probably wouldn’t have been asking Capote for reporting advice, but I do think his book helped clarify for her what kind she wanted to write: one that stuck scrupulously to the facts. And there’s no doubt that her work on The Reverend would’ve brought back memories of their time together in Kansas and that, partly thanks to that time, she knew exactly what to do when she started reporting her own true crime project.

For all who love To Kill a Mockingbird so much, it’s heartbreaking that Lee didn’t publish more. She led a busy life, it seems, and an interesting one divided between Alabama and New York City. You write that she struggled with alcohol, and she seems to have had many lonely moments as well. Can you speculate whether she was happy? Did it bother her not to publish more?
I want to say first that lonely moments are a really interesting and possibly necessary experience for a writer. Good writing comes when a writer sets herself to the task of thinking carefully and quietly and often in solitude about some idea or problem. One can have friendships across great distances and nurture relationships without being in constant contact; that feels countercultural in a hyper-connected society like ours, but I don’t think that being alone, even for considerable amounts of time, and even sometimes at a certain psychic cost, is necessarily a problem. That said, such moments can obviously become too numerous or too costly, and someone very close to Harper Lee described the years that she was working on this true crime project as “dark times.” So she definitely did have periods in her life when her deep desire to produce art made her unhappy and encouraged her most destructive habits and tendencies. But her sisters and extended family tried hard to watch over her, and she had a few close friends in New York who helped companion her through these difficult periods. It’s also clear that, in ways I think few people really understand, Lee was a genuine intellectual, and her correspondence reveals a real delight in reading and thinking—gifts she brought to a small circle of friends and family even if she never again figured out how to share them with the wider world.

There are rumors that Lee kept a diary. Thoughts?
Don’t I wish! A few people told me that she did, but whenever I asked her family or close friends about the possibility, they laughed and then sighed. Those who knew Lee well scoffed at the idea that she would ever have written down her thoughts and feelings in a way that could one day be made public, but they also noted how therapeutic such an exercise in self-examination would have been for someone otherwise so resistant to introspection. I share that feeling, but I also wish that she’d kept a diary for posterity’s sake, or written her own memoirs, since there are so many questions about her life and work for which we’d all love to know the answers.

Has anyone (or anything) else caught your fancy as much as Lee? Are you tracking down any other literary mysteries or recluses?
This is such a lovely way of asking the question of what comes next but also such a keen way of describing Furious Hours. It’s a book that, like its author, is obsessed with mystery and secrecy and the knowability or unknowability of any given person, event or idea. That said, I’m also obsessed with suspense, so I think I’ll leave the question of what comes next unanswered, although I hope it’s a story as incredible as this one!

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Furious Hours.

Author photo by Kathryn Shulz

Casey Cep discusses her new book, Furious Hours, which explores the true case of an Alabama serial killer who fascinated Harper Lee.

NonfictionHumorEssays

Kathleen Hale

Interview by Carla Jean Whitley

Kathleen Hale isn’t hiding from the controversy that inspired the title of her new essay collection, Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker. When she published her essay “Catfish” in The Guardian in 2014—about stalking a Goodreads reviewer who gave her book a one-star review and exposing the reviewer as someone using a false identity online—it inspired a wave of online criticism that led Hale to quit the internet for good. Now, with the release of her first book since those events, we asked her some questions about mental health, the “toxic hellscape” of the internet and how to keep writing when your every word is being scrutinized.

I noticed that the version of “Catfish” that appears in this book has a different ending than the version that originally appeared in The Guardian. This ending is more vulnerable; it gives more details about your stay in the psychiatric hospital following the essay’s blowback and delves into the ramifications for your mental health. Do you hope the new ending will give people a fuller view of the story? How do you hope they will respond?
The new ending is the linchpin to my essay’s original thesis, which is that the internet and in particular social media breed psychosis. I might have been an extreme case. But I feel like my case is on a continuum with what non-mentally ill people experience.

Four years removed from the essay’s original publication, how do you feel about it now? Has that changed at all over the years? 
It’s more obvious now than it was in 2014 that the internet is a toxic hellscape. Since then we have literally elected an internet troll as our president, which says a lot about the power trolls wield on Twitter, and social media has ruined lots of lives. People born in the 2000s seem to have a healthy distrust of things like Facebook. I realize looking back at myself how unsophisticated and naive I was. I got sucked into the internet, and it made me go crazy.

Has this experience—and the critique that is resurfacing now, with this book’s publication—affected how you interact with social media and the internet as a whole?
Very much so. I’m no longer on social media. I don’t write for free. And I don’t read what other people write about me, which has made me saner and a lot more productive.

Has this experience affected your view of “cancel culture”? How so?
I was at a party the other day and someone asked, “Has anyone read XYZ?”—some article online that was apparently controversial. And the first thing people asked was, “No, what are people saying about it?” I find that fascinating: that the first question is not about the work itself but about its reception. That is a very post-Zuckerberg phenomenon.

Though “Catfish” is already generating a lot of attention, it’s not the only essay in which you're vulnerable. What motivates you to continue to reveal yourself in this way?
During the recession in the early 2000s, women’s personal essays were referred to as “confessional essays” and were some of the only things I could get paid to write. During that time I published a ton of essays that really embarrass me now, because they’re revealing to no end. But under more ideal circumstances, I try very hard to differentiate between “secrets” and “story,” and to only pick those “confessions” that drive the story forward.

My hope is that the six essays in this collection productively harness revelatory details. They have been revised since their original publications to knit together a story of insanity in my 20s, which is only a phase if you survive it, and my desire to seek out the external danger that mirrored my internal experience.

But the collection is also a swan song to my 20s, and to memoir writing in general, in the sense that I don’t think I’ll ever write about myself again, at least not like this. Six good essays over eight years simply isn’t good math. And ironically, it turns out that I’m a pretty private person. It’s a Catch-22: part of the creative process naturally involves sharing one’s work with other people. But I’m shy, so there’s also desire to hide, or remain pseudonymous, which is a right that is still enjoyed by trolls but no longer afforded to artists.

Do you have a response for those who question why someone who harassed a book reviewer should have the opportunity to continue publishing?
I think the essay shocked people in part because we like to think that what we do and say online has no repercussions for us whatsoever. But what if the owner of that restaurant we smeared on Yelp, under multiple user names, lowering its overall rating to, say, 2 out of 5, all because the hostess had a “bitchy” demeanor, showed up at our front door? Nobody wants that. That’s scary. But is it fear we feel when the restaurant owner rings our bell, or an unwelcome sense of responsibility for our online conduct? Maybe it’s a little of both.

What do you hope readers, skeptics or otherwise, take from this collection?
After dealing with some very dedicated internet trolls, who’ve been with me now for nearly five years (happy anniversary), I began to realize that I couldn’t effectively sit down and try to tell a story while simultaneously trying to gauge or mitigate potential backlash to it. This collection contains honest essays about my life, which obviously opens me up to scathing analysis about how I lead my life. But allowing myself to hope that “readers, skeptics or otherwise” take it the right way spins me out of sorts and hurts my productivity. The way I’ve survived since getting offline is by thinking, “My job is just to write,” and now that the collection has been published, I must move on to the next thing.

Sometimes you juxtapose one subject with another, as in “Cricket,” in which you write about the Miss America pageant and a woman who overdoses in a bathroom. What does your writing process look like, and how does it allow these seemingly disparate concepts to come together in your mind?
Disparate concepts are always coming together in my mind because I have mental illness. As a writer, I try to weed out the random thoughts from the relevant ones and string the latter batch together into a narrative that isn’t boring.

You seem to be drawn to unusual or difficult subjects in general, such as the community of environmentally ill people in Snowflake, Arizona. What prompts this curiosity?
I can’t take credit for coming up with the idea for the Snowflake essay—that one belongs to Mae Ryan, an amazingly talented filmmaker who had pitched the story to The Guardian and was originally going to report it with Jon Ronson, but he couldn’t make it, so they called me. It was one of my first real gigs after getting out of the psych hospital, and I found the experience so refreshing, because it allowed me to write about a community of people suffering in ways I could relate to, while also taking a break from being a main character in my own stories. Susie and Deb were fascinating people and generous hosts. I can’t thank Mae enough for finding them and letting me tag along. The whole experience really seeded my current interest in writing exclusively about other people.

Though you’ve published a number of essays, this collection is a genre shift as far as your books go. Do you anticipate continuing in young adult fiction?
No, my career in young adult fiction is over. No YA publisher will work with me out of fear of offending my anonymous online critics/trolls. I still get to write professionally about teenagers, but it’s always for television and film, where I can remain anonymous. I love it.

You address mental health several times throughout this collection, including mention of a psychiatric hospital visit that followed the incident from which the book takes its title. How has your own mental health journey continued since that time?
Perhaps in another five years, when a decade has passed since I published something “inappropriate” online and caused a minor uproar on Twitter, I’ll finally be known for something other than an essay that landed me in a mental hospital. That said, it’s a pretty good story, and the title of my collection, Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker, is clearly in part a callout to that story. But the title also refers to the theme of predation that unites all six essays and to the gaslighting that women endure in a sexist society that recapitulates female aggression as insanity. In my case, however, the word “crazy” is absolutely true, and I own it completely! I am crazy. The internet drove me crazy.

How are you caring for yourself surrounding this book release, as people critique your publisher’s decision to publish it and you personally?
I stay offline and sit down at my desk in the real world and work on my next thing.

What are you working on now?
In my 20s I was interested in myself. But now that I’m in my 30s, I realize that other people are much more interesting than I am. My next book is a work of nonfiction about an unusual community where something tragic happened. Most people have heard of it. But they don’t know the whole story.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker.

Kathleen Hale discusses mental health, the “toxic hellscape” of the internet and how to keep writing when your every word is being scrutinized.

Tom O’Neill

When the Charles Manson Family murdered five people in August 1969, it was the shocking climax of America’s most chaotic decade. Now, after 20 years of meticulous research, Tom O’Neill reveals that everything we thought we knew about this tragedy is really just the tip of the iceberg.

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