Login
This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
Linda Button| Longreads | July 4, 2023 | 15 minutes (3,167 words)
Momo
She filled our lives with good food,
chutzpah, laughter, and love.
Enh. I could sense Momo looking over my shoulder as I typed, her head wrapped in a bright coral scarf. I was relieved she had put on weight since death. The final month her skin had hung on her, a size too big. She was back to her firm, long-legged self, her dark eyes bright with interest.
“Enh?!” I said.
I like where you’re going, but the words aren’t right.
This was what we had always done for each other—poked and questioned and haggled over art. Still, I felt the pressure of the deadline. “Your husband needs this in four days. I‘ve got to get the ball rolling.”
Momo shrugged. You’re the writer.
What did she know? Inside I harbored a delicious fantasy that my words would cause the audience—Momo’s friends and sisters, her husband, Marty, and their daughter—to ooooh at how I had captured her gusto on a tombstone.
For most of my career I have written ad copy. The work suits me. Constraints. The single page of paper. Brevity. Choose as few words as possible. Let the visuals tell the story. Conjure emotion in compressed space and time. Here, then, was the perfect writing assignment for me. A three- by two-foot billboard. Thirty words, max. My business partner’s epitaph.
But unlike advertising, lofted into the airwaves to evaporate, this project would be carved into granite for eternity. I yearned to create a gravestone that would sing through the ages, that would capture the joie de vivre that was my partner. One year later, Momo’s death still had me reeling. I had worked with her for two decades. I loved her. I considered Marty, her husband of only a few years, a latecomer to the Momo party. Now, for this assignment, he was also the client. He had final say, after all: When it comes to customs of death, spouses top all others. According to Jewish tradition, the time had come to inscribe the grave marker. A literal deadline.
Get the Longreads Top 5 Email
Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
Marty had procrastinated for months. So, at the request of friends, I was pitching in. The final words were due by the end of the week. Could I deliver genius in five days?
Momo was right. The copy was “enh.” I emailed the lines to Marty anyway—She filled our lives with good food, chutzpah, laughter, and love—and hoped he would embrace it.
Momo and I had run an ad agency together. She was a seize-the-day daughter of Holocaust survivors; I was bred from stoic Yankee stock. When our agency dwindled to two, we embraced our differences and renamed the business Tooth and Nail. She, the smile. Me, driving home the point. We spread out giant sheets of paper on her dining room floor for brainstorms, plotted campaigns on her sofa, pilfered images off the internet, fought, competed, stepped over each other’s words, slashed ideas, fretted over stubborn, uninspired clients, and laughed about our men.
In the early days, on train rides home from New York to Boston, Momo would find a table for four and unfurl her coat onto the adjoining seat so no one would join us, while I tucked my backpack around my shoes, not wanting to take an inch more than I had paid for. The coastline scrolled by. She counseled me on my imploding marriage; I marveled over her athletic dating. “Who should I choose?” she asked. “The heart surgeon who’s analytical, or the brain expert who’s all heart?”
“Which one brings you joy?” I knew enough to ask that question. Momo chased pleasure, splurging on business class and nice hotels. She spent far more energy on my happiness than I did. She gifted me photographs of tulips exploding in red and orange, a painting of a woman treading a gray ocean, her nose barely above the surface, as if Momo saw beauty in me but also my struggles. She extended a life raft. She cooked homemade matzoh ball soup steaming with ginger and fennel, she listened deeply, as the best therapists do. I left our conversations feeling both filled and emptied, cleansed and heard.
Finally, she chose Marty, the psychiatrist who strummed classical guitar and wrote her love letters from his neglected house near the shore.
Then, the mammogram revealed a 2.2-centimeter lump. Cue the mastectomies, chemo and radiation, wigs and thinning eyebrows. Momo rejected that as her entire story. For seven years after her diagnosis, Momo made even cancer an adventure. She wrote a blog.
Am I upset over the possibility of losing a breast? Not really. I’ve had a terrific pair for 48 years. My girls have given me and many boys great pleasure.
She treated loss as a punch line, no topic too intimate.
On Monday I took a shower and quickly realized that I won’t be scheduling any bikini waxes in the near future.
In advertising we start with the audience and consider how we want to make them feel. Who would trudge the slope to visit Momo’s gravesite each year? Her loyal circle of friends, surely. Her three older sisters, each a variation of Momo: artistic, smart, empathetic. And, of course, her 13-year-old daughter and round-shouldered Marty, his AirPods filled with classical guitar. I imagined her quiet, sarcastic daughter cresting the hill and I wanted to reward her with a smile, to feel the warmth, sechel, and humor of her mom embracing her.
Amazingly, when I look back, I did not follow my own best practices. I did no research on tombstones, threw out no wide net. I suffered from tunnel vision—exactly what I warn young writers never to do—and got stuck on a single idea. Had I bothered, I would have discovered a wide field of possibilities; it turns out that epitaphs trace the arc of history with tales of society, legacies, and stories of power and love.
From traditional Jewish blessings . . .
“May her soul be bound in the binding of life.”
and Japanese poetry . . .
Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
. . . to good old sardonic American.
Here lies Butch, we planted him raw,
he was quick on the trigger, but slow on the draw.
We could have honored Momo’s philosophy, She was bubbles in the champagne of life, or captured her perseverance: Grit and Grace, or something risqué, pulled from her own blog. “I won’t be scheduling any bikini waxes in the near future.”
I could have offered Marty an array of choices, mocked up what the stone would look like, handed him a scotch, and nudged him in the right direction. Instead, I worried and clung to one idea. Grief stuffed me into a small, hardened box.
I was thinking of something more inspiring.
Marty’s response waited for me the next morning. In advertising, where writing is a team sport, my ego had long ago shrunk to a chickpea. Still. Ouch. He sent examples of quotes he considered inspiring.
“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” —Dr. Seuss
“In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” —Abraham Lincoln
“The pain passes. The beauty remains.” —Renoir
My stomach curdled with disappointment. I hated when clients reached for clichés. Also, I was pretty sure Old Abe never said that. Momo leaned across and squinted at the text. She turned to me with a look between constipation and impatience: What do these dead white guys have to do with a hot, middle-aged diva?
“Right?!” I nodded even though I got where Marty was coming from. When a star collapses and sucks up light and life you need big mother constellations like Abe Lincoln and Dr. Seuss on your side. Marty was crazy in love with Momo. He proposed in her throes of dying and adopted her daughter. Not so crazy.
We’ve published hundreds of original stories, all funded by you — including personal essays, reported features, and reading lists.
But he wasn’t there when Momo first brought her daughter home from China, the same year I gave birth to my youngest child. He hadn’t watched our kids grow up to be best friends. He wasn’t with us, looking down on giant sheets of paper, pulling ideas from the air, creating a company while taking turns with after-school pickup. Where was he when we got The History Channel clients snockered on vodka at a creative presentation on Russian tzars, or when Momo snored through a conference call, and we claimed it was a leaf blower?
My hand hovered over the keyboard. Momo was still making that face. I marshaled my diplomacy and shot a note back to Marty.
The Renoir quote is lovely—haven’t heard it before. How about this:
Momo
She filled our lives with chutzpah, laughter, and love.
“The pain passes. The beauty remains.” —Renoir
Marty didn’t respond. The day ticked by.
In her last month I had wheeled Momo around the block, past her front yard where a gardener friend had fashioned a river of smooth stones. Momo did not admire the curving white through her lawn, or the blaze of yellow leaves outside her windows. She curled inward with pain. Now that it was my turn to lavish her with support and comfort, I had no words. I spoke to her as if to a child. “Isn’t that tree beautiful!”
“Take me home,” she said.
Her office had been turned into a sickroom, a large bed and TV at one end. Her sisters had arrived from Israel, Dominica, and Maine and tightened around her. They filled the kitchen with music, took turns dressing her, served up platters of hummus and opinions. They, and her other friends, somehow understood the rituals of grief, care, and mitzvah. Their religion was seeped in loss and optimism. They practiced simple, concrete gestures. But I didn’t even know what to do with my hands. I felt useless, as if I had gone from insider to outsider. I’ve been here all along, I wanted to say to them. Momo and I, we helped each other. She offered me refuge from my unraveling marriage. I gave her purpose.
The night she passed, I left my phone in the living room. When I woke, messages from her friends and sisters spilled down my screen. Voice mails. Texts. “Come to the hospital!” “Hurry!” I had slept while my friend died.
Another day, nothing.
“He hates it,” I said.
Oh, you know Marty. Momo waved her hand. He’s a BFD at the hospital. He’s probably curing ADHD and seasonal depression.
“After years of pounding me on deadlines, you’re giving him a pass?”
He’s a genius, they need more time.
Ouch, I thought. Double whammy.
The morning of the deadline, my email dinged.
This is what I woke up with at 4 AM:
Mother, wife, negotiator, artist, cook, adventurer.
Forever bold, stylish, and brave.
“The pain passes. The beauty remains.” —Renoir
Thoughts? Marty.
Lists. The final refuge of the desperate, the last gasp of clients when they’d run out of ideas or lacked imagination. Marty had reduced Momo to a string of nouns, adjectives, and commas, as if that defined her. Plus, Wife was the second word?
Momo beamed. Stylish. Adventurer! Marty’s so good with words, isn’t he?
That’s what love does, I muttered to myself. It infuses mediocre writing with sentiment. “He left off sister. Friend!”
Momo frowned. Gotta include them. Maybe we need an extra tall slab. Fit everything in.
I pounded a response on the keyboard.
Oh, those 4am thoughts!
I would add friend, sister, businesswoman . . . and the list gets long. Maybe focus on how she made us feel? xoxo
How did Momo make me feel? She had taught me that moments live in the flickering gold light of a beech tree and a bowl of warm soup. That loss waits for all of us, so we’d better wring happiness from every second. Death had robbed me of my witness, my confidant, the most honest friend I ever had. She never lied to me about my situation. Or herself. How many lovers have you had? I had asked her when I started dating again. She looked off to the corner of the restaurant, counting. “Sixty? Eighty? I had fun.” Would I ever squeeze so much out of life? She left nothing on the table.
What did I give her? My doggedness. My drive. My craving for partnership, as if I was born incomplete. I gave her my standing in the industry. My fierce competitiveness. My soundless, grateful love.
I went to make coffee. Marty’s response waited in my inbox.
It doesn’t work to say how she made us feel. We need to convey who she was. Funny, I left off sister and friend as her middle sister thought that it would be unnecessary, but it’s a key part of who Momo was. I was hoping that negotiator and artist would cover who she was as a businessperson.
Off to the eye doctor.
Ah, he was pulling in Momo’s sisters. A classic zone defense move by the client. I poured contempt onto the page.
New glasses? Hope you’re seeing more clearly now. Give me a call . . .
What do you think, Momo? I looked around the room and discovered her missing. Marty never responded either. But a tombstone deadline does not melt away like some canceled ad campaign.
The morning of the unveiling broke crisp and bright, the kind of April day we long for after the gray length of winter. A brightly colored square, rippling in the sunlight, waited for us. Someone had swathed the tombstone in scarves. The wind lifted the corners, flirting and winking, to reveal edges of letters. What was written there? When I had asked Marty the night before at a gathering in their home, he shrugged and said, “Something like in the email.”
Momo had handpicked her site. Even the year before, as we tipped clumps of earth onto her casket, weeping, we admired the location. It faced a protected edge of the graveyard.
Now, a year later, grass had grown over the mound. The trees plumped with buds and sunlight flickered through new green leaves. The rabbi, a short, bearded man, gestured for us to draw close. Marty stood with their daughter, his arm around her. I expected Momo to leap out from behind the stone and join us.
We each read something. I had to borrow a quote that morning, too overwhelmed to think. Words. All my life I have wrestled with, debated, and polished them. But how much had they ever mattered? Momo’s sisters approached the stone and unfastened the tape that secured the scarves. My shoulders tensed and my hand squeezed a damp Kleenex in my pocket. As the coral silks pulled away, the epitaph revealed itself from the bottom up. The words were indistinct, unreadable, and I cursed the stonecutter. Then I pushed the tears from my eyes and read the final, stubborn, unfixable inscription.
Momo
Mother. Wife. Sister. Friend.
Negotiator. Artist. Cook. Adventurer.
Forever Bold, Stylish, and Brave.
“The pain passes. The Beauty remains” —Renoir.
November 4, 1958–October 25, 2013
Every word rang true, but they read like a catalog. Writing, I have realized, reflects the writer, not the subject. The tombstone embodied Marty: conflict-averse, hoping to placate everyone. The list did not add up to Momo. I had yearned for bolder art, and my failure said something about me too. I deferred to Marty instead of seizing the moment and creating art worthy of this woman, if that was even possible.
Loss had yawned over me the past year with daily reminders of my friend. The plants she had bequeathed to me, now gasping for water, hung from my ceiling; my phone became a minefield of photos and buried emails. I would rifle through contracts or sort through our old projects and feel fresh pinpricks of grief. I turned funny tales from our partnership over until they became smooth, comforting stones in my palm.
I had tried to find another business partner. I needed someone else, I knew that, to keep me from spinning tighter into self-criticism, to slow down and let my feelings catch up, to find happiness for myself, as she had taught me. I even met with a consultant who listened carefully over bad hotel coffee and said “You’re lucky if you get one or two partners like that in a lifetime. Don’t try to replace her—go out and seek many people.” So I found designers, producers, and accountants to help me run the business. I began a relationship with a kind man. Each person filled a hole in my life but, like the litany on the tombstone, couldn’t capture what I had lost. Death had rubbed its heel squarely on what vibrated and flourished between us, ending the world Momo lived in, of possibility, her quicksilver wit, the warmth that rose from her, her push to seek out new adventures.
I closed my eyes and imagined going home and calling Momo and telling her about this day, where we sang songs and prayed and grieved both privately and as a chorus. The group murmured on either side of me. The edge of a cold breeze snuck down my collar. I folded my arms and held myself tighter.
Ach!
“Momo?”
What’s with the waterworks? Life is waiting for you down the hill, my dear.
I never visit Momo’s gravesite, nor do I want to. She sits next to me when I labor over a script or edit a commercial, and even now, as I try to craft this memory of her. I did not have the right words to say to her in her final weeks. I could not conjure poetry for her at her service. My words failed me then, they fail me still, and I keep trying. I want to breathe life back into the shining energy that filled my days. I want to make Momo alive for you on this simple piece of paper.
Do words matter? I visit Momo’s blog and linger over her final post, written weeks before she died. The stamp of that last date floats farther away from me, but the words still leave fresh yearning.
Seven years of debilitating treatments, anxious scan results, and the occasional self-diagnosis. It’s a lot to go through to drop a few pounds. Seven very precious years spent with my magnificent husband, my daughter and stellar friends. Seven years going on eight years with nine years in reach and ten years hardly a stretch.
Knowing all that and still, I live like there is no tomorrow.
Linda Button is a storyteller and writer for a large non-profit. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Magazine, PBS, and elsewhere. Her memoir-in-progress, Fight Song, explores mental illness, martial arts and learning to let go, despite love.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy Editor: Peter Rubin
In this interview, Amanda Petrusich talks with Nick Cave about grief, resilience, religion, music, and Faith, Hope and Carnage, a book based on his conversations with journalist Seán O’Hagan. Sure, these are topics you’d expect in a Q&A with the Australian singer-songwriter, but that doesn’t make it any less rich or moving. I like their exchange about channeling spirituality or some kind of “enigmatic otherness” when making music, and dealing with loss over time, which Cave says gives us a deeper understanding of being human. His thoughts on AI, ChatGPT, and art also bring music to my ears.
Art has to do with our limitations, our frailties, and our faults as human beings. It’s the distance we can travel away from our own frailties. That’s what is so awesome about art: that we deeply flawed creatures can sometimes do extraordinary things. A.I. just doesn’t have any of that stuff going on. Ultimately, it has no limitations, so therefore can’t inhabit the true transcendent artistic experience. It has nothing to transcend! It feels like such a mockery of what it is to be human. A.I. may very well save the world, but it can’t save our souls. That’s what true art is for. That’s the difference. So, I don’t know, in my humble opinion ChatGPT should just fuck off and leave songwriting alone.
In this lovely essay at The Millions, Aidan Ryan explores his editing process, and the abandoned, unused writing that he’s accumulated and compiled into a “Miscellaneous” document over the years. Ryan shares inspiring examples of how authors write, build their worlds and the stories of their lives, and continue to draw from and tap into existing work as if dipping into a vat of bread starter. In an anecdote about playing with Legos as a child, he beautifully describes how he liked to tell stories with all of his toys and figurines, from different universes — “I was only interested in the story of everything.” This sentiment is reflected in his insights on writing and editing, but also waiting — the act of putting language aside, but still keeping it close, so that “everything remain[s] possible.”
I think about a folder in the cloud, the one called “Writing.” And the folders within it, branching universes: “Poems” and “Essays,” and within that “Outtakes,” and within that the file called “Miscellaneous,” now over a hundred pages. And I think of the stories that as a child I told and retold in bright plastic—before I found a world of words that I never had to pack away.
This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
Jessica L. Pavia | Longreads | February 21, 2023 | 20 minutes (5,721 words)
I spent most of my time in his room. Every day the same routine: 15 minutes before the bell rang, 45 at the end of the day. My excuse at first was that I didn’t have many friends. Good friends. But that wasn’t true. Entirely.
When I found myself in his class, the side effects of several friendless, depressive years still clung to my skin. The pull of his bright room, the shining praise he left on my papers, called to the deep aches within me. So I made up excuses for seeing T., my English teacher.
It was my junior year and I was trying to figure out what I wanted, and how to get it. In the mornings, T. and I talked about our previous days, the books we were reading, or the upcoming lesson. I’d meander around his room, glance at photos hanging on his wall, and ask about inside jokes from previous classes written on torn paper pierced onto cork boards. I found out he sang and played guitar in a band with another English teacher, and I made an internal promise to stumble into the bar they played in once I turned 21. We’d glance at each other from across the room, me cradling an emptying beer to prove my age, and we would know: Time had caught up, we could be together.
I wore knee-high socks and short plaid skirts, having stumbled around Tumblr the night before, beginning to idolize Lana Del Rey, Lolita, and nymphs; beginning to follow every blog tagged #teachercrushcommunity or #tcc, accounts with names like youaremyfavoritesubject, teachercrush-tcc, teachersthough.
I read students from around the world recounting their school day, or writing fantasy stories about themselves and their teacher crush. I saw GIFs of teachers smiling down at students chewing on pencils. One user commented: “THIS IS HOW BEN AND I HAVE EYE CONTACT MOST OF THE TIME WHEN HE’S IN FRONT OF CLASS SITTING DOWN.”
Sometimes, I considered writing about T.
*Some names have been changed.
My closest friend at the time was Kayla*. We had met years ago, at the snack shop while our brothers played baseball in the background, but I never remembered that. I knew her from eighth grade when we shared English, creative writing, and art classes together. The latter where we talked about Once Upon A Time and doodled hearts around our names alongside the characters’. Creative writing where we wrote into each other’s stories, each other’s universes.
By junior year, she had a deep crush on M., another English teacher up the stairs from T. She talked about him ceaselessly — at lunch, during rehearsal, all night over the phone.
At first, I thought she was deluding herself. The whole thing a disgusting fantasy. I could barely stand, in fact, sitting through lunch period with her going on about M.’s eyes or the way he stood next to her in the hallway.
But she was persistent, and eventually, I bought into it.
I bought into it because I liked having a secret, and loved having a crush. I reveled in the weight of it all, in how risky this business was. I enjoyed the game of seducing T. — the only way I knew how as a junior: Be kind, be interested, be smart. But the biggest reason was T.’s affirmations, which I sucked up like a sponge, how he made me feel smart and seen. He had a soft face and body; he talked about things I liked.
So now, when lunch came, we rushed through the crowd to nestle together at our table and share updates. Kayla was always more open than me, not even looking around the cafeteria to see who could be listening, never checking to make sure M. wasn’t lunch monitor that day, never bothering to use the code names we created.
By junior year, she had a deep crush on M., another English teacher up the stairs from T. She talked about him ceaselessly — at lunch, during rehearsal, all night over the phone.
We obsessed over stolen glances. The moments when T., sitting at his desk — brown hair and stubbly chin, his broad shoulders hunched over his laptop — would suddenly look up and catch my eye from across the room. How I would smile slightly, foot bouncing up and down beneath my desk.
Kayla and I swore up and down that M. and T. could read our minds, knew how infatuated we were, knew we were different, were artists.
We were being so obvious. Speaking with our eyes, our bodies. If they hadn’t said anything, hadn’t turned us down by now, it meant they definitely liked us back. They knew we were different — some invisible pulsation moving from their hearts to ours, begging us to recognize their deafening love, their painful lust, their desire to know us deeper than we knew ourselves. We relished that silence. But I’m not sure how harmless it was.
Our reading partnership began with me giving T. creative pieces I was working on — essays or poems I scribbled into notebooks and called art — while our class was preoccupied with The Great Gatsby, Macbeth, and The Stranger. At that point, I was in a separate creative writing class, but I reserved certain bits just for him.
And he did the same, for me.
Staying after, besides a few students coming in and out to ask questions about their next class, it was just us. I always started in my seat on the opposite side of the room, but without fail I would begin wandering around, making it seem aimless and random. Tilting my head to the side, acting as if something got my attention. Only to land at the table and chair just inches from his desk.
T. would return a piece of mine, something about a boy who didn’t exist, or a boy who was secretly him. He usually took a few days to read and leave notes, sometimes just a night. The days we got to talk about my work were my favorite. Instead of me taking up his time and space, T. invited me to his room after the final bell. There, I’d pull my chair up beside his large dark desk as he pulled in tight around the corner, his body leaning over the pages in front of him, a red pen in hand. I basked in the time, the effort, the generosity he spent on each line, each scene, each metaphor. He was so purposeful in what he said and how he said it. I knew he really meant it — had taken the time because my writing was worthy of it. I was worthy.
“I have something for you to look at,” he told me once. “But it’s really rough.”
My heart started racing with ideas of what it could be. Half-formed thoughts of a short story where we end up together. Maybe a poem or two about some mysterious woman with short brown hair and dark eyes.
Instead, he talked about his novel, following two brothers from a mining town beginning to cave in on itself. Set years after the gold rush, the brothers find some artifact in an old building, and then the story bounced between two timelines: that of the boys in their town sinking to the core of the earth, and the artifact, a throwback to the town’s most glorious days.
He swiveled on his desk chair and pulled out the thick manuscript, bound together with the largest paperclip I had ever seen. When he handed it to me, I expected the pages to fall heavily into my palm. Instead, I felt our fingers brush past each other as the weight transferred from his large hands into mine, my skin tingling at the contact that proved it was possible to get more. I wanted more. I was hungry for more.
My friendship with Kayla was often subconsciously performative. We based our personalities on images of Lana Del Rey; the short white dresses, the dirty knees, the angled liner, the ruffled white socks. When Kayla came over to my house we put on red lipstick and sucked red lollipops. We opened one of the windows in my bedroom and sat on the roof outside. She grabbed my Polaroid camera as I placed the Born to Die album on my 2014 record player. We sang about loving older men who were addicted to drugs but held us gently. Who would die for us. We growled out lyrics begging these men to kiss us hard in the pouring rain, toying with them, saying they like their girls insane. Kayla and I turned to Tumblr to find others like us, sent each other images of gauzy dresses revealing high-rise white panties, found poems about fucking in apple orchards, and reveled in them.
Out on my roof, our bright lips developed first on the Polaroids, then our tongues, red from the candy. We put our hair in pigtails. Kayla picked out quotes from Lolita, a book we hadn’t even read yet, and recited them like gospel: “You have to be an artist and a madman … in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs … the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.”
Kayla told me we were artists, that we had fantastic power; that we were deadly demons among our peers. That we knew more about romance and those delicious tremors of grown-up life. And she said that T. and M. were artists, too.
When the clock hit 2:15 p.m., I found my way back into his room. Every once in a while, T. took advantage of my presence, keeping me busy organizing books or helping with lesson plans. Once, when restacking, I stumbled upon a dirty white cover with colorful lines slashing up the left corner, The Catcher in the Rye. Pages were beginning to fall out and become oxidized, but I recognized the title from somewhere deep down in my body.
Kayla and I turned to Tumblr to find others like us, sent each other images of gauzy dresses revealing high-rise white panties, found poems about fucking in apple orchards, and reveled in them.
I was bringing the book over to my desk when another student walked in. T. had left to return books to a teacher upstairs. I looked at this student as she told me about a poetry quiz; T. had said some students might be coming in and told me where the quizzes were. I nodded my head, told her to sit, shuffled through the white pages until we found the right one. I gave it to her and sat down in the front of the room.
Then other students started coming in to grab summer reads. I told them to sign out the books on a sheet. When the student was done with her quiz, I put it on a new pile on T.’s desk. I kept signing out books and handing out quizzes, waiting for him to return. At the same time, a new confidence in myself — in my leadership — peeked out from the shadows.
When everyone left, I took back Catcher and plopped on top of his tall spinning chair, feeling proud of myself. Finally, he returned, apologizing profusely for taking so long. I explained all that happened and he looked at me, in his gray Friday crew neck shirt — a favorite because it was thin and I got to see lines and mounds and turns underneath — and said: “Well aren’t you like my little secretary.”
I stopped spinning on the chair. I got warm and fuzzy inside and felt something sort of tighten beneath my skirt. Just the day before he had called me to his desk and told me I knew how to write, to stop freaking out about it.
“You’re like a little woodland creature that feels isolated, scared sometimes, and overthinks too much. But you shouldn’t, because you’re good at writing. You should be confident,” he told me.
Later that night, I wrote everything down. And suddenly, because I couldn’t help myself, I ran away with it, writing: “He makes me so happy, but there’s so much danger attached to being with him. And I really don’t want to ruin his life. More than anything, I just really enjoy having someone to talk to, who enjoys my company. And I just really, really want to hug him and feel his caring and understanding hands around my back, feeling my entire body go warm in his grasp.”
The next day, back in his room, I asked T. if he ever read Catcher in the Rye. He shrugged, said it was overrated. Even still, he walked over to the bookshelves and grabbed the same off-white paperback. “Maybe you’ll get something from it that I didn’t,” he said. But as I read it, I too didn’t like it. I kept thinking I was missing something, not reading it right. Holden was dull and apathetic — the language boring, lacking lyricism and poetry, every word landing with a thump. No tidy ending wrapped up with a bow.
I felt so much all the time, was preoccupied with everything meaning something, but Holden just walked. And seemed to never stop. He carried his past with him, on and on, wherever he went. It was the last thing I wanted to see. At some point between giving me Catcher and before I slogged through it, T. asked to talk after class. When the bell rang, I headed to his desk. “I read your essay,” he said. He meant a short story I wrote about a young girl with an eating disorder who’d been hospitalized, sick from obsessing over the way she could escape her body and mind. My anxiety and depression were known to only ever come out in my writing, infiltrating my themes and settings, notebooks of scrawled poetry about wanting to die. Even when I hesitated to reveal how dark things had gotten to myself, I couldn’t hide it on paper. Without meaning to, I manifested these neuroses into something more tangible, physical.
I thanked him.
“It was very well done but I have to ask, is everything okay?”
I wanted to say yes and no. No, things aren’t okay. I cry in the shower every night, my parents don’t care. Yes, because I have you, and having you means I have a reason to write, to feel good about myself, to feel good about my writing, to keep coming to school. I wanted to say I did everything to please him.
But instead, I told him it was inspired by a television show. I couldn’t shatter the fantasy I’d built around us by admitting no, actually, something was broken in me. “Everything’s fine,” I told him.
I still have a few of the emails T. and I exchanged. Most, if not all, I sent using my personal email, hoping it would offer a veil of anonymity. I had seen it work in Molly Maxwell, a Canadian film I steadily became obsessed with. I don’t think I ever realized he used his school one.
We’ve published hundreds of original stories, all funded by you — including personal essays, reported features, and reading lists.
Going through the emails again, I’m both appalled and embarrassed by myself. My tone drips with desire for his approval. I sent him three messages in a row explaining how I pretended to die after my journalism teacher said I shouldn’t have used personal pronouns in my final’s essay. Then in a separate email, he said that from what he had heard, I had the 100 percent in the bag — which I took to mean he was thinking about me on his own, asking for my grades without instigation. In the next email, I am ecstatic, writing in all caps and thanking him profusely.
One still makes my heart flutter, my pulse quicken. It’s from March 14, 2015, at 12:53 p.m. It reads: “I should be done with your story by the last bell if you want to talk about it — you should be very proud.”
Though he never took advantage of my lead, he played his part, too. He never told me to stop. Never told me I was being inappropriate in my advances, in my clear obsession. I finally see he loved the attention, too.
Last day of classes, junior year, I couldn’t bring myself to leave his room. While other students barely held their excitement together, skin itching for summer break, all I thought about was how I wouldn’t be able to use our lesson, or an upcoming vocab quiz, as an excuse for retreating into his classroom. I studied his broad shoulders and towering height, his pressed blue-checked button-downs and light beige khaki pants, his brown belt, and breaking sneakers — soon to no longer be in my daily vision — and felt a deep emptiness inside. I wondered if he felt the same. If that day held as much dread for him as it did for me.
I asked T. to sign my yearbook. Deep down I expected a proclamation of love, having convinced myself the only reason why he hadn’t reciprocated my gestures was that I was his student. I wondered, now that I would be a senior, would he be free to say what he wanted? I hoped what he wanted was me.
As I waited for him to scribble something romantic, I plopped myself on the spinning stool behind his podium and looked out to where I normally sat: second row, two desks in from the left-side windows. I thought of all the times I bit the end of my pen, toyed with him, tried to get him to blush and maybe even get hard. Begged him to notice me, see me, love me. I thought of slowly crossing my legs in my short skirts, raising my hand after every question, thinking I was proving my maturity despite my age.
He finished my yearbook and walked over to me. Rotating back and forth, back and forth, left and right on the stool, I imagined him pulling me in for a kiss, me touching the small of his back, him removing me from the stool and pushing me up against the wall. Instead, he grabbed a whiteboard eraser and began removing any last remnant of the year. But he was so close to me as I turned left and right, left and right; each nudge moved me closer and closer to where he stood behind me. I could nearly feel his hair in the wind I created, pushing the stool as far as it could go, knowing I could brush his arm if I got over far enough. And he didn’t move away; he didn’t do anything. His back faced me, but he was so close I could smell him. Later that night, alone in my room, I opened my yearbook. On the entirely blank page I had left for his words, I found a small note, barely taking up the left-hand corner.
“You were a great student this semester,” he wrote. “Make sure to come visit!”
I read over the minuscule text again and again, searching for what wasn’t there. That’s it? I asked myself. Even if he didn’t love me back, surely I deserved more recognition than that. Didn’t I?
Senior year, Kayla and I were in the same advanced English class. We spent most of our time talking about the way M. looked at her differently yesterday. About how his request for her to water his plants was obviously a declaration of his trust in her, a trust beyond teacher and student. (“He wouldn’t ask just anyone!”) We ignored the immature giggles at lunch coming from Anthony and Claire, saying that M. was gay and Kayla was wasting her time. Sometimes when he monitored lunch, Kayla and I were convinced he stood near our table on purpose.
I imagined him pulling me in for a kiss, me touching the small of his back, him removing me from the stool and pushing me up against the wall.
A favorite topic was the day Kayla sat on top of a desk in M.’s class after school, leaning over toward him behind the podium. She kicked her feet lazily while I watched from behind the door, ready to inform her of every stolen glance she missed once their meeting ended. When she walked out, we clasped hands and ran down the hall, singing praises of how well she seduced him, had captured his attention.
In class, we were assigned to write about a book turned into a movie. We scoured the internet for age-gap films, which wasn’t hard, and stumbled onto The Babysitter (1995), An Education (2009), Palo Alto (2013), Magic in the Moonlight (2014), and Pretty Baby (1978). We idolized the relationship between Ezra, a high school English teacher, and Aria Montgomery, his student, in Pretty Little Liars, asking the universe what we had to do for that to happen to us.
Unsurprisingly, we decided to write our essay on Lolita for the assignment. The first step: getting our hands on the book, which felt dangerous, maybe even wrong. Dressed in our most darling outfits we made our way to the bookstore. With the sweet taste of doing something salacious, we snuck around the shelves, nearly begging one of the male clerks to ask us what we were looking for. After half an hour of searching, we were about to give up before finding that iconic cover of baby-soft pink lips nestled next to other “Summer Beach Reads.” We found this incredibly funny, made jokes about it for weeks to come: “Ah, yes, my favorite beach read, young girl has an affair with an older man, who is also her stepfather. Sounds like my ideal summer read.”
We watched the film together, more than once. I began to find myself no longer romanticizing the story and felt nervous to tell Kayla. She was still holding onto the love story and it felt dangerous to admit I wasn’t. Here was the one person who understood me. Was I really going to isolate the both of us? We were artists, after all. Like Humbert said: Together against the world.
But something in the film didn’t hit right. That final scene, maybe. Or when Dolores finds out her mother has died and her sobs ricochet through the motel walls; retainer in, oversized pajamas, hair falling out of cloth-rolled curls. Her face twisted and unrecognizable she doesn’t look like a kid anymore, but she certainly doesn’t look like a woman. Perhaps the turning point was in Humbert’s narration, “You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.” Or later on, when he says she died in childbirth — a child she would never have had if he hadn’t stolen her, never molested her. Because he never gave her a choice. Those scenes were switches.
My final essay focused on how Humbert created a Dolores he wanted us, as readers and jury, to believe in. A Lo that desired his love and advances. We never actually know what she wants in the book because we can’t see her. Humbert is able to hide her behind the words on the page, behind her silence. But the movie gives us clarity through her physicality — the sadness in her face, the bags under her eyes, all the moments she pushes him away only to come back. A young girl without a mother, in need of even a false safety.
Whenever Kayla asked me about the paper, I made it sound less condemning. But inside, I knew I didn’t want this story for myself anymore. I watched the movie and felt a dip in my stomach. I saw Dolores for who she truly was: a 14-year-old girl. A scared girl. A kidnapped girl. I didn’t want to be lied to, stolen, raped, abused. I wanted independence and autonomy.
And yet I still snuck into T.’s classroom, still spun into his doorway with a big Barbie smile plastered on my face. How could both things be true?
Maybe the answer’s in Molly Maxwell. In the film, we follow Molly, a young girl at a school for gifted children, and a new teacher in town, Ben, whose rock band only recently disbanded. Molly and Ben stumble their way into an independent photography study and later a relationship. They “run” into each other on buses — Molly having seen Ben get on from down the street, rushing to meet up with the closing doors — and catch each other at a bar downtown.
One of the first photos Molly takes is of her feet, adorned in green socks, floating below her room’s chandelier. I began taking my heavy, clunky film camera to school. And with each new roll of film, the first picture was always my feet sticking up in the air, dangling below the crystals.
I ripped out a page from a magazine and scribbled my favorite lines from the film on it:
“You’re something else, Molly Maxwell.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“No. You’re like a hand grenade.”
I daydreamed about running into T. around town and going on a secret jaunt to an island as Ben and Molly do. I wondered what we’d talk about, spinning around in some dizzying abandoned top ride. I wondered if he would take my film camera, like Ben does with Molly’s, and gently pull my sweatshirt hood down, his big hands hesitating to tuck the hair flying around my face behind my ears. I wondered if he’d get angry if I said, “Do not bother, waste of film.” I wondered how we’d look at each other after the photo was taken, sitting in the silence of rushing waves and whispering wind.
In one scene, Molly takes her clothes off slowly in front of Ben. I told myself it was because she wanted to and because she was a woman, not a kid, and they could both see it. Molly stares at Ben who says, “You know you’re a real godsend.” She takes her hair out of its ponytail, stands up, unbuttons her shirt. She pulls her skirt and gray tights down, her shirt off. She’s standing in green underwear and a silver bra. Ben walks over to her, closing the space between them, hands linger over her arms, her skin, like one touch might hurt her.
Kayla and I went through phases of watching this movie: as high school students, freshmen, then juniors in college, and first years in graduate programs. Watching the movie in high school, the relationship between Molly and Ben felt so distinctive from Dolores and Humbert’s. Molly spends the entire film convincing Ben of her maturity. And she does it so well, that I believed her, too. So when their relationship starts, it does feel more consensual than Lolita. That’s the trick.
In one scene, Molly takes her clothes off slowly in front of Ben. I told myself it was because she wanted to and because she was a woman, not a kid, and they could both see it.
In the book Stolen by Lucy Christopher, a young woman is kidnapped by a man who’s been watching her. He attempts to convince her of his love, and eventually, with the onset of Stockholm syndrome, he does. But the book wants its readers to feel the same way. It’s moving and upsetting and successful because you, ostensibly, develop the syndrome, too.
Narratives like Molly Maxwell, like Stolen, are meant to make us question the ease with which we start to accept inappropriate relationships. But when you’re young and looking for approval, you don’t have the tools to analyze these subtleties at play. All to say, it took me until my early 20s to see the movie in a new light. And when I did, Molly sounded young, felt young, was young. I finally saw it.
I brought T. my college essay more to read than to edit, but I guess I didn’t explain that well enough. He asked me to come by after school so we could go through what he thought of it, and given any excuse to sit beside his desk once more, I agreed. But when I got there, other students were in his room, too. For some reason, I thought it would be just us; a special meeting closed to the outside world.
He gestured for me to pull up a chair. I scooched in as close as I could, tried to touch my leg to his, so close I could tell the fabric blend of his pants. T. started going through his notes and I saw my paper was riddled with red pen marks. My cheeks flamed, pulse quickened: He hates it, he hates it, he hates it, he hates me.
Half listening, my ears filled with blood as he went through each grammar change he thought I should make, each wrong sentence. At one point he called over to the other students in the room, peers of mine, and asked what they thought of a line. That was the ultimate betrayal.
I didn’t listen to them. I just stared into his eyes, my whole face hardening. How could you do this? My writing is just for you. Why are you asking them? What role do they play in this?
I seethed so much that I thought he would feel my body radiating heat. At the end, I snatched the paper out of his hands, tears forming in my eyes, and stalked out of the room.
When I got home I stormed up to my room, chucking my backpack onto the floor. I grabbed my black notebook out of my bag and wrote: “Today, I grew up. Today, I realized I don’t need, nor want, T. by my side. He was rude to me in a way that showed me he doesn’t care in the way I thought. And I’m honestly very happy I had this revelation.”
“I needed it.”
“I deserve bigger and better things.”
We run through the halls, blue dresses with gray cardigans, Kayla’s big purple backpack dwarfing her height despite the three-inch wedges she always wore in spring. Our small girl laughs ting off the metal lockers as we race against the clock. Just a few more steps and then his door. Just a few more steps and one last goodbye, maybe finally a hug, a kiss, or an admission of love. But as we turn left, manifesting M.’s door swinging wide open at the sight of her, it’s shut and locked.
Kayla backs away and lightly slams her head into the locker behind her. My laughter starts to roll and cannot stop. I snap a photo as we both laugh at ourselves, sinking down to our knees, stomachs hurting, abs forming.
“Well I guess that’s it,” she says.
We join hands once more, but there’s something more final to it this time. The door to the outside world, to our cars and the road, is right down the hall. We head over.
Part of me has let T. go. Another part, the ugly part, knows I would be jealous if it came out that T. took advantage of a student that wasn’t me. That I’d interpret as him saying I was never good enough. There is so much silence in all of this. In the stories of girls abused and groomed by their teachers; in the stories of girls aching for attention, and teachers relishing in it. I workshopped this essay once and the professor — an older white female writer — thanked me for telling it from this perspective. “People don’t believe me when I say some of these young women are asking for it,” she told me. “That they sexualize male teachers.” Her comment broke me. Made me feel completely misunderstood. That’s not what I’m trying to say, I wanted to yell.
I scooched in as close as I could, tried to touch my leg to his, so close I could tell the fabric blend of his pants.
Kayla and I used to watch the movie Beautiful Girls for Natalie Portman’s character and her neighbor Willie, an older man visiting his hometown. In one scene, Willie leaves his buddies ice fishing in a red shed and walks over to where he’s seen Natalie Portman’s character, Marty, skating with other children. He wears a trench coat and hoodie. She has on overalls and a white fair isle sweater. A green hat on her head, mittens to cover her small hands.
She asks what he’s doing there. He tells her. He asks about her crush from school: “So where’s Scooter? Uh, what’s his name. Billy? Tiger? Pookie?” She’s not into him anymore.
“So you got someone new?”
She does a small jump on the ice. For the first time, she’s quiet. Then she smiles, licks her lips a bit: “Yep, you.”
Willie laughs, a smile crosses his face and his breath turns to smoke in the cold air. He’s happy with this reveal. “What?”
“You. You’re my new boyfriend Willie. You up to it? Oh, I feel faint!”
She falls into his arms, and in the background, one of Willie’s old friends, now skating with his own kids, falters. He’s heard about her one drunken night when Willie said he thinks he loves her.
Marty asks if Willie will wait for her. She says, “We can walk through this world together.”
Young girls are desperate for validation. We crave recognition so badly from older male figures that sometimes we mistake innocent need for emotional desire. That impulse is misguided, sure, but we are children. We are young and pubescent and desperate for someone, anyone, to see us and say everything will be alright. That we are alright. And it’s easy to misconstrue love when you have access to bits of culture that romanticize those relationships, imbuing sensuality within the hush of forbidden love.
Only recently have we begun the uncomfortable conversations. Memoirs like Alisson Wood’s Being Lolita and Cheryl Nichols’ four-part Hulu docuseries, Keep This Between Us, expose what they describe as an “epidemic” of inappropriate relationships between students and teachers, and the silence from administration, peers, and adults that enables the behavior.
There is no situation in which the student is to blame, ever. Even if they “ask for it,” even if they seduce and flirt and beg. Certain teachers, often narcissistic, relish the spotlight we give them. Some may never act but remain complicit in their silence. For something so pervasive amongst young women — so much so that entire communities online used to exist in support of it, and probably still do — we should all be much louder.
I once took T.’s quietude for admission. If he only spoke, if he only acted like an adult and broke the mirage, where would my energy have then gone? All the time I spent molding myself into his perfect student. Focused on pleasing him and only him. I’d like to think it’d go somewhere progressive. I’d like to think I would have poured it into myself.
Jessica L. Pavia is a Pushcart Prize-nominated creative nonfiction writer whose work has appeared in Catapult, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, and the Columbia Journal, among others. She is a columnist for Write or Die Magazine based in Rochester, NY.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copy-editor: Krista Stevens
This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
Running is a sport of contradiction. Finishing a marathon is at once extraordinary and unremarkable: Running 26.2 miles is an exceptional achievement, but it’s also one that 1.1 million people complete every year.
In running, themes of life and death coexist. On one hand, it’s a celebration of what the human body can do and achieve. Some events, like cancer charity runs, are associated with the will to survive. But at the other end, in the sport’s most extreme races like the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon in California’s Death Valley, participants teeter on the edge of mortality. The truth is, the marathon was born out of, quite literally, death.*
* The first marathoner, an Athenian man delivering news of a Greek victory after a battle, collapsed and died after finishing his journey.
Other contrasts abound. Sociological analyses of running culture also show how it can be egalitarian and unequal at once: Theoretically, running has no barrier to entry, and all you really need is a good pair of sneakers, but the socioeconomic and racial disparities in the world of competitive running are hard to ignore. The median household income of the Runner’s World print audience in 2022 was $120,050 (well above the 2021 national median of $70,784), implying that running is somehow associated with wealth. (A study on the meaning of running in American society looks at how running perpetuates ideals of capitalism and consumerism.) On the other hand, the simple act of jogging by yourself, in your own neighborhood, can be deadly for those less privileged; the most high-profile running stories in recent years haven’t been about heroes, but victims.
All of which is to say, running can be a complex subject, and essays and features about running fascinate me, especially after I became a runner myself.
The appeal of running isn’t always obvious to outsiders. Until I became a runner, I had been mystified why people would subject themselves to such a tedious kind of suffering. Masochists, I thought, whenever a group of runners passed by me in college.
But now the joke’s on me. I’m that guy running with a varicolored Dri-FIT running tank, six-inch lined running shorts, a Garmin feature-packed to conquer K2. My face is smeared with sunscreen, enough to trap dirt and insects that land on my face.
My transformation from an unbeliever to that friend who guilt-trips you to cheer for me on a Sunday morning happened two-plus years ago, thanks to — what else? — the pandemic. One fateful day in March 2020, after indoor gyms shut down, I decided to run across the Queensboro Bridge in Queens, New York. Back then, I didn’t have a smartphone, so I put my iPad mini in my polyester drawstring bag and ran across the bridge, listening to What We Talk About When We Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. What started that day as a lockdown pastime evolved into something more, and thanks to Murakami, I’ve since added marathon entry fees as a line item in my annual expenses.
I’d like to think that all runners have experienced that moment when they cross over from “someone who runs” to a “runner.” The more you run, the more you experience moments of endorphin-induced glee. But one day you achieve escape velocity — and feel the euphoria of the “runner’s high.”
As the pieces below will show, runner’s high is not the only reason — nor is it the most meaningful one — writers run. If you’re Murakami, the reason can be as mundane as to stay fit after committing to a sedentary job. For other writers, it’s more complicated. The stories in this reading list highlight six writers’ insights on the act and art of running.
Longtime fans of the Murakami Cinematic Universe will find familiar elements here: baseball, jazz, understated prose, and non sequiturs. For a time, before Murakami became a novelist, he was the owner of a jazz club in Tokyo. In this piece, he describes how — and exactly when — he decided to write and how his early habits and commitments allowed him to do so prolifically for decades.
Running a jazz club required constant physical labor, but when Murakami started to spend more time at his desk, he started gaining weight. “This couldn’t be good for me,” he writes in a deadpan statement. “If I wanted to have a long life as a novelist, I needed to find a way to stay in shape.” Being metabolically challenged helped Murakami develop his work ethic.
Murakami drops writing advice while making parallel points about running. But the way he does it is frustratingly tantalizing — he’s not the one to share his tips openly à la Robert McKee. Murakami suggests that writing, like running, relies less on quick decision-making skills than patience and long contemplation: “Long-distance running suits my personality better, which may explain why I was able to incorporate it so smoothly into my daily life.”
Murakami calls himself a no-talent — a colossal understatement — but readers who have encountered unreliable narrators in his novels know better: We shouldn’t be so naïve as to take his words at face value.
Writers who are blessed with inborn talent can write easily, no matter what they do—or don’t do. Like water from a natural spring, the sentences just well up, and with little or no effort these writers can complete a work. Unfortunately, I don’t fall into that category. I have to pound away at a rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of my creativity. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another hole. But, as I’ve sustained this kind of life over many years, I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening those holes in the rock and locating new water veins.
Murakami doesn’t debunk the myth of an artistic genius but shows that with a sustainable routine, the genius can be prolific. If you’re reading for concrete advice on writing and a neat analogy comparing running to writing, you won’t find it here. Rather, we get something better: a portrait of the artist as a young runner.
Don’t let the title fool you. Rachel Richardson has no unconditional praise for Thoreau; she politely defies him. In his essay “Walking,” Thoreau spoke to an audience of men as he opined on nature. To him, women were symbols — “for the splay of land on which such a free man saunters,” writes Richardson — rather than his target readers.
To read Thoreau’s essay in 2023 is to be startled by his problematic view of women and puritanical sense of “capital-N” Nature. He would not approve of the urban environment that Richardson describes while she runs: “I was born in a California he didn’t imagine, in a hospital in a town laid out with lawns and gardens.” Her piece is a bracing tonic against the writer’s anachronistic thoughts.
Richardson, like many other runners like me, was not always a runner: “How or why anyone would do this for pleasure was beyond my ability to fathom,” she thought when growing up. But in her 20s, she discovered running as a refreshingly guilt-free activity to do in a world that made her anxious. (People who started running during the pandemic, like me, might agree. Unlike going to the gym or participating in a team sport, which were risky at the time, running was easier to navigate and do on our own.)
Richardson writes that she never knows what her running route will be. But that uncertainty brings relief. Freedom. Inspiration. Running rewards runners with a sense of uncomplicated happiness and goodwill, which Richardson details in this delightful passage:
When I run, I smile and people smile back. Kids wave at me and cyclists nod as they zoom by. Other runners raise a hand of hello or, my favorite, flash a big grin. Sometimes we’re wearing the same race shirt—me too!, I point. Sometimes they’re in a zone I can’t penetrate, with their earbuds and podcast or playlist keeping them company. I still smile, even when they don’t look up. Hey, we’re out here, doing this beautiful thing.
When the endorphins start kicking in, around mile three, I love everybody, even the sourest-faced walker or most oblivious group of teenagers taking up the whole trail and dropping Doritos on the ground. Nice dog!, I shout when I see a dog happily panting at her runner’s side, or You’ve got this! to the struggling jogger stumbling to the end of his route. … I am an unrepentant dork when I run.
I have beef with running memoirs that try to overburden the sport with dramatic insights. Not because insights can’t be found in running, but because execution without sentimentality is no easy feat. Thompson’s essay — which deals with, among many things, family relationships, parental abuse and influence, sexuality, ambition, and mortality — is a clear-eyed piece that demonstrates what can be done in the hands of a dexterous editor and writer.
I’ve read this piece many times, and like a good novel, I’m drawn to different themes every time. In my most recent read, two ideas resonated: defining one’s identity separate from one’s parents’ and identifying with one’s masculinity without being poisoned by it. It’s an all-consuming narrative that spans four generations of men in Thompson’s family.
As he would later tell me, running was the rare sport where you mostly competed against yourself. You could learn without having to lose. It was also something he hadn’t failed at in front of his father.
I sent an early version of this essay to my older sister, who saw something clearly that I hadn’t identified yet. “Running solved nothing for [Dad]. You’ve had a longer journey with it, and used it in ways that are much more productive. But I have this nagging sense that your story of needing to follow footsteps (the schools, the running) and needing so much not to follow footsteps (the overindulgence, the flameout, the irresponsibility and failure) are more complexly interwoven.
Whereas Murakami’s piece, detached from romanticism, was not a very effective sales pitch for running, Joyce Carol Oates’ ode to running may intrigue any writer who could use more literary imagination; she writes about running as a consciousness-expanding activity, allowing her to envision what she writes as a film or dream: “I’ve never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but as the attempted embodiment of a vision: a complex of emotions, raw experience.”
This piece was written more than 20 years ago. Oates, one of America’s most renowned storytellers, has published more than 70 books in her literary career. For her, running certainly seems to work.
The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort. Running is a meditation; more practicably it allows me to scroll through, in my mind’s eye, the pages I’ve just written, proofreading for errors and improvements.
My method is one of continuous revision. While writing a long novel, every day I loop back to earlier sections to rewrite, in order to maintain a consistent, fluid voice. When I write the final two or three chapters of a novel, I write them simultaneously with the rewriting of the opening, so that, ideally at least, the novel is like a river uniformly flowing, each passage concurrent with all the others.
Though I can’t claim the same level of inspiration, something similar happened when I first started running. During my daily runs, I experienced breakthroughs where I felt stuck: A connective sentence or a word I’d been looking for would pop into my head. On some days, this happened so often that I needed to stop every few minutes to record it on my phone, which disrupted my run. Eventually, I learned to run with a waterproof pocket notebook in my left hand and a retractable pen in my right.
The May 2020 timing of this piece on Jim Fixx, the “father of recreational running,” was wonderfully apt for pandemic-inspired runners. It was as if Chris Ballard, a seasoned sports writer, was inducting new runners into the history of the sport.
Ballard observed that more people started running during the pandemic, believing it “would in some way do them good, or make them feel better about themselves or the world, if even for a moment.” But the belief that running is good for your body and soul wasn’t always accepted wisdom but once an argument, even a radical and contrarian one.
It may sound glib to say that “running saved my life.” But for Fixx, it really did. And, in a tragic irony, it also killed him. Fixx was one of the central figures of the running boom of the ’70s and whose book, The Complete Book of Running, became “the most lucrative nonfiction title ever published by Random House,” writes Ballard. It was a hit, and the media couldn’t get enough of him. As Ballard writes, “a fad had become a craze,” and for the first time in a year, 100,000 Americans finished a marathon. The book was noteworthy not just because it was an encyclopedia of running; it heralded a certain kind of running memoir, one in which an author details their salvation by running.
Ballard writes both a pocket history guide on how running became a major sport in America and a personal history of the man who made it possible. Although this story has been told many times, Ballard’s reporting is enriched by Fixx’s journals, to which his family offered access for the first time.
After his death, the sports world changed profoundly. Running was no longer a craze, or a miracle cure. But neither did it die. Instead, it evolved. In 1977, 25,000 Americans finished marathons; By ’94, more than 300,000 did. In ’94, Oprah ran, and completed, her only marathon, spurring a boom among those who felt the feat previously unreachable. By the turn of the century, how you ran mattered as much as whether you did. Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run spurred thousands to tromp through the woods barefoot. Ultramarathons gained in popularity. Rock ’n’ roll marathon and fun run entered the lexicon. By 2011, women accounted for close to 60% of the finishers in half-marathons.
It’s not exactly a light read, so let me leave you with an irresistible detail: Fixx’s father was born a Fix but added a second x to his name. Why? He thought, “a person’s name ought to be a proper noun, not a verb.”
I couldn’t think of a better piece to wrap up this reading list than a meta-essay about writing on running by Kathryn Schulz who is, after all, a master of meta-writing. (Her piece about Oxford’s “A Very Short Introduction” series is a good example.)
What do runners think about when they run? In the first part of this two-part story, Schulz looks to scientific research and lays out the uninspiring results. She writes: “Like a fair number of psychological studies, this one confirmed the obvious while simultaneously missing it.” But she continues:
Of course runners think about their route, their pace, their pain, and their environment. But what of everything else that routinely surfaces in the mind during a run? The new girlfriend, the professional dilemma, the batteries you need to remember to buy for the smoke detector, what to get your mom for her birthday, the brilliance with which Daveed Diggs plays Thomas Jefferson (if you are listening to the soundtrack to “Hamilton”), the music, the moment (if you are listening to Eminem), the Walter Mitty meanderings into alternate lives: all of this is strangely missing from Samson’s study. The British author Alan Sillitoe got it right in his 1958 short story “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”: “They can spy on us all day to see if we’re … doing our ‘athletics,’ but they can’t make an X-ray of our guts to find out what we’re telling ourselves.”
Then, Schulz points out, with a knowing wit, the shortcomings of contemporary writing on running. Writing about running without schmaltz — like Murakami — is no easy feat, which makes it hard for people to find books that “address the mind of the runner in descriptive rather than inspirational or aspirational terms.” You could also argue that Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run, despite being enjoyable, reads like gonzo journalism. And some running memoirs that read like redemption memoirs, such as Robin Harvie’s The Lure of Long Distances, follow the same formula.
Later, Schulz champions Poverty Creek Journal, a book by literary-critic-cum-runner Thomas Gardner, as “the only one to uncover the literary possibilities inside the terse, repetitive, normally unimaginative genre of the running log.” After reading this piece, I read this strangely profound book — it’s a mix of literary criticism, running logs, and thoughts that range from complaints to grief.
When Schulz says running logs are “terse, repetitive, normally unimaginative,” she doesn’t intend it as a criticism. Running is, admittedly, an incredibly understimulating sport to watch, so much so that I suspect even the most avid runners probably don’t sit down to watch the Boston Marathon from beginning to the end.
And here’s a pitfall of sports writing: There’s often too great a desire to imbue a grand meaning to the sport. “Life is a marathon,” goes the cliché. But the thing is, life is like a marathon. So writing about running becomes a balancing act, one in which — without sufficient craft and self-awareness — can be a challenge. But here, Schulz (and Gardner) masterfully explore the essence of running, in all its glory and tedium. A sport of contradiction indeed.
Sheon Han is a writer and programmer based in Palo Alto, California. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Quanta Magazine, and elsewhere. You can read his work at sheon.tk.
FreshRSS 