Best of 2019: Personal History

Bianca Bagnarelli's illustration for Anne Boyer's "The Undying"

Here are my favorite New Yorker “Personal History” pieces of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Anne Boyer, “The Undying,” April 15, 2019 (“I try to be the best-dressed person in the infusion room. I wrap myself up in thrift-store luxury and pin it together with a large gold brooch in the shape of a horseshoe. The nurses always praise the way I dress. I need that. Then they infuse me with a platinum agent, among other things, and I am a person in thrift-store luxury with platinum running through her veins”).

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “77 Sunset Me,” December 23, 2019 (“Oddly, or not, I find myself thinking about death less than I used to. I thought that I might be kidding myself in my explorations of the subject while my life stretched ahead of me to an invisible horizon. But no. The thinking cut channels in which I now slip along. They involve acceptance. Why me? Why not me? In point of fact, me”). 

3. Dan Piepenbring, “The Beautiful One,” September 9, 2019 (“As the credits rolled, he rose without a word, skipping down the stairs and out of the theatre, his sneakers shining laser red in the darkness”).

4. Nick Paumgarten, “The Symptoms,” November 11, 2019 (“In the following weeks, my skull felt as though someone had draped a towel over it and was pulling down on all four corners, or maybe cinching tight a bank robber’s stocking”). 

5. Robert A. Caro, “Turn Every Page,” January 28, 2019 (“There are certain moments in your life when you suddenly understand something about yourself. I loved going through those files, making them yield their secrets to me”).

6. Kathryn Schulz, “The Stack,” March 25, 2019 (“Some people love books reverently—my great-aunt, for instance, a librarian and a passionate reader who declined to open any volume beyond a hundred-degree angle, so tenderly did she treat their spines. My father, by contrast, loved books ravenously. His always had a devoured look to them: scribbled on, folded over, cracked down the middle, liberally stained with coffee, Scotch, pistachio dust, and bits of the brightly colored shells of peanut M&M’s”).

7. James Marcus, “Blood Relations,” March 11, 2019 (“There would be no closure, no healing. I would simply adjust myself to a new and severely depleted reality”).

8. Jill Lepore, “The Deadline,” July 8 & 15, 2019 (“Upstairs, one of the skylights blew open and the rain came pouring in, onto the wedding dress I’d sewn from a bargain bolt, brocade”).

9. Héctor Tobar, “The Assassin Next Door,” July 29, 2019 (“When it was over, I walked through the aromatic ruins of an incinerated liquor store, its floor a syrupy mess of broken glass, green and amber”).

10. Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Hereafter, Faraway,” June 10 & 17, 2019 (“Then his camera captures us from behind, me clinging to my mother’s hand as we walk toward a rendezvous with our future selves”).