10 Best Personal History Pieces: #2 Anne Boyer's "The Undying"

Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli, from Anne Boyer's "The Undying"

The New Yorker’s “Personal History” section is a rich source of reading pleasure. Some of the magazine’s best pieces appear there. Over the next ten months, I’ll choose ten of my favorites (one per month) and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Anne Boyer’s “The Undying” (April 15, 2019)

This great piece is a deeply personal take on the ravages of cancer treatment. In 2014, Boyer was diagnosed with breast cancer. She underwent four rounds of intensive chemotherapy, followed by a double mastectomy. She describes the process as “semi-annihilation.” She describes her suffering in detail after excruciating detail:

Blood from chemotherapy-induced nosebleeds drips on the sheets, the paperwork, the CVS receipts, the library books. We emit foul odors. We throw up. We have poisonous vaginas and poisoned sperm. Because our urine is full of toxins, the signs in the bathroom instruct patients to flush twice.

Once my hair is gone, once I can no longer taste my food, once I have passed out while shopping for a bread knife in IKEA, once the ex-lovers have all visited to make one last attempt to get me in bed, once the generous humiliations of crowdsourced charity have assured me months of organic produce, I have become a patient. The old ways are through. Any horizon is made of medicine. Any markers of specific identity beyond “the sick” and “the healthy” come from another era.

Every movie I watch now is a movie about an entire cast of people who seem not to have cancer, or, at least, this seems to me to be the plot. Any crowd not in the clinic is a crowd that feels curated by alienation, all the people everywhere looking robust and eyelashed and as if they have appetites for dinner and solid plans for retirement. I am marked by cancer, and I can’t quite remember what the markers are that mark us as who we are when we are not being marked by something else.

A nurse inserts a large needle into my subdermal port. First, things are drawn from me, then things are flushed in and out of me, then things drip into me. For each of these things that drip into me, I must say my name and when I was born. Of the many drugs that I am infused with, some have familiar, clear-cut effects: Benadryl, steroids, Ativan. I should know how these feel, but in this context they never feel like themselves. Instead, they combine with the chemotherapy drugs to create a new feeling, a unique mush of lack of clarity.

After the infusion is done, I sit up until I fall over. I don’t give up until I give up. I try to win all the board games, remember all the books any of us have read, stay up late. Terrible things are happening in my body. Sometimes I will say it to my companions: “Terrible things are happening inside of me.” Finally, forty or forty-eight or sixty hours later, I can’t move and there is nothing to take for the pain, but, trying to be obedient to medicine and polite to my friends, I take something for the pain.

Boyer puts us there – in the cancer pavilion, the infusion room, the recovery room. She says of the cancer pavilion:

The cancer pavilion is a cruel democracy of appearance: the same bald heads, the same devastated complexions, the same steroid-swollen faces, the same plastic ports visible as lumps under the skin. The old seem infantile, the young act senile, the middle-aged find that all that is middle-aged about them disappears. The boundaries of our bodies break. Everything we were supposed to keep inside us now seems to fall out.

Boyer doesn’t pretend to be heroic. She cries, rants, and rages her way through her treatment. In one of my favorite passages, she writes,

We are supposed to be legible as patients while navigating hospitals and getting treatment, and illegible as our actual, sick selves while going to work and taking care of others. Our actual selves must now wear the false heroics of disease: every patient a celebrity survivor, smiling before the surgery and smiling after it, too. We are supposed to be feisty, sexy, snarky women, or girls, or ladies, or whatever. Also, as the T-shirts for sale on Amazon suggest, we are always supposed to be able to tell cancer that “you messed with the wrong bitch!” In my case, however, cancer messed with the right bitch.

But she does have a desire to live. As bitter and negative as she sometimes is, she’s still on the side of life. She says it expressly (“During treatment, you must have a desire to live”) and she says it implicitly in her vivid, spirited, perceptual style. This, for example:

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.

And this:

My cancer was not just a set of sensations or lessons in interpretation or a problem for art, although it was all of these things. My cancer was a captive fear that I would die and leave my daughter in a hard world with no resources, a fear, too, that I had devoted my life to writing and sacrificed all I had and never come to its reward. It was a terror that all I’d ever written would sit data-mined but not read in Google’s servers until even Google’s servers were made of dust, and in the meantime I would become that unspeaking thing, a dead person, leaving too soon everyone and everything I loved the most.

In the end, Boyer’s body bore the unbearable. She survived the treatment. Her cancer was eradicated. She’s written an unforgettable account of her ordeal. 

The First Person Is Real (Contra Merve Emre)

Merve Emre (Photo from The New York Review of Books)

Merve Emre, in her profoundly wrongheaded “The Illusion of the First Person” (The New York Review of Books, November 3, 2022), argues that the “I” in personal essays is a fiction. She says, 

Most essayists and scholars who write about the personal essay agree that its “I” is, by necessity and choice, an artful construction. Watch, they say, as it flickers in and out of focus as a “simulacrum,” a “chameleon,” a “made-up self,” a series of “distorting representations” of the individual from whose consciousness it originates and whose being it registers. 

She goes further. She contends that individual subjectivity, on which the “I” is based, is also fiction. She writes,

What if individual subjectivity were as much a fiction as the “I” with which it so prettily speaks? What if stressing the artifice of the first person were, as Louis Althusser argued, a strategy for masking “the internal limitations on what its author can and cannot say”? What if the real limitation of the genre were its glittering veneer of expressive freedom, of speaking and writing as a self-determining subject? What if no performance of stylish confession or sly concealment could shake this ideology loose? What if these performances only intensified the enchantments of subjectivity?

My answer is that, if all these “what ifs” were true, the personal essay would die. It would no longer be a firsthand account of lived experience. To me (this is my own individual subjectivity speaking), the “I” of the personal essay authenticates the experience it describes. It’s what makes that experience real. For example:

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.

After the infusion is done, I sit up until I fall over. I don’t give up until I give up. I try to win all the board games, remember all the books any of us have read, stay up late. Terrible things are happening in my body. Sometimes I will say it to my companions: “Terrible things are happening inside of me.” Finally, forty or forty-eight or sixty hours later, I can’t move and there is nothing to take for the pain, but, trying to be obedient to medicine and polite to my friends, I take something for the pain.

That’s from Anne Boyer’s brilliant “The Undying” (The New Yorker, April 15, 2019), her memoir of her experience fighting triple-negative breast cancer. “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.” How I love that sentence! Subjective to the bone. Is it fake? Come on! It’s presented in the magazine as “personal history,” i.e., as fact. There’s no doubting the authenticity of her experience. And, I submit, there’s no doubting the authenticity of her “I.” She is who she represents herself to be. How do I know? Because her “I” is part of her glorious style. And her style is who she is. 

Here's another example, this from one of my favorite personal essays – Edward Hoagland’s “Of Cows and Cambodia” (included in his great 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River):

During the invasion of Cambodia, an event which may rate little space when recent American initiatives are summarized but which for many of us seemed the last straw at the time, I made an escape to the woods. The old saw we’ve tried to live by for an egalitarian half-century that “nothing human is alien” has become so pervasive a truth that I was worn to a frazzle. I was the massacre victim, the massacring soldier, and all the gaudy queens and freaked-out hipsters on the street.

That’s from the essay’s remarkable opening paragraph. Whose “I” is that if not Hoagland’s? No one else writes that way. His style is as identifiable as a fingerprint. Subjectivity is at the heart of it. He has his own distinctive way of looking at things. His use of the first person to express himself is as natural to him as breathing. I can’t imagine him writing any other way.

Take another example. This is from Aleksandar Hemon’s wonderful “Mapping Home” (The New Yorker, December 5, 2011), his account of leaving Sarajevo and learning to live in Chicago. He writes,

I was still working for Greenpeace at this point, walking different city neighborhoods and suburbs every day, but every night I came back to the Edgewater studio I could call my own. I was beginning to develop a set of ritualistic practices. Before sleep, I would listen to a demented monologue delivered by a chemically stimulated corner loiterer, and occasionally muffled by the soothing sound of trains clattering past on the El tracks. In the morning, drinking coffee, I would watch from my window the people waiting at the Granville El stop, recognizing the regulars. Sometimes I’d splurge on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway (now long gone) that offered a $2.99 all-you-can-eat deal to the likes of me and the residents of a nursing home on Winthrop, who would arrive en masse, holding hands like schoolchildren. At Gino’s North, where there was only one beer on tap and where many an artist got shitfaced, I’d watch the victorious Bulls’ games, high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar. I’d spend weekends playing chess at a Rogers Park coffee shop, next to a movie theatre. I often played with an old Assyrian named Peter, who owned a perfume shop and who, whenever he put me in an indefensible position and forced me to resign, would make the same joke: “Can I have that in writing?” But there was no writing coming from me. Deeply displaced, I could write neither in Bosnian nor in English.

I think it’s just plain common sense to interpret Hemon’s “I” as signifying Hemon himself. If it isn’t Hemon, who is it? Who is splurging on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway? Who is watching the Bulls’ games at Gino’s North, “high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar”? Who is spending weekends playing chess at a Rogers Park coffee shop, next to a movie theatre. Some ideal version of himself? I don’t think so. Hemon isn’t into writing ideal versions of himself. On the contrary, his aim is to bring us as close as he can to his immigrant experience. The piece is represented as fact, and I think it is fact, every word, including Hemon’s “I.” The onus is on Emre to prove otherwise. Invoking Adorno doesn’t cut it. 

Another example:

I had written about movies for almost fifteen years, trying to be true to the spirit of what I loved about movies, trying to develop a voice that would avoid saphead objectivity and let the reader in on what sort of person was responding to the world in this particular way.

That’s Pauline Kael, from her wonderful “The Movie Lover” (The New Yorker, March 13, 1994). There’s no chameleon here, no glittering veneer. Individual subjectivity exists. It thrives! It’s the key to great writing, nothing less. 

One more example:

I do not take notes as I read. I dog-ear—verso-top, recto-bottom—and underline sentences and paragraphs. I create a document and type out every underlined sentence and paragraph, sorted by book. Then I create a second document and sort the sentences and paragraphs by subject. The process of doing this usually gets me to a preliminary articulation of the argument I want to make, its beginning and its end, its arc, and its subclaims. I handwrite outlines in a very haphazard way, on the backs of bank statements and other stray envelopes strewn across my worktable. 

Seven “I”s. Who do they belong to? Answer: Merve Emre: see “Educate, Entertain, Scold, Charm: Merve Emre, interviewed by Lauren Kane” (The New York Review of Books, April 16, 2022). Is it really her? Perhaps those “I”s are just made-up versions of herself. But I don't think so. I think it’s really her in full individualist subjective mode. Writing outlines on the backs of bank statements? How bourgeois!   

Interesting Emendations: Anne Boyer's "The Undying"

Here are two versions of the same passage:

1. We are supposed to be legible as patients while navigating hospitals and getting treatment, and illegible as our actual, sick selves while going to work and taking care of others. Our actual selves must now wear the false heroics of disease: every patient a celebrity survivor, smiling before the surgery and smiling after it, too. 

2. We are supposed to be legible as patients and illegible as our actual selves while going to work and taking care of others as our actual selves now with the extra work of the false heroics of legibility as a disease: every patient a celebrity survivor, smiling before the surgery, and smiling after, too, bald and radiant and funny and productively exposed.

The first version is from Anne Boyer’s great personal essay “The Undying” (The New Yorker, April 15, 2019); the second is from her Pulitzer-prize-winning book of the same name. Which is more effective? To me, it’s no contest. The New Yorker version is much clearer.

The same applies to other passages in Boyer’s book; the New Yorker versions appear superior. Here are three more examples:

New Yorker	Book
In the week before chemotherapy begins, it is like preparing for a winter storm, or a winter storm and a house guest, or a winter storm, a house guest, and the birth of a child.	In the week before chemotherapy begins, it is like preparing for a winter storm, or a winter storm and a houseguest, or a winter storm, a houseguest, and the birth of a child; also, maybe it is as if preparing for all three of these and a holiday, a virus, and a brief but intense episode of depression, all while also suffering the effects of the previous storm, houseguest, birth, holiday, virus, and depression.
The day before chemotherapy, a friend arrives from someplace I would rather be—California or Vermont or two different towns named Athens. I do everything to look healthy so that my friend will praise the skillfulness of my camouflage, its materials purchased at Wigs.com, CVS, and Sephora. We don’t speak of chemotherapy except for the practical exchange of information, like what time to set the alarm for and the best route to the pavilion. We pass our time as friends would, roasting vegetables and listening to music and speaking excitedly of other friends or ideas or political events.	The day before chemotherapy, a friend arrives from someplace I would rather be—California or Vermont or two different towns named Athens or New York or Chicago. Then it is exactly as it is: as if a friend has arrived from far away. On that day, I do everything to look healthy so that my friend will praise the skillfulness of my camouflage, its materials purchased at Wigs.com, CVS, and Sephora. On the day before chemotherapy, we don’t speak of chemotherapy any more than is necessary for the practical exchange of information, like what time to set the alarm and the best route to the pavilion. We pass our time as friends would, roasting vegetables and listening to music and speaking excitedly of other friends or ideas or political events.
The day of chemotherapy, we wake up early and arrive at least fifteen minutes late. We predict how well the treatment will go by what song is playing on the car radio: “Bohemian Rhapsody” (not so good), TLC’s “Waterfalls” (better). Chemotherapy, like most medical treatments, is boring. Like death, it is a lot of waiting for your name to be called. It is also waiting while the potential for panic and pain hangs around, too.	The day of chemotherapy, we wake up early and arrive at least fifteen minutes late. We predict how well the treatment will go by what song is playing on the car radio: “Bohemian Rhapsody” (not so good), TLC’s “Waterfalls” (better). Chemotherapy, like most medical treatments, is boring. Like death, it is a lot of waiting for your name to be called. It is also waiting while the potential for panic and pain hangs around, too, waiting for its name to be called. In this it is like war. The aesthetics of chemotherapy appear to have been decided by no one. That makes them like everything ideological. Later we begin to understand the costumes, machines, sounds, rituals, and architectures.

“Omit needless words!” cried William Strunk in his classic The Elements of Style (1972). The New Yorker followed this injunction when it edited Boyer’s manuscript. Yet, when Boyer published her book, she put those words back in. Why? The obvious answer is that she doesn’t consider them needless. Those additional words mean something to her. Sometimes concision isn’t the only aim. Artist’s necessity plays a role, too – fidelity to his or her own consciousness. And if that means breaking Professor Strunk’s rules, so be it. 

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”).

2019 Year in Review

Leo Espinosa's illustration for Nick Paumgarten's "Unlike Any Other"

Three words sum up this year’s New Yorker: Paumgarten, Paumgarten, and Paumgarten. He had quite a run, producing three superb reporting pieces (“The Descent of Man,” “Unlike Any Other,” “The Message of Measles”) and a wonderful “Personal History” essay (“The Symptoms”). Here’s a sample from “The Descent of Man”:

My own “Holy shit, I’m in Kitzbühel” moment came on a Tuesday in January, earlier this year, after I stepped off the train at the base of the Hahnenkamm gondola. It was dusk. The town was still relatively quiet, in the absence of the eighty or so thousand fans who were expected to invade that weekend for the annual series of Alpine races and debauches. I glanced up and saw for the first time, shadow-blue and telephoto close, the final section of the Streif, where the racers, after soaring off a jump, come hauling across a steep, bumpy, fallaway traverse—legs burning, skis thrashing—and into the final plunge, the Zielschuss, reaching speeds of almost ninety miles an hour. I had been watching the race on television for decades, whenever and wherever I could find it, with a heart-in-throat intensity of devotion that embarrasses me, and this last hellbent stretch was always the emotional climax, the site of either life-threatening crackups or ecstatic finishes, amid the drunken, swaying throngs. And here it was, the empty stage, the star of the show. The course was marked off with blue food dye, which, in flat light, helps the skiers see the contours in the snow. Viewed in person, from below, the traverse looked narrower and steeper than it did on TV. From the angle of the course workers’ stance, as they tended to the slope in crampons, you’d have guessed that they were ice climbing. I walked up on the snow to the finish area. If the Streif was an idol, I was close enough to ask for an autograph.

  

Another writer who had a great year: Alexandra Schwartz. Her “Bounty Hunters,” an account of her experience working at the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, is one of my favorites. In addition, she wrote a marvellous profile of Miriam Toews ("Benefit of the Doubt") and several excellent critical pieces, including “Painted Love,” on the life of Picasso’s muse, Françoise Gilot, and “ ‘While I Live, I Remember’: Agnès Varda’s Way of Seeing.” Here’s an excerpt from her brilliant “Bounty Hunters”:

You learn something about people, working Co-op checkout. You see how they handle their kids, their parents, and their partners. You see friends greeting one another and exes steering clear. You ask about beautifully named foods that you have never engaged with before—ugli fruit, Buddha’s hand, fiddlehead ferns—and then you chat with the people buying them about how they plan to prepare them. It is fascinating to observe what people eat, and almost prurient to be allowed to handle their future food, to hold their long green-meat radishes and cradle their velvety heirloom tomatoes, as fat and blackly purple as a calf’s heart.

The best piece of the year, for me, was Anne Boyer’s essay on cancer treatment, “The Undying.” What an extraordinary work! It fuses unmistakable, idiosyncratic, personal style with radical, original observation. Here’s a sample:

We are supposed to be legible as patients while navigating hospitals and getting treatment, and illegible as our actual, sick selves while going to work and taking care of others. Our actual selves must now wear the false heroics of disease: every patient a celebrity survivor, smiling before the surgery and smiling after it, too. We are supposed to be feisty, sexy, snarky women, or girls, or ladies, or whatever. Also, as the T-shirts for sale on Amazon suggest, we are always supposed to be able to tell cancer that “you messed with the wrong bitch!” In my case, however, cancer messed with the right bitch.

A special shout-out to Peter Schjeldahl – the magazine’s pre-eminent pleasure-giver, and one of my heroes. In addition to publishing one of this year’s most delectable books (Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light), he produced yet another run of marvellous exhibition reviews, including “Enigma Variations” (on Dana Schutz and Richard Deacon), “Modernism for All” (on Joan Miró), “Exposed” (on Garry Winogrand and Jeff Wall), “Not Waving” (on the Whitney Biennial), “Of Nature” (on Thomas Cole and Brice Marden), “Skin Deep” (on Pierre-Auguste Renoir), and “Heavy” (on Richard Serra) – all suffused with his love of textures, shapes, lines, light, and color. And then his terrific personal essay, “77 Sunset Me,” appeared earlier this month and blew me away. Here’s a taste:

I’m not in physical pain as I write, though I tire quickly and nap often. I have been receiving, every three weeks, an immunotherapy infusion—not chemo, and not a cure—which, at the outset, the doctor said had a thirty-five-per-cent chance of slowing the disease. (At those odds in Vegas, you’re broke within an hour, but in baseball you’re a cinch for the Hall of Fame.) A recent scan shows marked improvement, likely extending my prospect of survival. But I have to wonder if, whatever betides, I can stay upbeat in spirit. A thing about dying is that you can’t consult anyone who has done it. No rehearsals. No mulligans.

My highlight reel could go on and on. Instead, over the next few days, I’ll roll out my “Top Ten” lists - my way of paying tribute to the pieces I loved most. Thank you, New Yorker, for another splendid year. I’d be lost without you. New Yorker without end, amen! 

Mid-Year Top Ten (2019)

Katy Grannan, illustration for Ian Frazier's "Pumper's Corner"

It’s time for my annual “Mid-Year Top Ten,” a list of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year so far (with a choice quotation from each in brackets):

Reporting

1. Ian Frazier, “Pumper’s Corner,” February 18 & 25, 2019 (“As Rachael walked me through each well, I appreciated the Rube Goldberg-ness of it all. No two were the same. “The guys out here like to say that a well is like a woman, because each one needs to be handled differently,” Rachael said. She had been to these wells often, and sort of whispered each one, the way she would a horse. She put her hands on pipes, felt for hot spots, peered into gauges, cocked an ear for wrong sounds. She had me listen at a pipe where rising gas from a mile down hissed and echoed—all O.K. there”).

2. Burkhard Bilger, “Extreme Range,” February 11, 2019 (“The voices were growing louder, circling the silo one by one with the choir close behind. Wells lifted his head to the cloud of voices rising and swirling toward the ceiling, then stretched out his arms as they joined in a great, ragged chord. When they fell silent, I could hear the tapping of rain on the roof outside. Then a last voice sang out—Shaw’s quiet mezzo, wafting up like a fleck of ash above a flame”).

3. Nick Paumgarten, “The Descent of Man,” April 29, 2019 (“I glanced up and saw for the first time, shadow-blue and telephoto close, the final section of the Streif, where the racers, after soaring off a jump, come hauling across a steep, bumpy, fallaway traverse—legs burning, skis thrashing—and into the final plunge, the Zielschuss, reaching speeds of almost ninety miles an hour”).

4. James Lasdun, “Glow,” April 29, 2019 (“A crack appeared in the clouds directly above us. It widened, showing a sprinkling of stars and then the entire Big Dipper. There was a stirring among the photographers: their cameras had started detecting things. After a moment, an oblique greenish bar like the one I’d seen the night before became visible. It grew brighter and denser, then contracted into an oval of emerald light. People chattered excitedly. I was about to warn them not to get too carried away when a streak of brilliant green shot out of the oval, at high speed, and zoomed over our tipped-back heads, corkscrewing across the sky. I almost toppled over while following its trajectory. The green light formed several tentacles, which twisted and writhed together and looped in circles. Astonishment was proclaimed in a half-dozen languages. The circles dropped needles of piercing brightness that travelled, in tandem, around the sky, as if tracing the undulations of a celestial shower curtain”).

5. Douglas Preston, “The Day the Earth Died,” April 8, 2019 (When we arrived, DePalma’s site lay open in front of us: a desolate hump of gray, cracked earth, about the size of two soccer fields. It looked as if a piece of the moon had dropped there. One side of the deposit was cut through by a sandy wash, or dry streambed; the other ended in a low escarpment. The dig was a three-foot-deep rectangular hole, sixty feet long by forty feet wide. A couple of two-by-fours, along with various digging tools and some metal pipe for taking core samples, leaned against the far side of the hole. As we strolled around the site, I noticed on DePalma’s belt a long fixed-blade knife and a sheathed bayonet—a Second World War relic that his uncle gave him when he was twelve, he said”)

6. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Under Water,” April 1, 2019 (“Flying at an altitude of two thousand feet, I could make out the houses and farms and refineries that fill the strips, though not the people who live or work in them. Beyond was open water or patchy marsh. In many spots, the patches were crisscrossed with channels. Presumably, these had been dug when the land was firmer, to get at the oil underneath. In some places, I could see the outlines of what were once fields and are now rectilinear lakes. Great white clouds, billowing above the plane, were mirrored in the black pools below”).

7. Rivka Galchen, “The Eighth Continent,” May 6, 2019 (“When a Masten rocket takes off, it has a delicate appearance. One of the newer ones, the Xodiac, looks like two golden balloons mounted on a metal skeleton. A kite tail of fire shoots out as the Xodiac launches straight up; at its apex, it has the ability to tilt and float down at an angle, as casually as a leaf. When Xodiac nears its designated landing spot, it abruptly slows, aligns, seems to hesitate, lands. It’s eerie—at that moment, the rocket seems sentient, intentional”).

8. Joshua Rothman, “What Lies Beneath,” March 25, 2019 (“Sacks bent down and selected another strip of linen. Using his brush, he glued it to the wooden shingle, half obscuring its red eyes. The fabric flowed vertically down the canvas. Leaning in, he used his fingers to adjust its path, creating ridges and folds so that it would be open to oxygen. Then, from a nearby worktable, he retrieved a box of kitchen matches. He struck one of them and set fire to the linen. The flames rippled upward, serpentine. He watched them climb, then, after a few seconds, used his brush to snuff them out. Some of the linen was gone. We stood looking at the materials, colored by smoke, now joined by a scar”).

9. John Seabrook, “Machine Hands,” April 15, 2019 (“It was only at the very end of the eight-second window that the Pitzer wheel dropped down and—in a blur of motion that recalled Doctor Octopus, the Spider-Man villain, attacking one of his victims—the claws grabbed and picked the ripe berries in a fraction of a second, pop-pop-pop, and deposited them, apparently unbruised, on a shelf at the top of the machine’s chassis. Then the robots moved on to the next plant in that row”).

10. Rebecca Mead, “The Perfect Paint,” March 18, 2019 (“When I was visiting, a batch of Hague Blue was being stirred to completion. The enormous vat of paint shimmered like a luxurious pool in a Turkish hammam, and I almost wanted to climb in”).

Personal History

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. 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”).

3. James Marcus, “Blood Relations,” March 11, 2019 (“I peeled a yellow leaf away from the stone. It occurred to me that, as I got older, the beautiful, booming abstractions were becoming real. When I was young, eternity was too big to grasp. The years were elongated, shining, countless. But my father, I now understood, was gone forever”).

4. Kathryn Schulz, “The Stack,” March 25, 2019 (“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”).

5. 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”). 

The Critics 

1. Peter Schjeldahl, “Not Waving,” May 27, 2019 (“I was lucky to catch a rehearsal of a performance work by Brendan Fernandes that will take place at scheduled but infrequent times: five ballet dancers in black leotards strike varying poses on an arrangement of skeletal frameworks in black-painted wood. That was dreamy”).

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “Exposed,” May 13, 2019 (“You see the comprehensive capture of scenes on the wing. If the camera tilts, it’s not for arty effect but to squeeze in the relevant details of, say, a group of women bustling forward between a beggar in a wheelchair and a small group of people standing or sitting at a curb—three rhythms in flashing counterpoint”).

3. James Wood, “Escape Velocity,” April 1, 2019 (“Hempel, like some practical genius of the forest, can make living structures out of what look like mere bric-a-brac, leavings, residue”).

4. James Wood, “Contents Under Pressure,” January 14, 2019 (“Gunaratne’s powers of observation are so acute and extractive that he can trust his material to generate its own human significance”).

5. Dan Chiasson, “A Still Small Poem,” April 8, 2019 (“His forms vary depending upon what his senses perceive: jagged and tense around a mountain lion, long and languid next to a butterfly”).

6. Alex Ross, “The Concerto Challenge,” March 25, 2019 (“The first movement follows the rudiments of sonata form, with the scampering opening material set against a slinky cantabile second theme that has a whiff of old Hollywood about it, as if Bette Davis were sipping a Scotch with the blinds drawn”).

7. Anthony Lane, “Adrift,” February 4, 2019 (“But the noir is beige at the edges, and the sex is hopelessly brisk and coy; if Baker wanted it steamy, he should have put the kettle on to boil”).

8.  Anthony Lane, “Awkward Ages,” May 27, 2019 (“It’s a sumptuous performance from Burke, whom I’ve seen on TV playing the nefarious Dolokhov, in the BBC’s “War and Peace,” and onstage as the agonized pastor in Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm,” and who gives off an aroma of loucheness as if it were expensive cologne”).

9. Sarah Larson, “Home on the Range,” February 4, 2019 (“The plot whirls along, heading inevitably toward collaborative writing, drunken mayhem, brandished golf clubs, existential crises, flying toast”).

10. Lauren Oyler, “Sex Ed,” April 1, 2019 (“These sentiments, which sever intellect from feeling or mind from body, are decidedly not Dworkinesque, and the ease with which we’ve pulled out what is useful or prophetic about her work suggests that we’re still not reading her writing the way she would read it: closely, actively”). 

Talk of the Town

1. Mark Singer, “Man vs. Mouse,” January 7, 2019 (“He arranged “a Maginot Line of glue traps” and set out a pizza box with a mouse-size hole and, inside, pieces of mozzarella and pepperoni surrounded by glue traps. This yielded maddening footage of Horace entering the pizza box and, moments later, sauntering out”).

2. Patricia Marx, “New Shade,” January 14, 2019 (“It was a clear morning—the sky was a shade of blue that resembled Benjamin Moore’s Icing on the Cake”).

3. Ben McGrath, “Boom,” January 28, 2019 (“The best place to watch the Tappan Zee Bridge blow up, this past Tuesday, seemed to be slightly north of Lyndhurst, the old Jay Gould estate, in Tarrytown”).

4. Patricia Marx, “Viewing Party,” April 1, 2019 (“There, among the chintz furniture and cucumber sandwiches that could have come over on the Mayflower, was “1076 Madison,” an exhibition of Cynthia Talmadge’s paintings depicting the Campbell building. The art works were displayed on easels that on other occasions had supported wreaths, photo collages, and, in one case, a deceased’s cherished dartboard”).

5. Mark Singer, “The Anti-‘Godot,’ ” April 15, 2019 (“Lean and nimble, he has dark brown hair that aimed in various opposing directions, a horseshoe mustache, a graying goatee, and scruffy extra-in-a-saloon-scene cheeks”).

Goings On About Town

1. Andrea K. Scott, “Art: ‘Maya Lin,’ ” January 14, 2019 (“As the marbles shimmer along the floor, then flow up the walls and across the ceiling, they become dotted lines on a sheet of paper, a map in the midst of being folded”).

2. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: Barca,” February 18 & 25, 2019 (“The broth in her zuppa di pesce, a Sicilian-style fish stew abundant with mussels, clams, shrimp, black sea bass, Castelvetrano olives, and fregola, a pearl-shaped pasta, is so appealingly redolent of Pernod that I couldn’t resist sipping the last dregs straight from the lidded crock after my spoon had been cleared”).

3. Johanna Fateman, “Art: Heidi Bucher,” May 20, 2019 (“Among the nine stunning pieces in this exhibition, which have yellowed and become more scab-like with age, is a drooping mold of one of that building’s windows, its slightly bowed shutters suggesting the wings of an enormous insect”).

4. Briana Younger, “Night Life: Ari Lennox,” June 3, 2019 (“Her love-struck tales are consistently gorgeous, but it's when she weaves in the mundane details—a new apartment, watching "Adventure Time," shopping at Target—that the silken muscle of her voice makes itself most evident, a reminder that there is soul to be found in even the most prosaic life events, that just having breath can be worth singing about”).

5. Richard Brody, “Movies: Under the Silver Lake,” April 29, 2019 (“A zine traces long-ago Hollywood scandals; a friend finds the secrets of the world on the back of a cereal box; clips and names of classic movies and video games hint at vast secret connections; a popular band fronts a cult; and a reclusive old songwriter claims to be behind all modern culture and its labyrinthine conspiracies”).

6. Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: O:n°,” April 15, 2019 (“Servers, wearing chic indigo smocks, operate as carefully as cat burglars, slipping inconspicuous timers in and out of their pockets as they glide around the room”).

7. Peter Schjeldahl, “At the Galleries: Matvey Levenstein,” March 4, 2019 (“Layered grays, orange-flavored sepia, and the odd palely simmering pink or blue constitute—or conjure, or exhale—spectral woods, clouds, a snow-covered ancient graveyard, and a storm at sea”).

8. Michaelangelo Matos, “Night Life: Wata Igarashi,” May 20, 2019 (“As synth patterns shape-shift in slow motion and crisp percussion slumps into slurping timbres, his mixes find the sounds' edges melting into one another”).

9. Jiayang Fan, “Tables For Two: Szechuan Mountain House,” June 3, 2019 (On a recent Tuesday, two Gen X-ers and one millennial, all Sichuan natives, sat down under silk lanterns and poured themselves jasmine tea from a cast-iron pot into bone-china cups so fine they resembled the pearly inside of seashells.

10. Richard Brody, “Movies: Enthusiasm,” March 18, 2019 (“He films with a wild, expressive energy, panning rapidly to follow the swinging clapper of a bell and depicting electric wires as ecstatic striations of the sky”).

newyorker.com

1. Chris Wiley, “How Larry Sultan Made His Father a Metaphor for Dashed American Dreams,” April 7, 2019 (“In the picture that came out of that poolside photo shoot, we see that behind the elder Sultan is a rolling expanse of tightly cut grass soaking up the water from an automated sprinkler system, which passes for rain in those parts—a landscape on life support. His father is tan, but he is also old, his body clearly heading toward its twilight, and he looks somewhat melancholy—despairing, even—as if the empty pool in front of him were a reservoir of regrets”).

2. Chris Wiley, “Lee Friedlander’s Intimate Portraits of His Wife, Through Sixty Years of Marriage,” January 11, 2019 (“Looking at these pictures, it is impossible not to feel the palpable tug of time’s undertow, its inexorable movement toward we-know-not-what. This is underscored in the show by a handful of purposeful echoes. Here, a young Lee with his uncanny, icy eyes and lolling forelock is nestled close to Maria, her face a vision of benign tolerance; there, on a windswept Oregon beach, Lee cranes his head away from his camera awkwardly to nuzzle in adoration against Maria, who is elegance personified, and now thirty years older. Here is photography’s ultimate irony: it can freeze time, but never stop it”).

3. Alexandra Schwartz,“ ‘While I Live, I Remember’: Agnès Varda’s Way of Seeing,” March 30, 2019 (Her films, which celebrate the art of the foraged and the found, can be like associative essays, or like poems).

4. Lauren Collins, “On the Roof of Notre Dame, Before It Burned,” April 15, 2019 (“The omniscient of the Internet told us not to fret, that cathedrals had been built and burned before. But Parisians watched with the supplicant helplessness of the ages, singing hymns on their knees as the firefighters battled to save the north belfry on the second day of Holy Week”).

5. Charlotte Mendelson, “Seeds, The Gateway Drug to Gardening,” April 23, 2019 (“To the unafflicted, seeds may seem like nondescript black dots, distinguishing themselves only once they’ve blossomed. But look closely and you’ll see that they are quietly astonishing in their variety, particularly when they’re patiently waiting in the dried remains of last year’s flowers: the papery discs of hollyhock, neatly arranged in doughnut rings; glossy nigella specks in spiky spheres; the fat succulence of apples; the pony flank of chestnut; speckled borlotti or elma beans, black and white like baby killer whales; poppies like salt shakers; and calendula, my favorite, an explosion of prickly crescents, dry brown springs tight with life”).

Favorite Short Story

Han Ong, “Javi,” June 10 & 17, 2019 (“Hard to credit that the figure in front of him is a woman. The silhouette is huge and partly obscured by the screen door. He, on the other hand, is in plain sun, right in the middle of the gravel path—hesitant to go any closer—all of the New Mexico sky on top of him”).

Favorite Poem

Daniel Halpern, “Catch,” April 15, 2019 (“the sound of the ball popping the leather / in the silence below the summer Valley trees, / an occasional pale-colored car sliding // past us, unnoticed / down Vesper”).

Favorite Issue

April 29, 2019 (“The Travel Issue”), containing Lauren Collins’s “Kitchen Companion,” James Lasdun’s “Glow,” and Nick Paumgarten’s “The Descent of Man” – all excellent.

Favorite Cover

Malika Favre, “Summer Hours” (May 27, 2019)

Favorite Illustration

Sergiy Maidukov, illustration for Alex Ross’s “The Concerto Challenge” (March 25, 2019)

Favorite Photograph

Immo Klink, illustration for Nick Paumgarten’s “The Descent of Man” (April 29, 2019)

Favorite Sentence

Listening to Bone, Wells realized that his story was etched into the very sound of his voice: a slow, dehydrated drawl, thick with Southern heat and vocal fry, the indolence of small towns and the drag-footed pace of a heart slowed by heroin. – Burkhard Bilger, “Extreme Range” (February 11, 2019)

Favorite Paragraph

My cancer was not just a set of sensations or lessons in interpretation or a problem for art, although it was all of these things. My cancer was a captive fear that I would die and leave my daughter in a hard world with no resources, a fear, too, that I had devoted my life to writing and sacrificed all I had and never come to its reward. It was a terror that all I’d ever written would sit data-mined but not read in Google’s servers until even Google’s servers were made of dust, and in the meantime I would become that unspeaking thing, a dead person, leaving too soon everyone and everything I loved the most. – Anne Boyer, “The Undying” (April 15, 2019)

Favorite Detail

When she came out of her house, she was brushing her teeth. The arrival of a stranger at her door at nine-thirty in the morning did not faze her, and she continued to brush for a few minutes as we talked. – Ian Frazier, “Pumper’s Corner” (February 18 & 25, 2019)

Favorite Description

But my favorite dish might be the karsod, another soup. With a putty-pale sheet of lightly oiled dough stretched over the top of the bowl, it resembles an uncooked potpie, a broadcast of blandness. To pierce the surface and access the piping hot broth inside is to be reminded that mild does not necessarily equate to boring. In a version with lamb, the simple, slightly gummy pastry and the clear, fragrant liquid, dotted sparingly with scallion, cilantro, and translucent coins of potato, provide an optimal canvas for the gently gamy flavor of the simmered meat—as humble yet surprising as the restaurant itself. – Hannah Goldfield, "Tables for Two: Lhasa Fresh Food" (May 20, 2019)

Seven Memorable Lines

1. At a certain point, I found myself trapped in a vortex of flashbulbs, loden, jawlines, and boobs. – Nick Paumgarten, “The Descent of Man” (April 29, 2019)

2. He unwrapped a sixteen-inch fossil feather, and held it in his palms like a piece of Lalique glass. – Douglas Preston, “The Day the Earth Died” (April 8, 2019)

3. Humans are producing no-analogue climates, no-analogue ecosystems, a whole no-analogue future. – Elizabeth Kolbert, “Under Water” (April 1, 2019)

4. Andria was wearing a three-piece suit, accented by a scarlet pin that glowed like a pomegranate seed. – Lauren Collins, “Kitchen Companion” (April 29, 2019)

5. Also, as the T-shirts for sale on Amazon suggest, we are always supposed to be able to tell cancer that “you messed with the wrong bitch!” In my case, however, cancer messed with the right bitch. – Anne Boyer, “The Undying” (April 15, 2019)

6. There would be no closure, no healing. I would simply adjust myself to a new and severely depleted reality. The world would come to an end, as it always does, one world at a time. – James Marcus, “Blood Relations” (March 11, 2019)

7. “You’re no more than a hooker,” she says, and Baker retorts, quick as anything, “A hooker who can’t afford hooks.” Zing! Who said the age of wit was over? – Anthony Lane, “Adrift” (February 4, 2019)