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”).

September 9, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Dan Piepenbring’s fascinating “The Beautiful One,” an account of his experience collaborating with Prince on his memoir. The time frame of the piece – January 29, 2016 to April 21, 2016 – happens to be the last three months of Prince’s life. Piepenbring didn’t know that, of course. Did Prince? At some level, was Prince conscious he was nearing the end? Had he lost the will to live? Piepenbring’s piece hints he might’ve. It reports, 

One of the people closest to Prince told detectives that, after Prince’s first show in Atlanta, he’d said that he “enjoyed sleeping more these days,” and that maybe it meant he’d done all he was supposed to do on Earth; waking life was “incredibly boring.”

Well, it may have been boring for Prince, but it wasn’t for Piepenbring, and it wasn’t for me, as I vicariously tagged along. The second section describing Piepenbring’s first meeting with Prince is riveting. Here’s a sample:

Behind his sphinxlike features, I could sense, there was an air of skepticism. I tried to calm my nerves by making as much eye contact as possible. Though his face was unlined and his skin glowed, there was a fleeting glassiness in his eyes. We spoke about diction. “Certain words don’t describe me,” he said. White critics bandied about terms that demonstrated a lack of awareness of who he was. “Alchemy” was one. When writers ascribed alchemical qualities to his music, they were ignoring the literal meaning of the word, the dark art of turning base metal into gold. He would never do something like that. He reserved a special disdain for the word “magical.” I’d used some version of it in my statement. “Funk is the opposite of magic,” he said. “Funk is about rules.”

The third section is superb, a description of Piepenbring’s visit to Paisley Park (“In a high-ceilinged room adjacent to the soundstage, Jakissa Taylor Semple, who goes by DJ Kiss, was spinning records on a plinth surrounded by couches and candles. Six of Prince’s aides and bandmates swayed to the music next to a tray of vegan desserts. A mural of black jazz musicians from Prince’s “Rainbow Children” era was on the wall; a large silver rendering of Prince’s glyph was suspended from the ceiling”) and, later in the evening, his attendance, with Prince and his entourage, at a local movie theatre to see Kung Fu Panda 3 (“We headed over in two cars and found a lone attendant in the empty parking lot ready to unlock the door. Prince arrived just after the movie began, slipping into the back row”).

What an adventure! It leads to a trip to Melbourne to join Prince for the first leg of his “Piano & a Microphone” tour in Australia, resulting in this memorable scene:

The car pulled into Crown Towers through a special entrance that snaked below the hotel to a bank of underground elevators. I told Prince that I liked the quiet of hotels at this hour. There was something weirdly appealing about wandering their long carpeted corridors late at night. Prince gave a sly smile. “I’ve done it many times,” he said.

The piece brims with wonderful details: “the plastic diamond the size of a Ring Pop” that Prince’s driver wears; the smell of perfume in Prince’s hair; the “fistful of twenty-dollar bills in the cup holder” of Prince’s black Lincoln MKT; Prince’s sneakers, white platforms with light-up Lucite soles,” flashing red. 

Those sneakers play a part in “The Beautiful One” ’s most beautiful sentence: 

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.

God I wish I’d written that. I devoured this piece – one of the best of 2019, for sure.