10 Best Personal History Pieces: #3 Leslie Jamison's "A New Life"

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 Leslie Jamison’s superb “A New Life” (January 22, 2024).

In this memorable piece, Jamison writes about two tightly interwoven experiences – the birth of her daughter and the death of her marriage. It begins,

The baby and I arrived at our sublet with garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers, sleeves of instant oatmeal, zippered pajamas with little dangling feet. At a certain point, I’d run out of suitcases.

Note the specificity – “garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers, sleeves of instant oatmeal, zippered pajamas with little dangling feet.” It’s a hallmark of Jamison’s pungent, vivid style.

The piece is beautifully structured, unfolding in month-by-month stages of the baby’s development: the first few weeks (“Life was little more than a thin stream of milk connecting my body to hers, occasionally interrupted by a peanut-butter sandwich”); two months old (“Three, four, five days a week, we walked to the Brooklyn Museum. Going to the museum was a way to saturate our endless hours with beauty”). When the baby is three months old, Jamison takes her on a book tour. Her mother goes with them:

Four weeks, eighteen cities. We stood at curbside baggage stands in Boston, Las Vegas, Cedar Rapids, San Francisco, Albuquerque, with our ridiculous caravan of suitcases, our bulky car seat, our portable crib. The baby in her travel stroller. The unbuckled carrier hanging loose from my waist like a second skin. Everywhere we went, I brought a handheld noise machine called a shusher. It was orange and white, and it calmed my baby down better than my own voice.

That “The unbuckled carrier hanging loose from my waist like a second skin” is inspired.

The “book tour” description also contains this wonderful passage:

In restaurants all across the country, I shoved food into my mouth above her fuzzy head as she slept in her carrier beneath my chin. The receipts were headed to my publisher, and I was determined to eat everything: trumpet mushrooms slick with pepper jam, gnocchi gritty with crumbs of corn bread that fell onto her little closed eyes, her head tipped back against my chest. I was flustered and feral, my teeth flecked with pesto and furred with sugar. Then I pulled down my shirt and gave these meals to her. In Los Angeles, I nursed in the attic office above a bookstore lobby. In Portland, I nursed among cardboard boxes in a stockroom. In Cambridge, I nursed in a basement kitchenette beneath the public library.

When the baby is six months old, Jamison takes her to a writing workshop she’s conducting. Her husband stays with the baby in a hotel a block away from where the class is being held. Jamison gets so caught up in the workshop (“I felt intensely, almost ferociously present”), she forgets that at a certain point she’s supposed to call a break and get back to the hotel to breast-feed her baby:

When my phone buzzed with the third text from my husband, She really needs to nurse, I called our break early and ran, breasts hard and heavy as stones, my flip-flops slapping against the hot asphalt. I began to feel the dizzying vertigo of role-switching, draining and propulsive at once, flicking back and forth between selves: I’m a teacher. I’m tits. I’m a teacher. I’m tits.

My favorite part of “A New Life” is the scene at a reading in Toronto in which Jamison is being interviewed on a stage directly across from the room where a publicist is watching her baby. The walls are glass. Jamison can see them (“It was like watching a silent movie in which another woman was actually the mother of my child”). She writes,

At first, my daughter was happily slamming her fists against a wooden conference table, but then she started to get fussy. Put her in the carrier, I thought. The woman picked her up and started bouncing her around the room. Nope, I thought. You gotta use the carrier. My daughter started crying. But the glass was thick! I couldn’t hear a thing. It was as if someone had pressed the Mute button on her. The woman picked up the carrier, clearly confused by it. You have to clasp the buckle around your waist before you do the shoulder straps, I thought. The woman interviewing me asked a question about how I excavated profundity from banality. No, the big buckle, I thought, watching the woman in the glass room try to put my daughter in the carrier before she had the waistband fully cinched. I had to force myself to look away, and when I looked back my daughter was settled in the carrier. She looked peaceful.

Jamison’s account of becoming a parent is the main strand. But there’s a secondary thread – her disintegrating marriage and the question of whether she should try to save it. At one point, she writes,

The idea that we both felt so many of the same painful things didn’t help me believe that the marriage was more possible to save. It became harder and harder to convince myself that our good months in the beginning mattered more than all the friction that followed. It seemed like the good place we were trying to get back to was just a small sliver of what we were.

In the piece’s final section, an account of a friend’s wedding she’s attending, she resolves the issue:

At the ceremony, I gave a speech to the assembled crowd. Marriage is not just about continuing but reinventing. Always being at the brink of something new. Delivering this ode, I felt like a fraud. I had reached the end of reinventing. A voice inside me said, You are a liar. You have not done enough. A week later, I would tell C—in our basement therapy—that I was done. At that wedding in the mountains, the words I’d offered as a homily had been an elegy hidden in plain sight.

My summary of this great piece fails to do it justice. I’ve omitted so many glorious details – the smell of oranges, the blue mesh hospital underwear, the Saskatchewan Shuffle, Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party,” on and on. It’s one of the best “Personal History” pieces ever to appear in The New Yorker.

Credit: The above illustration is by Bianca Bagnarelli, from Leslie Jamison’s “A New Life” (The New Yorker, January 22, 2024).    

2024 Year in Review

Let’s begin with a drink, shall we? How about one of those 1884 Martinis that Gary Shteyngart writes about in his “A Martini Tour of New York City” (April 24, 2024). What a dazzling piece! Great subject, exquisite style. Definitely my favorite piece of 2024. Here’s Shteyngart’s description of the 1884 Martini:

This beast is premade with two types of gin—Boatyard Double Gin, from Northern Ireland, and the New York Distilling Company’s Perry’s Tot Navy Strength Gin—which clocks in at a ridiculous 114 proof. This dangerous concoction is then fat-washed with Spanish Arbequina olive oil, after which it is frozen and the olive oil’s fat removed, while vermouth, lemon liqueur, a house-made vetiver tincture, and a few dashes of lemon-pepper bitters are added. A lemon peel is then showily expressed over the glass tableside and a very briny Gordal olive and a cocktail-onion skewer are plopped in.

Yes, I’ll have one of those, please. Mm, that is beastly! Okay, let’s roll!

Highlight #1: The 2024 Food Issue. This digital-only issue is crammed with delectable writing, including Shteyngart’s brilliant “Martini tour” piece, Adam Iscoe’s “No Reservations,” Helen Rosner’s “Padma Lakshimi’s Funny Side,” Jiayang Fan’s “Another Chinatown,” Patricia Marx’s “Spoiler Alert,” and Hannah Goldfield’s “Holey Grail.” I love sensuous writing. The 2024 Food Issue is pure nirvana. Here’s a sample:

It was easy to see how a Courage bagel could offend, if not enrage, a New York purist. It brings to mind a rustic, crusty baguette: the exterior is dark, craggy, and heavily blistered; the crumb is a little stretchy with a lot of air holes. (Courage bagels are leavened with sourdough starter, rather than commercial yeast.) If you were to scoop it, another move for which a bagel aficionado might make a citizen’s arrest—stay safe out there!—you’d be left with mostly crust. This makes it especially suited to Courage’s main offering: photogenic open-faced sandwiches. Bagel halves are topped with various combinations of cream cheese, jewel-like slices of tomato, thin coins of cucumber, smoked salmon, roe, or sardines, then painstakingly finished with salt, freshly cracked pepper, a drizzle of olive oil, fronds of dill. A Courage bagel is a Los Angeles bagel, ready for its closeup. [Hannah Goldfield, “Holey Grail”]

Highlight #2: Luke Mogelson’s “The Assault” (April 15, 2024). Mogelson is a superb war reporter. In this riveting piece, he tells about his recent experience embedding with Ukraine’s 1st Separate Assault Battalion in Tabaivka, a settlement in north-eastern Ukraine, less than ten miles from the front line. 

Here’s an excerpt:

For the rest of the day, a steady stream of small groups of Russian infantrymen—between two and six soldiers each—walked to Tabaivka from the east. Few made it across the three-hundred-yard gap. The snow had relented, and Boyko easily stalked the groups with the surveillance drone. Perun bounded between the panel and the radio, shouting himself hoarse, calculating azimuths, and correcting the aim of his stormers, snipers, and machine gunners. It was madness: Russians kept marching down the same paths, to the same spots where their comrades had just died. One 1st Battalion machine gunner later told me he had fired his weapon so much that it had kept him warm in his frigid dugout. He couldn’t see the men he was killing. But since they kept reappearing in certain places, he memorized different branches below which he could point his barrel to hit specific coördinates up to a mile away.

Highlight #3: Leslie Jamison’s “A New Life” (January 22, 2024), a meditation on becoming a parent and ending a marriage – both experiences tightly interwoven. The piece brims with thisness – “blue mesh hospital underwear,” “garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers,” “zipped pajamas with little dangling feet,” “diapers patterned with drawings of scrambled eggs and bacon.” Jamison is a superb describer – direct, specific, concrete. For example:

In April, I took the baby on a book tour. She was three months old. My mother came with us. Four weeks, eighteen cities. We stood at curbside baggage stands in Boston, Las Vegas, Cedar Rapids, San Francisco, Albuquerque, with our ridiculous caravan of suitcases, our bulky car seat, our portable crib. The baby in her travel stroller. The unbuckled carrier hanging loose from my waist like a second skin. Everywhere we went, I brought a handheld noise machine called a shusher. It was orange and white, and it calmed my baby down better than my own voice.

There are dozens of other quotable passages. The whole piece is quotable – a masterpiece of personal history writing. 

Highlight #4: Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two.” This column is a constant source of reading pleasure. I look forward to it every week. There are two versions of it – the short version that appears in the print edition, and the longer version that is published on newyorker.com. I love comparing them. Among my favorite Rosner pieces this year are “Old John’s Diner” (“The lemon-meringue pie is unimpeachable, with a buttery crumb crust and pucker-tart yellow curd under a snowcap of floaty, marshmallow-like meringue”), “Le B.” (“The desserts are quite lovely, including butter-drenched crêpes Suzette, theatrically flambéed tableside, and an obscenely silky chocolate sorbet that conjures licking frosting straight from the bowl”), and “Misipasta” (“The lights are just dim enough to soothe, the tidy menu of cocktails and bitter Italian sodas ready to offer a bit of relief. The air smells like Parmigiano and butter, the sound system is playing the Pointer Sisters”).   

Highlight #5: After a six-year absence, the triumphant return of “Bar Tab.” My favorite New Yorker column is back! See, for example, Jiayang Fan, “Bar Tab: Another Country,” August 5, 2024 (“Disoriented, the pair perused the menu, he choosing C’mon Dad Gimme the Car, a tequila-forward, lip-tickling strawberry-and-jalapeño cocktail named for a Violent Femmes song, she opting for I May Destroy You, a smoky mezcal-and-Aperol number inspired by the HBO show”); Rachel Syme, “Bar Tab: So & So’s," October 14, 2024 (“One twist on a Martini features blood-red beet juice”); Ray Lipstein, “Bar Tab: “Kelly’s Tavern,” October 28, 2024 (“Here, an upside-down shot glass at your place signifies that someone has, with a timeless, Tony Soprano bravura, paid for the next of what you’re drinking”). 

Other top picks of the year:

Eric Lach, “Trash, Trash Revolution,” April 15, 2024 (“Some of the trash bags have burst open, but others are curiously intact, and you can still make out a few pieces of furniture that never got a chance to be fully digested”).

D. T. Max, “Design for Living,” May 6, 2024 (“He happily spends hours poring over blueprints, dividing former fields of cubicles into small but clever residences and reconceiving onetime copy-machine nooks as mini laundry rooms or skinny kitchens”). 

John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Vol. 4,” May 20, 2024 (“I work with words, I am paid by the word, I majored in English, and today I major in Wordle”).

William Finnegan, “The Long Ride,” June 10, 2024 (“Dropping in to the heaviest waves, he would fade and stall, casually timing his bottom turn to set up the deepest possible barrel. He would disappear into the roaring darkness, then reappear, usually, going very fast, with that little grin”).

Ian Parker, “His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” June 17, 2024 (“Inside, I was surprised by the loudness of the surf—even in the dim vestibule where the aluminum Ando statue used to stand. In an empty house with no windows, the sound of the ocean filled every room. Underfoot, the original tiles had been hammered out, and so had the cables and pipes that were once embedded beneath. The floor was now rough concrete, covered in cavities and trenches, like a road that had been chewed up by a milling machine ahead of a resurfacing”).

Paige Williams, “Ghosts on the Water,” June 24, 2024 (“The men were wearing waders, hoodies, and yellow rubber gloves up to their elbows. One of them flicked on a powerful flashlight. From the bridge, I watched them traverse an inhospitable stretch of beach and climb the jagged riprap, moving toward the bridge piling where their fyke net was tethered”). 

Ian Frazier, “Paradise Bronx,” July 22, 2024 (“In another few blocks, on my right, I passed the small but excellent Bronx Museum of the Arts, where I’ve seen shows of graffiti art of the seventies and Gordon Matta-Clark’s chainsaw-cutout sections from floors and ceilings of abandoned Bronx apartment buildings—that crazy turquoise-blue kitchen linoleum!”).

Nick Paumgarten, “Dead Reckoning,” July 29, 2024 (“It’s all tightly choreographed, but the music still feels alive, improvised, viney. A not-unpropulsive jam scored a vista of the desert at night, a gesture toward the group’s 1978 trip to Egypt: a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree view of the Great Pyramids under a lunar eclipse, bats winging in the shadows of the Sphinx. Then, to the delight of the Mayerheads, a wanky “Sugaree,” under a shower of scarlet begonias”).

Ben Taub, “The Dark Time,” September 16, 2024 (“Arakali approached the stratotanker from behind and from slightly below. The tanker filled the P-8’s cockpit windows—four huge jet engines, spanning my peripheral vision. Arakali leaned over the controls and craned his neck upward. His hands shook wildly, compensating for forces that I could not see; in relation to the stratotanker, the P-8 seemed perfectly still. A young woman, lying prone in the stratotanker’s tail, stared back at him, her face framed by a small triangular window, as she guided a fuel line into the top of the P-8. There was a rush of liquid above us—two tons per minute. Then the line detached, and Arakali descended over the Barents Sea”).

Anna Wiener, “Joy Ride,” September 23, 2024 (“Still, before I left, Petersen sent me around the block on a grape-purple Platypus. I cruised past the auto-body shops and a restaurant puffing anise-scented air. The Platypus was agile, and sturdy as a parade float”).

Rachel Syme, “Sniff Test,” September 23, 2024 (“The resulting perfume did not smell edible or organic; it evoked something air-gapped and untouched by human sweat, like a new Porsche that happens to be filled with cotton candy”). 

Elizabeth Kolbert, “When the Ice Melts,” October 14, 2024 (“The boardwalk curled east and then ascended a rocky ridge. From the ridgetop, there was a view directly onto the ice jam: a floating mountain range with slopes of pure white. The reflections of the icebergs quavered in the water, which was blue to the edge of purple. The smaller bergs were the size of a house; the bigger ones, I figured, were the size of Grand Central Terminal”).

Rivka Galchen, “Pecking Order,” October 21, 2024 (“We heard the “tea kettle tea kettle” call of a Carolina wren; it sounded like a game of marbles to me. We saw a warbling vireo, a Cape May warbler, a blackpoll warbler, and a black-and-white warbler—birds so small that it was difficult to fathom how far some of them had travelled to be there. We heard little chips that sounded like a window being cleaned; a crickety decrescendo that was not made by crickets; a sound like a trill running into a wall; a high-pitched three-fast-one-slow, like a child playing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony”).

Rebecca Mead, “Color Instinct,” November 18, 2024 (“Nestled in the corner of one couch is a plush panda bear, apparently well loved, its fur tinged with a rogue splash of citrine paint”).

Paige Williams, “Wild Side,” December 2, 2024 (“In the living room, Fadden found bear scat, a foot in diameter. In the kitchen, he found Miller dead. Her naked body was gashed with claw marks; her left arm and most of her right leg had been eaten down to the bone. The security bars on the window hung by a single bolt. The cabinets were destroyed. In the bedroom, Fadden saw paw prints and soil, and, on the bed, feces and urine. Miller’s laptop was still plugged in and open. Fadden wrote in his report that she appeared to have been dragged off her bed after she was already dead”).

Rivka Galchen, "Leg Work," December 16, 2024 ("According to a description of what would become known as the Ewing amputation, the surgeon makes a 'stairstep incision' over the shin using a scalpel. The relevant part of the limb is 'exsanguinated.' A flap of skin is peeled back to expose the leg muscles. Care is to be taken, the account notes, to isolate the saphenous vein and a nearby nerve. This is only the beginning of what is simultaneously a delicate, gruesome, and revolutionary surgical procedure; one of the required tools is a bone saw").

Anthony Lane, “Stirring Stuff,” December 23, 2024 (“You melt a bit of butter, sauté some chopped onion, add rice, stir it around, add wine, stir, then add hot stock, ladle by ladle, while you stir and stir again. Remove the pan from the heat. Throw in grated Parmesan and more butter. Stir. Wait. Serve. Eat. Feel your immortal soul being warmed and suffused with pleasures both rare and immeasurable. Lick the spoon. Wash the pan. Done”). 

Rachel Aviv, "You Won't Get Free of It," December 30, 2024 & January 6, 2025 ("Trauma tends to lead to a kind of unknowing repetition, and, in the second half of her life, Alice reënacted the dynamic with her mother, in new form: she had to trade reality for fiction, her daughter for art"). 

Best “Talk of the Town”

Nick Paumgarten, “Misty in Manhattan,” February 26, 2024 (“Khan recorded voice memos of her attempts to perfect the landings on “tree” and “understand.” She touched her nose as she sang, as though she could hear through it”).

Ben McGrath, “Where’s My Car?,” March 4, 2024 (“In 2005, Goswick sliced his suit going through the windshield of a car that went off the old Tappan Zee Bridge”).

Ian Frazier, “Uncaged Birds,” March 4, 2024 [“Once the performance started, the cloud, which you soon forgot about, and others like it (all products, probably, of an offstage cloud-making machine), vividly captured beams of light from above the stage that came down in vertical shafts, suggesting interrogation lamps, the columns of a courthouse, or the bars of a prison cell”].

Robert Sullivan, “Find a Grave,” April 8, 2024 (“Instruments came out of the car, Morrow starting off with a reel called ‘Sligo Maid.’ Suddenly, his fiddle popped its tuning peg. ‘That’s Coleman!’ Kelly said”).

Adam Iscoe, “Catamaran,” July 1, 2024 (“The vessel, known as Energy Observer, resembled a sperm whale that had been wrapped in roughly ten thousand photovoltaic cells”).

Robert Sullivan, “From Philly to Venice,” July 1, 2024 (“The Arkestra practiced and eventually toured the world, the row house filling with gig posters, its plaster walls soaking up decades of music from a band that, under Sun Ra’s leadership, had set out on a course of inter-dimensional travel, using chords and time signatures and equations rather than rocket fuel”).

Ben McGrath, “Clean Your Pipes,” November 25, 2024 (“To a novice eye, the only clear indication that all this labor was in the service of a musical instrument was the triple-decker keyboard sitting on a table, next to some bubble wrap, on the second floor”)

Best of “The Critics”

Jackson Arn, “Tone Control,” January 29, 2024 (“I enjoy her paintings most when she makes an unlikely pair of colors scrape against each other and then smooths things over with a third. In “Greener Lean” (1978), the odd couple are a thick, too sugary green and a sickly yellow, and the deus ex machina is a drizzle of red in the lower right, which gives the yellow a little life and the green a little nuance”).

Alex Ross, “Twin Feats,” April 1, 2024 (“The rapid-fire sotto-voce chords that launch the Scherzo went off with purring finesse; the coda of the first movement became an exuberant one-man stampede. Just as impressive was Levit’s ability to sustain tension across spare textures, as at the desolate end of the Funeral March. Acoustical mirages beguiled the ears: in the trio of the Scherzo, brassy E-flat-major triads evoked a trio of hunting horns”).

James Wood, “A Life More Ordinary,” April 8, 2024 (“Kumar’s details have the vitality of invention and the resonance of the real, as if echoing with actual family history”).

Jackson Arn, “Warp Speed,” April 22 & 29, 2024 (“Patterns unfold horizontally, but every so often a twisted pair of vertical threads (it’s called a leno weave) slashes its way out of the grid”).

Amanda Petrusich, “Age of Anxiety,” May 27, 2024 (“ ‘Lunch’ is a weird, pulsing track, vigorous and horny. It’s also my favorite song on the new album, in part because Eilish sounds incredibly free, which is to say, she sounds like herself”).

Alex Ross, “Thoroughly Modern,” June 3, 2024 (“At the end of the initial passage comes a solitary, exposed C: Wang rendered it with a sudden coldness, signalling the transition to the minor. Such nuances of articulation are essential to persuasive Chopin playing. The oasis of C major returns just before the coda, this time reduced to five pianissimo chords. Wang struck the first of these with a dry, plain tone; then her touch softened, so that the chords subsided into a somnolent haze. After a split-second pause, the coda exploded with concussive force”).

Hannah Goldfield, “Desert Island,” June 3, 2024 (“Inside, Villiatora serves what he calls ‘Hawaii street food’: a refined spin on a Korean-inspired plate lunch, featuring a strip of tender galbi and a meat jun, griddled golden and crisp; a spectacular fried chicken thigh shellacked in a chili-pepper-guava glaze that tastes strikingly of the juicy fruit. A dozen yards away, on the casino floor, animated bison stampede across the screens of digital slot machines, a game called Buffalo Ascension promising gold”).

Kathryn Schulz, “Casting a Line,” July 8 & 15, 2024 (“Like every brilliant author, Maclean simultaneously seems inexplicable and demands explication—some attempt to answer the questions raised by his prose. One of those questions is practical, a matter of craft: How does he do this? But another is ontological: What kind of man could make this work?”).

Maggie Doherty, “Duty Dancing,” September 9, 2024 (“Consider the first lines of ‘Churning Day’: ‘A thick crust, coarse-grained as limestone rough-cast, / hardened gradually on top of the four crocks.’ Each consonant cracks like a peppercorn between the teeth. These are poems you taste”).

Parul Sehgal, “The Mystery of Pain,” September 16, 2024 (“Commas are inserted casually, idiosyncratically. The language is softer, mussed, exploratory. Pain makes a mockery of control; the armor of high style is loosened”).

Jackson Arn, “Eyes Wide Shut,” September 23, 2024 (“The scene is only a few firm details away from abstraction, a Rorschach test tilted sideways—not a thing plus its echo but an unbroken flat-deep surface. If it is still an impression of a lost moment, there is something newly sturdy mixed in; each brushstroke declares, I’m still here”).

Jackson Arn, “It Takes a Village,” October 14, 2024 (“Circular handle joins with square container, apples form pert rows of three and four, individual finds perfection in collective. And look at the stems! Each points straight to Heaven, with no sign of rupture from the tree”).

Casey Cep, “Touch Wood,” December 9, 2024 (“The ‘Mack Chairs’ look, improbably, like industrial flowers: backs standing like stamens, legs curving like tendrils, seats resting on metal cruciforms as bright as tropical petals”).

Best Poem

Robert Hass, “A Sunset,” September 9, 2024 (“In the dark / I thought of a radiant ordinariness / That burned, that burned and burned”).

Best Cover

Hudson Christie, “The 2024 Food Issue”

Best Photo

Landon Nordeman’s photo for Gary Shteyngart’s "A Martini Tour of New York City" (April 24, 2024) 

Best Illustration

Bianca Bagnarelli’s illustration for Leslie Jamison’s “A New Life” (January 22, 2024)

Best newyorker.com Post

Nathan Heller, “Helen Vendler’s Generous Mind,” April 30, 2024 (“What she had was an almost tactile understanding of the ancient practice of creating poems as art, and—running her hands like a dressmaker along the back of their stitching, watching the way they draped and moved and caught the light—she could see not only what poets did but how they did it”).

Best Paragraph

In restaurants all across the country, I shoved food into my mouth above her fuzzy head as she slept in her carrier beneath my chin. The receipts were headed to my publisher, and I was determined to eat everything: trumpet mushrooms slick with pepper jam, gnocchi gritty with crumbs of corn bread that fell onto her little closed eyes, her head tipped back against my chest. I was flustered and feral, my teeth flecked with pesto and furred with sugar. Then I pulled down my shirt and gave these meals to her. In Los Angeles, I nursed in the attic office above a bookstore lobby. In Portland, I nursed among cardboard boxes in a stockroom. In Cambridge, I nursed in a basement kitchenette beneath the public library. – Leslie Jamison, “A New Life” (January 22, 2024)

Best Sentence

Austria’s Truman vodka is shot into flaming orbit by an inventive liquor made by Empirical, the Danish distillery, and named after Stephen King’s pyrokinetic character Charlene McGee, which presents on the tongue as a flavorful burst of smoked juniper, hence the feeling that a draw of nicotine and tar can’t be far. – Gary Shteyngart, “A Martini Tour of New York City” (April 24, 2024)

Best Detail

Khan recorded voice memos of her attempts to perfect the landings on “tree” and “understand.” She touched her nose as she sang, as though she could hear through it. – Nick Paumgarten, “Misty in Manhattan” (February 26, 2024)

Thank you, New Yorker, for another great year of reading pleasure.

Credits: (1) Photo by Landon Nordeman, from Gary Shteyngart’s “A Martini Tour of New York City”; (2) Photo by Maxim Dondyuk, from Luke Mogelson’s “The Assault”; (3) Photo by Adam Whyte, from Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Old John’s Diner”; (4) Photo by Dina Litovsky, from Eric Lach’s “Trash, Trash Revolution”; (5) Photo by Michelle Groskopf, from Nick Paumgarten’s “Dead Reckoning”; (6) Photo by Alice Mann, from Rebecca Mead’s “Color Instinct”; (7) Illustration by João Fazenda, from Robert Sullivan's "From Philly to Venice"; Illustration by Tianqi Chen, from Alex Ross’s “Thoroughly Modern.”

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #9 Leslie Jamison's "Other Voices, Other Rooms"

Illustration by Eleanor Davis, from Leslie Jamison's Other Voices, Other Rooms

This is the second post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Leslie Jamison’s superb “Other Voices, Other Rooms” (The New York Review of Books, May 14, 2020).

This piece is a wonderful celebration of my favorite subject – the everyday. It ingeniously links two seemingly unrelated topics – Jamison’s baby and the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Private Lives Public Spaces.” The piece unfolds in seven sections. 

In section one, Jamison tells about how being with her baby heightened her awareness of everything around her. She writes,

Being with my baby every hour of every day demanded close attention, not just to her—whether her fluttering eyelids meant she was waking up or just dreaming, how close she’d rolled to the edge of our bed—but also to everything else, because the alternative to paying attention was growing bored out of my mind. My hunger for stimulation meant my gaze was sensitized, the way your eyes can see more after you’ve spent a few minutes in the dark.

She says, “Those newborn months made the everyday visible again. It was all suddenly there.”

Section two introduces the MoMA exhibition:

An exhibition called “Private Lives Public Spaces” comprises a collection of home movies showing everyday scenes: one child pushes another in a sled as the day darkens around them. Lace curtains billow in a breeze. A woman mock-proposes to another woman at a lawn party, kneeling on the grass and laughing. A middle-aged man in a suit and tie rides piggyback on the shoulders of another middle-aged man in a suit and tie. Boys take furtive sips of Manischewitz at someone’s bar mitzvah, their glasses glinting in the ballroom light.

Jamison describes one of the movies:

An anonymous movie called My Dream Trip consists primarily of vacation footage shot on a train—the café car and narrow aisles, a pale water tower visible through a rain-streaked window—with voiceover from a man whose voice sounds like Kermit the Frog after twenty years of pack-a-day smoking. Smoker Kermit is thrilled by everything he sees. “So beautiful,” he keeps saying at the sight of the St. Louis Arch, “so gorgeous.” His gaze is humid with enthusiasm. And when he sees the automated gate at the entrance to an underground parking garage, he says, “Hello hello HELLO,” as if greeting a long-lost friend. Tenderness saturates the footage of his wife wearing her white camisole in their sleeping cabin, or eating potato chips and drinking beer out of a plastic cup in the dining car; his nighttime footage of the red-light district in New Orleans feels like a feral fever-dream, blurred by unspoken desire.

That “Hello hello HELLO” makes me smile. I, too, have experienced that heightened state of consciousness when, like Smoker Kermit, I’m thrilled by everything I see. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s bliss. 

In sections three and four, Jamison describes some of the moments in the MoMA home movies that most affected her. She writes,

One sequence in the Jarret family movies shows a small group of people dancing in a living room. It looks less like an organized party than a spontaneous eruption of festivity on a regular weeknight: three women doing the twist between the coffee table and the couch, one in linen slacks with a cigarette between her lips; folks with furrowed brows playing cards at a table behind them; a baby in a lace dress propped against a corner couch cushion; a boy in a red bathrobe and one in black suspenders, both clasping their hands together and swimming downward like fish, checking their feet occasionally, not sure if they are doing the steps right. It’s an ordinary evening brimming with the extraordinary condition of being alive, and watching gives me a sense of vertigo, as if I’m falling through cracks in the surface of experience—witnessing the secret of what it feels like to be this person, in this moment. Something rises inside me, as if it could touch these strangers just beneath their skin. Something in me wants to.

Now comes section five – the core of Jamison’s meditation. For her, she says, fascination with the grace of ordinariness “began in twelve-step meetings, listening to the voices of strangers in other basements in distant cities – riveted by stories or clichés that my literary training had taught me to understand as banal.” She says, “Recovery was teaching me that every life held profundity. Banality was just a call to look harder.”

That brilliant last line – “Banality was just a call to look harder” – went straight into my personal anthology of great epigrams. Change “was” to “is” and the line could serve as my personal credo. Section five ends with another inspired line: “Meaning is happening Now! Now! Now!”

In sections six and seven, Jamison expands her meditation on beauty to include other artworks she sees at MoMA, e.g., Albert Bierstadt’s A Storm in the Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, and photographs documenting the artist Lea Lublin’s 1968 Mon Fils (My Son). But, for me, the high point of the piece is section five. “Meaning is happening Now! Now! Now!” are words to live by. 

Mid-Year Top Ten 2024

Photo by Landon Nordeman, from Gary Shteyngart's "A Martini Tour of New York City"

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):

1. Gary Shteyngart, “A Martini Tour of New York City,” April 24, 2024 (“The highlight of Tigre’s Martini menu is the vodka-based Cigarette, which Platty immediately qualified as ‘smoky as fuck’ ”). 

2. Luke Mogelson, “The Assault,” April 15, 2024 (“In the operations center, Perun yelled into the radio, ‘No! Don’t cross in front of the entrance!’ But Wolf couldn’t hear him. He kept walking until he reached the open door. For several long seconds, everyone in the operations center watched as he stood there, motionless. Then he crumpled”). 

3. Leslie Jamison, “A New Life,” January 22, 2024 (“The baby and I arrived at our sublet with garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers, sleeves of instant oatmeal, zippered pajamas with little dangling feet. At a certain point, I’d run out of suitcases”).

4. William Finnegan, “The Long Ride,” June 10, 2024 ("Dropping in to the heaviest waves, he would fade and stall, casually timing his bottom turn to set up the deepest possible barrel. He would disappear into the roaring darkness, then reappear, usually, going very fast, with that little grin").

5. Alex Ross, “Thoroughly Modern,” June 3, 2024 (“Wang lingered over the passage with unaffected tenderness, giving just a twinge of emphasis to its bittersweet chromaticism”).

6. D. T. Max, “Design for Living,” May 6, 2024 (“He happily spends hours poring over blueprints, dividing former fields of cubicles into small but clever residences and reconceiving onetime copy-machine nooks as mini laundry rooms or skinny kitchens”).

7. John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Vol. 4,” May 20, 2024 (“I work with words, I am paid by the word, I majored in English, and today I major in Wordle”).

8. Eric Lach, “Trash, Trash Revolution,” April 15, 2024 (“Some of the trash bags have burst open, but others are curiously intact, and you can still make out a few pieces of furniture that never got a chance to be fully digested”).

9. Ian Parker, "His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy," June 17, 2024 ("In an empty house with no windows, the sound of the ocean filled every room. Underfoot, the original tiles had been hammered out, and so had the cables and pipes that were once embedded beneath. The floor was now rough concrete, covered in cavities and trenches, like a road that had been chewed up by a milling machine ahead of a resurfacing"). 

10. Paige Williams, "Ghosts on the Water," June 24, 2024 ("The pour revealed sea lice, krill, a needlefish, and a bunch of twitchy sticklebacks, as silver as store-bought fishing lures—bycatch, all of which gets returned to the river. Cupping the net from the bottom, the patriarch teased the few glass eels into view and plucked them out, the way you’d pick lint off a sweater").

Best Cover

Klaas Verplancke, “On the Grid” (March 25, 2024)

Best "Talk of the Town" Story

Robert Sullivan, “Find a Grave,” April 8, 2024 (“Instruments came out of the car, Morrow starting off with a reel called ‘Sligo Maid.’ Suddenly, his fiddle popped its tuning peg. ‘That’s Coleman!’ Kelly said”).

Best Illustration

Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli, for Leslie Jamison’s “A New Life” (January 22, 2024)

Best "Goings On" Note

Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Le B,” March 4, 2024 (“Nearly every dish incorporates luxury ingredients, though they generally show up as supporting players: foie-gras drippings in a creamy onion dip, or an earthy whiff of white truffle in a garlic-cream soup. At times, this can feel a bit like opulence theatre, rather than actual opulence—a black-truffle-flecked gelée, draped over a devilled egg en chemise, tasted like nothing much at all, least of all truffles—but when it works, my God, it works”).

Best Photo

Photo by Bobby Beasley, for David Means’ “Chance the Cat” (January 22, 2024)

Best newyorker.com Post

Nathan Heller, “Helen Vendler’s Generous Mind,” April 30, 2024 (“What she had was an almost tactile understanding of the ancient practice of creating poems as art, and—running her hands like a dressmaker along the back of their stitching, watching the way they draped and moved and caught the light—she could see not only what poets did but how they did it”).

Best Sentence

Austria’s Truman vodka is shot into flaming orbit by an inventive liquor made by Empirical, the Danish distillery, and named after Stephen King’s pyrokinetic character Charlene McGee, which presents on the tongue as a flavorful burst of smoked juniper, hence the feeling that a draw of nicotine and tar can’t be far. – Gary Shteyngart, “A Martini Tour of New York City” (April 24, 2024)

Best Paragraph

In restaurants all across the country, I shoved food into my mouth above her fuzzy head as she slept in her carrier beneath my chin. The receipts were headed to my publisher, and I was determined to eat everything: trumpet mushrooms slick with pepper jam, gnocchi gritty with crumbs of corn bread that fell onto her little closed eyes, her head tipped back against my chest. I was flustered and feral, my teeth flecked with pesto and furred with sugar. Then I pulled down my shirt and gave these meals to her. In Los Angeles, I nursed in the attic office above a bookstore lobby. In Portland, I nursed among cardboard boxes in a stockroom. In Cambridge, I nursed in a basement kitchenette beneath the public library. – Leslie Jamison, “A New Life” (January 22, 2024)

Best Detail

Khan recorded voice memos of her attempts to perfect the landings on “tree” and “understand.” She touched her nose as she sang, as though she could hear through it. – Nick Paumgarten, “Misty in Manhattan” (February 26, 2024)

Best Description

Of course I got the soup. Plenty of ink has already been spilled over the titillating Soup No. 5, a small tureen of thick brown broth, heavily spiced with sibot (a smoky-tangy blend of Chinese herbs), in which float bits of bull testicles and penis. A bowl is salty and savory, warming and rich; the soup is traditionally consumed as a hangover cure, perhaps owing to the virility of its star ingredients. (One is spongy, the other chewy; I won’t spoil which is which.) I’m not sure if I’d order it on a return visit, though—I’ll save room, instead, for grilled morsels of pork jowl brushed with glossy-sweet barbecue sauce made with banana ketchup, or sticky skewers of eel glazed in lemon-lime soda and ginger. The K.F.C. (Kanto fried chicken), little popcorn nuggets of tender dark meat, arrives with a bowl of dipping sauce that’s so fiery hot, so puckery with fish sauce, that it made me feel wildly alive. – Helen Rosner, “Tables for Two: Naks” (February 5, 2024)

January 22, 2024 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Leslie Jamison’s extraordinary personal essay “A New Life.” It’s about becoming a parent and ending a marriage – both experiences tightly interwoven. The piece brims with thisness – “blue mesh hospital underwear,” “garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers,” “zipped pajamas with little dangling feet,” “diapers patterned with drawings of scrambled eggs and bacon.” 

Jamison is a superb describer – direct, specific, concrete. For example:

In April, I took the baby on a book tour. She was three months old. My mother came with us. Four weeks, eighteen cities. We stood at curbside baggage stands in Boston, Las Vegas, Cedar Rapids, San Francisco, Albuquerque, with our ridiculous caravan of suitcases, our bulky car seat, our portable crib. The baby in her travel stroller. The unbuckled carrier hanging loose from my waist like a second skin. Everywhere we went, I brought a handheld noise machine called a shusher. It was orange and white, and it calmed my baby down better than my own voice.

Another:

Up in the mountains, I ran out of baby-food pouches the day before the ceremony. So I walked into town to buy more, the baby snug against me in her carrier, bundled in an eggplant-purple snowsuit, swivelling her head like an owl to look at all the snowy trees. On the walk back, she cried because her cheeks were red and burning from the cold. Why hadn’t I packed more pouches? Every time something went wrong, it was only my fault. I wanted a life that was ninety per cent thinking about the complexities of consciousness, and just ten per cent buying pouches of purée. But this was not the life I’d signed up for.

Jamison’s imagery is astounding. On falling in love, she writes, “It was like ripping hunks from a loaf of fresh bread and stuffing them in my mouth.” On nursing her baby: “When my phone buzzed with the third text from my husband, She really needs to nurse, I called our break early and ran, breasts hard and heavy as stones, my flip-flops slapping against the hot asphalt. I began to feel the dizzying vertigo of role-switching, draining and propulsive at once, flicking back and forth between selves: I’m a teacher. I’m tits. I’m a teacher. I’m tits.” On divorce: “When I was very young, I thought divorce involved a ceremony, the couple moving backward through the choreography of their wedding, starting at the altar, unclasping their hands, and then walking separately down the aisle.”

There are dozens of other quotable passages. The whole piece is quotable! It’s a masterpiece of personal history writing. Highly recommended.

Postscript: The unfurling clementine-peel illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli that accompanies Jamison’s piece is brilliant.

The Beauty of the Ordinary: Leslie Jamison and Sam Youkilis

Still from Sam Youkilis's "10:13 A.M., Tribeca"

One of the most captivating artworks I’ve seen this year is Sam Youkilis’s short video loop “10:13 A.M., Tribeca,” included in newyorker.com’s brilliant “April 15, 2020: A Coronavirus Chronicle” (April 27, 2020). It shows a masked florist assembling a bouquet of purple lilacs. Nothing dramatic happens. The florist stands at his workbench efficiently and matter-of-factly fitting a bunch of lilacs together, cutting the stems to make them even. And that’s it, the sequence starts over – fifteen seconds of seemingly mundane life. But it’s not mundane. Youkilis captures a slice of visual poetry simply by training his camera on an urban scene that most of us would walk right by. But once we’re shown it, we see the beauty.

Leslie Jamison explores this subject – the extraordinary in the ordinary – in her recent “Other Voices, Other Rooms” (The New York Review of Books, May 14, 2020), a review of the MoMA exhibition “Private Lives Public Spaces.” She describes the show as follows:

An exhibition called “Private Lives Public Spaces” comprises a collection of home movies showing everyday scenes: one child pushes another in a sled as the day darkens around them. Lace curtains billow in a breeze. A woman mock proposes to another woman at a lawn party, kneeling on the grass and laughing. A middle-aged man in a suit and tie rides piggyback on the shoulders of another middle-aged man in a suit and tie. Boys take furtive sips of Manischewitz at someone’s bar mitzvah, their glasses glinting in the ballroom light.

Jamison says,

It would be a lie to say that I was blindsided by the beauty of the ordinary at MoMA; more truthful to say I’d gone looking for it. By the time I stood in front of those home movies, I was nearly a decade into an ongoing fasciantion with the grace of ordinariness: an increasingly insistent belief in un-extraordinary lives as sites of meaning. For me it began in twelve-step meetings, listening to the voices of strangers in other basements, in distant cities – riveted by stories of clichés that my literary training had taught me to understand as banal. Recovery was teaching me that every life held profoundity. Banality was just a call to look harder.

“Meaning is happening Now! Now! Now!,” she says, and we must try to catch it. Certainly that’s what Sam Youkilis did in his “10:13 A.M., Tribeca” – a wonderful act of attention.

Reality Cake

A couple of weeks ago, in the "Bookends" column of The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Leslie Jamison and Daniel Mendelsohn extolled the merits of memoir-novels. Jamison’s piece particularly sticks in the mind. She seems to think that fictionalizing memoir makes it more artful. She asks, “So what’s the lure of the blur? Why do we like that space of uncertainty in which we don’t know what’s been invented and what hasn’t?” She answers, “There’s an electric charge in toggling back and forth between the shimmer of what’s been artfully constructed and the glint of what actually was.” She says, “We get the frisson of admiring the narrative as both artifact and plain fact, a North Pole both imagined and constructed. We get to have our reality cake and eat it too.” “Reality cake” is a good name for memoir-novels. They’re confections of the real and the fictive. I have no interest in them. I prefer reality served straight – all facts, no fiction. But this doesn’t mean that I lose out on the experience of Jamison’s “frisson.” This is where I take issue with Jamison. She asserts that it’s fiction that makes reality artful, as if, say, John McPhee’s Coming into the Country and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains are just inert lumps of raw fact. There are works of factual writing that are as beautifully and artfully wrought as any novel. Fiction doesn’t necessarily make reality artful; it just makes it fake.