The Best American Essays 2013 Read online

  The Best American Essays features a selection of the year’s outstanding essays, essays of literary achievement that show an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought. Hundreds of essays are gathered annually from a wide assortment of national and regional publications. These essays are then screened, and approximately one hundred are turned over to a distinguished guest editor, who may add a few personal discoveries and who makes the final selections. The list of notable essays appearing in the back of the book is drawn from a final comprehensive list that includes not only all the essays submitted to the guest editor but also many that were not submitted.

  To qualify for the volume, the essay must be a work of respectable literary quality, intended as a fully developed, independent essay on a subject of general interest (not specialized scholarship), originally written in English (or translated by the author) for publication in an American periodical during the calendar year. Today’s essay is a highly flexible and shifting form, however, so these criteria are not carved in stone.

  Magazine editors who want to be sure that their contributors will be considered each year should submit issues or subscriptions to The Best American Essays, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA 02116. Writers and editors are welcome to submit published essays from any American periodical for consideration; unpublished work does not qualify for the series and cannot be reviewed or evaluated. Please note: all submissions must be directly from the publication and not in manuscript or printout format. Editors of online magazines and literary bloggers should not assume that appropriate work will be seen; they are invited to submit printed copies of the essays (with full citations) to the address above.

  As always, I appreciate all the assistance I regularly receive from my editors, Deanne Urmy and Nicole Angeloro. Liz Duvall once again expertly handled production. I remember the excitement of reading the first essay I’d seen by Cheryl Strayed, then a graduate student in creative writing at Syracuse University. “Heroin/e” appeared in what was one of my favorite magazines at the time, Doubletake, in 1999 and was selected by Alan Lightman for The Best American Essays 2000. Since that early appearance, Cheryl Strayed has emerged as one of the country’s outstanding nonfiction authors. It is a pleasure to have her return to the series, this time as an editor. Her keen sense of prose narrative is evident throughout this collection, as is her receptivity to a diversity of voices and periodicals. So get ready to experience an abundance of exciting essays.

  R.A.

  Introduction

  WHEN I TEACH WRITING I tell my students that the invisible, unwritten last line of every essay should be and nothing was ever the same again. By which I mean the reader should feel the ground shift, if even only a bit, when he or she comes to the end of the essay. Also there should be something at stake in the writing of it. Or, better yet, everything.

  The stakes of my own first essay couldn’t have been higher, beginning as it did at dawn in Taos, New Mexico, on the Fourth of July in 1997, when I woke abruptly and tearfully, as if from a nightmare, and sat straight up in my bed with the icy realization that I was forgetting my mother. It was a strange thing to realize, given the fact that in the six years she’d been dead I’d written about little else, my nascent body of work a mosaic of her too-short life. My mother the horse-crazy army brat. My mother the pregnant nineteen-year-old bride. My mother the battered wife. My mother the scrounging-to-get-by single mom. My mother the bread-baking, back-to-the-land animal lover. My mother the intellectually avid optimist. My mother the forty-five-year-old cancer-riddled corpse.

  You could fairly well say she was my subject, though obsession might be a more accurate word. Both before and after her young death she was at the heart of every short story I wrote, and she was also at the center of the novel I was writing then—on that Fourth of July in Taos, where I was a resident at the Wurlitzer Foundation. Teresa Wood, the character I’d based on her, was my mother condensed and expanded, magnified and muted, twisted and reformed—my attempt to create the purest expression of who she was. But on that morning when I woke with a sense of urgency and regret, I understood in a flash that I’d done the opposite. All of that conflating and distilling and mishmashing hadn’t made my mother more pure. It hadn’t conjured her back to the world. It had only taken her from me in yet another way. Fiction had ruined her. I had ruined her. It was an unbearable thing to realize all at once. And so I did the only thing I could do. I went immediately to my computer and began writing with one simple mission: to remember my mother.

  I wasn’t trying to write anything that would be anything. The word essay didn’t even come into my mind. I wanted only to transfer my version of the actual truth from my head to the page so a document of my mother’s life and death would exist as a buffer against the other, fictional version I felt so deeply compelled to write. I began with a description of her naked dead body. How strange that moment was—when she was so profoundly there while also being so profoundly not there. From that first line onward, the words came raw and reckless and ravaging all day long. The hours passed without my noticing as I wrote and rewrote each sentence. I didn’t eat. Or think. In my memory, I didn’t even rise from my desk, though I must have. Out of a feeling of emotional necessity rather than artistic intention, I wrote the true story of my mother’s cancer diagnosis and the ugly death that followed only seven weeks later; of the way my enormous grief turned into a self-destructive sorrow that manifested itself in heroin use (among other things); and of the brokenhearted acceptance I finally had to bear. By the time I stopped writing it was dark outside. Night. I paced the room as the pages I’d written printed out, and then I read them out loud to myself, understanding only then what I’d done. Written an essay.

  The word essay means “to try,” “to attempt,” “to test.” It’s what I was doing that day when I woke and sobbed in my bed and ended up hours later with an essay in my hands. Trying, attempting, and testing are what writers do in every form, of course—the making of literature is always an experiment—but I think those words convey something essential and particular about the art of the essay. Behind every good essay there’s an author with a savage desire to know more about what is already known. A good essay isn’t a report of what happened. It’s a reach for the stuff beyond and beneath. Essayists begin with an objective truth and attempt to find a greater, grander truth by testing fact against subjective interpretations of experiences and ideas, memories and theories. They try to make meaning of actual life, even if an awful lot has yet to be figured out. They grapple and reflect with seriousness and humor. They philosophize and confess with intellect and emotion. They recollect and reimagine private and public history with a combination of clarity and conjecture. They venture into what happened and why with a complicated collision of documented proof and impossible-to-pin-down remembrances. And they follow the answers to the questions that arise in the course of writing about what happened wherever they go. The essay’s engine is curiosity; its territory is the open road.

  This is what makes them so damn fun to read. Their vibrancy and intimacy, their mystery and nerve, their relentlessly searching quality is simultaneously like a punch in the nose and a kiss on the lips. A pow and a wow. An ouch and a yes. A stop and a go.

  Or at least the essays I love most are like that. And that’s what this collection is—the twenty-six essays among the hundred and some listed at the back of this book (many of which I also loved) that made me feel, for the brief time I spent reading them, as if the rest of the world had fallen away. The essay might be about a man’s relationship to Mormonism or a woman’s search for a serial killer she may or may not have encountered decades ago. It might be about the way one hears the music of Joni Mitchell differently over time or endures the death of a child or triages injured soldiers or survives five months at sea or gives birth to a daughter. It matters not. Though they display a range of styles and cover a diversity of subjects, the essays I deemed “best” this year share a powerful drive toward
emotional and intellectual inquiry that deepens into a dazzling unfolding. Each of these essays left me saying Ah at the end, with joy or sorrow or recognition, with delight or dread or awe or all of those things mixed together. As if nothing would ever be the same again.

  CHERYL STRAYED

  POE BALLANTINE

  Free Rent at the Totalitarian Hotel

  FROM The Sun

  ON MONDAY MORNINGS I modeled for the painters at an old cannery converted into art studios in Eureka, California. Laughable as it was for a thirty-two-year-old man to strike nude poses on a wooden platform, I preferred it to what I usually did for a living: short-order cooking or unloading trucks. I stood up there on this particular Monday in 1987 trying not to move for two hours, suffering muscle cramps and loss of circulation, and, as always, faintly worried about getting an erection but somehow even more uneasy about the possibility of strangers seeing me through the windows—as if a roomful of strangers weren’t ogling me already. Meanwhile down the hall my painter friend Jim Dalgee raved so violently that one of the artists suggested calling the police.

  After I dressed and picked up my $60, I went down the hall and knocked on Jim’s door. The ranting stopped for a moment, and there was a clatter, followed by the door jerking open and Jim sticking his head out. He did not let many people into his studio, but he liked me because we had both wasted our youth, had gotten off to terribly late starts, held similarly outdated and sentimental views on art, and showed no signs of ever becoming successful. A short man in his late forties with a brushed-up shock of black hair like the crest of a blue jay, Jim wore his standard paint-spattered work shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes. The room behind him was full of dense blue cigarette smoke that curled in the sunlight from the southern windows. He smelled strongly of turpentine and beer.

  “Jim,” I said, “we could hear you shouting all the way down the hall.”

  “Was I shouting?”

  “Yes. At the top of your lungs.”

  “Come in, man. I’ve got coffee.”

  Jim’s eight-by-ten, brick-walled studio was furnished with a small fridge and a card table with a coffeepot and a boom box on it. Nine years earlier he had fled his previous life as an L.A. salesman and migrated six hundred miles north to Eureka to start over as a painter at the age of thirty-eight. Stacked against and hanging from every wall were hundreds of his acrylic paintings, all of which he refused to sell or show. Jim’s style was postimpressionism: Matisse, Pissarro, Cézanne. He admired foremost those who had started late, such as the stockbroker-salesman Paul Gauguin and the wretched lunatic Vincent van Gogh. Though I was not qualified to judge Jim’s work, I would’ve liked to own his Black Cattle Against Orange Moon at Dusk or Portrait of Camille Benoit Desmoulin’s Head in a Basket.

  Though I had quit drinking and doing drugs the year before, I allowed myself the occasional consolation of a few cigarettes with Jim in his studio. I also planned one day to write a story about a fictional Jim jumping from the window to his posthumous fame. I poured myself a cup of coffee while he raged at the people on the street below, calling them “philistines” and “slobs.” It was unusual to find him in such a state so early.

  “Is everything all right?” I asked.

  “The sleepwalkers!” he bellowed like an animal in pain.

  “They’re going to call the police,” I said.

  “They’ll only be doing me a favor!” he shouted, sweeping his arm across the room, as if to indicate all the canvases he’d stretched that morning, the color-blobbed cardboard boxes he used for palettes, and the rows upon rows of acrylic paints in plastic squeeze bottles along the floor.

  There was no point in talking to him when he was this far gone. The shouting would soon run its course and be replaced by a desperate apprehension that he didn’t have long to live. I drank some coffee, shook a cigarette from Jim’s pack, and fell into one of two yellow velveteen swivel chairs, a smoldering pedestal ashtray between them, like a giant clam with indigestion.

  “I’m going to buy an albacore today,” I said, applying a flame to the tip of my cigarette.

  “The sycophants!” he snarled and then whirled from the window. “A what?”

  “An albacore tuna, down on the docks. They’re only a buck a pound. Do you want one?”

  “No, nah.” He waved in disdain and began to hunt for the cigarette he had just lit, his brow furrowed. “We need to get some more cigarettes.”

  Around one that afternoon Tarn McVie rapped lightly on Jim’s door and stepped into the room. In his mid-twenties, Tarn already had paintings in galleries across the country and routinely sold single works for sums that could’ve sustained me for an entire year. His gigantic oil canvases awed me, and one sticks in my mind to this day: an orange nude coming at you through the water, flash of white at the knee. In spite of his conventional training, European-museum background, postmodern leanings, and early success without apparent struggle, McVie was the sort of natural, congenial artist that Jim and I both longed to be. He was also one of the few painters who refused to sign the petition presently going around to remove Jim from the building.

  “Hello, men,” he said. “Hear the news?”

  “What news?” Jim said, teeth clamped down on his cigarette, another burning in the colossal ashtray between us.

  “Market crashed.”

  “What market?” I asked.

  “Stock market. Dow Jones fell over five hundred points,” he said. “Highest point drop in history. There’s nothing on TV except talk about it. You can’t even watch General Hospital. Everyone says we’re headed for the next Great Depression.” His eyes sparkled as if we were all about to go on a field trip to paint tulips and the bus were waiting downstairs. “They’re already calling it ‘Black Monday.’”

  I had never paid much attention to the Ferris-wheel vicissitudes of the New York Stock Exchange, but when $500 billion in stock value simply evaporates, when nearly 25 percent of the market ceases to exist, when the president of the United States preempts soap operas and game shows to urge everyone not to panic and numerous respected experts explain that the country has seen no comparable financial event since 1929, even the poor take heed. I had also been observing the wastrel, arrogant, and bellicose habits of my country for years, and my sensitive, aesthetic side tended toward portent and hyperbole. So I trusted the news media’s Henny Penny proclamations that our Day of Reckoning had finally come.

  Heading down the alley away from the artists’ studios an hour later, I thought I would remember forever this day of ruin, October 19, 1987, the same way I remembered the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A man in a white shirt and blue tie staggered toward me with a dazed expression, and from the sky above I expected to see falling stockbrokers. I pictured myself on a freight train full of hobos. From every corner came the dire chatter of radios and TVs. Like all the gloomy broadcasters, I was convinced that the next Great Depression was upon us.

  The fishing boats were in from their morning runs, and it now seemed imperative that I buy that albacore. Food would soon be in short supply, and there would be mobs in the streets, breaking windows and overturning cars.

  The rheumy-eyed fisherman shrugged when I told him the news. “They can’t break you if you’re already broke,” he said.

  My fish, cleaned and bled, weighed fourteen pounds, and because albacore spoils rapidly, it was frozen as hard as a chunk of iron. Incongruous as it might seem to walk away from a fishing boat with a frozen fish, you couldn’t beat the price, and albacore were much easier to cut into steaks this way. I carried it by the tail with a newspaper so it didn’t freeze my hand.

  I lived downtown in an apartment complex that, for its Second Empire façade, transient tenantry, and despotic manager, I had dubbed the Totalitarian Hotel. The manager, Mrs. Vollstanger, was a gouty old Prussian and always wore pearls and thick, embroidered white sweaters. She met me at the top of the grand staircase, arms folded, chin trembling, and glowered down at my fish.

  “It
’s an albacore,” I explained.

  “Yes,” she said. “I saw you coming.” Mrs. Vollstanger had a telescope in the window of her third-floor apartment and kept track of all the goings-on below. “I have an eviction notice for you to serve.”

  I considered asking if she was aware of the stock market plunge but thought better of it, since bad news seemed only to cheer her. “Who’s it for?”

  “Hot Pants,” she said, meaning my common-wall neighbor, a young woman named Annabelle Taft.

  It didn’t take Mrs. Vollstanger long to find derogatory nicknames for all her tenants. There was Moon Child and Clydesdale Maria and Porky Pete. I suppose behind my back I was Machine-Gun Typist.

  “Annabelle?” I said. “Why?”

  “I’m not running a brothel here,” she retorted, one of her fondest declarations, along with “I’m not running a crack house/animal shelter/home for unwed mothers here.”

  “Just let me get this fish in the freezer, and I’ll be right up,” I said, resisting the urge to salute. “Would you like a couple of tuna steaks?”

  “No, thank you,” she said.

  My apartment was a single room with a set of high, arched, greenish windows, an electric stove, a fridge, a sink, and a very long entryway. Sometimes when someone knocked it took me so long to get to the door that my caller would be gone by the time I arrived. My place was full of moths, whose origin I could not determine. They were the small, rolled-up type, like pencil shavings. I had liked them at first for their silence and the intricate designs on their delicate wings, but now, with their growing numbers and regular obtrusion into my books, blankets, and bathtub, I considered them a nuisance.

  My room was sparsely furnished with items left by the previous tenants, who had vacated abruptly. There was a vinyl-covered recliner and a dining room table, upon which sat my typewriter, and two chairs that went with the table. There was a television on a stand that I did not often use since it received only two channels, though occasionally I watched I Love Lucy—a program I had disliked as a child for all its yelling—and a PBS show hosted by theological psychologist John Bradshaw, who asserted that all my addiction problems could be traced back to my “wounded inner child.” (Maybe I was hurt by early exposure to episodes of I Love Lucy.)