Old magazines are cheap time machines, archaeologies of collective desire. Find a print issue, specialist or popular, preferably more than 20 years old (though 10 may do the trick), and read it from cover to cover. You will execute no deep dive, vanish down no rabbit hole; your reading is instead a lateral slice through a culture, class or milieu. A few years ago, while writing a book about great sentences, I went looking for photo captions that Joan Didion composed in the 1960s during her time at Vogue. I found these perfectly formed, uncredited fragments, but also Didion writing about a new museum in Mexico City — “One comes away remembering certain small things, haunted by oddities” — and other high-toned pieces: Hardwick reviewing movies, articles on Alberto Giacometti and Günter Grass. There were fashion photographs by Gordon Parks and William Klein. I confirmed what I suspected about the aesthetic sophistication of midcentury American magazines and their readers.
Here’s a little secret about Steph Catudal’s memoir, “Everything All at Once,” which chronicles her husband’s harrowing skirmish with lung cancer in 2020: The book’s even-numbered chapters were written years ago, long before Tommy Rivers Puzey, Catudal’s ultramarathon-running spouse, developed a hacking cough that gave her a bone-chilling sense of déjà vu. It had to be Covid-19, right? Wrong.
Those even-numbered chapters are sections from Catudal’s unpublished memoir about losing her father to lung cancer when she was 14. He had the same cough.
At that point, the Rim Fire — which started below Highway 120’s Rim of the World Vista lookout — seemed controllable. Then, on Monday, August 19, two days after the first spark, the wind changed direction and the fire escaped the narrow canyon, quintupling in size in a single day. It would eventually burn 257,314 acres of forest, making it the third largest in California history to that date. Emerald would be arrested and confess to starting it; a grand jury would indict him based on evidence that he’d set a small campfire to burn some trash and let it escape his control. Two years later, in 2015, after coincidentally timed deaths torpedoed the government’s case against Emerald, the charges against him would be dropped.
Looking back now, a decade later, the Rim Fire feels like a prelude to disaster — a cleared throat ahead of an End Times scream. After 2013, California entered its megafire era. What had been a generational burn in Tuolumne County began to tumble down the list of California’s largest wildfires — it was leapfrogged in 2017 and in 2018, and five more times in 2020, and again in the summer of 2021. After a relatively quiet 2022 fire season, a rainy 2023 has forecasters predicting a later, but possibly more intense fire season. And what had seemed like a West Coast problem has enveloped the rest of the country this week — as wildfires rage through Canada’s forests, the skies above the North East have been stained yellow and the air made thick with smoke.
In the years to come, whenever my work seemed dull and uninspiring, or the vagaries of funding forced me down an unwelcome path, or – worse – the NIF was in the news, my mind would turn back to that moment and ask: ‘What if?’ Imagine if I were at that other job in that other state thousands of miles away. Imagine a different life that I would never live.
Then again, perhaps I had dodged a bullet, who knows?
“Will I live to see its end?” your mother asks.
She is sixty-nine years old and lies in the hospital room where she has been marooned for the past eight years, shipwrecked in her own body.
“It” is the story that you are now writing—this beginning you have yet to imagine and the ending she will not live to see.
Crucially, throughout, Viren reflects on the relationship between truth and facts, and how facts can "tell different stories depending on who is picking them out and placing them in a narrative line." This layer of rumination on lies, honesty, and nonfiction storytelling takes the essay beyond a rehashing of wrongdoing and into a deeper exploration of how easily fact and fiction can blur — a topic that should matter to us all.