At first, Shulamith Firestone was told that her brother Danny had died in a car crash. It took her “over twenty-four hours to dig out of [her] father the bitter truth that the body had a bullet hole in the chest.” Firestone was alienated from much of her family. She and Danny had not spoken in years. Even when both attended the same college, even when she passed him on their campus, “he did not say hello.” After graduation, Firestone heard “distant reports of him” from her sisters: Danny was in therapy, Danny was in graduate school, Danny, who had once been so upset with Shulamith for breaking some “trifle” of Jewish law, was “dating ‘shiksas’” and a Zen Buddhist now; in a photo Firestone saw during those years, Danny “looked like he was medicated, with swollen fingers.”
Firestone spends the final pages of her 1998 memoir Airless Spaces tracking Danny’s collapse: from a Zen center in Ithaca, to whom he had given nearly every cent he had, to Taos, New Mexico, where it seemed “he had purposefully chosen a secluded spot on an Indian Reservation that he knew of and meditated himself into the suicide, in which he shot himself at close range with his own gun.” Or perhaps, Firestone came to suspect, he was murdered. She never found out. “In the end, theories about his death, whether murder or suicide, afterlife or no,” she wrote, only “contributed to my own growing madness—which led to my hospitalization, medication, and a shattering nervous breakdown.” These are the final words of Airless Spaces, but the book is ouroboric: only physics prevents you turning the page and finding the first again, from taking another loop through the sections “Hospital,” “Post-Hospital,” “Losers,” “Obits” and “Suicides I Have Known,” the last of whom is Danny, until the madness, institutionalization, release and the hard late life of Shulamith Firestone once again reaches the final page, and its beginning.
Since 2007, I’ve written some books directly in French and others in English. Each time, I feel a familiar pang of regret of having to choose one language over the other.
I had never translated my own work until a couple of years ago, when I decided to experiment: I would write a book simultaneously in both languages. I opened two documents on my screen—one in English, one in French—and began switching back and forth between them.
Earlier this year—Valentine’s Day weekend, to be precise—I found myself sitting on the floor of a loft in downtown Los Angeles with eight other adults, learning how to fake an orgasm. We had been told to make three “oo” sounds punctuated by a sharp inhale. Next, we bit our lower lips and exhaled on the letter “V.” “Vuh, vuh, vuhhhhhhh,” we harmonized. After a few rounds of this, I started feeling out of breath. A scene from “Barbarella” in which Jane Fonda’s character, strapped into an orgasmatron by a mad scientist, nearly expires from pleasure flashed before my eyes. At the front of the room was our conductor, Yehuda Duenyas, a lithe fifty-one-year-old in a pewter-colored sweatshirt that matched his graying faux-hawk. After our final exhale, he leaped up from a stool and gave each of us a fist bump, adding a heartfelt “Good work!”
I was participating in a four-day sex-choreography workshop run by CINTIMA, which Duenyas co-founded in 2023. It is one of twelve certification programs accredited by SAG-AFTRA to train intimacy coördinators. It is a new job—so new, in fact, that the union offers a definition on its website: “an advocate, a liaison between actors and production, and a movement coach and/or choreographer” of sex scenes. My CINTIMA classmates were hoping to join a rapidly professionalizing field. In April, for example, the Intimacy Professional Summit, a three-day conference in Minneapolis for intimacy coördinators, featured panels such as “Sex Parties, Orgies, and Other Large Scenes” and, for those interested in depicting, say, Regency-era raunch, “Romancing the Past.”
When the seventeen-storey Avari Towers opened in Karachi in April 1985, it was the tallest hotel in the city. ‘It felt other-worldly,’ said one chef who worked there when he was a teenager. ‘It was there that I saw a swimming pool for the first time,’ he remembered, ‘and swimsuits.’ By December 1986, this $32 million building had another novelty to offer – Fujiyama, a Japanese restaurant at its summit, named in honour of the famous peak. For the first six Saturdays of that month, eighty of Karachi’s most powerful residents were hosted for a complimentary lunch party at the restaurant’s soft launch. There had been no advertisements for Fujiyama, and for those six weeks, the only way to get in was with an invite; these began to land in the homes and offices of the city’s bankers, businessmen, doctors, and other members of Karachi’s elite. By the new year, the restaurant was so busy it had waiting lists. There were now two kinds of people in the city of six million: those who had tried sushi and those who had not.
There are plenty of surprises as the story develops, always centered on the power of female friendships and the importance of family.
A young woman sits reading, a pot of tea to hand, her blue dress almost the only colour in a still, sandy room. Gwen John’s painting The Convalescent shows a subdued yet happy moment, for this woman is free to think and feel. That, we see in Judith Mackrell’s outstanding double biography of Gwen and her brother, was her ideal for living: to be at liberty even if that meant existing in deepest solitude.