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For two decades, Kelly Flynn barely noticed the protesters who gathered almost daily along University Boulevard, the main public drag to the office park that houses her clinic, A Woman’s Choice of Jacksonville. The signs, the chants, the occasional blocked sidewalk—they all went with the territory of running an abortion clinic in Florida, one of the last states in the South where abortion remains widely accessible. Most mornings, Flynn would take a back route to avoid them. As soon as she turned left onto University Center Drive, the quiet road fronting the clinic’s two buildings, she almost forgot the protesters existed. The only people permitted to use the private road and parking lots were the medical staff who worked in the surrounding offices, their patients, and approved visitors. Anyone else was trespassing.

All that changed on the morning of Dec. 1, 2020. The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office logged a call from the clinic shortly after 9 a.m.: Three protesters had infiltrated the clinic’s defenses, staking out a spot on the private road. They parked in the lot next door, anti-abortion banners hanging from their cars. According to a sheriff’s report, when officers arrived to remove them, “THEY PRETEND TO BE RENTERS.” An hour later, the officers appended a correction: “PEOPLE HAVE AUTORIZATION (sic) BY PROPERTY OWNER TO BE ON PROPERTY.” The police drove away; the protesters stayed.

That’s when Flynn discovered she had a new neighbor: Gertrude Perez-Poveda, a former accountant in her early 70s who is a leader of Family for LIFE, a local anti-abortion group. Trudy, as everyone calls her, was known for picketing the nearby Planned Parenthood. Now she’d moved into a drab one-story building a couple of hundred feet from Flynn’s clinic that had sat vacant while its owner, a doctor, faced prosecution for allegedly exposing himself to a patient. (He was convicted last year.) For $1,000 a month, Perez-Poveda suddenly had 24/7 access to a room, a bathroom, and—most importantly—the private road. 

Kelly Flynn stands outside her clinic, A Woman’s Choice of Jacksonville, Fla.

In the little more than two months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States has committed $14 billion in money and weapons to the Ukrainians. That’s an extraordinary sum, more than three times the amount of US aid Ukraine has received since 2014, the year Russia annexed Crimea. 

But last week President Joe Biden blew past that figure. He asked lawmakers for $33 billion of aid, consisting of defensive weapons and economic assistance. If Congress approves Biden’s request, the US government will have sent Ukraine $47 billion in less than a year, more money than all but a handful of countries have ever received, in total, from the United States. 

“It is almost unprecedented to shovel that much aid to one country in such a short amount of time,” William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told me. Only four countries have received more than $30 billion in lifetime aid from the United States, and two of them—Iraq and Afghanistan—were the site of lengthy US conflicts. 

Biden is requesting $33 billion in aid to Ukraine, which is more money than the US has sent all but four countries *in total* since 1946 https://t.co/ALx5dlIqyd

— Dan Spinelli (@danspinelli902) April 28, 2022

Almost ten years ago, I published a novel called Nevada with a small press called Topside that doesn’t exist anymore. You may or may not have heard of it, but if there are trans people in your life who are readers, they probably have. It became a subcultural Thing. It’s been out of print for a few years, but in June, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will bring it back into print.

People have called Nevada “ground zero for modern trans literature,” and while I get that—before it was published, I don’t think I’d read a novel with a trans character who I didn’t at least sort of hate—I don’t really feel like a genius visionary who invented literature centering marginalized experiences. At the very least, this idea occludes the work other people had done that made Nevada possible. So instead of celebrating myself, I want to use this opportunity to say thanks, and to think through some of the influences and experiences that shaped the novel.

FICTIONMANIA

At one point in Nevada, Maria mentions the “stupid 2002 internet.” At a Q&A following a reading on the 2013 book release tour, I was asked what that meant. I struggled to come up with a decent answer. We are so steeped in for-profit social media today that it’s hard to remember anything else. It wasn’t until the night after that reading, lying awake and beating myself up for not having a good answer, that I thought of a pretty good one. It is a website called Fictionmania. It’s still online. And if you’re hungry for that post-post-vaporwave retro “2002 internet” aesthetic, great news: it hasn’t updated its design since it came online in 1998.

While reading Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion, I often caught myself mistaking it for a diary. The memoir details an illicit affair in prose that feels startlingly immediate, full of particulars that seem to surface in real time: a skirt in a Benetton shop; a list of fortune-tellers in the telephone book; the faded lettering of a plaque that reads PASSAGE CARDINET, near where the author sought a clandestine abortion years before. Yet I was continually made aware that time had passed, and this was last year’s love seen through this year’s eyes: “From September last year,” Ernaux writes, near the beginning, “I did nothing else but wait for a man: for him to call me and come around to my place.” The details of this “most violent and unaccountable reality” have been refracted and altered, distilled into a remarkable book.

I recently read A Girl’s Story, Ernaux’s 2020 memoir of another doomed and passionate love—her first, in the summer of 1958—and was struck by her description of the process by which she reconstructed her former self, the diligence with which she studiedthis young “girl of ’58.” Ernaux googles her summer-camp bunkmates and considers pretending to be a journalist so she can call them up and ask about herself. She looks at a photograph of her long-lost lover’s great-grandchildren. While reading an old diary, and letters she sent to a classmate, she recognizes certain falsenesses in them—pretensions, lies, self-deceptions. The quotations from books she copied down in 1958 now strike her as a more direct means of access to her state of mind then. All memoir involves time travel, and yet Ernaux, as she twists and turns, trying to cross the schisms between her various selves, manages to create what feels like a new tense—a literary time zone that can hold it all at once.

In our Spring issue, the Review published some of the source material on which Ernaux based Simple Passion: selections from her real diaries from 1988, which describe her affair with a married diplomat from the Soviet Union. Here is that violent and unaccountable reality, recorded at a distance of mere hours. Many entries are short, factual, engaged with the torment of love and logistics: “Last night he called. I was sleeping. He wanted to come around. Not possible. (Éric here.) Restless night, what to do with this desire?” Others are breathless and breezy: “I realized that I’d lost a contact lens. I found it on his penis. (I thought of Zola, who lost his monocle between the breasts of women.)” To read them is to encounter something like a pentimento, the revelation of writing underneath other writing—a quality that already suffuses so much of her work. We can, of course, marvel at what Ernaux was able to make of these entries in Simple Passion. But they offer their own distinct and potent pleasures, the rare, delightful, occasionally shocking intimacies of reading someone else’s private thoughts.

To mark the appearance of Ernaux’s diaries, the Review has been asking writers and artists to share pages from their own. Yesterday on our website, we published the first in the series: part of the poet Elisa Gonzalez’s 2018 journal, which documents the aftermath of an affair and a marriage. Reading them now, she, too, had some distance from this former self. “I used to accept, unquestioningly, that pleasure was fleeting,” she writes in a postscript. “but now I think it has an afterlife, during which we integrate it into all the griefs we also feel.”

These diaries feel like gifts, or offerings, that are unlike any other kind of writing. There is, as Ernaux herself writes in a brief introduction, “a truth in those pages that differed from the one to be found in Simple Passion—something raw and dark, without salvation, a kind of oblation.”

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

“Barneys was more than a department store,” issue no. 239 contributor Adrienne Raphel reminisces in a new essay on the Daily. “A glowing spiral staircase, white as milk, wound its way through the store—the Guggenheim, but make it fashion.” This week, we’re unlocking an Art of Fiction interview with the bard of postwar American consumerism, Don DeLillo, as well as Zadie Smith’s story “Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets,” Mary Ruefle’s account of shopping—as in shoplifting—at Woolworth’s in “Milk Shake,” and a series of photographs taken of Paris’s legendary market, Les Halles, in the sixties.

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and art portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

INTERVIEW
The Art of Fiction No. 135
Don DeLillo

In our Spring issue, we published selections from Annie Ernaux’s 1988 diaries, which chronicle the affair that served as the basis for her memoir Simple Passion. To mark the occasion, the Review has begun asking writers and artists for pages from their diaries, along with brief postscripts.

July 13, 2018

I was up all night and it’s afternoon now. Maybe writing this will let me go to sleep. Sometimes it feels as if I’ve been awake for six months. Longer? In Cyprus I felt like I never slept. Even when I did my body felt impatient, braced, alert, waiting for the knock of the cat’s paws on the bedroom door at 5 A.M. I would be out of bed before she could start mewing for food. “Acutely, terribly awake,” I wrote in a poem I’m still trying to finish. She knew I was an easy mark, looking for an escape into the day. I saw nearly every sunrise from my window onto the garden. The bougainvillea. “I want to make love to everyone who’s ever lived,” I wrote in the same unfinished poem. An unwise wish, and a lie, of course, if taken literally—but the feeling. What was I trying to ask for? Pleasure. Recompense from the world. Surprise. The end of desire. Something.

And now I’m a sad woman, apparently; sleeplessness is entirely changed, desire’s not ended but it holds hands with pain. He does not come to me because he does not want to come, and not for any other reason. It’s all very boring, this recitation. Last night it rained horribly but even so I forced myself to go to Chelsea for dinner with J. and her friend Y., who has one of those jobs I always want when I find out they exist. He’s an expert on repairing antique, or simply old, sound equipment. I envy expertise that seems both useful and specific. And like you had to actually do something to acquire it, like it’s not just blather. J. was late, so I had to make conversation with Y. while he finished a blueberry galette. The galette was a godsend, actually, since I had just listened to his complaints about how blueberries are an inferior fruit, tasteless, and the only reason he was making this was because J. had requested it. And then, after I had enough wine to feel like talking, J. arrived, and everything improved as they sparred the way old friends do. I didn’t eat enough for Y.’s satisfaction, so he chided me and then forgave me after I ate more galette, and then he started playing records on a record player so beautiful I didn’t want to go near it, and then J. got out the molly and coke. We took a signed photo of a famous musician off the wall to do lines off of, now I don’t remember who, but Y. joked “he’d approve” so it was probably Keith Richards or someone like that. I saw K. R. joke once about how his ghostwriter did all the work on his memoir. It sounds like a relief to have someone translate, or invent, your memories, to tell your life story so you can read it.

Arsenal have been linked with a move to sign Dominic Calvert-Lewin from Everton this summer, but Kevin Phillips wants the club to aim higher.

The England international may be in want of a move to a bigger club, but given his struggles throughout the current term, it is difficult to argue his cause.

Phillips claims he can see why we are supposedly interest in his signing, but as an Arsenal fan he simply doesn’t want to see us invest a substantial sum in bringing him to north London.

“It’s a strange one,” he told the Football Insider.

“I think when he’s fully fit and firing, I can see it. But putting my Arsenal cap on, as an Arsenal fan – would it really excite me?

Kevin Campbell has heaped praise on Arsenal loanee Dinos Mavropanos with West Ham claimed to be eyeing his potential signing.

The Greek international is currently on loan with Bundesliga side Stuttgart where he has been enjoying a fine season, but with the club currently under the threat of relegation, they are unlikely to be able to keep hold of him beyond the season.

Stuttgart do have an option to buy the defender, one which you would expect them to take up, even if the decision was then to sell him on for a profit should they succumb to relegation.

West Ham are now being linked with his potential signing this summer as they look to continue to bolster their squad, and former Arsenal striker Kevin Campbell has praised the defender amidst links with such a move.

“From what I’ve heard, he’s done really well in Germany,” Campbell told the FootballInsider.

David Moyes has claimed that it’s ‘quite difficult’ to understand Arsenal’s set pattern ahead of his West Ham side’s clash with Arsenal.

The Gunners are hoping to make it three wins in a row as they look to close in on a top-four finish, having a two-point lead over Tottenham in the table at present.

After recent wins over both Chelsea and Manchester United, we now have the tough challenge of going away to London rivals West Ham, and their manager has praised the job being done by Mikel Arteta, before admitting that it is difficult to understand our patterns of play.

“I think he’s done a really good job,” Moyes told reporters during his pre-match conference (via the club’s official website.

“They were in the semi-finals of the Europa League last year and it shows how well they have come on from what they have done last year, so I am sure Mikel wants his teams to be in Europe (again).

Despite many Arsenal fans not giving any credit to Mikel Arteta, despite bringing in half a team of unnkown younsters last summer, and somehow guiding them into the fight for the Top Four spot, the fact is that him and his half-baked team have worked wonders this season.

If we can win again tomorrow against our local rivals West Ham, we are most definitely in the driving seat again, unless Tottenham can pull off another miracle by beating Liverpool at Anfield next week.

Arteta himself is very happy with the way the team has developed, and cannot help but praise them and fully expects the youngsters to improve even further next season, with a few new additions in the coming transfer window.

The boss made it clear at the end of last summer that we were only half-way through our rebuilding project, and we should see a lot more progress ahead of the next campaign. “I think the team has made a great leap at the level of identity, game, style, clarity… And obviously, the ability that has given us to be able to repeat line-ups, the power to repeat the system and the power to repeat movements, dynamics, structures that we want, has made it easier for us, it has given us a lot of fluidity and security”, explains the Spanish coach on DAZN’s podcast (translated by Google).

LONDON, ENGLAND – APRIL 23: Mikel Arteta, Manager of Arsenal gives their team instructions during the Premier League match between Arsenal and Manchester United at Emirates Stadium on April 23, 2022 in London, England. (Photo by Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)

“They have shown that they have the ability to win games and be decisive, and they have done so in a very consistent way for many games, ”