{"id":191292,"date":"2026-06-04T13:02:43","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T21:02:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=191292"},"modified":"2026-06-04T14:49:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T22:49:07","slug":"kerry-howley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=191292","title":{"rendered":"Kerry Howley"},"content":{"rendered":"

My 2008 Kerry Howley interview.<\/a><\/p>\n

Kerry Howley (b. 1981)<\/a> is an American journalist, essayist, and screenwriter. She writes literary nonfiction that joins immersive reporting to philosophical questions about consciousness, institutional power, surveillance, and the construction of narrative. Her work sits within a tradition that runs from New Journalism<\/a> through the essayistic reportage of Joan Didion (1934-2021)<\/a> and Janet Malcolm (1934-2021)<\/a>, and it carries a steady concern with how large organizations define the people they record.<\/p>\n

Howley was born in Georgetown, Texas<\/a>, and spent part of her youth in Iowa. She studied at Georgetown University<\/a> and took a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and English in 2003. That philosophy training shapes her reporting. She approaches her subjects through questions about perception, embodiment, and knowledge rather than through the accumulation of facts alone. Phenomenological<\/a> problems recur in her writing: how a man experiences reality from inside his own mind, and how that experience survives contact with systems that try to catalog it.<\/p>\n

She came to Reason<\/a> magazine as an intern in 2003, the Burton C. Gray Memorial Intern. She then moved to Southeast Asia and reported from Yangon for the Myanmar Times<\/a>, covering the United Nations and development questions. She returned to the United States in 2005 and joined the Reason staff, rising to associate editor in 2006 and senior editor in 2007. She reported from Washington, Los Angeles, Myanmar, and Cuba. She examined informal markets, economic transitions, and the friction between state power and individual choice. The libertarian skepticism of those years toward concentrated authority stays visible in her later work, though her mature writing reaches past any single politics.<\/p>\n

Howley earned an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program<\/a> in 2011, and she later taught there as an assistant professor. The program gave her time to study prose at the sentence level, a discipline she has named as central to her method.<\/p>\n

Her first book, Thrown<\/em><\/a> (2014), brought wide recognition. The book takes mixed martial arts<\/a> as its surface subject. It reads as an inquiry into embodiment, risk, and the search for transcendence in a disenchanted age. Howley builds the narrative around two fighters, Jens Pulver (b. 1974)<\/a> and Brandon Thatch<\/a>, and she follows them through training, injury, and the public exposure of the cage. She departs from sports journalism. The athletic result interests her less than the fighter’s experience of pain, fear, and discipline. A crafted narrator carries the book, a figure who shares much with the author yet works as a literary construction. Through this narrator Howley blurs the line between observer and participant, and she moves from close description of combat to abstract reflection on desire and consciousness. The New York Times named it a Notable Book. It won first prize in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards and earned a place on best-of-year lists at Time, Slate, and Salon.<\/p>\n

Through the 2010s Howley widened her range as a magazine writer. She published reported essays and features in The New York Times Magazine<\/a>, Harper’s<\/a>, The Paris Review<\/a>, Granta<\/a>, Bookforum, and The Atlantic<\/a>. She returns again and again to people whose lives press against powerful institutions and who resist easy classification. She frames social questions through the gap between official accounts and lived experience rather than through ideology.<\/p>\n

Her interest in secrecy and state power led to work with the filmmaker Alex Gibney (b. 1953)<\/a> on the documentary The Forever Prisoner (2021). The film traces the detention and interrogation of Abu Zubaydah<\/a>, the first high-value prisoner subjected to the CIA<\/a>‘s program of so-called enhanced interrogation. By following the bureaucratic record that sustained those practices, the project anticipates the concerns of her later book. It studies how institutions generate, store, and reshape official memory.<\/p>\n

In 2020 Howley joined New York<\/a> magazine as a staff writer. Her work there turns toward the consequences of political polarization, digital media, conspiracy belief, and falling trust in institutions. She treats these as problems of knowledge and perception more than as partisan contests. Her reporting on Alex Jones<\/a> and on defendants tied to the January 6 Capitol riot asks how a man builds a coherent picture of reality inside an environment flooded with rival information.<\/p>\n

These questions reach their fullest form in her second book, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State<\/em><\/a> (2023). The book grows out of her New York profile of Reality Winner (b. 1991)<\/a>, the intelligence contractor who printed and leaked a classified report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and received a five-year sentence. Howley sets Winner’s story against the post-September 11 expansion of American surveillance and intelligence work. She presents surveillance less as a technology than as a form of narrative production. Institutions gather fragments, arrange them into stories, and then act on the stories as if they hold the whole of a person. One claim sits at the center of the book: modern bureaucracies build simplified versions of human beings. Databases, intelligence files, and court records turn a man into a legible category, and the category drops everything that does not fit. Much political conflict, she argues, grows from the distance between the recorded self and the living one. The book draws character sketches of Edward Snowden<\/a>, Chelsea Manning<\/a>, and other leakers. It was named a New York Times top ten book of the year and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.<\/p>\n

Howley returned to Winner’s story as a screenwriter. She wrote the feature film Winner (2024)<\/a>, which dramatizes the leak and its aftermath and carries her study of secrecy and individual agency into a new form.<\/p>\n

Her prose is compressed and ironic. She observes closely, and she keeps uncertainty in view rather than resolving it. She rarely sets herself up as a moral authority or an advocate. She holds competing interpretations open, and she stays alert to the moment when an institution flattens a complex reality to make it manageable. Critics place her near Didion and Malcolm for this reason, though her focus on surveillance, data, and information systems marks the work as her own.<\/p>\n

Howley has held a Lannan Foundation fellowship and, in 2025, a Guggenheim fellowship<\/a>. She married the writer Will Wilkinson (b. 1973)<\/a>, with whom she has two children, and she lives in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

Taken whole, her work circles one question. How does a man experience reality when powerful organizations work to define reality for him? She has asked it of fighters, detainees, analysts, leakers, and ordinary citizens. The answer stays steady: the human remainder, the part no file holds, is what her reporting tries to recover.<\/p>\n

The Set<\/strong><\/p>\n

Howley belongs to a set that sits where literary nonfiction meets institutional reporting, and she reached it by crossing out of an earlier world. Take the roster first, then the code.<\/p>\n

The literary-essay core holds her nearest kin. Leslie Jamison (b. 1983)<\/a> is the closest, another philosophy-minded essayist who reports from inside an experience and writes the self as a made thing. Patrick Radden Keefe (b. 1976)<\/a> shares her subject, the single person caught in a large institutional machine, rendered at book length with a novelist’s care. Around them stand Maggie Nelson (b. 1973)<\/a>, Eula Biss (b. 1977)<\/a>, John Jeremiah Sullivan (b. 1974)<\/a>, Jia Tolentino (b. 1988)<\/a>, Rachel Aviv<\/a>, and Melissa Febos (b. 1980)<\/a>, who blurbed Bottoms Up<\/em><\/a>. The lineage above them is fixed: Joan Didion (1934-2021)<\/a>, Janet Malcolm (1934-2021)<\/a>, and behind those the New Journalists Tom Wolfe (1930-2018)<\/a> and Gay Talese (b. 1932)<\/a>. Katherine Boo (b. 1964)<\/a> and Jane Mayer (b. 1955)<\/a> mark the investigative wing, the reporters who keep the prose and add the documents.<\/p>\n

The Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program<\/a> is her guild. John D’Agata<\/a> is its theorist, the man who pushed the essay toward the lyric and toward a loose relation with fact, the tradition that licenses Howley’s crafted narrator. Kristen Radtke<\/a>, her fellow Iowa graduate, took a Guggenheim Fellowship<\/a> the same year. The program supplies the creed she states herself: the afternoon spent unraveling one Nabokov sentence.<\/p>\n

New York<\/a> magazine is her present home and her daily company. Jonathan Chait (b. 1972)<\/a>, Rebecca Traister (b. 1975)<\/a>, Olivia Nuzzi (b. 1993)<\/a>, Frank Rich (b. 1949)<\/a>, and David Wallace-Wells<\/a> surround her there. Chris Hayes (b. 1979)<\/a>, who blurbed her and writes his own books on American institutions, sits on the broadcast edge of this circle. Alex Gibney<\/a> connects her to the documentary world.<\/p>\n

Then the world she left. Howley came up at Reason<\/a>, and that past still shapes the set after the migration. Her husband, Will Wilkinson (b. 1973)<\/a>, made the same crossing, from libertarian policy writing toward a heterodox center. Matt Welch<\/a>, Nick Gillespie (b. 1963)<\/a>, Virginia Postrel (b. 1960)<\/a>, Megan McArdle (b. 1973)<\/a>, and Tyler Cowen (b. 1962)<\/a> formed her early adulthood. The surveillance beat of her later work runs alongside Spencer Ackerman<\/a>, Jeremy Scahill (b. 1974)<\/a>, Barton Gellman (b. 1960)<\/a>, and James Risen (b. 1955)<\/a>. She is not of that press. She borrows its subject and refuses its certainty.<\/p>\n

That crossing is the first thing to see. Howley carried the libertarian suspicion of state power into a literary world that leans left, and she kept the suspicion while dropping the policy vocabulary. Her set prizes the move. It reads as independence.<\/p>\n

What they value: the well-made sentence above all, then originality, then sympathy for the misread person. They value ambivalence and distrust advocacy. They want the book you cannot file under a genre, and they say so in the blurbs, where “unclassifiable” is the warmest word they own. They value intelligence as such, and they fear the clich\u00e9 more than they fear error.<\/p>\n

Their hero system rewards the writer who sees what the crowd flattens and renders it whole. The hero takes a despised figure, the cage fighter, the leaker, the woman who finds satanic symbols on a soda can, and shows the full person the file destroyed. Heroism is noticing. The saint of this system spends the afternoon on the sentence and the year on the paragraph and comes out with a book that remaps its form. The villain is the flattener: the bureaucrat who files a man into a category, the hack who moralizes, the ideologue who knows in advance what he thinks.<\/p>\n

Their status games run on placement, prizes, and the praise of other writers. Status comes from Harper’s Magazine<\/a>, The Paris Review<\/a>, The New Yorker<\/a>, and a staff seat at New York. It comes from the Guggenheim Fellowship<\/a>, the Lannan, the National Book Critics Circle Award<\/a>, the New York Times top ten. It comes most from genre-transcendence, from a fellow writer saying he cannot describe what your book is. The television hit, the writer holding her own against the partisan talking head, confers a lesser status. The deepest status sign is to be hard to place, useful to no team, claimed by everyone.<\/p>\n

Their normative claims sit firm under the irony. The state should not reduce a man to his data. Surveillance is wrong. Torture is wrong. A person owns a truth the institution destroys, and the destruction is the sin. They will not say these flat. The set treats the open moral declaration as gauche. The norm arrives through rendering and through the exact detail, never through the sermon.<\/p>\n

Their essentialism is the bedrock under all of it. They hold that a real interior exists, a self prior to every file, a human remainder no database can hold. The category lies and the lived life tells the truth. Consciousness is singular and cannot be reduced. This faith wears the costume of skepticism, since they doubt every institutional account, yet at the center sits a strong positive belief in the authentic person. Howley’s whole body of work rests on it.<\/p>\n

Their moral grammar runs on irony and complexity. Ambivalence is the cardinal virtue and easy certainty the cardinal vice. They extend sympathy downward, to the loser and the freak and the misclassified, and reserve contempt for the flattener and the moralist. To know too readily what you think is the worst fault in the room. They prize complexity as a moral good and not only an aesthetic one, and they suspect anyone whose conclusions arrive too fast or fit a team too well. The grammar lets them oppose the surveillance state and the smug progressive certainty in one breath, the position Howley has held since she crossed over.<\/p>\n

Essentialism<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Stephen Turner<\/a> denies that social and collective words name real shared things. Culture, practice, norm, tradition, the social: these look like substances with causal powers, and they are labels we lay over many separate people whose habits run similar enough to earn the same name. Sameness is an attribution we make from outside. It is not an essence sitting inside the cases. Turn that tool on Howley and two of her foundations crack.
\nHer surface program is anti-essentialist. She shows the file falsifying the man, the category dropping the person, the dossier standing in for a life. Good. The trouble starts under the floor, where she keeps two essences of her own.
\nThe first is the authentic self. Howley believes in a human remainder, a real interior prior to every record, the thing no database can hold. Her whole grief depends on it. The institution betrays the person because the person carries a true inner content the institution misses. Turner cuts the ground away. The true self the file destroys is a posited essence, no firmer than the bureaucratic category she attacks. There may be no unified interior waiting under the descriptions. There may be a man with a long bundle of habits, trainings, moods, and histories, describable a hundred ways and exhausted by none, and that incompleteness is the normal state of all description, not the wound of a lost essence. The database does not fail to capture a soul. It is one more partial account among many, and partiality is what accounts are. Strip the essence and the betrayal stops reading as betrayal. What remains is the ordinary gap between any label and any person.
\nSee the symmetry. The state reifies a category and calls it the man. Howley reifies an interior and calls it the real man. Both moves posit a hidden substance. Turner refuses both. The individual is real and carries no essence. He is a site of causes, not the bearer of a core.
\nThe second essence is the institution. Howley writes “the surveillance state,” “the deep state,” “bureaucracy,” as though each names a single agent with a will. The institution flattens. The institution builds simplified versions of people. The institution acts on its stories. Turner reads this as reification of the collective. No such unified thing does anything. Many people in many agencies, trained in incompatible practices, making contingent choices under local pressure, get summed into one noun and handed a verb. “Surveillance is made of us,” she writes, and “to study surveillance is to learn we cannot escape ourselves.” That is essence-talk at full volume. Surveillance turns into a metaphysical condition rather than a scatter of particular practices done by particular hands. Replace the noun with the people and the drama thins. No deep state holds an intention. There are clerks, cables, statutes, and habits.
\nHowley’s two essences need each other. The authentic interior looks violated only against the backdrop of a unified institution doing the violating. The unified institution looks sinister only against the backdrop of a real self it crushes. Pull either essence and the other loses its charge. Drop both and you keep everything true in her reporting, the named clerk, the named cable, the person reduced on a form, and you lose only the metaphysics that made the reduction feel like fate.
\nThis leaves Howley right about Reality Winner and Abu Zubaydah. The reductions she records happen. Turner’s claim is narrower and harsher. The reductions are not the failure of institutions to honor an essence the person carries. They are descriptions, made by people, serving purposes, and they fall short the way every description falls short of every life. Howley wants the shortfall to mean a theft. Turner says it means only that no account is the last word, hers included, the one that posits the irreducible self included.<\/p>\n

Explaining the Normative<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Turner’s target in Explaining the Normative<\/em><\/a> is normativism, the habit of positing a binding “ought” that floats above behavior and claims to explain it. The normativist watches people act, finds a regularity, and then adds a second story on top: the act is valid, correct, obligatory, required by a norm. Turner says the second story does no work. The bindingness gets laid on, not found. Strip it and you lose nothing the regularity did not already carry. What remains is natural. People trained to act one way, disposed to feel a pull, ready to sanction the ones who stray. The feeling of obligation is real as a feeling. The obligating object is a ghost.
\nHowley tells me in 2008<\/a> that she has no book and no tradition she feels bound to. She reaches instead for a function. “The job of morality is to help people find ways to cooperate.” Right and wrong reduce to “ways of cooperating that are mutually beneficial.” On abortion, “Who is harmed if we prohibit this? Who is benefitted if we do not?” On prostitution, “Women ought to be free to do what they want with their bodies.” She thinks this makes her a clear-eyed pragmatist with the metaphysics cleared out.
\nTurner shows the metaphysics still in the room. She has dropped the religious source and kept the normative vocabulary. “Harm” does the heavy lifting in her calculus, and harm is a normative primitive, not a neutral measurement. The “ought” in “women ought to be free” stands flat and binding, and she never says where its force comes from. Autonomy is her bedrock, the value she will not dissolve even while she dissolves abortion and prostitution into line-drawing with no good answer. Ask why autonomy gets to be the floor when everything above it stays contingent, and the normativist has no reply that bottoms out in anything but the value. Turner’s reply does bottom out. Autonomy is the disposition her training installed deepest, not a fact she found in the moral order.
\nThe interview even narrates the training<\/a>, which is the part the normativist never wants you to see. A streak of individualism at six. The village-atheist phase at ten. Then Reason, which she says “brands libertarianism as creating space for identity creation,” a “broad view of autonomy that I found attractive.” She lets “the literature take me where it goes.” That is a causal history of habituation, told plainly. Howley gives you the genealogy of her own commitments and then treats the commitments as binding rather than as the residue of where the literature took her. The genealogy is the Turnerian account. The bindingness she lays over it is the idle wheel.
\nWatch her on norms head-on. She says of misogyny that “they are changing norms and I’m waiting for them to change further.” Norms as mutable social regularities: Turner agrees. But “further” smuggles a direction, a standard the shifting norms move toward. No such standard waits out there. There is her trained preference and the people who share it, sanctioning the slow. The teleology in “further” is the posit. Pull it and you keep the real thing, a woman who wants other people to act as she is disposed to want them to act, and who will press until they do.
\nNow run it forward to the books. The mature work stops arguing the norm and starts rendering it. The reduction of a person to a file reads as a wrong, the surveillance as a violation, and she almost never states the rule. Turner calls this normativism at its purest. She produces the reader’s feeling of obligation, the recoil, the sense that this must not be done, and then presents that produced feeling as the recognition of a moral fact. The narrative confers the bindingness and disguises the conferral as discovery. The 2008 Howley<\/a> argued the autonomy the later Howley renders. Same posit, quieter delivery.
\nNone of this shows her conclusions wrong. Turner does not tell you prostitution should be illegal or that Reality Winner earned her cell. He tells you that the “ought” Howley reaches for, then and now, explains nothing the habits and the sanctions do not already explain, and that her own interview<\/a>, by laying out how she got trained into autonomy, makes the deflationary case for him.<\/p>\n

Pierre Bourdieu<\/a> (1930-2002)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bourdieu gives you the whole set as a field, a structured space where writers compete for a capital you cannot bank but can lose in an afternoon. Two poles organize the space. At the heteronomous pole, writing serves something outside literature, the market, the party, the policy shop, and success there gets counted in sales, clicks, and political use. At the autonomous pole, writing serves only the recognition of other writers, and success gets counted in prestige that pretends to despise counting. Howley’s world clusters at the autonomous pole, and almost everything strange about it follows from where it stands.
\nThe autonomous pole runs an inverted economy. Bourdieu calls it the economic world reversed. The mass best-seller earns money and loses standing. The book that sells slowly to the right few earns standing and defers the money. So the warmest word the set owns is “unclassifiable,” because a classified book is a legible product, and legibility belongs to the market the autonomous writer must scorn to keep his rank. The blurb is the coin of this realm, peer paying peer in symbolic capital. Febos consecrates Howley, Hayes consecrates Howley, and each transfer lifts both parties, because both stand inside the circle that gets to confer worth. Prizes do the same work at higher voltage. The Guggenheim, the Lannan, and the National Book Critics Circle are the field’s banks. They issue the currency, and they back it with nothing but the agreement of everyone who counts.
\nDisinterest is the engine, and Bourdieu’s sharpest point is that the disinterest is interested all the way down. The denial of economic and political motive is the shape ambition takes at the autonomous pole. To say “I am not pursuing a TV career” is not to step off the board. It is a strong move on it. My 2008 interview<\/a> catches Howley making the move in real time. She is on Red Eye every other week, ten to twenty times the audience of her magazine, and she keeps the show at arm’s length. “It no more defines my life than hanging out with friends after work.” She hopes people see her as “the senior editor at Reason,” not the girl on the late-night Fox panel. She names the charge herself, the colleagues who say she is “dumbing down your craft.” That anxiety is field-consciousness at work. She guards the boundary between the autonomous good, the written craft, and the heteronomous temptation, the mass-television reach that pays in fame and costs in standing. The reach she could have she declines, and the decline is the asset.
\nRead her trajectory and the homology snaps into place. The interview<\/a> gives the origins Bourdieu wants. A father she calls a systems analyst, “not very profitable.” A mother who is a respiratory therapist. A Catholic girls’ school in Connecticut. A fat, sullen, atheist child who hated the cheerleaders and wanted to be a novelist, “squirreled away somewhere far away living a vivid internal life.” That is a habitus built for the autonomous pole before she ever found it, a disposition toward interiority and against the crowd, primed to read the popular as beneath her and the difficult as hers. Georgetown supplies the elite credential. The Iowa nonfiction MFA, the consecrated seminary of the form, converts the credential into literary capital. New York magazine and the books complete the climb. She moves from the middle into the dominated fraction of the dominant class, the people rich in cultural capital and thinner in money, whose standing rests on taste and whose adversary is the holder of mere power.
\nThat structural position explains her subject and her politics at once. The autonomous writer wins distinction by consecrating the unconsecrated, by taking low material, cage fighters, a leaker, the surveilled, and lifting it with high literary seriousness, importing prestige through the transformation. The adversary stance toward the state runs deeper than conviction. It is the native posture of the cultural fraction toward the political and economic fractions above it. Cultural capital critiques power because critiquing power is how cultural capital asserts its rank. Caring about the right victims in the right register pays.
\nNow the migration, Reason to New York. Bourdieu reads it as a passage from the short production cycle to the long one. Reason is the heteronomous house, writing yoked to a politics, the libertarian party, the quick hit. New York and the literary book belong to the long cycle, where the payoff comes late and arrives laundered through disinterest. She drops the punditry and the panel for the slow book that becomes a film a decade on. The autonomous route pays in the end, in money as well as prestige, but only for the writer who first convinces the field she was not chasing the money. Her line in the interview<\/a>, “I’ve let the literature take me where it goes,” is the purest autonomous gesture available, the disavowal of strategy that serves as the field’s most effective strategy.
\nThe set believes in the singular voice, the sui generis book, the writer no category holds. Bourdieu calls this the charismatic ideology, the field’s standing misrecognition of its own hand. The value the blurbs and prizes and placements produce gets relabeled as genius native to the author. The human remainder no file can hold is a real and moving idea, and it is also a product, made to the exact specification of the autonomous market, sold to the few who can consecrate it, and praised in the one word that market saves for its best goods. Unclassifiable. The field made the value, then taught Howley and her readers to call it her gift.<\/p>\n

Buffered & Porous Identity<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Philosopher Charles Taylor<\/a> splits the self in two and dates the split. The porous self belongs to the enchanted world. Its boundary leaks. Spirits, grace, demons, and cosmic forces cross into it, meaning lives out in things, and the man stands open and unprotected, host to powers larger than him. The buffered self belongs to the disenchanted modern world. Its boundary holds. Meaning withdraws into the mind, the cosmos goes inert, and the man becomes master of his own significance, sealed, safe, and cut off. The buffered self buys security and pays in flatness. It cannot be invaded, and it cannot be filled. Modern people live inside it, inside what Taylor calls the immanent frame, and they ache for the fullness the sealing took away. Hold that and Howley’s whole corpus reads as one long campaign against the buffer from the inside.
\nStart with what she is. The 2008 interview<\/a> gives you the buffered self in pure form. She rejects Catholicism at six, calls herself “the worst village atheist you could imagine” at ten, and settles into an adult unbelief with “no strong compelling reason to believe in God.” She wanted to be a novelist living “a vivid internal life.” She prizes autonomy, control, the bounded sovereign individual, the libertarianism she found at Reason that creates “space for identity creation.” Every marker points the same way. Disenchanted, self-authored, master of her meanings, shut tight. Taylor’s modern subject, drawn from life.
\nNow watch the sealed self go hunting for the opening. Thrown<\/em><\/a> is the hunt named outright. The title borrows Heidegger’s (1889-1976) word for being cast into existence, but in Taylor’s register it names the wish to be thrown open, breached, pulled past the boundary the buffer keeps. Her narrator is a phenomenology student, the buffered intellectual at maximum seal, and she goes looking for ecstasy in the one place the disenchanted world still lets the self be breached. The cage. Pain, risk, the body at its limit, the crowd, the blood, the surrender of the control she otherwise guards. The fighters reach for porousness through their bodies and she reaches for it through them. Taylor calls the goal fullness, the moment when life stops being flat and gathers into intensity. Howley finds her candidate for fullness in violence, because violence is where a modern can still lose the self without having to believe anything. The cage is re-enchantment for unbelievers. It opens the porous channel and asks no creed.
\nThe interview<\/a> rehearses the same reach before the book. Her happiest years are Burma under the dictatorship, the place that threw her “out of my comfort zone,” where by eleven each morning she had “a completely bizarre experience.” That, she says, “makes you feel in the moment. It makes you pay attention.” Read it through Taylor and it is the buffered self seeking porous experience through dislocation, hunting the breach in dread and strangeness because the sealed life at home cannot supply it.
\nBottoms Up<\/em><\/a> runs the same problem with the poles reversed. Now the buffer is the enemy, scaled up into an institution. The surveillance state treats the person as the perfect buffered object, a closed unit of data, bounded, legible, masterable, exhausted by the file. The dossier is the buffered fantasy made bureaucratic, a self with no opening and no remainder, fully captured and fully owned. Howley spends the book showing the leak. The parts that spill past the data, the life the record cannot hold, the person who exceeds the category. In Taylor’s terms she defends porousness against an order that denies a man has any. The grief in the book is the disenchantment grief at full strength, the protest of a writer who cannot bear a world that files the soul as information.
\nHowley is the disenchanted modern who refuses the flatness of her own condition. She lives in the immanent frame and cannot leave it, too sealed to believe, too hungry to accept the seal. Taylor calls this the cross-pressure, the modern caught between a closed world and the intimation of something past it, at home in neither. Her work is the cross-pressure turned into a method. She writes from inside the buffer about everything that strains against it, the ecstasy of the fighter, the remainder the state cannot reach, the depth no description drains.
\nHowley wants the porous opening on buffered terms. She seeks ecstasy as a spectator and a phenomenologist, transcendence as an aesthetic event, the sacred renamed as the irreducibly subjective so a man can honor it without kneeling to anything. She reaches for the breach and keeps her hand on the door. The fighters risk the loss of the self. She watches them risk it and writes it beautifully. The detainee and the leaker suffer the invasion of the buffer. She records the suffering and insists on the remainder. What she will not do is the thing the porous self does, surrender the mastery, accept a real outside, let something cross the boundary she did not choose and cannot control. Her human remainder no file can hold is enchantment domesticated for atheists, the soul preserved under a secular name so the disenchanted can keep it without paying for it.
\nHowley diagnoses the buffered condition with more feeling than almost anyone now writing, and she performs its central evasion in the same motion. She mourns the sealed self and guards the seal. The hunger is real and the door stays shut, and the whole body of work lives in the gap between them. If you use one frame on her, use this one, because it explains not only what she writes about but why a woman with no God spends her life writing about the search for grace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My 2008 Kerry Howley interview. Kerry Howley (b. 1981) is an American journalist, essayist, and screenwriter. She writes literary nonfiction that joins immersive reporting to philosophical questions about consciousness, institutional power, surveillance, and the construction of narrative. Her work sits … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=191292"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":191338,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191292\/revisions\/191338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=191292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=191292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=191292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}