Ashley Naftule | Longreads | September 2018 | 9 minutes (2,464 words)
It takes a writer of considerable talent to gear-shift from meditations on mortality to goofy stoner daydreams (and not give the reader whiplash while she's doing it). It's a tonal trick Jessica Hopper pulls off over and over again in Night Moves, a poignant (and often hilarious) memoir of her time in Chicago in the early aughts. On one page, Hopper is solemnly reflecting, "You make peace with death's swift manners and it raises you up"; on another, she's wondering what it'd be like to run over a great poet with a dune buggy. Ruminations on aging, community, love, and friendships stand shoulder-to-shoulder with sharp, madcap anecdotes, like when a stranger at a nightclub says Hopper resembles "a kabuki donkey" on the dancefloor, or when a pair of socialites at a music festival are aghast at how she's eating an apple directly off the core. The poetry and absurdity of existence are constant companions in the pages of Night Moves.
The veteran author's easy grace with the written word comes as no surprise when you take her long career into account. Starting off as a D.I.Y. zine writer, Hopper quickly rose through the ranks to become a freelancer and contributor to publications like SPIN, Grand Royal, Rolling Stone, GQ, Punk Planet, and The Chicago Reader. She's been an editor at Pitchfork, Rookie, MTV News, and the University of Texas Press. Her knack for juggling incisive cultural criticism with personal reflections and wry humor can be seen in her 2015 collection of music writing, The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic.
While music comes up often in Night Moves ("Loving the Smiths is one thing, but loving Morrissey is another thing entirely," Hopper writes), it's a book that's more concerned with what happens just outside of and right next to the rituals of listening to records and going to shows. It's a book about long bike rides to venues, the sadness of watching friends get blitzed on cocaine at dance nights, the joys of holing up in an apartment and reading back issues of The New Yorker while the city freezes outside. Hopper's book is a testament to the pleasures of bumming around, the ecstasy of slowing down and enjoying the neighborhood and your friends before career and family and all the other milestones of adulthood start accelerating your timeline. Read more of this post
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