Escaping Into the Crossword Puzzle – The New Yorker

The anorexics attraction to the stories of Holocaust victims could be seen as yet another symptom of her reading disorderconsuming descriptive texts as prescriptive. But it actually reveals a more structural condition of the starving mind: one that is rooted in obsessive fixation and decontextualization, allowing a single feature of the human body to stand in for the totality of ones self-worth, like a synecdoche. Or one that lets the signs of starvation, in Auschwitz or Utah, stand in for one another, like a metonymy.

This kind of substitutive logic appears in early case histories of anorexia. In 1919, Ellen West, an anorexic and bulimic patient of the psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, wrote out her thought pattern as an equation: Eating = being fertilized = pregnant = getting fat. Such symbolic displacement is the bread and butter of Freudian psychoanalysis; it should also be familiar to the average solver of a crossword puzzle. The clue and the answer in a crossword must be perfect substitutions for each other. The clue can be straightforward: three letters for Consume (Answer: EAT), or it can play on linguistic misdirection: three letters for Not fast (Answer: EAT). The potential for words to mean so much with so little context is the puzzlers great pleasure.

Before I entered rehab, I wanted to treat my eating disorder as a puzzle to be solved. My body had become a glaring symbol that was at once obvious to others and totally inscrutable to me. I was a walking sign of misery and virtue, slow death and supremacy (over my appetite, over other women), self-erasure and self-display. I felt an almost melancholic disappointment in my inability to produce the key (some repressed trauma, some psychosexual dilemma) that I could use to cure myself.

In case histories of anorexics from the first half of the twentieth century, the patient, who is nearly always a woman, becomes a puzzle for her psychiatrist, who is nearly always a man. The key to solving the puzzle usually lay in the equation of food and sexuality: two common solutions were the fear of pregnancy, as with Ellen West, and the repressed desire for fellatio. In 1942, the psychiatrist Ruth Moulton suggested that the anorexic rejects slimy foods because they remind her of semen, or because she wants to be force-fed to satisfy a fantasy for oral sex. The former is sexually timid; the latter demonstrates sexual aggression. At once too frigid and too promiscuous within the terms of early psychoanalysis, the anorexic girls appetitesfor sex, for food, for ambitionwere a threat to the cultural order.

In the same period that anorexic women became a source of medical suspicion, the crossword puzzle became an object of cultural hysteria. Newspapers and magazines from the nineteen-twenties and thirties warned of a crossword craze gripping the countrys minds. Hotels considered placing a dictionary next to the Bible in every room; telephone companies tracked increased usage, as solvers phoned friends when stuck on a particularly inscrutable clue; baseball teams feared that Americas pastime would be usurped, the grid to replace the diamond. The passion for crosswords was described as an epidemic, a virulent plague, and a national menace.

Much of the outcry focussed on the puzzles trivializing waste of brainpower. In 1925, Arthur Brisbane wrote, in his syndicated column, Young people who want to increase their vocabulary should not deceive themselves with crosswords. Let them read Shakespeare. Others feared that the puzzle was a threat to the family unit. A host of divorces in Ohio were said to have been caused by the daily crossword, with the manager of one legal-aid association claiming to have received an average of ten letters a day from wives who have to remain at home these evenings just because their husbands are suffering from crossword puzzleitis. Like an emotional affair, the crossword seemed to be siphoning off energy and intimacy from married life.

This square vice, as the Daily Princetonian called it, became a locus for anxiety about a movement that was explicitly changing American gender relationsfirst-wave feminism. The earliest innovators of the puzzles form were women: in 1914, the first crossword puzzle published under a byline was created by Mrs. M.B. Wood; in 1929, Mildred Jaklon, the founding puzzle editor of the Chicago Tribune, pioneered the crossword contest; and, in 1934, Mrs. ElizabethS. Kingsley invented the Double-Crostic puzzle (or the acrostic, as its now called). In books, comics, and postcards from the time, the New Woman and the crossword puzzle became linked as flouters of Victorian gender conventions. Flora Annie Steels novel The Curse of Eve, published in 1929, is about two antiheroines who are making a living out of the craze for crossword puzzles. One is a fashionable beer heiress, with more bite and better business instincts than her brothers; the other is a cash-strapped dancer, who sees marriage as another form of prostitution. Both are depicted as simultaneously desexed (in the fullness of her bodily and mental powers she sits free of sex) and oversexed (with an unconscious desire to attract, unconscious desire to appropriate). Both are too great a puzzle for the modern man to grasp.

The dangerous fantasy of the puzzle woman is perhaps most famously registered in the 1925 novelty song Crossword Mama. A puzzling woman, she devotes herself to the crossword as a proxy for other fashions of the time. Like the flapper, she is liberated from the corsets and the customs of the Victorian age. A double-crosser, she is not to be trusted: You call me honeythat means bee!/Looks like Ill be stung no doubt. The conceit extends across nine verses: I heard you mention butcherthat means meat!/Who you gonna meet tonight? But, like the Sphinx before her, the Crossword Mama solicits a solution: Crossword Mama, you puzzle me, the chorus concludes. But Papas gonna figure you out.

There are hundreds of other Jazz Age relics that conflate the flapper and the crossword as icons of the Zeitgeist. In these images, the puzzle represents the enigma of female desire and fuels the intimacy between men and women in an otherwise chaste culture of heterosexual courtship. It allows verbal and physical taboos to be breached, as members of the opposite sex say four-letter words to each other, cuddling around the newspaper page. You naughty boyit couldnt be that word! reads the caption on a postcard featuring two young solvers, a blushing man and a woman clutching her breast. By the dual logic of the crossword craze, the woman is the puzzle, and the puzzle brings solvers closer to their desire. The puzzle, in other words, is a sex object.

A few months before I left for rehab, in 2010, my boyfriend persuaded me to start submitting my crosswords to the Times. Will Shortz, the newspapers longtime crossword editor, encouraged the submissions: if I was quick with my revisions, he said, I could be the youngest woman to publish a crossword in the papers history. (I wasnt that quick; I became the second youngest.) At the time, I didnt understand that I was an outlier in what has come to be known as the CrossWorld, a highly devoted, pun-loving set of mostly male, mostly STEM-educated speed-solvers and constructors.

My second puzzle appeared in the Times when I was in Paradise. (The staff drove to Logan, Utah, the nearest big city, to buy a copy of the print edition but couldnt find one.) The puzzles theme was Its all Greek to me, and its answers included words with Greek letters nested inside them. My inspiration came from the discovery that Freuds oral phase contained the Greek letter alpha; that answer was the puzzles 1-Down.

I would remain in Paradise for another three months. The occasionally punishing, often surreal conditions of rehab suited me. Food and body-image challenges that I was givenmeant to simulate life after treatmentbecame more tolerable and even amusing to me by the end of my stay: Surprise! Doughnuts for breakfast today; Group therapy will be done in bikinis today; No makeup today (easy for me); No hair-straightening today (harder, for a Jewish girl). When I checked out of the facility, after spending the better half of a year there, and returned home to New York City, my recovery was precarious but hard-won. I was learning to trust my bodys hunger cues and to reimagine my days in terms of opportunities and responsibilitiesnot willfully overdetermined by food rules and restrictions.

That fall, I returned to college, and during intractable periods of body dysmorphia, I retreated into the grid. Constructing crosswords remained a primary source of solace, but something had changed: I was beginning to be recognized for my work by the audience I had ambivalently courted in the pages of the Times. Other outlets, looking to diversify their bylines, solicited my puzzles. I was known not just as a constructor but as a woman constructor.

When I graduated, in 2013, Shortz offered to hire me as his assistant. I was reluctant to accept the post: resolutely committed to my newly stable recovery, I worried that giving my time over so fully to crosswords would somehow prove symptomatic of relapse. But I uncrossed the wirespuzzles disembodiment anorexia relapseand took the job. Four days a week, I rode the Metro-North train from the city to Pleasantville, New York, to join Shortz at his home office, a room flooded with crossword ephemera and walled with reference books, holdovers from his pre-Google editing days. I knew that I was benefitting from a kind of CrossWorld affirmative action: there were many young men creating crosswords, more prolific than I, a handful of whom even expressly wanted to be the next Will Shortz. But, if my appointment at the Times was political, so, too, was my output.

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Escaping Into the Crossword Puzzle - The New Yorker