Anywhere Else, livre ebook

A memoir of growing up in Florida interwoven with cultural reflections of the state from The X-Files to Emerson—revealing the complex truths of life as a Floridian

Florida and pop culture are a magnetic, viral match. From true crimes on social media to spring break movies to Miami Vice, the state has been served up for the rest of the world as a place of swamp things, serial killers, beach bums, teen girls, and dead poets. In Anywhere Else, Rachel Knox weaves her own story around the media caricatures, digging deeper into what it’s like to be from a “wild” place—and who gets to decide what that means.

Knox writes from her own experiences of Florida as a child in Sunday school, a student on field trips to Everglades National Park, and a bartender making drinks for both out-of-state partiers and locals. She blends these memories with critical looks at touchstones from different cultural moments, such as Aileen Wuornos, America’s most famous female serial killer; Florida’s Highwaymen artists and Thomas Kinkade, the much-beloved religious “Painter of Light”; Ralph Waldo Emerson, the transcendentalist writer who spent time in St. Augustine; the gloriously trashy 90s neo-noir Wild Things; and the “Monster of the Week” episodes of The X-Files.

Writing with clarity and searing honesty about real issues refracted through this prism of pop culture, Knox is both witty and vulnerable. In these essays, whether she’s bobbing in the warm waters of the Gulf or running through the trailer parks of her childhood, Knox portrays a Floridian struggling with a deep, complicated love of her home state. Anywhere Else is a book for anyone who resonates with the message that home may not be a perfect place, but that it is worth fighting for.

In the past decade, I’ve grown defensive of a place I hadn’t known I cared so much about. As I pontificated to strangers in bars and new friends with a fervor that surprised me, I realized something. I loved Florida, deeply, and maybe always had. My teenage longing to leave felt more like what it actually was: teenage longing, something everyone probably feels. It was less about the place I was from, and more about the person I wanted to be. Something had told me I couldn’t be that person in Florida, but I was finally starting to disbelieve it. The whole time I lived in New York, I missed Florida dearly—wanted to brag about it, to show others its good side, to describe the way the sky looks during one of our million-dollar sunsets. I wanted to make everyone who chuckled sit down at the edge of a dock and eat a Cuban sandwich, wash it down with a cold beer or Rum Runner. I wanted to walk with them through a silent pine forest in the early morning, looking for scrub jays. I wanted to take them mudding, to the rodeo, to the fish fry on the corner, the lighthouses dotting the coasts. Down the cobblestone streets of St. Augustine, America’s oldest city, where a gust of salt air and a squint of the eyes might make you believe you’re in Seville, five hundred years ago. To steer them down Crystal River in the spring, when the manatees are swarming and bumping up against their kayak with whiskered noses, and then challenge them: try to tell me, now, that this place is a joke.

I realized that writing into those feelings might be more effective than starting bar fights about them. I was already writing about Florida all the time, anyway, even when I tried not to. It came bubbling up whenever I tried to make sense, on the page, of the events of my girlhood and the person I became as a result. The heat and sweat and buzzing of cicadas bled into every scene, prompting comments from the other students in my writing classes about how I seemed “really obsessed with place.” I started looking for any depiction of Florida that went against the narrative I kept hearing, in order to hold them up to my own life, looking for gaps, and this book was born.

Author’s Note

Introduction / Let Us Alone

Wild Things

Spring Break Forever

The Last Resort

“It Is a Queer Place”

Agua Mala

Deserter

Motel Art

My God, Rachel, How Can You Live Here?

Acknowledgments

References