A grid has a matter-of-fact magic, as mundane as it is marvellous. From sidewalks to spreadsheets to after-hours skyscrapers projecting geometric light against a night sky, the grid creates both order and expanse. In 1979, the art critic and historian Rosalind Krauss wrote about the ubiquity of the grid in modern art, citing the even-panelled windowpanes of Caspar David Friedrich and the abstract paintings of Agnes Martin. “The grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion or fiction),” Krauss wrote. It was this paradox—the promise of control and transcendence—which first drew me to the prototypically modern grid: the crossword puzzle.
I began writing crosswords when I was fourteen, which is also when I began starving myself. The connection between these impulses felt intuitive: they both stemmed from a desire to control my image and to nurture a fledgling sense of self. I read in a health-class textbook that high-achieving, affluent young white women were the population most likely to succumb to anorexia. I found in the common identifiers of the disease—extreme thinness, perfectionism, a penchant for self-punishment—a rigid template on which to trace my pubescent identity. It was a distorted fantasy of success that ignored the actual demographic reach of eating disorders and betrayed the stony limits of my teen-aged imagination. Diagnoses for mental illness are notoriously reductive, and I wanted to be reduced.
“Crossword-puzzle constructor,” I found, was an uncannily compatible identity-container. She must be disciplined, I imagined people thinking. A little obsessive, maybe—but the cultural residue of female hysteria, a century later, might have you convinced that this simply meant “adorable.” And, without a doubt, she must be smart. As I tried harder to escape the trappings of my body—to become a boundless mind—I plunged deeper into a material world of doctors, therapists, scales, and blood samples. I filled notebooks with calorie counts and clues, meal plans and puzzle themes. My first crossword puzzles reflected my high-school preoccupations: an early grid was “midterms”-themed, featuring words with “term” in their middle: DETERMINED, MASTERMIND, WATERMELON.
Most of what I knew about crossword construction came from the 2006 documentary “Wordplay,” in which Merl Reagle, the late syndicated puzzle-maker, walks the viewer through the mechanics of designing a crossword. Reagle’s cameo is distinctly unglamorous: we see him in a midsize sedan, driving by Florida’s strip malls, riffing on the roadside signage. “Dunkin’ Donuts—put the ‘D’ at the end, you get ‘Unkind Donuts,’ which I’ve had a few of in my day,” he says. Later, when coming across the phrase “Noah’s Ark”: “Switch the ‘S’ and the ‘H’ around. That’s ‘No, a Shark’ !” His house is full of crossword paraphernalia: black-and-white ties, mugs, and a crossword mural in his living room.
The hard-core kitsch aesthetics of Reagle’s life were not exactly what drew me in. But with his simple puns he seemed to be accessing something foundational about language—a code that could be rearranged and manipulated through sheer brainpower. When he plotted out a “Wordplay”-themed crossword onscreen, using grid paper and pencil, I internalized the puzzle’s protocols: perfect one-hundred-and-eighty-degree symmetry, elegantly interlocking words, a minimum of black squares, no jargon or linguistic waste, only “good words.”
What makes for a good word, in the eyes of a crossword-puzzle constructor? The language of aesthetic judgment is gustatory—one has good taste or feels something in one’s gut—but crosswords are meant to transcend physical sensations. Fans of the Times crossword may have heard of the “Sunday-morning breakfast test”: the paper’s requirement that its puzzle not turn the stomach of a morning solver. (“URINE would bail me out of a corner a million times a year,” Reagle says, in “Wordplay.” “Same with ENEMA,” he adds. “Talk about great letters. But you gotta keep those words out of puzzles.”) This was one of many rules instituted by the architect of the contemporary puzzle, Margaret Farrar, the Times’ first crossword editor. She believed that a crossword should activate your mind, not your body.
Perhaps, then, it is of little surprise that crossword constructors have imported the language of pure math into their process. A good word might be a term with a high vowel-to-consonant ratio (AREA, ERIE, OREO) or extreme anagrammability (LIVE, EVIL, VEIL, VILE). It could also be something more capricious. Why was it so rewarding to watch solvers, in “Wordplay,” fill in the squares for 1-Across (“Stark and richly detailed, as writing”) with ZOLAESQUE? Was it the unlikely combination of “Z” and “Q”? The word’s improbable specificity? Its rolling sound off the tongue?
Ascribing arbitrary but absolute value to words and letters came to me naturally. Anorexics, like crossword constructors, are predisposed to black-and-white thinking, and although some of my ideas about food were widely accepted in a fat-phobic culture—high-caloric snacks are “bad”; weight loss is “good”—many of the behaviors and food rituals I adopted, sacrosanct in my imagination, were unintelligible to an outsider. I wouldn’t allow myself a teaspoon of ice cream, but I could eat a pint of frozen yogurt. I could have a full stack of chocolate-chip pancakes—as many chips as the diner’s cook would load into the batter—but not a drop of syrup.
I spent only a few months in public denial, hiding my disorder from my family and friends. But, by the winter of tenth grade, it was obvious that I had become stuck in a rigid pattern of behavior; I couldn’t simply go back to another way of thinking or eating. Eventually, doctors and parents—and my own fear instincts—intervened. I would have to gain weight to stay in school and avoid hospitalization. I decided that I would gain the weight but retain control: I would do it by eating “good” foods, not “bad” ones. I would eat four large meals a day, and between each one I would write a crossword puzzle. My war with my body at a temporary ceasefire, I escaped into an abstract matrix of letters and words. The simple fifteen-by-fifteen-square grid gave order to my racing thoughts and offered a replacement high for that of starvation. If, by the dumb logic of my eating disorder, I was losing something special about myself by gaining weight, I was bolstering my self-esteem by creating crosswords, something I knew to be difficult, precocious, and exceptional.
The anorexic girl is a victim of improper consumption. A prevailing cultural logic assumes that the desire to fast is triggered by the overly literal intake of commercial images—in magazines, on Instagram—of stick-thin supermodels and celebrities. In other words, the feminist critic Abigail Bray writes, many people believe that anorexia is both an eating disorder and a “reading disorder.” Bray rejects this etiology of the disease, which implies that the anorexic, like so many Madame Bovaries before her, suffers simply from an inability to distinguish fact from fiction. The anorexic does flirt with literalism—The culture tells me to be thin; here you go, I’ve done it!—but she is just as likely to practice a highly creative misreading of cultural cues, as I did when I took my textbook’s cautionary tale as aspirational.
The puzzle of anorexic reading habits was made more apparent to me when, at age nineteen, I left college and checked in to a treatment center for women with eating disorders, in the infelicitously named town of Paradise, Utah. For the previous five years, I’d been stuck in a pernicious cycle of weight loss and doctor-mandated weight gain. I was never not anorexic in that time, maintaining a choke hold on my food intake, even if I had concocted a way to appease doctors in the short term. I needed—and even felt some relief upon accepting—the behavioral interventions of in-patient treatment.
I didn’t write crosswords in rehab. I have never liked to work with other people watching: the supervisory gaze interrupts the escapist conceit that I exist only in a virtual space of moving letters on a page. And everything in Paradise—eating, sleeping, shitting, reading—was highly supervised. A budding English major, I brought more books than clothes with me, hoping a self-guided course in American literature would suit my convalescence. My favorites were the works of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth: their bawdy wit was a welcome antidote to the facility’s earnest mix of Mormonism and group therapy.
I learned that my books were being monitored when my therapist banned Roth’s “Anatomy Lesson.” The title suggested to him some perverted relation to the medicalized body, and, to be fair, he wasn’t entirely wrong. When I asked what books, in particular, were banned from Paradise, I was told that it was ultimately left to the therapist’s discretion, but that they tended to belong to one of two genres: books promoting dieting, and those detailing the conditions of Holocaust internment. Each, I was told, might be perilously read as instructional.
The anorexic’s attraction to the stories of Holocaust victims could be seen as yet another symptom of her “reading disorder”—consuming 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 one’s 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 puzzler’s 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 girl’s appetites—for sex, for food, for ambition—were 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 country’s 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 America’s 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 puzzle’s 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 relations—first-wave feminism. The earliest innovators of the puzzle’s 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. Elizabeth S. Kingsley invented the Double-Crostic puzzle (or the acrostic, as it’s 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 Steel’s 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 ‘honey’—that means ‘bee’! / Looks like I’ll be stung no doubt.” The conceit extends across nine verses: “I heard you mention ‘butcher’—that 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 Papa’s 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 boy—it couldn’t 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 newspaper’s 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 paper’s history. (I wasn’t that quick; I became the second youngest.) At the time, I didn’t 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 couldn’t find one.) The puzzle’s theme was “It’s all Greek to me,” and its answers included words with Greek letters nested inside them. My inspiration came from the discovery that Freud’s “oral phase” contained the Greek letter “alpha”; that answer was the puzzle’s 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 given—meant to simulate life after treatment—became 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 body’s hunger cues and to reimagine my days in terms of opportunities and responsibilities—not 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 wires—puzzles ≠ disembodiment ≠ anorexia ≠ relapse—and 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.
Shortz is known for editing up to ninety per cent of the clues in a crossword submission, tailoring its references to suit a desired level of difficulty and an imagined audience—one that could be as broad or as narrow as Shortz wanted it to be. We tangled, mostly amicably, over this question of audience. We had markedly different frames of reference—he was a sixty-two-year-old who had grown up on a horse farm in Indiana, and I was a twenty-three-year-old who grew up in Tribeca—and the collision of our backgrounds made for good conversation and better crosswords. One of my proudest moments was getting him to rewrite the clue for BRO (traditionally, “Sister’s sib” or “Sibling for sis”) as “Preppy, party-loving, egotistical male, in modern lingo.” But, when I constructed a puzzle that prominently featured the term MALE GAZE in the grid, he insisted that the phrase wouldn’t be in the average Times solver’s lexicon; it wasn’t “puzzle-worthy.” (Although I lost that battle in 2014, the term appeared three years later, under his editorship.)
During my time with Shortz, I received both credit and flak for modulating the voice behind the puzzle’s clues: for including words and idioms from my generation and perspective. In 2014, I became the youngest woman to create a puzzle for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, a weekend-long speed-solving competition. I was not on a mission to draw attention to my difference from the other constructors, but my crossword, the sixth puzzle in the tournament, did that work for me. In the grid’s southeast corner, JESSA (48-Across: “One of the girls on ‘Girls’ ”) intersected with JANSPORT (48-Down: “Backpack brand”). I thought both were “gettable” answers. (“Girls”-talk was, after all, abundant in 2014.) But apparently the JESSA / JANSPORT crossing had damaged some contestants’ scores and sunk their tournament rankings. I had created what in crossword jargon is called a Natick, an unjustified intersection of two obscure answers, leaving the solver with no hope but to guess at the solution: TESSA / TANSPORT? NESSA / NANSPORT?
The term “Natick,” coined by the puzzle blogger Rex Parker, stems from a 2008 Times puzzle in which NC WYETH (1-Down: “ ‘Treasure Island’ illustrator, 1911”) intersected with NATICK (1-Across: “Town at the eighth mile of the Boston Marathon”)—crossword esoterica, to be sure. But to think of my puzzle crossing as a Natick was to confess to never having watched the hit HBO show (no sin there), or to never having bought school supplies or gone to child-care dropoff (more damning, perhaps). You might even say it was to confess to being a man.
As my relationship to the puzzle shifted—from a private to a public activity; from a coping mechanism to a political tool—I began to see myself filling one box in the public imagination and then another. Part of the appeal of a young woman crossword constructor is that she is focussing her intelligence on a frivolity; she is making her smarts unthreatening and benign. Of course, nothing about my story, neither its reflection of cultural misogyny nor its origins in my willful self-destruction, is benign. Surely this is not what the mothers who approached me at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament had in mind when they tried to set me up with their doctor or lawyer sons.
The crossword has long served me as a retreat from the material world, but it is little more than a reflection of it: an index of the preoccupations, obsessions, and tics of common usage. I am part of a macro generation of constructors and editors who are diversifying the puzzle and expanding the crossword lexicon beyond the doldrums of arcana: we are men, women, and nonbinary constructors who know that what makes for a “good crossword word” is recognition, the pleasure of finding something you know fit neatly into the cramped corners of a newspaper grid. To see increasingly more of the world reflected in this admittedly specialized leisure-class activity is not just satisfying; it’s political.
Will Shortz likes to say that when human beings see an empty square they feel the need to fill it. A manifest destiny of the mind. For me, the puzzle’s delights continue to reside in the contradictions of the grid, holding the limitless signifying power of language in temporary abeyance. The crossword is a game of associations: to write a clue, a constructor needs to rack her brain for all possible words and idioms associated with a desired “answer.” Like Freudian analysis, or a linguistic Rorschach test, the puzzle creates meaning out of the chance encounters between words and images, proper and sometimes improper nouns, and acts as a window into our fantasies, tastes, and unyielding fixations. Perhaps this is why the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan advised his young analysts-in-training, “Faites des mots croisés.” (“Do crossword puzzles.”) Of course, if you’re looking to plumb the collective unconscious, you could also just read Shakespeare. ♦
