I’ve recently been spending time with a trio of seething, striving, sadistic men. Luckily for me, they’re all made up. There’s Nile Jarvis, an antisocial rich kid with daddy issues, and the villain in the Netflix thriller “The Beast in Me”; Andrew Winchester, an antisocial rich kid with mommy issues, in the hit murder mystery “The Housemaid”; and Stephen DeMarco, the complicated, antisocial working-class kid with everybody issues in the Hulu series “Tell Me Lies.”
This trinity of fictional sociopaths are all supposed to be from Nassau County on Long Island, which is where I grew up. This coincidence is likely to have escaped most viewers, but it definitely caught my eye. There is something true to life about it. Nassau County, in my experience, does tend to produce more than its share of villainous, dead-eyed jerks.
If you’re not familiar with Nassau County, which is the section of Long Island that borders New York City, I can assure you that many of my other neighbors were wonderful and noteworthy people. Hewlett High School, which I attended (and where my mom taught for 35 years), produced such distinguished alumni as the fashion designer Donna Karan, the filmmaker Ed Burns, the poet laureate Louise Glück and the artist Ross Bleckner. It’s also true that the name Long Island has long evoked different things for different people, from the ceaselessly borne mythomania of Jay Gatsby on the North Shore to the blue-collar, heavily accented tabloid exploits of figures like Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco on the South.
Nassau County has the distinction of being both one of the country’s richest counties — its median household income ranks eighth in the United States — and a place forever defined by the fact that it’s not quite as urbane or glamorous as the looming city that sits to the west or the fabled mansions of the Hamptons, in the other direction, at the eastern end of the island. Nassau was the birthplace of the racist postwar ur-suburb known as Levittown, as well as Robert Moses’s Southern State Parkway — which, legend has it, was built with purposely low overpasses to prevent passage by buses carrying people from nearby poor urban communities. And it’s been the home of a few real-life serial killers — every suburb has its secrets! — such as Joel Rifkin and Rex Heuermann, the Gilgo Beach killer. And, yes, voters in Nassau County were part of the coalition that helped elect George Santos to the House of Representatives, before he was exposed as a con artist and a criminal.
Even with that colorful history, the coincidental appearance of so many fictional villains made me wonder: Why Nassau County? Why Long Island? Why now?
So I asked the writers who created them.
Carola Lovering, who wrote “Tell Me Lies,” wanted her protagonist, Lucy, to be from someplace like her hometown, Bedford, N.Y., a storied Westchester suburb, and friends from Long Island suggested the tonier Suffolk County to counter her antagonist Stephen’s Nassau roots. Freida McFadden, the best-selling novelist who wrote “The Housemaid” (once entirely pseudonymous, she recently revealed herself to be a doctor named Sarah Cohen), grew up in Manhattan, but felt Long Island was a natural setting for a suburban melodrama, like a “real-life version of Wisteria Lane,” she told me, citing the TV show “Desperate Housewives.” She hoped to invoke the kind of “suburban neighborhood where everyone knows everyone and they all have their own juicy secrets.”
It was Gabe Rotter, the TV writer behind “The Beast in Me” and himself a fellow Nassau native, who struck on what sounded to me like an essential truth. “You can’t overestimate what it means to grow up 30 miles from the most intense city on the earth and not be in it. You can feel that on Long Island,” he said. “You’re there but you’re not there.” He continued: “The proximity without belonging is kind of a very specific psychic wound that Nassau County inflicts on its people.”
Proximity without belonging — come to think of it, in my experience, that could be an ideal motto for Nassau County. As a kid growing up in Nassau, I felt my life was defined by these kinds of contradictions. My parents were Bronx-bred lefties living amid fiscally conservative, socially liberal Reagan Republicans. I lived in a modest house in a middle-class town but had school friends in nearby hamlets who resided in lavish mansions with indoor pools and Rolls-Royces parked out front. There was always a sort of nowhereness (or everywhereness?) to my life that made me feel as if I were lying no matter how I described my upbringing. Were we rich? Poor? City? Suburbs? Some in-between thing? I felt that I didn’t fit in anywhere. Looking back, I wonder if that was the most Nassau thing about me.
Proximity without belonging is also an apt description of a wider crisis that’s got the whole country in its grip — which might explain the mini-epidemic of fictional Long Island bad guys. Red states butt up against blue states, the 1 percent and the 99 percent share the same cities, yet we’re all struggling to figure out how to coexist. Mr. Rotter’s comment recalled something the journalist Anand Giridharadas said recently about Jeffrey Epstein, a Coney Island native who came of age “with a burning desire to have money, to be in the elite.” As Mr. Giridharadas explained, “This is an outer-borough thing. I think this emotion of the outer borough right near Manhattan, the desire to make it in Manhattan, has become one of the defining political forces of our age.” In other words: proximity without belonging.
Or consider another famous example of this syndrome: Donald Trump, who grew up in the affluent Jamaica Estates section of Queens, just a few miles west of the Nassau border. From that vantage point he cast his gaze on conquering Manhattan, and it’s often been speculated that he’s driven by an outer-borough-shaped chip on his shoulder.
“Cities give you anonymity, and rural places give you isolation, but I think suburbs give you kind of neither and both,” Mr. Rotter told me. Nassau County is a place forever caught, like the whole country, between a vision of who we aspire to be and an anxiety about who we really are.
Yet as Mr. Rotter reminded me, it remains the kind of place that people in the city escape to — and in what he called “a delicious irony,” the Long Island Expressway that carries people back and forth to the city is popularly known as the L.I.E.
I’ve long since made my own escape from Nassau, heading westward toward the city. Whenever I return, I experience simultaneous nostalgia, irritation and a sort of knee-jerk protectiveness. The place feels a lot like family in that way: I can talk smack about Long Island because it’s my hometown, but I’d caution outsiders with the same inclination to mind their manners — or face the wrath of a Nassau girl. As we’ve seen, the place can turn out the type of characters whom you definitely don’t want to mess with.
Carla Sosenko is the author of the memoir “I’ll Look So Hot in a Coffin: And Other Thoughts I Used to Have About My Body.” She’s a former editor in chief of Time Out New York and grew up in Nassau County, Long Island.
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