I spent two years trying to sell TV shows in Los Angeles. Before my first pitch, I asked my agent if I should dress casually or formally. She told me to dress “NYC cool,” which was absolutely not one of the options. I can’t say my memories of my time in Hollywood were “good,” necessarily; I never quite felt like I fit in.
After I left LA, I wasn’t keen to re-enter that world: the world of pitching ideas you never thought would reach viewers, of waiting in “development hell” for months, of never getting an official rejection, but instead just watching the industry slowly ghost you. Because of the sour taste Hollywood left in my mouth, I was particularly struck by how much I enjoyed Hallie Cantor’s Like This, But Funnier, the perfect satire of the TV writing industry. Her protagonist, Caroline, captures exactly what it means to spend your days pitching a nebulous idea for a TV show while wondering if your life is ever going to start moving. Cantor deftly describes the negative space that fills your world when the industry demands you have a close personal connection to your story, but your days are spent in your PJs in front of a laptop, so you don’t think that story is quite that compelling. She skewers how attached execs can be to small, unimportant details of a pitch that become impossible to build a world around. She roasts the industry’s obsession with authenticity while making the same type of show over and over again. All while capturing a complex female protagonist struggling to manage her relationship, her career, and her uncertainty about starting a family.
Cantor and I met over Zoom to discuss the screenwriting industry, letting our characters live in uncertainty, and envying the nine-to-five.
Ginny Hogan: How did the character of Caroline change during the drafting process of Like This, But Funnier?
Hallie Cantor: In my first draft, she was oddly very grumpy and annoyed all the time. And I think that was partly because I was grumpy and annoyed about having to write a first draft. And that came out in the character. It’s also an easy place to find humor: this self-defensive, cynical crouch of like, this is stupid, that’s stupid. But that gets grating over 300 pages. In later drafts, I really pushed myself to find places where she’s more terrified or elated or any other emotion. So she’s not just constantly annoyed.
GH: I imagine that this was very much inspired by experiences that you had as a writer. Did you consider writing a memoir?
HC: I never thought about writing a memoir. I didn’t even think that I was going to be writing about my own experiences at all. I set out looking for an idea for a funny fictional novel. Then, I had this idea about a writer married to a therapist, which I am in real life. Gradually, in my subconscious, I started feeding pieces of my own experiences into Caroline’s, and the story became what it is. But often, when I’m writing, I take a real feeling and hang it on a scaffolding of a bigger premise. That’s not only more fun for the writer, but it’s more fun for the reader to read about somebody who’s lying and stalking, caught in a web of their own deception, instead of a plot that’s more like “she felt bad about herself for a couple years.”
GH: One of the things I loved in the book was Caroline’s TV show pitches. The pitches get worse and worse, but the studio gets more and more excited about them. She gets caught in this web of lies; she’s not sure that it’s ethical for her to pitch the show because the character is inspired by her husband’s patient. And on top of that, she knows the pitches are bad. And I found it very real – it can feel like the industry’s taste is not aligned with your own. But I’m wondering, for a person who is outside of Hollywood, was there anything you wanted to explore that felt too far-fetched? Anything you had to rein in to make it more believable?
I think her journey is about having the self-compassion to not be afraid of her own ambivalence.
HC: Not really. There’s a section that’s just emails from her agents and executives giving her notes on the script. An early reader said, “This section feels like a different tone from the rest of the book. This is a little too heightened.” And I was surprised because a lot of that was taken verbatim. There’s definitely a bit of satirizing, but I didn’t think of the book as a Hollywood satire because the reality of Hollywood is so silly and ridiculous. I just wanted to present that on a plate to people outside of it.
GH: That really comes through. Did you know when you started writing how you wanted Caroline’s story to end?
HC: Not specifics. I had a sense that I wanted her to have a changed relationship by the end, both with herself and with her work. For so much of the book, her fatal flaw is that she feels like to be worthy, she has to be exceptional. She thinks she has to be the most talented, that she has to rise above everybody else in Hollywood. And by the end, she’s open to the idea that her creativity can connect her to other people instead of setting her apart from them. I did note that I didn’t want her to decide one way or the other about the question of whether or not to become a parent, which is also a big thread in the book. I didn’t want the takeaway to be, “yeah, you should have kids,” or, “no, it’s okay not to have kids.” I wanted to honor her ambivalence. And honestly, she’s not even ready to make that decision. I think her journey is about having the self-compassion to not be afraid of her own ambivalence.
GH: That’s so interesting. I know it’s becoming a bigger thing to depict child-free women in books and on TV, which is so cool because that’s definitely been missing. At the same time, I also think it’s so cool to depict a woman who just stays in uncertainty. That is definitely missing from the conversation.
HC: So many articles are like, “I wasn’t sure, but now I have my two-year-old.” Well, okay, you figured it out, but what about the rest of the world?
GH: There are parts of the book that felt so close to home in terms of how people talk in Hollywood, especially with Caroline’s agent. Was there anything that felt almost cringy to write?
With those experiences, you’re carrying the shame, internalizing it, wondering if you were asking for it.
HC: There’s one scene about a Secret Santa gift exchange in a writer’s room. And it’s not even really necessary for the plot, but I always knew that I wanted to include a moment like it. I’ve had these experiences in the TV writing industry, as people do in a lot of creative industries, where somebody makes a joke or says something that’s a bit off, and you don’t realize until later that it upset you. But at the same time, you don’t wanna say anything because getting along with the other writers is such a big part of the job—you want to be part of a cohesive social unit. But with those experiences, you’re carrying the shame, internalizing it, wondering if you were asking for it. And I wanted to show that. Specifically, how the accumulation of those kinds of experiences could affect Caroline. And could affect the way that she feels about herself and her career. But it was difficult to write. I found myself experiencing this self-doubt of like, is this even anything? Should I not even include this? Is she being a whiner?
GH:Creative careers are so idealized, and Caroline is a woman who’s had a lot of conventional success and is still dissatisfied. So I love that scene because it really shows that she has not had a super smooth ride, and yet, she herself still idealizes this career path and can’t imagine doing anything else.
HC: That’s a big part of it. You do idealize the career, and you don’t want to seem ungrateful because you do love what you’re doing. But then, there are these parts of it that you’re like, this didn’t feel so good.
GH: Is there anyone in Hollywood you were worried would be upset by the book?
HC: There are maybe some people who could see themselves in it, but the honest truth is, I don’t think that they read books. And even for people who have read it, it’s easier to recognize a behavior in others than in yourself. In the meetings I’ve had about the book, people have been like, “Oh, it’s so accurate, everybody I know is like that.” And I’m like, “Yeah, and you.”
GH: Did the process of writing the book change how you view your screenwriting career? Or screenwriting as a field?
HC: If anything, it underscored for me how much free work we’re expected to do as screenwriters. It sounds counterintuitive because, obviously, writing a novel is the ultimate piece of free work. But it felt different; I knew that even if I didn’t sell the novel, it could exist as a piece of art in the world. And that was very satisfying. It also made me reflect on the years I had spent working on pitches and scripts that are basically blueprints for something else. And you have a small chance of getting paid and a very slim chance of the work getting produced. It can be very hard to feel that your work is valued in those circumstances.
GH: Was it easier to get motivated for something that you knew you could make on your own?
HC: Definitely. I had gotten to a point where I was pretty jaded about working on pitches because after enough failures, I was like, well, this is not gonna be anything.I’m just doing this on the off chance that I get paid, but no one’s ever going to read it or enjoy it in the way that an audience is meant to enjoy something. So it was very exciting to work on a novel and think that even if I ended up publishing it on a blog, people could still read it.
GH: Do you want the book to change readers’ perceptions of the TV writing industry?
I don’t think I’m the first person to say that the entertainment industry is tough.
HC: It’s an interesting question. I certainly didn’t set out with that intention. And I don’t think I’m the first person to say that the entertainment industry is tough. In the years since writing the first draft of the book, we had the writer’s strike, which showed people the bigger structural issues facing TV writers. So if anything, the book can function as a magnifying glass. It lets the reader zoom in on what it feels like to work within a system that is constantly demanding that you bang on the door to prove yourself over and over and over. And how easy it is to adopt a worldview about your worth, and value of your labor, and your relationships to other people, and how much you can trust what other people say, and how authentic you can be with other people, and all these things that have a massive impact on us as humans.
GH: The relationship aspect comes through so well in the book. Caroline is married to a therapist. And I know from my own experience that there’s this dynamic between being in a creative career and being married to someone who has a stable job. I’m curious what your thoughts are on it. Does it ever make you envy a nine-to-five?
HC: All the time. And my husband not only has a stable job, but it’s a job that concretely helps people. So it’s very easy to be like, What have I done with my life? But yeah, I’m doing it. I’m telling myself that laughter helps people in its own way.
GH: It does! And I tell myself that all the time too.
HC: And the flip side is that you do get to see the downsides of a nine-to-five, where this person has to go to work every day, even when they feel crappy and wanna take a nap. And as creatives, we do have the freedom to make our own schedule and all those other things that we can appreciate.
Recently, I was texting with the editor of my most recent book about how there seem to be cycles in in literature, some kind of zeitgeist or collective unconscious, like how for a minute there were so many retellings of Frankenstein (like this, and this, and this, and this).
Speculative fiction has been having a moment for a while, and in many works—including the ones on this list—there is also a deep current of loss and isolation. And ghosts. What’s interesting to me, just as how the Frankenstein retellings came from really different writers, is the way the through lines in books from this season cross generations, genres, and perspectives. The story collections from Patricia Henley and Tayyba Kanwal, whose debuts have nearly three decades of distance between them, have a lot more in common than the jacket copy would suggest. Similarly, ire’ne lara silva and Wesley Brown capture a kind of familial longing, though Brown’s realism is literary (in the genre sense) and silva’s is magical.
My editor said he’s starting to see a lot of Icarus metaphors, but what I’m seeing is writers using narrative to try and articulate our contemporary moment, even if their work is set in the 14th Century, like Lauren C. Johnson. None of these books fly too close to the sun, but all take that same soaring ambition.
A group of five college friends take a trip to Palm Springs, the first time they’ve all been together in years. Careers, children, marriages, and aging parents make connecting in person difficult, even though they always keep up with each other in the group chat. Yet, as elder millennials, the fourth decade of their lives is about to become a flash point: Changes are coming for each of the women. Their renewed closeness creates a scaffolding they all hold on to, but it also reminds them of the times they were less supportive, wrapped up in their own concerns. Clutch is a novel that explores the complexity and nuance of long female friendships, and Nemens writes this dynamic with perfect pitch. The only reason to put this engrossing novel down is to text your bestie.
After being entwined in a decade-and-a-half long relationship, the nameless woman in Schikora’s novel and Dutch, the charismatic leading man in her idea of a love story, ultimately part. Though they were never fully honest with each other as a couple, hiding the pieces of their past lives dealing with substance abuse and disordered eating, the protagonist of the novel cannot let Dutch go. Even when he marries, she pines for him and what they could have been, to the point that she considers Dutch’s wife the “other woman.” The protagonist tracks her relationship with Dutch along with another love story, that of June Carter and Johnny Cash. A Woman in Pink chronicles the relatable if heartbreaking reality that love is not always enough to make a partnership work, and takes a hard look at what healing actually means.
Cornerstone Press: Apple & Palm by Patricia Henley
In the town of Whistle Pig, people are living their lives. Characters recur in Patricia Henley’s latest. For example, Jill Zebrak, who in one story regularly retrieves her elderly father from the local casino and mildly tolerates his lover who is closer in age to her than him, appears in another story where she takes in two young girls after their parents die in a murder-suicide. Yet Henley’s collection is not bleak: There is a vibrant artist colony in Whistle Pig, amorous octogenarians, and a true sense of community. What Henley does best is describe how small-town life has both a frustrating insularity and inescapable points of connection. Apple & Palm looks at the ways we live and the choices we make not only for our own survival, but also for the survival of the people who surround us.
A domestic worker trapped in a Dubai household of extraordinary wealth schemes for her and the other workers to get out; a Houston family’s babysitter lands a spot on a reality show about nannies, and they attempt to use this to catapult their own children to fame; in Lahore, a privileged woman seeks her own economic agency, only to be rebuked by her husband, all while a gifted bracelet from her son—meant to convey his prosperity—circles her wrist like a handcuff. In Pakistan, and in the Pakistani diaspora, Kanwal’s characters are pushing against customs and expectations, or angling for power and dominance. The stories are written with attention to an emotional center. It’s not always clear who the villain is, and that’s the point in these heartfelt and beautifully textured stories.
In this multi-generational novel, the higher price that women pay, from action to silence, is cracked open. Sali, the only child of an evangelical family, stands trial for the murder of her husband. Fourteen years earlier, she was living in her family’s home and was pregnant by a married man. After his accidental death, she is wedded to a local police officer who swears to raise the child as his own. Yet, while Sali and her husband go on to have two more children, they struggle with money and marital fidelity. The murder trial makes the Zambian national headlines, and Sali’s 15-year-old daughter Ntashé has to reconcile what the newspapers print and what she hears in the courts against what she knows of her mother. Sali’s own mother must do the same. Gripping.
In this hybrid work, photographs of Joshua trees, Ferris wheels, and old motels are companions to the story of Dawn and Johnny, who are on a road trip across the American West. Dawn, a photographer, has cancer. Johnny, the driver, navigates highways and red dirt roads, and drives onto a golf course to flip a donut. The effect is that of chronology by postcard, narrative through mile-markers. The book captures the desolate beauty of both the desert plains and mountains, punctuated by tiny, dying towns. something out there in the distance is a slim volume containing a deep emotional weight.
After a brush with death, Antonio encounters his first love, a man who has passed over and is caring in the afterlife for Antonio’s child who did not survive to infancy; Emma Elisa grows marigolds all season to host an elaborate Día de los Muertos party, where her community builds altars and considers the past; a spirit of death inhabits a tattooed body, falls in love with a hospice nurse, and runs a taco truck with vegan options. In these loosely linked stories, the veil between the dead and the living is a mere shimmer. The collection speaks to erotic desire, brings myth into reality, confronts generational trauma, and addresses colonialism all in stunning, gorgeous prose. The beauty in how silva writes speaks to our complicated histories and yearning bodies.
Betty is a young woman with a famous feminist mother best known for executing a re-imagining of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and that shadow hangs over Betty just as an elaborate fresco. As Betty experiences the messy part of early adulthood when friendships and relationships change, her childhood begins to feel more distant. In conversation with a server at Lonesome Ballroom, at happy hours with her grandmother, or wading through the discourse of her marriage, Betty cannot quite find her footing. She’s smart, she’s educated, but she also doesn’t have a clear sense of herself. McDonnell’s Lonesome Ballroom expertly wrestles with questions of third-wave feminism and familial inheritance, all while perfectly capturing the anxieties of the turn of the 21st century. A wild—and for women of a particular generation, highly relatable—ride.
The Watergate scandal of 1972 is embedded in the American consciousness, but less remembered is Frank Wills, then a young man who had worked his way up to a security guard at the Watergate complex. On June 17th, he noticed that locks to one of the office suites had been tampered with and called the police, ultimately bringing down the Nixon presidency. In this short novel, Wesley Brown blends the true story of Wills with the fictionalized account of Wayne Beasley, a Black Korean war vet who runs a family barbershop in Savannah and recounts his memories of Wills as a child, a young adult, and then a man at the center of major historical event. The novel emerges as a conversation between generations that asks questions about race, politics, war, and family. Looking for Frank Wills is a powerful retelling of Wills’s story.
Born to a Chinese mother and a British father, Eric is out of place at school in Hong Kong and called a “ghost” for his light-complexioned face. Eric is caught between different realities: should he speak English or Cantonese? How does he negotiate his separated parents’ different perspectives against his own experiences? How does he figure out who is against who he wants to be? Wong Foreman takes all of these questions and alchemizes them into an exploratory narrative that centers Eric and excavates family dynamics. There’s an epistolary element that brings the voices in closer, but the center is Eric and his struggles. A novel that’s as broad as it is heartfelt.
In the aftermath of a romantic breakup, a writer and journalist departs the apartment he shared with his partner, making all of the arrangements within ten days. On a train to Berlin, the narrator of Sajko’s novel reflects on his (and her) culpability for their parting while also ruminating on memories of his family, like his alcoholic father who died alone and his mother who made a harrowing escape from his father’s violence. A compressed book, every sentence sings with emotional resonance and is imbued with the protagonist’s regret. Every Time We Say Goodbye is a master class in both economy of language and expansiveness of feeling.
It’s 1348 in Paris, on the west façade of Notre Dame, and the statue of Sainte Geneviève has been gifted an orange by a woman who climbs the wall to reach her. Though the forms that adorn and guard the cathedral look still to passerby, they’re conscious beings who can loose themselves from their niches for one night each moon cycle and explore the city, its people, and its pleasures. Geneviève wants more than one night monthly, and despite the cautioning she is given, isn’t so interested in the rules after she’s tasted the orange. The West Façade draws on everything from Eve’s eating of the apple to Cinderella needing to return before midnight to questions about what consciousness and sentience means—all the more a salient line of inquiry in the age of AI. Johnson takes the art of another era and contemporizes it to a compelling, original effect.
In this linked collection of speculative fiction, an accountant who is learning to swim is interrogated by her humanoid companion; a woman is unanchored in time and cannot remember giving birth to her daughter or even who she is; and in the title story, a couple argues incessantly and from such deep unhappiness the woman dreams hopefully of contracting a fatal tumor. Gadsby’s stories have simmering resentment, the cruelty of children, and the terror of never belonging as characters right alongside her unhappy people, threaded together with recurring themes. The effect is a glittering collection with high emotional tension.
The adulthood experience of purchasing a first home becomes something much more pronounced for Eleanor Fan. As she grew up, her mother, Lele, helped her with everything—even into adulthood—but after Lele’s death, Eleanor is left without her guidance and ultimately buys a property that’s less of a home and more of a sodden cage. As the Pacific Northwest rain continues to fall, Eleanor must reckon with both the absence of her mother’s strong force in her life, and the appearance of a new force: ghosts who speak to her. Fu’s novel shows the impact of isolation on a young woman consumed by grief, as the story unfolds with increasing intensity. A literary page-turner.
The perspective in The Unravelling of Ou belies the seriousness of the book: The narrative is told from the viewpoint of a sock-puppet named Ecology Paul. Of course, Ecology Paul must be puppeted by someone, and that’s Minoo, who is struggling with feelings of isolation. The sock-puppet speaks less to whimsy and more to how desperately people need to be seen and listened to, and how deeply feelings of shame are buried. Yet while the sock puppet is a source of comfort to Minoo, her adult daughter is not having it, and Minoo must work through her own feelings in order to save the relationship. Ghadery takes a silly premise and transforms it into a captivating, layered story. A feat of imagination and execution.
It’s the kind of hot summer day in rural Alberta where my limbs hang so heavy that I wobble as I walk, almost drunkenly, and bump against Caroline and Kim beside me. “Sorry,” I mutter, and they push me away half-heartedly while Chris weaves back and forth on his yellow BMX bike. We’ve been kicked out of the house and told to go play. We already rambled through the ditches, took turns targeting trees with rocks, moseyed our skinny legs past the few houses around us, past a farmer’s field with cows, a small creek, past the frog pond where we catch tadpoles in the spring and pour them into glass jars that we set inside the house so we can watch them grow and lose their tails and sprout their funny legs.
I learned about metamorphosis in school last year, and it makes my stomach and fingers and feet and head fill with happiness to think about it. The magic of it. Right there in this pond. Like some witch is waving her wand and zapping creatures into other creatures, except the witch is Mother Nature.
I don’t understand it exactly, but metamorphosis seems a lot like evolution. And evolution means that some people think we used to be monkeys. I look at Caroline while we walk and imagine her covered in hair, imagine her teeth and mouth turned enormous, her picking bugs off my head and eating them like the sister monkeys do on nature shows, swinging from a tree with one arm. That I can imagine; we’re both excellent at hanging from the monkey bars on the playground at recess.
But she’s too old to actually do that now. The girls in her grade just stand around in groups and talk, yell at the boys, sometimes walk around the yard, but I can still do the highest baby-drop of anyone in my class.
I don’t think our family believes in evolution though. At least, I don’t think our church does, but I’m not sure. Maybe people at church who don’t believe in evolution haven’t thought much about tadpoles, because it’s scary to see how weird they look when they’re caught between half tadpole and half frog, but it’s also super cool. And that makes me wonder if maybe I’m a half something too.
The tadpoles in our pond have all turned to frogs by now, so we keep walking, aimless, talking, sometimes laughing, nudging one another along in the heat, meandering back home with no real purpose but that we want to return. Maybe this time we’ll be allowed to stay inside and watch something on TV in the cool dark of the family room, though we already know there’ll only be soaps on midafternoon. We aren’t allowed to watch soaps.
It’s a white van. No windows on the side. But instead of driving by, it reaches us and stops.
The roads are deserted. Heatwaves simmer ghostly above the asphalt while the power lines hum over our heads and a chickadee dee-dees to some bird-love in the forest. We have the place to ourselves, it seems. The world.
But then, there’s the sound of a vehicle turning onto our gravel subdivision road, coming behind us slowly. We turn to watch it, move to the side to let it pass as we’ve been taught. There’s plenty of room; the road is wide. It’s a white van. No windows on the side. But instead of driving by, it reaches us and stops. A man with curly hair smiles and asks us for directions to a place nearby. We all know where it is, but Caroline, the oldest and best at talking to strangers, steps forward and walks around to his window to answer him. She’s smiling and confident as always, easy with strangers. I watch her and envy that ease, wonder if I’ll ever learn to talk to people the way she does because I’m the shy one. I will also be “the tall one,” my aunt has predicted, because Caroline will be “the pretty one.” We follow her lead to the front of the van.
He doesn’t seem to understand what she’s saying, which is strange because the directions are simple, but how fun to know more than a grown-up. The man opens the door to hear Caroline better, I think, and the door comes between us, separates us from her while we wait. He’s still confused, and she repeats herself again, but she looks nervous and shy now, uncertain, which is strange. Finally, the door closes and the stranger drives away.
The air hums. None of us move. We, four children, stand on the gravel road, the sun hot on our dark heads. We look at the wet, white puddle on the ground in front of us until Chris asks what it is.
“Pee,” says Caroline. “He peed in front of me.” But it looks nothing like pee.
We look at one another, at the puddle, at our shoes. We wonder if something just happened to us. Some change planted deep and about to sprout. We feel it, but don’t know if it matters. Should we tell someone? Mom is at work, so it would have to be Dad. Dad is risky—he could get mad.
My stomach fills with something like fear, but I don’t understand it. We decide to tell. We turn toward the cool walls of the shop in the backyard, where Dad is at work on somebody’s car.
He’s furious when Caroline tells him that some man just peed in front of her, and he understands something about it that I don’t, something related to my fear. He calls the police and then jumps into his old green pickup with the other mechanic he’s hired for help and leaves us alone while he drives around looking for the curly-haired man in the white van.
I don’t understand: his anger, his driving around, his calling the police. But the something sick and scared is bigger now. We go inside the house. No one is around to tell us not to. We gather in the bedroom that I share with Caroline, the four of us on our two beds, and we wait.
There’s a very tall, very large police officer at our door later that night, and Dad greets him like a friend showing up to a party. Something has shifted in him now, and his anger is gone, replaced by an emotion that seems more like excitement. He guides the policeman through our house and sits him at our kitchen table, in Caroline’s chair. We stand beside him, two at each elbow, gathered like a family photograph. He looks at each of us children, asks us our names, smiles, puts a business card in each of our small hands. It has a silhouette picture of a man behind bars and black and red letters that say Crime Stoppers. His name is DET. G. F. (Gary) Jones, it says, but we don’t use his name. We hardly say anything. He asks us questions about the van, what the man said, what he looked like, what we said back to him. He writes down notes. It’s very quiet as the pen scratches along the paper. And then he pulls out a photo album as thick as my palm is wide.
“These,” he says, opening up to the very first page, “are all men who’ve done similar things to kids around here.”
Around here? I wonder. To other kids? Maybe kids I know?
There are pages and pages of men in the album, and I wonder why so many of them are going around peeing, why they would do it in front of kids. The men look sad and tired; some of them look scary; none of them look like the curly-haired man from the white van.
The policeman stays for a long time taking notes, and he tells us that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police will search the area for the next few weeks. When he’s done, he looks up and around at our house, says that it’s very nice. Most visitors say this, and my dad smiles, pleased, and we all know what’s coming next.
“Would you like a tour?” he asks the policeman. And the policeman says yes.
Like a travel guide, my dad shows him our dining room off the kitchen and the table loaded with papers to be filed; he shows him the office packed with boxes from our childhood to be sorted through, the room with the empty hot tub that rarely works, the bathrooms, our messy bedrooms. He opens our door and shows him our pink canopied bedroom filled with clothes and toys, dolls and books, our life spread out before him.
The policeman smiles. I can tell he wants to leave now, had maybe only ever been politely interested, though my dad doesn’t seem to notice it. Dad continues to tell him about the double thickness of the walls, the fire-retardant insulation, how he designed the house himself, had the blueprints done up from his own drawings, and then finally, he’s finished. They’re at the door shaking hands. The policeman leaves. Dad returns to his shop out back; Chris and Kim go to their separate bedrooms; Caroline and I go to ours.
Years later, when I’m a teenager and old enough to understand but somehow still don’t, I say something to Caroline late one night, lying in the dark while we talk, about the time that man peed in front of us. “Peed in front of us” has become our code for the thing we don’t know how to discuss and the title we give to that moment that changed us without our understanding why. But Caroline’s old enough now, too, and tonight she’s had enough of the code.
“It wasn’t pee,” she spits, angry and hurt at my little-sister stupidity.
Caroline had once told me that she’d stopped wearing pretty earrings after that day.
“Oh,” I say dully. And I remember again the man’s face, my dad’s anger, the police visit and the photo album. I remember, remember, remember how the van door had opened and cut me off from Caroline, and that something had happened to all of us, but in different ways. How no one talked to us about it. How Caroline had once told me that she’d stopped wearing pretty earrings after that day, said she’d thought that maybe he’d done it because she’d worn those earrings. Wanted to look pretty.
And I think of how it had ended with the policeman’s visit and a guided tour through our house, all our private spaces on display with us kids clinging at the edges. I think of the tadpoles we used to catch in the spring, the way their arms ripped through their chests one day when it was time. And I wonder if it hurt. If they knew what it meant. We carried them back to the pond when it happened so they wouldn’t die in our jars. They clung to the edges as we poured, their hearts beating hard beneath pale skin, little bodies of uncertainty shaken loose from their homes into unknown territory. They grabbed for one another as they fell, arms outstretched, like sisters in the dark, like fire reaches for fire, the warmth of another flame.
Myths rarely disappear. They mutate, migrate, and reappear in new forms. In contemporary fiction, their presence is often subtle, embedded in the structures of narrative or the emotional architecture of characters wrestling with forces larger than themselves.
In Parted Gods, Alfredo Félix-Díaz builds a novel that moves between the ancient and the modern through the lives of fraternal twins Antonella and Federico Adamo—a painter and a jazz pianist whose artistic ambitions unfold across Berlin, Sicily, and New Orleans. Drawing on classical mythology while remaining grounded in contemporary artistic life, the novel brings music, painting, and literature into constant conversation. The result is a narrative attentive not only to plot but to rhythm, image, and artistic inheritance.
Félix-Díaz comes to the novel with a background in theater and screenwriting—disciplines that emphasize movement, dialogue, and visual composition. Those influences shape the structure of Parted Gods as much as myths do. The novel’s scenes often feel staged and the prose carries a musical cadence that mirrors the inner lives of its characters.
I sat down with Félix-Díaz to discuss the novel’s relationship to myth, how music and visual art shape narrative voice, and what happens when artists working across disciplines bring those sensibilities into fiction.
Summer Stewart: Alfredo, myth has persisted as a structural backbone in literature for centuries. What drew you specifically to the “hermaphrodite” myth and mythic duality while writing Parted Gods?
Alfredo Félix-Díaz: I wanted to start from the biggest cliché about love. Baudelaire used to say that there is nothing more beautiful than a cliché or a common saying—the first thing that approaches people before a “forest of symbols” opens up. Everyone talking about love says things like, “Oh, my other half” or “my better self.” Yet, when you really go into the myth, as my characters do, a huge world opens up. It implies a sense of history. My characters are international beings—Sicilians with a conflicted past. Their father is Argentinian and their mother is Austrian; they feel they have no “path,” but they have the path of this mythical past: the idea that we were once powerful beings joined together, but we were split apart.
It also speaks to a present that is relatable to all of us—the feeling that we are split within ourselves and split from the other. I’m very interested in right- and left-brain dynamics and the asymmetries between them. The myth puts my characters into a dramatic situation. We want to rejoin ourselves; we want to be powerful like the gods.
In Plato’s Symposium, this myth is told by Aristophanes, a comic poet. It’s not presented as a “true” final solution for what love is; it’s a bit grotesque. It goes against the ideal of Greek beauty. We were “monsters” before we were “complete.” This simple cliché about love has layers of darkness, an aspiration toward the divine, and an animalistic side. It implies the things that divide us from the gods—like the lack of “mating seasons,” which leads to the necessity of social controls like the taboo against incest. All these layers were buried in a myth that seems so accessible.
SS: Before turning to the novel, you worked extensively in theater and screenwriting. How do those disciplines shape the way you think about pacing and scene construction?
AFD: A lot of that is subconscious. In theater and screenwriting, you are used to having a “problem,” or something happening in every scene—even if it’s just someone trying to cross a room filled with plants and people.
I always like my characters to have “stage business” or props. For example, I have an image of Federico putting butter on toast while speaking to his sister. I don’t always dare to have a conversation if there isn’t enough stage business to ground it.
However, I tried to move away from cinema in terms of the “embodied self.” When Antonella gains awareness of her brother’s memories, she gains awareness of what he was feeling in his body. That is something I can’t easily transmit in cinema or theater. I leaned into that to avoid making a “cinematic” novel where you are just seeing things from the outside.
The moment you have twins, you get the friction that we usually only have inside ourselves.
SS: Antonella and Federico are both artists navigating ambition and rivalry. What does the dynamic of twinhood allow you to explore, regarding artistic identity, that might not emerge with a single protagonist?
AFD: It allows for dialogue and evades the “echo chamber.” Artists can be very Whitman-like: “I am myself and I am my universe.” The moment you have twins, you have a divided consciousness. Are they one? Are they two? You get the friction that we usually only have inside ourselves.
When you’re writing, is it your brain? Your feelings? Your fear? Your desire to please a reader? With twins, I can take that inner turmoil and dramatize it. For me, drama is always at least two people in dialogue. One person looking at themselves in a mirror doesn’t interest me as much.
SS: The novel moves through Berlin, Sicily, and New Orleans. How did those environments shape the emotional atmosphere, and what led you to choose them?
AFD: I was living in Berlin as I wrote the novel. I grew up in Mexico City and San Diego—San Diego is so spread out and Mexico City is a “monster”—but Berlin is complex and big enough to sustain everything I could imagine. I could contain the whole map in my head like a stage.
Regarding New Orleans, I identified with Federico’s approach because I’ve only been there a few times. He enters it as a complete foreigner, though he has “been there” through his music. Jazz and the piano playing he admires happened there, partly in reality and partly in his imagination. That gives it an unsettling energy.
Sicily is my favorite part of the novel, yet I have never been there. It represents an aspirational world. I love ancient Greek culture, and so much of it was in Sicily. For me, it is a world of nostalgia for something you lost but never actually had. Italian friends who read the manuscript couldn’t believe I’d never been. I compare it to the birth of opera or the violin in the Renaissance; they were created by people trying to recreate the sound of the ancient Greek lyre without actually knowing what it sounded like. From that imagination, something completely new was born.
SS: Music feels embedded in the prose itself. Do you think of scenes in terms of musical composition
I write novels like poems—which is a huge struggle.
AFD: Not exactly, because I’m not actually good at music! It’s a point of frustration for me. I had a piano at home as a kid, but I didn’t start classes until I was 15 or 16, which felt too late.
What you’re feeling is likely that I am a poet, and I think like a poet. I write novels like poems—which is a huge struggle. I wish I could just sit down and write a terrible first draft to get the story out, but I can’t. Every section I start, I have to find the perfect phrase, the right accent, the right alliteration. It’s tiresome, but it creates a musicality that comes more from poetry than from a technical knowledge of music.
SS: Antonella’s work as a painter introduces another artistic language. How did visual art influence your construction of imagery?
AFD: It was exciting to tell the story through the eyes of a painter. It gave me a lot of liberties. She is the narrator, and even when she’s telling Federico’s story, she has an aesthetic vision. She cares about color, shape, and composition.
I’ve written catalogs for sculptures before, and I love interpreting the world through that lens. Again, it’s a bit of a “frustrated artist” thing—I painted a bit as a teenager but wasn’t very good at it. It’s nice to take those frustrations and work through them in fiction.
SS: Many novels about artists focus on success or failure, but Parted Gods seems more interested in the psychological cost of creating. What questions about ambition were you exploring?
AFD: The concept of “success” is actually quite off-putting to me. Having lived in Europe for a long time, I feel this is a Central European novel. There, people aren’t as obsessed with the concept of success as Americans are. I find it strange when people track how much money a movie made on its opening weekend—why do we care? That’s for industry magazines.
The poet Paul Celan once asked the poet Ingeborg Bachmann why she wanted to go to America, saying he was puzzled by a place where experience is measured by success. I share that sensibility.
The twins’ ambition is deeper and perhaps more “dangerous” than success: It’s the act of creation itself—the “peak experience.” It’s about stealing fire from the gods. When you are possessed by the muse, you feel a sense of power. That “high” of inspiration is their true ambition.
SS: You engage with classical mythology without it becoming a simple retelling. How do you see myth functioning in contemporary fiction?
AFD: I think the “hero’s journey” has been cheapened by Hollywood. In ancient Greek myth, a hero isn’t necessarily someone who saves people; a hero is someone who has the capacity to suffer.
What if these myths were not myths, but facts occurring in our own bodies?
I try to do what Flannery O’Connor did with the Catholic religion. Myth was religion. I want to treat myth as an “incarnational” art—as if it were real. There is a famous anecdote about O’Connor where someone called the Eucharist a “wonderful symbol,” and she replied, “If it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” For her, it was a fact.
I wanted to make Greek myth a literal, incarnational fact. In Western art, art has often taken the place of religion. I wanted to take this to the level of the “grotesque,” asking: What if these myths were not myths, but facts occurring in our own bodies?
SS: Do you think of Parted Gods as engaging with a particular literary lineage?
AFD: Certainly Flannery O’Connor, but also the Impressionists like Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. They always used a narrator who was part of the story. Antonella is a bit of an unreliable narrator, but only because she filters everything through her own eyes. She isn’t lying to the reader; she’s telling the story to herself.
I also have to mention Hermann Hesse. I read all his novels as a teenager and then forgot about them, thinking they were “teenage” readings. But looking back, my focus on duality and twins is very much like a Hesse novel—like Narcissus and Goldmund or Steppenwolf. I also touch on alchemy toward the end of the book, which also ties back to that Jungian influence found in Hesse.
SS: Is there anything else you’d like to add about the “incarnational” aspect of the book?
AFD: I don’t care much for “newness.” Homer is the peak; we’ve been going downhill since then! But I think the idea of bringing myth into the body is what makes this work.
Painting has always done this. Antonella values Velázquez. In his paintings, you see Hephaestus working in his smithy. If no one told you he was a god, you wouldn’t know—he looks like a contemporary worker. Rembrandt’s Artemis is a huge, physical woman who has nothing to do with the “ideal” Greek form. Painting brings the gods into the present of the painter. I wanted to do that with the novel: to give the myth flesh.
This is my last fundraising letter to you as Executive Director. In my 10 years in this role, and 16 at Electric Literature, I have seen funding for the arts gutted. In 2025, we received $57,000 in grant funding, compared to $127,000 the previous year. This $70,000 reduction was a result of the Trump Administration dismantling the NEA and attacking artistic expression. As an indirect result, other funders have been spread thin and grant amounts have been broadly reduced.
I wish we lived in a country where there was more federal, state, and organizational support for the arts. Maybe one day we will. In the meantime, it’s on all of us to step up. Last year, you did. Individual donations to Electric Literature went from $155,000 in 2024 to $215,000 in 2025—a $60,000 increase that nearly covered EL’s grant losses.
One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned as Executive Director is to ask for what EL needs. This sounds simple, but for years I was inclined to ask for less—to ask for the amount that sounded palatable, or seemed achievable—and to make up the difference with debt and sacrifice. It took our community stepping up last year to teach me that getting what we need is possible.
Your support also taught me that caring for Electric Literature is not a responsibility I shouldered alone. As a nonprofit, Electric Literature does not belong to any one person; it belongs to all of us. To the staff, to the thousands of writers we publish and pay, and to the millions of readers who read their work for free every day.
Electric Literature is undergoing an exciting transition as I step away and other staff members take the reins. We’ve set a more ambitious goal for this spring fundraiser so that EL’s new leadership has the security to face whatever challenges lie ahead. Their vision for Electric Literature is fresh and inspiring and worthy of your investment. Together, we are strong, and the future of literature is bright.
I’m asking you, once more, to support this organization we all love before the April 15 deadline. We’re still over $20,000 away from our $35,000 target—maybe this goal is ambitious, but it’s what we need, so it’s what we’re asking for. Time is running out; please give generously.
The Person Who Lives Here Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
The man who’s called me out to pick his lock is lying. He doesn’t live there. I know this, because it’s my apartment.
When I received the message, my first reaction was shock. Not a stomach-churning kind of shock—like when Sarah decided to up and leave after ten years of marriage and told me with nothing but a text—but more a feeling of surprise. That of everyone in this damn city they could steal from, they’d choose me.
I thought about calling the police, but left the number undialed. I guess a part of me was curious. Everything’s already so fucked, I wanted to prod it a bit more just to see what would happen. So now I’m on my way to help a man break into my own home.
When I arrive, he’s sitting on the worn corridor carpet, staring at the ceiling. He’s in his late twenties, wearing tight jeans, a baggy tee featuring a band I’ve never heard of, and an old beanie. He’s a little jittery—understandable, given that he’s about to commit a felony—but all things considered he’s holding it together. It’s a look not so different from that of most of my customers. I used to enjoy watching their concern melt into relief whenever I teased their door open. I’d smile as they stepped over the threshold, arms outstretched as though hugging an old friend. That’s how I used to feel getting home, too. These days, I shuffle Metropolis-like through my front door, past wedding photos, past the jacket that Sarah used to say suited me, past the boomerang from our trip to Australia that we swore we’d learn how to throw. Everything’s preserved, like Pompeii after Vesuvius erupted—except in this case it was Sarah blowing up my life.
The man flashes a fake ID bearing my name. “I appreciate you coming out so quickly,” he says with as much confidence as he can muster.
I stare at him for a moment, pondering my next move. Confronting him’s still an option, of course. There’s no room in those drainpipe jeans of his for a weapon, and I’m sure a combination of old man strength and primal rage would see me through. But the same morbid curiosity that brought me here keeps dragging me along for the ride.
So instead, I sit there, picking the lock with the quiet professionalism I’d give any other customer. After a few minutes, the door springs open.
I wait in the van as he loads his car with my shit: the widescreen TV Sarah and I used to snuggle up in front of; the record player she bought me for my thirtieth; the food processor that’s been collecting dust for a year.
As the man drives away into the night, I step inside. Everything’s gone: not just the expensive stuff, but the small things too. Liquor, coasters, even the damn boomerang. And for the first time in forever, I can breathe a little more easily.
I love a rousing epic, but I’m equally drawn to smaller, more interior odysseys—stories set in kitchens, in unassuming towns, or in the mind itself. Unlike larger-than-life quest narratives with a traditional (and traditionally male) protagonist, these little odysseys take place in spaces often coded as female and just as often dismissed as unimportant. But their smallness is precisely the point, and although they promise neither resolution nor reward, they offer something equally rich: friction, intimacy, insight, and a slow remaking of the self.
My book, Troika, chronicles a three-day road trip to California’s Central Coast. In the car: me, my 77-year-old mother, and my 22-year-old daughter. We drive 250 miles south to Solvang, a quaint Danish town made famous by the 2004 film Sideways, meander through the Santa Ynez Valley, stop at an ostrich farm, visit a stunning outdoor light installation in Paso Robles, bicker, binge-watch the second season of The White Lotus, and embark on a quest for the best latte art. It’s a modest journey—three women, three days, an unambitious itinerary—but along the way, Troika explores the complicated interior landscapes of myth, migration, and memory, braiding together echoes of the Odyssey, a legacy of loss, and a family history of fleeing from monsters, both real and imagined.
The nine books on this list undertake similarly circumscribed journeys: across a parlor, through a single unruly sentence, back into a childhood bedroom. Their protagonists are daughters, mothers, wives, caretakers, and strivers—women who struggle with the weight of inheritance and expectation, confront and name their own desires, and navigate uncharted interior terrain. But even when hemmed in by economic exigency, physical disability, or cultural constraints, these protagonists show us that nothing is more heroic than a consciousness finding a way forward on its own terms.
Over the course of a single, breathless, looping sentence that runs for a thousand pages, the unnamed narrator muses about her failed first marriage, her happy second marriage, her four children, her health, her health insurance, money, her part-time job baking pies, her earlier job as an untenured history professor, the sites of Native American massacres near the small Ohio town where she lives with her family, GRWM routines, climate change, internet headlines, and the thrumming violence just beneath the surface of American life. We may not know her name, but she contains multitudes, and by the end of the novel, she feels like a close friend.
Catherine Sloper’s beautiful, clever mother died in childbirth, and Catherine—who grows up to be neither clever nor beautiful—is left in the care of her meddlesome older aunt and her exacting, acerbic father, a well-regarded doctor who believes that “you are good for nothing if you aren’t clever.” What’s a girl to do, especially if she’s stuck in her father’s house with no marriage prospects? If you’re Catherine, you endure a broken heart, quietly defy your controlling father, take up needlepoint, find your backbone and your voice, and realize that your small-seeming life may not be so small after all—especially if you live it on your terms…
A mother and daughter embark on a treasure hunt in the Utah desert. They are carrying an unreliable map, a lifetime of resentments and regrets, and not enough sunscreen. The mother, Christy, is erratic and irresponsible; the daughter, Bea (short for Beautiful), seeks order in numbers and weather patterns. Their search for treasure loops and meanders, but much of the narrative drama takes place in the cramped spaces of memory, text exchanges, and snatches of conversation. A fraught, uneasy tenderness slowly builds between the two women as they chart an unexpected path back to each other.
Ruth’s fiancé has dumped her for another woman (“I loosened the jar lid,” she notes, “so someone else could open him”). Her father, who has Alzheimer’s, is flinging his pants and shirts into trees. Ruth returns to her childhood home, where she cooks cruciferous vegetables (her father calls them “crucified vegetables”) and jellyfish, which are supposed to stave off cognitive decline, accompanies her parents on walks to the park, and searches for projects that spark her father’s interest. The novel’s modest scale—meals prepared, notes left on the refrigerator, snatches of dialogue overheard in the street—belies its immense affection, wry hilarity, and attentive intelligence.
Daisy Hernández is five when she begins learning English—a language that sounds like “marbles in the mouth”—and for years afterward, the hurt of being the first to leave her Cuban-Colombian family for another language lingers. Her fluency puts her at a remove from the people she loves most; so does identifying as bisexual and speaking out in a culture that traditionally values stoicism and silence. But no matter how far she ventures, writing allows her to remain close to home; writing, she says, “is how I leave my family and how I take them with me.”
A self-described semi-famous artist sets out on a cross-country drive, but 20 minutes into her trip, she checks into a small-town motel. There, she spends an exorbitant amount of money redecorating the motel room, engages in an unconsummated affair, and dreads the “estrogen cliff” that will send her hurtling into the jaws of menopause. The novel is polarizing—readers have dismissed the protagonist as self-indulgent and unlikable and cringed at her no-holds-barred frankness—but I was brought to tears by her fearless willingness to explore the darkest recesses of her psyche and the rich intimacy of female friendships that undergird the novel.
Odysseus’s loyal wife, Penelope, spends most of The Odyssey weaving, waiting, and weeping. Now that she’s dead, she’s ready to drop some truth bombs from the underworld. She is no longer willing to bite her tongue, to keep the right doors closed and go to sleep during the rampages. She’s sardonic and angry. She regrets not standing up for the maids Odysseus and Telemachus slaughtered when Odysseus returned to Ithaca, but it’s too late; their voices haunt her story, for the maids understand better than anyone the steep cost of keeping the home fires burning.
Why go outside when you can hang out in your apartment with the internet, the TV, and your garbagemonster cat? Samantha Irby sees no reason for it. Her bowels are irritable, her arthritis is flaring, the dating scene is “fucking dire,” and her job skills are limited to—in her words—surly phone answering, playing the race card, and eating other people’s lunches in the break room. Also, her mind is a “never-ending series of shame spirals” leavened with depression and anxiety, which is why she’s staying home in her day pajamas, eating the snacks she ordered online, and spinning the dross of daily life into gold.
Imagine your father (who, incidentally, spent your college tuition on a guitar that once belonged to Paul McCartney) is one of a handful of non-celibate Roman Catholic priests in the world. You are nothing like him. You write poetry. On the internet, which has just become a thing, you meet another poet in a poetry chat room, and the two of you marry (at 19!)) and move to Savannah. You’re poor and happy, until a catastrophe forces you and your husband to move back into your father’s house, which in this case also happens to be the house of God. Lockwood’s main instrument of resistance—her profane, poetic, loose-limbed, exquisitely unhinged voice—punctures the domestic claustrophobia and creates its own sacred spaces.
Women’s stories feel different to me. People say that if only women ruled the world, there would be no more war (a lovely thought, and one I’ve been returning to lately) because women are socialized to revert first to empathy, to the collective rather than the fiercely individual, to taking care of other people and thinking of their needs, sometimes to a fault. We see that in the lens they bring to their fiction. Women in war hold families together; women in fiction often emphasize the vulnerable, rather than the physically strong. And they act—as the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) called the women in Amira Ghenim’s ACalamity of Noble Houses—as “custodians of memory,” preserving a version of events that course-corrects accepted patriarchal accounts.
Over four years, I had the privilege of reading and translating Areej Gamal’s Sawiris Prize-winning novel Mariam, It’s Arwa. The book, emphatically and sublimely female, is about a multiplicity of revolutions, the most literal of them appearing in its frame plot, during the Arab Spring in Tahrir Square and Cairo’s streets. The novel spans generations of women: the mother who falls in love across class and religion and risks everything to follow her heart; the daughter who leaves an unhappy home and emigrates to Germany to find herself; the abused grandmother who has internalized the idea that a woman is nothing if she doesn’t bear a son; and the mother who nearly dies in her quest to make that dream a reality. And of course, the two main characters’ love is its own revolution—a remaking of the world as a more inclusive place in spite of itself, even if their world is one small apartment on Champollion Street. It’s my favorite kind of book: a book by a woman about women taking their lives into their own hands. One that centers women at the forefront of revolution/war and social change.
While my definition of “revolutionary” here is broad—encompassing societal revolution and personal rebellions against tradition—I admit that war is at the forefront of my mind. As I’m writing this, the normal city sounds in Amman, Jordan, where I am, are interspersed with emergency sirens, occasionally fighter jets and explosions. The US and Israel are attacking Iran, which is attacking back, and we are war-adjacent. More or less safe—we hope—but affected, as is the entire region. It’s hard not to see echoes of this chaos appearing in some of the novels on this list. But when I look around, I’m grateful to see echoes of the heroines’ tenacity and resilience, as well. These novels have much to teach us about the importance of knowledge-gathering and memory, seeking out joy in the midst of crisis, and rejecting any entity that tries to write our stories for us.
Nawal El Saadawi (1931-2021), the Egyptian writer, medical doctor, and psychologist, has often been compared to Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf—an outspoken feminist and activist whose writing had a dramatic impact on generations. Jailed under Sadat for “crimes against the state,” she wrote about authoritarianism, feminism, and capitalism, and Woman at Point Zero—what the British-Palestian writer and lawyer Selma Dabbagh calls a “small volume of fury”—is one of her seminal works. The main character, Firdaus, is in prison awaiting execution after killing a man. As she tells her story, it is difficult not to feel both anger and empathy. There are few points of hope in the book, in which money is the only source of autonomy for a woman and prostitution near-inevitable for one born without, yet it is through landmark novels like this one, with its fierce condemnation of patriarchal society, that change is possible. Pleasant? No. To say that the book needs a content warning would be an understatement. Important? Incredibly.
I first read William Granara’s translation of Granada, the trilogy’s first book, as part of a book club, where members were heartbroken that the subsequent parts were untranslated. Now, for the first time, the whole trilogy is available in English. The story begins in 1492, when the Arab kingdom of Granada falls to the Christian Castilians, and the Moorish presence in Spain becomes unstable. The text follows a Muslim family as it tries to make sense of the forced conversions, book burnings, job loss, immigration, rebellion, and Inquisition until, one hundred years later, their descendants are deported en masse. The women in the book stand out, particularly Salima, a great lover of books and a healer, and Maryama, her sister-in-law, who is clever, defiant, and compassionate, a rallying point for the community in chaotic times. Women are at the core of this book, conserving knowledge and holding their families together.
Planet of Clay by Samar Yazbek, translated by Leri Price
Told in lyrical, often cinematic prose from the perspective of a neurodivergent young woman named Rima, Planet of Clay depicts the Syrian Civil War and the aftermath of the chemical attack and siege on Ghouta. Rima, who does not speak, spent much of her childhood in a school library and has a deep love of books and painting. We find her lost in her thoughts when the book opens, trapped in a cellar with only boxes of paper and a pen, recording her story as she runs out of food. The war has stripped her of all the people she loved, and she cannot grasp why. “We are toys made out of clay, small toys, quick to break and crumble,” she writes. Still, this careful storyteller sees beauty at times when others don’t look for it, using her imagination to make sense of and find light in a dark world.
Set in 1930s Tunis, A Calamity of Noble Houses was shortlisted for the IPAF in 2021. It begins with Tunisian revolutionary Tahar Haddad, author of Our Women in the Shari’a and Society, and places her in the context of two upper-crust families, the conservative Ennaifers and the more progressive Rassaa family. Here, Haddad, a real historical figure from humble origins who was instrumental in shaping the future of women’s rights in Tunisia, falls in love with the young Zbaida Ali Rassaa, who becomes the wife of Mohsen Ennaifer. When dubious accusations of an affair surface, tragedy strikes. The novel decenters Haddad to tell the story of the two families as narrated by eleven different characters from disparate social classes who, together, paint a rich portrait of a nation in flux, spanning several decades.
In 1987, during the First Intifada, a curfew is imposed in a Nablus neighborhood, and three women are trapped inside the same house. Nuzha, its owner and daughter of a prostitute, is furious at society and the whispers that her mother was a spy for Israel. Sitt Zakia, a middle-aged midwife, uses faith as a barrier against the political violence surrounding her. And Samar, the optimist, is a university graduate studying how the Intifada has affected Palestinian women’s lives. Together, they hatch a plan to thwart Israeli soldiers’ effort to barricade the street. Like Mariam, It’s Arwa, this novel doesn’t gloss over the multiple fronts of the ongoing revolution. When it was published in 1990, the novel was criticized for daring to depict domestic violence on the part of Palestinian freedom fighters. But Khalifeh makes it clear that these women’s oppression is twofold: both Israeli Occupation and the patriarchy itself.
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
A finalist for the National Book Award and longlisted for the International Booker Prize, Minor Detail won the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, but the awards ceremony was indefinitely postponed in solidarity with Israel after the October 7 Hamas attacks—a move that drew criticism from numerous organizations. The novel is a haunting meditation on war and memory that includes two intertwined stories. The first begins in 1949, when an Israeli battalion massacres an encampment of Bedouins in the southern Negev and abducts a Palestinian teenager whom they rape, kill, and bury. The second is the story of a young woman from Ramallah, born twenty-five years to the day after this crime, who sets out to uncover more details about it, encountering obstacle after obstacle as she attempts to access archives that will give her information about her country’s past. This is knowledge-seeking as revolution at its best.
Blood Feast by Malika Moustadraf, translated by Alice Guthrie
Malika Moustadraf was a force of nature and an icon of feminism who passed away in 2006, at just 37 years old. A “rebel realist,” as she called herself, Moustadraf’s prose is so embodied that it often turns the stomach. It details what translator Alice Guthrie calls “an unflinching look at the worst traumas of the female experience in patriarchal society, shot through with wit, wordplay, and razor-sharp political commentary.” Her stories fearlessly take on abject poverty, religious hypocrisy, pimps and incels, a girl’s horrifying first period, cybersex, and the failure of the Moroccan medical system to help those in need. Moustadraf was maligned in her time due to her literary activism, and her two books had fallen out of print in Arabic at the time of her death; it’s thanks in large part to Guthrie’s tireless advocacy that her writing is now available again in both Arabic and English.
I bought my Arabic copy of this book for the cover art: a girl in a swing, her eyes closed, a daisy covering her mouth. Then I read about Zahra—“flower” in Arabic—a girl who yearns to be close to her mother, who, in turn, uses Zahra as a shield in her love affair. Originally published in 1980, this classic of the Lebanese Civil War is about a young woman seeking to establish her own identity, one who spends years escaping. First from an authoritarian father and disappointing mother to West Africa—where she has a miserable marriage—then back to war-torn Beirut, where she begins an affair with a sniper. The book tackles childhood trauma, assault, the complex emotional landscape of emigration, and the stigma surrounding female sexuality. Unlike Firdaus in Woman at Point Zero, Zahra experiences and embraces pleasure—a point of hope, if not ultimately of salvation.
In a three-act whirlwind, autopoetic, hybrid play about the unborn ghosts of daughters lost to sex-selective elimination, Soham Patel’s The Daughter Industry delivers a genre abundant staging of social and economically produced gender woes. From sissy boi to high femme princess, seven players perform a complex yoga routine, lip sync, and engage in karaoke sing-offs to examine the bind of moving through a society that privileges the birth of those assigned male at birth, and figuring out where that leaves those who were determined, before birth, to be less socially viable. Hence the daughter industry, which churns out unborn ghost after ghost.
Despite the gravity of this subject, The Daughter Industry is lovingly choreographed by Patel’s recognizable charm, humor, and playfulness as a writer—traits which their players embody as well. Moody Scorpios and fastidious Virgos abound in this book, and gender becomes both a marker of where you are in this place and time as well as a moving target. The cast gives us this rich gender discourse while going into happy baby pose.
While Patel’s formally inventive deep dive into sex selective elimination takes on the South Asian Diasporic context, I am rocked by how we are all culturally implicated in this violent industry of assigned sex and the subsequent roles we are to perform, particularly as daughters. And yet, I am grateful for the ways Patel reminds us that there are still tender ties to our gendered upbringings. Our bodies are continuously yearning for answers, belonging, and to be free. Talking with Patel, I am reminded that the search for genres and forms that can hold these complicated questions is just as meaningful as the ways we make choices about how we embody our gender(s) in this lifetime.
Over email, Patel and I talked about the inextricability of genre and gender “bending” in The Daughter Industry, as well as the various bends, folds, and stretches that accompany the book’s elaborate yoga routine, and more.
Muriel Leung: The title of your latest collection is quite a legendary multi-genre assemblage: The Daughter Industry: A Hauntological Confession, Alternative History, Speculative Autopoetics in Three Acts with Seven Players. In so many ways, the charge of this genre-defiant work is consistent with its gender-defiant message, something we see in the gender bending and multiplicitous cast list (“all unborn ghosts”), and the opening poem “In My Dotted Suit and No Dupatta,” in which the speaker moves through having found their gender to “I hadn’t yet found my gender.”
Can you share the story behind this title (and illustrious subtitle)? How does the title mirror the intertwined relationship between genre and gender you’re thinking through in this work (especially the ghostliness of it all)?
Soham Patel: I’ve thought about the word “daughter” all my life because my parents gave me a name that’s traditionally assigned to sons. I know they wanted a boy and actually, when I was twelve or thirteen, one of my uncles started calling me Sohambhai (bhai meaning brother). It was a term of endearment while also him lowkey poking fun at my T-boy expressions. Gender’s always been a little confusing to me, but I don’t necessarily mean confusing as a bad thing. It’s a curious thing. That led me to the question “what makes a daughter?” and that’s where industry—that idea of making or manufacturing—plays into the title. Sex selection is an industry that eliminates daughters before they are born.
This is why the book is also a hauntology. It sees the ghosts of unborn folx, past, present, and future. One poem early in the collection is built around a speaker describing seeing a ghost. It also works within the tradition of confessional poetry: intensely vulnerable, controversial, conversational. I saw that ghost, and that was one of the starting points of this book. It’s an alternate history that examines a world where these victims of sex selection, these would-be daughters, (maybe) could have been born. I am making many selves through a poetics that imagines new realities about welcoming genders beyond the binary.
ML: That makes me think of Kazim Ali’s coining of the term “genre queer,” referring to the way genre, much like gender, is reflective of the myriad possibilities for embodiment and presentation.
There are seven players in the book, each of uncertain astrological placement and equally uncertain lineages, whose drama is told through a three-act structure, harkening Western dramatic forms, and also calling upon conventions of Indian theatre. What forms of play/performance did you feel called to draw on for the structure of this drama?
SP: The players allow me to draw on persona as form, messenger speech, and dramatic monologue. I wanted a multigenerational troupe of many genders to tell this story. Sai is masculine-presenting and serves as the solid older bro. Sajani is the matriarch. Suvali is the handsome femme sister who leaves town then comes back home. Sasmita’s younger and thinks this whole problem is audacious. Shasha/Sheetal, they’re kind of shy and obedient but not really. Sarah participates in heteronormativity and defends son preference while she understands it’s fucked up.
The elders’ discourse is more narrative while the younger ghost’s language use is more conceptual, they use documentary forms and are a bit more playful with the book’s topic and with each other. They’re irreverent but still they learn about the graveness of their situation and their playfulness eventually, by Act III, influences their elders.
ML: How realistic that there would be hierarchy even among the unborn! Why then a verse play? What does the use of verse in play form allow you to do?
SP: Making it a verse play took the pressure off of me and let them talk to each other. The three-part structure is based on the ayurvedic doshas: The first act is grounding, the second act is fire, a kind of metabolism, and the third act is air that’s evaporating not simply in acceptance, more at peace and accounting for the trace elements left by the sex selection processes. I tried this three-part structure in my first two books and I like how it forces some order on my chaotic ways of thinking,
I also draw on Kathakali theatre’s incorporations of music and dance and its elaborate use of tiny gestures, physical expression, and audience interaction. In the book, the players invite generative participation from readers by practicing yoga, staging a flash mob, throwing drag shows and lip synch revelries. Since a play gives the book a life beyond the page, I want The Daughter Industry to belong to other people and for them to imagine how these ghosts should occupy a stage of their own creation much like in the tradition of V.’s The Vagina Monologues.
ML: All this dynamism feels antithetical to the predetermined death issued by sex selective elimination. I feel the veils of this reality and the spirit realm become porous through every yoga pose and lip sync.
Earlier, you had mentioned your personal connection to the word “daughter.” I’m thinking of the title of your book again, where an industry of daughters indicates that “daughter,” much like girlhood, boyhood, or gendered roles or social positions are all manufactured through the joint production of culture, market mechanisms, and even proximity to or literal death. How has writing this book altered, if at all, your relationship to the term “daughter”?
SP: Daughter is speculation in the same way investments are. “Daughter” can be considered an asset that has a transactional value like a dowry or a diamond engagement ring or the wedding’s rehearsal dinner bill or covering the sangeet reception’s open bar. Both daughter and son function as commodities. In the book some of that function gets shuttled through poetry about trade, marriage, and parenthood. Writing the book also altered my relationship to the term daughter because it got me thinking about the term son with more complexity. I became more patient with both terms. For example, the work made me more sympathetic to the real pressures that are put upon sons within the context of son worship and patriarchal structures. This allowed for more room to give love to the boys and men in my life, that’s why I dedicate this collection to them.
ML: From a Chinese cultural context, I think too of what it means to not be just the eldest daughter but a “daughter-son” fulfilling both roles, given my disabled younger brother’s inability to fulfill traditional social and economic responsibilities as the son. I’ve always known that daughters are treated as commodities, but I think less about how sons participate in this gender economy too, so your explanation also helps me think more compassionately about the overall system we’re indoctrinated into.
Your mention of speculation, which is a market term as well as a literary one, also suggests play and imagination. I see this in the syntactical restlessness of your work. Lines that are playful at times, and at other moments emphasize with great seriousness the stakes of gender violence taking place through interrogation of medical language, religious tradition, and treatment of women as property. How do you know when it is appropriate to crack a joke on the page versus pushing forward a critique?
SP: At a certain point these ghost voices spoke to me and I became their interlocutor. As I moved in the world, I saw it through them and now they live with me and influence how I am thinking. Sometimes when I am watching TV with my wife, I point at a character and say something like, “He’s such a Sai,” “She’s totally giving Suvali,” etc. Sasmita’s likely cracking most of those jokes because for them, witticism can at once offer relief and put forward a critique. Shasha/Sheetal treat crisis with a cool irreverence too, sometimes they simply perform documentary poetics as they repeat the terrible things they overhear with a tonal disdain. Sajani, Suvali, and Sarah are more elegant and conditioned by these traditional forces that almost, but don’t quite, silence them.
ML: I think most people think of ghosts as fixed presences, static in their desires and post-life haunting. But these seven players change their minds, challenge the system of sex selection, confront the contradictions within their own beliefs, and learn that their own relationship to gender influences their positions. I imagine it’s a balancing act to write this book and to see how these different unborn ghosts impact each other.
As this manuscript began as your University of Wisconsin Milwaukee PhD dissertation, can you speak to how these players’ journeys have evolved over the years?
SP: Pronoun preferences and normalizing nonbinary genders became everyday language I didn’t have access to when I started writing these poems in 2010. Mine transformed from “she” only to include “they” which of course reshaped the use of “I” in my collection of lyric poetry about gender, reproduction, and the ghosts of sex selection. And while I read plenty and saw so many media representations, I still knew nothing firsthand about some topics the book approaches, and still [don’t], never will. Childbirth, for instance, or some experiences of both boyhood and girlhood.
I took a full-time job as an editor straight after completing my PhD. That day job transformed the book’s nighttime revision process in that I newly understood I could cut and reshape the drafts without losing the book’s essence, and I could think about audience more expansively. In the detached role of an editor, I discovered an intellectual and emotional freedom that had been impossible to access before. I also became a step-parent to two beautiful teenagers and that made my relationship fuller with the work. This major shift made me understand Suvali and Sajani’s perspectives on parenting with more accuracy as they now were informed by my lived experience. The speaker of these poems—persona, pantomime, the self of lyric I or otherwise—is always learning and language changes in their worlds every day.
ML: You’ve also published other collections that grapple with gender through ecological considerations—to afar from afar; ever really hear it, winner of the Subito Prize; all one in the end—/water. How do natural elements, from the blended forms that frame each act to the movement and scattered placement of humans that is diaspora, shape this work?
SP: Act II attempts a decentering of the human as it makes a thematic shift to exploring the reproductive practices of some animals. I watched all the videos in Isabella Rosselini’s Green Porno series many times as part of the research for adding this new vector into the book. Her animated shorts were such a great resource and offered a framework for challenging anthropocentric notions of gender.
Something I like about this book is that the work from all my books shape and influence it. The critical race theory and maudlin nostalgia from every really hear it is there, the question of home and belonging from to afar from afar appears, and the ecological crisis born from surveillance paranoia and corporate greed inevitable in our late capitalist structure that worries all the way through all one in the end—/water shores up in this book too. Flood subjects culminating.
ML: Indeed, this kind of spillage abounds and has cumulative force in The Daughter Industry! The collection takes us through a yoga routine—Sid (Sidhangana) does a series of prone poses, then serpent or cobra pose, savanasa the next, chants om, and goes into dead man’s pose—set to a playlist that includes pop classics like Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” and Destiny Child’s “I’m A Survivor.”
One of my most cherished memories of you is witnessing your rendition of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” at AWP Literaoke in Tampa, Florida. I think at some point during your belting of the line, “You’d think I’d lay down and die,” you fell to your knees, and then in the next moment, staggered up with “No, not I, I will survive.” I believe you got some standing ovations, or it could just have been me waving my sweater like a propeller in the air. How do your daily practices and pop culture affinities make their way through the book? And what are some additional poses and songs you would like to add to the karaoke queue?
SP: Oh, I like this game! Add Madonna’s “Vogue” where we can strike a pose while singing along with that queer anthem and “I’m Every Woman,” Chaka Khan, 1978. Besides warrior one and two, I didn’t explicitly fit many triangle poses into the book. These always reshape my days into better ones when I do them, so let’s add some. Right now, as I’m composing these answers (it’s a Sunday, the first day of February in 2026), I just want to rest a bit in child’s pose because I’ve been watching on my phone so many people I love living through all the unrests brought by apocalypse, the start of a civil war, and the end of an empire. So I need to calm my nervous system daily or else I won’t survive. I’d love to start a running queue for any reader of the book interested in participating.
I was a small child, my head the height of theirs, when I noticed the black parts of their eyes were shaped like shoeboxes. But I didn’t know then that their rectangular pupils are adaptive. Goats take their meals on savannas or other wide-open spaces that leave them vulnerable to predators and the beating sun. Horizontal pupils let in less light from above and allow a wide field of vision.
Living with five Nubians—four does and a buck—I witness how nimbly they manage difficult terrain and remain vigilant at the same time. Because a misstep can be fatal.
The does greet me this morning by nibbling my flannel shirt, which I imagine tastes of woodsmoke and chicken broth. The barn smells of sweet-sharp hay, of pine dust, a wisp of ammonia that lets me know the straw bedding needs to be changed. It’s the heart of winter, and I pull the girls close.
The does are two months pregnant, so I’ve stopped milking to allow the young mamas to build their strength and keep their vitamins, which they’ll need to give birth to healthy kids come April.
A lot of people choose not to freshen does in their first fall, but I was impatient to grow my herd, to get a revenue stream going to stabilize the farm, and Judy said that as long as the girls were good sized and healthy, they’d be fine to breed. I’m thrilled every time I look at this burgeoning pack of curious females.
Yet it’s my first time as a goat midwife. Can I really manage the upcoming births on my own? We have no money to hire a helper or to call the vet if something goes wrong.
At least I have Judy on speed dial.
Opening the chicken coop, I let the birds loose and empty a bin of kale stems and squash rinds as an enticement to venture farther afield. Few eggs to collect this time of year, when the days are so short. The birds are healthy but they look horrendous, the runts and weaklings’ backs picked clean of feathers. Their bare pimpled skin shames me, even though my father’s hens looked the same, no matter what he did. “Lucy,” he’d tell me, “there you see the meaning of pecking order.”
I’d planned a lot of indoor projects for the winter milking break, but that was before Michael lost our money and we needed immediate income. So today, instead of YouTubing a toilet fix, I’ll be testing the endurance of my gluteal muscles, sitting on my flat butt at the Edin General Store.
I hear Michael calling me as soon as I take my boots off downstairs. He’s perched on the side of the bed, eyes a faded brown, head bald, just a few stray tufts to the side. A birdlike Roman nose that anchors his still-handsome face.
He tells me he wants to go for a ride in the new snow. He gestures out the window at the thick layer smothering the fields. We look together at the boot prints I’ve made between the house and the barn. “You’ve already been out in it,” he says. “Now it’s my turn.”
Not only does he want to see the snow, but there are library books being held for him, and a bacon and egg sandwich at Franco’s with his name on it. “Let’s go out for breakfast, bella. I’ll read you the obituaries. You love the life stories.”
Of course I do, and I love it when he reads to me, but we don’t have enough time for an outing. I offer to run out and pick up the books and the sandwich.
But no. He wants to get out of the house. His voice is both firm and pleading.
Changing his own socks into thicker woolens and wedging shoes onto his swollen feet can stretch to a quarter hour. Then getting his arms into each sleeve of a parka, plus scarf and hat. The driveway has been plowed but there’s still a slick of ice, and I shiver just thinking about leading him across it to reach the passenger door, then holding the full weight of his seventy-nine-year-old, six-foot frame to transfer him into the depths of the car seat.
I don’t want him to feel a burden, and I don’t want to pity him, so I tell him simply that we don’t have time. I’m due soon at the store.
This does not sit well. Michael’s forehead reddens and the corners of his mouth press down. He repeats his desire for an egg sandwich.
In case what he really wants is to be doted on, I say, “Why don’t you come into the kitchen, I’ll fry you eggs and toast, and you can admire the snow from there. See if there are any deer in the back field.”
“You’re just being selfish,” he mutters.
I pause, startled. These short, angry flares are new and I’m not yet used to them. They’ve arrived in the wake of the giant loss Michael incurred, which has thrown me back into the vexed center of my parents’ financial strain. We always had enough, but there was no fat in the budget, and Mom and Dad never once took a vacation longer than a three-day weekend, or pricier than an unelectrified lakeside bungalow. I have, it seems to me today, simply given up city comforts for the quaintly beautiful privations of the country.
I shower quickly, warmed by the hot water if dismayed by the rusting tub. I emerge with a soothing voice and suggest to my husband that I put on a movie. Make popcorn. We have a complete library of Gilbert and Sullivan and he chooses The Pirates of Penzance. “Watch with me, bella,” he says invitingly. He pats the couch cushion next to him. Removes his glasses and rubs his eyes as if to better appreciate me. Smiles. His bad mood has apparently already vanished, as quickly as our savings account dropped to zero. But I cannot stay. I have too much to do.
How do I manage my anger and despair? Well, that’s why a woman has a barn.
Because I’m late—flustered by the regrettable exchange with Michael, then by trying to settle him down in front of the TV and set aside something for his early dinner, labeling the container with masking tape that says eat me—Shruti is behind the counter at Edin General, where I should be, ringing up two Slim Jims, a string of lotto tickets, and three packs of Camel Lights. I’m sweating, my scarf trailing to the floor to the extent that I step on it and nearly choke myself.
“I can see how it’s going,” Shruti says, pointing to my pink face and hair matted across my brow. She takes the scarf, the hat, and my jacket, putting each in its cubby or hook to the side of the counter. As always, she looks immaculate and yet perfectly casual in her jeans and clean sneakers and brown and cream cardigan with coconut shell buttons. The color combination makes me think of Felicia, my favorite doe, and for a moment I long to be back in the barn surrounded by lop ears and so many beating hearts.
“Tough morning?” Shruti asks with concern.
If I say anything about the murky state of my husband’s mind, or the dire straits of our financial situation, I’ll cry myself a river. A nod is all I can manage.
Shruti tries another tack. “Did you see the game last night?” She is a Celtics superfan, having become hooked on the NBA through trying to bond with her son, now an assistant professor at one of the nearby colleges. “If he doesn’t give us grandchildren in five years, we’re going to sue him,” she joked recently. Shruti is dying to attend a Celtics game in person, though when I ask her why she hasn’t looked for tickets, she shrugs sheepishly and says her son is too busy to go with her. Apparently, Hari, her husband, does not share her passion.
“Sorry, hon. Missed it,” I say.
She tells me “our” team lost to Philadelphia 89–80. “Kyrie didn’t play,” which I guess explains everything.
Glumly thinking about her team’s loss, Shruti gives me a last look of concern, then leaves for the back room, where she has calls to make.
How do I manage my anger and despair? Well, that’s why a woman has a barn.
I open the cash register to the hand-worn scent of bills and coins and ink from leaky pens. The ding and thrust of the jaw opening and closing has the satisfying feel of childhood toys.
Shruti has given me the exalted title of associate manager to justify paying me ten dollars above minimum wage plus a small bonus at the end of the year. In addition to staffing the register, I help with inventory, checkout, writing and proofreading announcements and advertisements. Shruti and Hari hired me in part for my deep roots in the community, even though I explained that I’d been away so long, my contacts were limited to my parents’ now elderly friends and those from high school who never left. “Those are precisely the people we want to attract,” Shruti assured me.
“How much is this, and how do you eat it?” A lanky, dark-haired boy with bangs in his eyes holds up a package of Shruti’s frozen samosas. They are delicious, as good as Michael and I have eaten in any restaurant. I tell the kid what they are and how to reheat them in the oven so they get nice and crispy. A package of six is ten dollars, but because I want him to try them, I give it to him for five bucks and plan to slip the other five from my wallet into the register once he leaves.
“They go well with beer,” I say. “Try that IPA in the blue can; it’s from a brewery just on the other side of the river.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it,” he says, and shrugs. “Okay.”
I pack everything up and take his card. Then I hold out the chutneys, mint and tamarind, displaying them in the palm of my hand like precious stones. I explain they’re like salsa, a dipping sauce. “Come back and let me know if you like them.”
As much as I love Shruti, I often find the store disquieting, not only because I see people I used to know, or should know, or no longer want to know, but because I can be interrupted at any moment. That’s what makes retail the pits, as my mother used to say. It’s hard to believe that I worked for twenty years in a field where all you do is talk to people. I always found PR spiritually effortful, but I thought that’s just what a real job was. To make real money, you had to escape the provinces and do things you didn’t want to do.
I’m relieved when the doorbell sounds the young man’s exit. My eyes mindlessly follow him to his car waiting on the road’s shoulder, engine running.
Just then, the door to the house across the street opens, and a tall, well-shaped woman in stylish thick-heeled boots rushes down the stairs to the street.
My breath catches. I lean closer and jut my nose into the windowpane.
Then I rush to the back room, where Shruti is on the computer. “The woman across the street in the old Masonic Lodge. Do you know her?”
My friend peers at me over her computer glasses. “Alexandra Stevens? Just a little. I met her on the sidewalk last week. Why?”
“We went to high school together.”
“Were you friends?”
“Very close, for a time. Do you know why she’s here?”
Shruti looks at me curiously, a sly smile playing on her lips. “I guess she couldn’t stay away, like you.”
I shake my head. Back then, Sandy didn’t have a country bone in her body. That was part of what drew me to her.
I want to rush out and hug her. To share the shock of being back in Edin as adults. But I’m also hesitant. I’d always assumed Sandy left the way she did because she couldn’t stand to stick around our dumpy town anymore. And that included dumpy me. I look down at my wrinkled, untucked shirt and my dirty boots. Well, she wouldn’t be surprised at Lucy in the present day.
I return to the counter and watch out the window as Sandy fishes for her keys. I’m crouching. I don’t want her to see me. When I think of it through Sandy’s eyes, I’m embarrassed to be working at the store. More than once, living in New York over the years, I thought, If only Sandy could see me. She never did, and after all our teenaged talk about getting out of this place, it looks as if I’ve never left.
What’s she doing back, and what would she think of me now? I also can’t help but wonder if she’s sorry.
It was, at first, a triumphant return.
I quit Columbia’s PR office, and Michael retired from the university’s Classics Department. We planned to subsist on his 403(b) and our joint savings, while he enjoyed the writing life and I took over my father’s farm.
What a wonderful idea this was!
My husband was seventy-seven, and I was thirty years younger. We thought we had ten good years ahead of us. Michael was healthy, still walked all over the city, and his mother had lived to ninety-five. We still had sex most Saturday mornings. He’d never been self-conscious of our age difference. I wasn’t embarrassed, but I did notice the way people looked at us, wondering if we were a couple or father and daughter.
Five years before our move, during a stretch of intense craving that felt like the kind women describe when they want a baby, I suddenly wanted to keep goats and make my own yogurt and cheese. My father, thrilled, swiftly began a persuasion campaign. He was waiting for his heart to give out, and he told me bluntly that he’d die easier knowing the land would continue as a farm. He lived in fear of our family’s acres morphing into suburban sprawl. I was the only one left to save them. My mother was long dead, and my sister had left Edin at fourteen for boarding school and now lived contentedly in Westchester County.
Dad always said our land was more than a source of income. It was a landmark in town, referred to by our family name, the Richard Farm, and he’d been generous in allowing a local organization to build a section of trail across one corner of the back field that connected to a longer walking route through the conservation area. Dad wanted people to enjoy the farm’s bounty, whether by walking across it or eating what we raised.
Columbia gave me an unpaid leave, and I interned with Judy Martin at Birchbark Dairy in the Berkshires, two hours west of Edin. I’d called her after discovering her ash-covered, aged goat cheese at Murray’s.
Farming, that summer, was an urge I suddenly couldn’t ignore. And having reached my forties, I felt more entitled to follow such urges than I did when I was young.
Judy, who wore her hair in two gray braids, a whimsical daisy or dandelion woven in, would wake us before dawn and carry strong black tea with milk and honey in a thermos to the barn. After three hours of milking, feeding, and making the rounds, we’d return to the kitchen and eat hard-boiled eggs. Judy didn’t talk much until she’d eaten. If she thought I needed to witness something, she’d whistle like a whippoorwill and point. Those largely silent mornings of companionable labor were often my favorite parts of the day. Feeling a part of a natural rhythm and relishing the glowing sunrise on my cheeks.
Michael visited once during my months apprenticing with Judy, but for the most part he fell back into his urban bachelor routine of movies on Tuesdays and chess on Fridays. Cooking for a friend on Saturdays. In truth, that was still his routine after we married, except I didn’t play chess, and his social circle expanded slightly to include friends of mine from college and the office, women who were mystified by the age of my romantic partner but did their best to be supportive.
At Birchbark, I went to bed with earth under my nails and the smell of milk in my nose. I slept like the newly born.
At the end of the summer, I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to go back to city life. But I did, stuffing disappointment under my blazer each morning. I tried to imagine a way I could ease Dad’s worries about encroaching development and satisfy my own new craving for space, for the heady scent of summer soil, for raising bleating baby goats. Would my urban husband go for it?
He would. Michael still adored his graduate students and paternally advising them, but he’d grown distant from the undergrads and tired of his own performance in the lecture hall. I’m ready for the next adventure, he told me. A little house in the country in which to write his slim, popular Roman histories.
I took Michael to the farmhouse deck and spread my arms at the vision I had been nurturing for the better part of a decade. Behind us were the house, twenty acres of vegetables, and the country road. In front of us unfurled another twenty acres of relatively flat field, but then the land sloped upward into uneven hills, forested along the top ridge. You could see these hills from the road. Bikers and drivers often paused in the spring to photograph the flowering meadows and, in the fall, the brightly burning leaves.
Michael shook his head in wonder, the look that I was going for. The one that came across his face when he stood inside the Pantheon, no matter how many times he’d peered up into its dome. “Carina come una foto.”
These fields are more than a pretty picture to me, though. They’re a source of profound nourishment.
We decided to move to Edin, provided I agreed to first spend six months in Rome, the city he’d eagerly shared with me over the years.
When I told Dad that I’d take over his farm, I felt like the prodigal daughter. A grin an acre wide spread across his face.
“I never gave up on you,” he said. “No matter all your years away.” Then he cautioned me, “But you really have to do it. Work the land, I mean. That’s the only way to keep the tax breaks. Otherwise the property taxes and the upkeep will eat you out of house and home.” He died a year later, fully at peace, he assured me. My sister Sue was perfectly happy to leave the farm in my eager hands.
Of course I would farm it. I just needed to start small and learn along the way. At that point, Michael and I had plenty of savings to keep us going until the land turned a profit.
Our parallel visions of country cultivation and literary productivity worked according to plan our first year back in Edin, as Michael typed away on his Olivetti and I planted my first garden in thirty years. The harvest went smoothly, and I reopened the farm stand at the corner of the front field. I made a plan for our hundred and one acres. Built a rudimentary milking parlor and cheese room to get my state inspection. I wanted to start out all organic for the dairy, but the price of organic feed shocked me into making that a goal for a few years down the line.
After Judy’s does kidded last spring, I took home two mamas, Nana and Brie, and Nana’s two doelings, Bora-Bora and Felicia. Also a proven buck, Derek Jeter (Judy is a Yankees fan). I handled the kids from the get-go to accustom them to my voice and smell. It was love at first sight.
Also in April, I deducted the cost of every purchased animal and pound of feed and, in exchange for the near evaporation of my property taxes, swore to the government—as Dad had done—that I would not develop the land for ten years.
I handled the kids from the get-go to accustom them to my voice and smell. It was love at first sight.
Slow and steady, I’d build my dairy, consulting with Judy along the way.
And then six months ago, the whirlwind summer harvest underway, as we were dripping in tomatoes and melons and everything green, something curious occurred. When I went into the bank to apply for a home equity loan to replace our leaking roof and invest in more animals and equipment, I discovered a craterous hole in our savings.
Had we been swindled? I raced home to ask my husband what he knew.
As he explained, his eyes expanded, the pupils widening into larger and larger circles. A look I’d seen before. Sudden, extravagant purchases used to appear in our apartment from time to time: a top-flight Vitamix, tickets for a last-minute flight to San Francisco. Many of these luxuries on the border of affordability I was guilty of enjoying. Neither of us grew up with money, and we relished the finer things. His excuse was always some discount or time-limited window (truffles enjoy such a short harvest season!). In this case, he had “loaned” the money to Alfie Romano, a beloved former grad student, Italian-American like Michael. Alfie had always been special. He’d dined at our apartment nearly every Friday for five years. Michael had been devastated when Alfie quit the program, but I had seen that the young man was not cut out for the slow pace of academia. He was a thrill seeker with great ideas but poor execution. Unfortunately, Michael had never been able to recognize his brilliant student’s flaws. So when Alfie launched his machine translation company and exhausted his first and second rounds of funding, he’d come to Michael as a last-ditch effort. “I couldn’t bear to tell him no,” my generous husband said, his long face pulled down into sadness. “Besides,” he said brightly, “it can’t fail. We’ve gotten in on the ground floor!”
“There’s no ‘we’ here,” I said, still in shock. “What were you thinking, doing this without talking to me?”
“We’ll be fine,” Michael said. “We’ll get it back and then some.”
“When?” I reminded him about the leaking roof, the sagging barn. The dairy enterprise that lay dormant, waiting for funds to expand. My whole reason for moving back to Edin.
“Soon, my dear. Be patient. Genius takes time.”
I was furious. A hole gaped in the pit of my stomach. How would we manage?
But I also saw something terrifying in that moment. The flippancy of his answer told me that Michael had not thought through Alfie’s plan. When I asked him questions, he was evasive when normally he’d have exuberantly dived into the details. Something had clouded his judgment. Had Alfie pulled a fast one? Or was the problem internal to my husband?
Genius might take its sweet time, but I didn’t have to wait long for the results of Alfie’s venture. Michael woke up one morning three months ago, took a phone call in his office (my sister Sue’s old bedroom), and reported that Alfie’s business had failed. “It is no more,” is the way he put it.
There would be no return on investment. Nor a return of our investment. The ground floor had fallen through.
Yet Michael seemed to show no real understanding of the bind this placed us in. “I’m in my last years, I don’t need much. I’ll eat like a bird,” he said. Was that a serene smile on his face? Why did he show no remorse?
I called Judy in a cold panic.
“Good thing you’re freshening the does,” she said matter-of-factly. “Now you’ll have something to sell.”
I heard voices in the background. “You have company?” I asked. “I don’t want to keep you.”
“One of those silly talk shows,” she said in the same even tone.
I was too concerned with my own predicament to ask what she was doing inside at noon on a Saturday at the height of breeding season.
During my internship, I had asked a lot of questions. Usually, they were about the goats. But one morning, standing in the hayfield, Judy about to mount the tractor, the July sun shining down from high above, I asked if she ever got lonely; her closest neighbor lived two miles down a dirt road.
“Sometimes, at Christmas, I wish someone would roast me a goose,” she said, half smiling. “Big, luscious meals are for sharing. Of course, I have Brad, but he likes to travel with his friends and I’m not the hosting kind of mother, so I try not to put pressure on him.” She looked at me with eyebrows raised, wondering if I understood.
I did. Possibly I was so drawn to Judy because my mother died when I was in college; that would be the psychoanalytical interpretation. Except Judy wasn’t maternal in a classically nurturing way. She was about the transfer of information and valuing every living being’s special properties.
“So yes, I do get lonely for conversation. For sharing milestones. But the day to day . . .” She shook her head. “Nah. I have an abundance of life to keep me company.”
God, I admired her in that moment. I never again doubted her solitary contentment. I can do this on my own, I said to myself after hanging up. Just like Judy.
When I arrive home from the store, Michael is already asleep. I change into my barn clothes. A frigid sleet is from the sky.
But the does’ comically droopy ears lift my spirits. As I feed them, I admire Brie’s rich chocolate brown coat. She’s the most aloof of the four. Nana’s face is beige and white, and she’s still protective of her daughters, Felicia and Bora-Bora. Felicia has a wispy black beard and rubs her head against the side of my thigh affectionately. She’s my favorite, for the way she tilts her head when I speak to her, as if ardently listening.
All four paw the floor and bang impatiently against the slats that separate them from the feed trough.“I’m on it,” I tell them. I pour fresh water, noting with satisfaction the success of my low-budget solution to keep the water from freezing: a plastic bottle filled with saltwater floating on the surface, bobbing just enough to break up any ice. Someday I’d like to heat the goats’ drinking water in winter, to lessen the shock to their systems, but right now the extra electricity is beyond our budget.
I haven’t eaten since lunch but it’s been a long day. I chomp a wedge of Judy’s alpine-style cheese, call that supper, and get into bed.
Some hours later I’m awakened by a crash. Followed by a weak cry.
Michael is tipped over the sofa, his white T-shirt gleaming under a sliver of moonlight. Bare legs like plucked drumsticks.
He must have heard me come into the living room because he says, his voice muffled by the cushions, “I can’t move.”
My heart speeds up as I race toward him, nearly tripping on the coffee table. “What happened?”
“Lavatory,” he says. Where he was headed. “Carpet.” The shag that tripped him.
“Does anything hurt?”
Together we bend his knees so his lower legs are flat on the floor and he is able to wrestle his arms underneath him and push his torso up so he’s in a kneeling position. He’s sweating lightly and I feel his heat. Not once in the past few months have we been naked together, touching like we used to. He clasps his hands into a mock prayerful position. “Like the good Catholic I am.”
Please, God, let this not be the first of many. That is my useless supplication.
I get him up on his feet and walk gingerly to the bathroom. I wait while he waits—“Damn prostate”—and then support him as he walks back to bed, a noticeable wobble in his step.
“Do you need anything checked out? Sure nothing hurts?”
“I fell into the sofa, bella,” he says testily. “Not the bookcase. I’m fine.”
Despite his protests, I sit with him while he settles himself and falls back asleep.
And then I get to work. I turn on all the lights and pull on thick gloves, gather a pair of pliers and a large, sharp X-Acto. The first incision is tough, exhilarating work. I cut another strip and another, moving furniture as I go. With pliers I pull up the staples and then tug on the golden shag. Decades-old dust rises and I cough, remember a mask Dad kept in the pantry, and fit that on.
As I yank and pull with all my strength, I think about Sandy, the glimpse of her out the store window. An unnamable emotion rises within me. Am I still mad at her for leaving the way she did?
We were besties for all of high school—as soon as Sandy moved here from suburban Connecticut before the start of our freshman year and we both went out for soccer. We loved each other; I feel sure of that. We were always hanging our arms over each other’s shoulders, wrapping them around waists, sleeping with legs intertwined. This felt natural and normal, but sometimes we were made to think it wasn’t. Some guy would say, “Why don’t you two make out already?” But that didn’t bother us. It was strange that I was closer to Sandy than I was to my sister Sue, and for a while I think my parents felt bad about the contrast, but they liked Sandy so much, she was soon part of the family.
Summer after senior year I was working for Dad on the farm, which Sandy thought a bad idea. “Scoop ice cream with me,” she said. “All you’ve ever done is farm. Employers want to see a diversity of experience.” Something she’d read in the newspaper or heard from our drippy guidance counselor. She’d convinced the owner of the ice cream stand to give her the title of manager because she thought that would help her get better internships in college. But Dad counted on me, and I liked being outside. I didn’t want to sweat inside some tiny shack, even with Sandy by my side.
The plan that final day had been for me to ride my bike to The Big Dipper, then we’d put my bike on the back of her car and drive out to the lake. The previous night had been normal, cozy; we’d gotten tipsy on my father’s beer after swimming in the river all afternoon. Sandy fell asleep in my bed. The next day I rode the fifteen mountainous miles to the shack. But when I got there, her boss said she’d never shown up. Nor did she after I waited for her all afternoon, the boss finally taking pity on me and giving me a milkshake, an order gone wrong.
Too embarrassed to call my parents, and knowing they were busy anyway, I rode all the way back home, up and down the fierce hills, crying most of the way.
I called Sandy’s house, and her mother told me she’d left early for college. “She didn’t tell you?” Mrs. Stevens sounded surprised. “Guess that explains her bitchy mood.”
Sandy wrote one rambling, apologetic letter to me at Barnard once classes had started. I wrote back, holding my anger and pretending I understood that she was just “super anxious to get a job and settle in before Sept.” I asked if she’d be home for Thanksgiving, but I never heard from her again.
“Girls this age,” my mother said, shaking her head. “I know I was one, but I’ll never understand them. I can’t believe Sandy, our Sandy, would be so rude and heartless. Try not to take it too hard, chicken.”
Mom tried her best, but how do you get over such heart- break at eighteen?
I labor, sweating heavily, until the ghostly pre-dawn hours. Tomorrow I’ll call the plumber and fix up the back bathroom so my beloved no longer has to traverse the living room to pee in the middle of the night. Should have done that months ago. But months ago that haunted look didn’t flicker in Michael’s eyes. A look I mistook, at first, for guilt over throwing away our savings, but now I wonder if there isn’t something else going on. Something we both have chosen to ignore.
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