You catch your reflection and think: What the fuck? Is that a new bone?
You’d liked it when you were younger—flaunted it, even—the prominent collarbone of a thinner woman. Then came your mother’s fugue summer, when amid all the worry and perplexity and frantic travel, your pulse became visible at the base of your throat.
Maybe something, the doctor said, maybe just underlying structures uncommonly close to the surface. You hadn’t thought of it that way before, but they were, weren’t they? All that visible rigging. Was it grisly? Did it make people squeamish? It struck you as unseemly, indecent, something meant to be private and internal out there for all to see. You became self-conscious. You began to amass a collection of high-necked tops. You began scrutinizing the necks and shoulders of other women during warm months, in exercise classes, in red carpet photos of actresses in strapless gowns. You were trying to understand what’s normal, where you fall.
Next was the emergence of the outer tips of your clavicle and knobs that must be the heads of your humeri. You suspected bone spurs, then looked up “bone spurs” and decided, probably not. No one has been able to explain it. Perhaps it’s premature aging, or another scoliotic disfiguration, a byproduct of your terminally terrible posture, something that might have been stopped had you noticed and course corrected in time. Which is to say: your fault.
It’s hard to know when more tendons in your neck and more mystery bones in your chest and shoulders have emerged, and when you’re just looking too closely, obsessing, growing more and more paranoid. It puts you in mind of that French show where a lake drained to slowly reveal a sunken town.
You imagine being able to wrap your fingers all the way around your clavicle. You imagine rainwater collecting in the hollows, hummingbirds alighting to bathe there. Ha, startle reflex like yours, you’d like to see them try. (A jest! Dear Universe, please do not send birds.)
At night while drifting off to sleep, you begin to observe stirrings. Lying on your belly, arm folded under your chest, you feel a delicate tickle against your palm. You flick on the light, rush to the mirror, and pull aside the collar of your T, but see nothing. This occurs several times before you finally catch a glimpse: something squirming underneath, like your galloping pulse did, but freer, more erratic.
It remains dormant during the day but grows bold at night. Stand still long enough before the mirror and you’ll see tiny bulges probing your skin from inside. You imagine hundreds of feathery legs, like a millipede. You poke your collarbone and it dives away in the other direction, testing the outer limits of your body, or further within, becoming, for once, discreet.
It wants, you think, to be free. Don’t we all.
To entrap that which would be rid of you, to ensnarl, to imprison, is ethically indefensible, it is morally repugnant. So you go to the kitchen, open the drawer. Your hand hovers: carving knife, paring knife, boning knife. The last of these sounds most appropriate, but you quail before the sharp edge and settle instead for a butter knife.
What will you become without it? Compressible, you suppose. The way rats can squeeze down their ribs for any point of ingress and octopuses can ooze through any hole not smaller than their eye. This could be the start of a whole new chapter of your life, one featuring cave exploration, wreck diving, and other claustrophobic pursuits.
Before the bathroom mirror, you wedge the butter knife behind your clavicle and begin to pry. At first, it bows and writhes in distress, but you pause to pet it, humming lullabies, and it calms enough to proceed. This hurts more than anticipated. The shaking hands and sobs aren’t helping. Nor is the blood, obscuring everything, making it slick and difficult to gain purchase. No longer able to make out much in the mirror, you might as well stumble into the bathtub, finish this curled up against cool porcelain.
Twang twang twang snap the tendons. Through the carnage slices something thin, pliable, and coated in gore. A wing! Of course, why didn’t you see it before: it wants to fly. You drop the knife, try to relax, just be open and unresisting. Your part here is done; like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, this struggle may be crucial to its becoming.
It surges, twists. You wonder how much will go, whether just the clavicle or a larger mess of tendon and bone is about to claw free of you. It is so close now.
You try to skip ahead to when the horror will be over, the pain. Not so far in the future, it’s scaling the wall, smearing the white with blood and gristle. You’re tempting it down with a bowl of milk, or sugar water, or raw liver, gently dislodging it from the crown molding with a broom. Assuming you still have control over your arms. Assuming you come out of this as more than abandoned meat, a lonely shell, hollowed and bereft. Be generous, you tell yourself. Be easy and selfless and kind. But when it looses a victorious, breastbone-rattling screech, recognition: this is more than you are willing to give away.
So you clamp your hands over it and cry, “Don’t leave me, don’t go!” You feel it fighting, as desperate to get away as you are to crush it to yourself. It’s a fierce struggle that carries on for several terrifying, heartbreaking minutes. At last, over your pants of “please, please, please,” you feel it subside, go still once more, and surrender under your bloody, trembling hands.
Coming of age is a lifelong creative act. So, too, is the act of making a family—biological, found, or some amalgam of the two. For writers who grow up with artistic parents or parent-figures—immersed in the worlds of literature or theater, photography, or sculpture from a young age—family is often tethered to an impulse to create. Subsequently, engagement with, or appreciation of, the media that informs our identities and family narratives can lend itself to experimentation: with collage essays and associative thinking, borrowed forms, fragmentation or compression.
While writing my second book, Woman House, a memoir in essays and flash interludes I call “assemblages,” I repeatedly turned to visual art, literature, and cinema to help understand my relationship with my mother, and to catch a glimpse of the woman and artist she was in her younger life, before I was born. She raised me on classic movies and trips to the museum, to appreciate fine art and messy, amateur experimentation alike. Art was something we shared—and yet, as I matured into an adult who sought out expressionistic or surreal work for its bodily frankness (Louise Bourgeois’ femme maisons, for example), my mother often reviled my taste. Where she favored classical, conventionally “tasteful” work demonstrating technical skill, I found myself drawn to images that moved more freely upon the canvas than I felt safe to in my body. In Woman House, form and content alike reflect the act of making—a body, a work of art—to channel control; the act of seeing as a release and opening to feeling.
The following reading list includes experiments in nonfiction, essay, and memoir that engage with art and coming-of-age narratives simultaneously. These books unpack the ways in which family, media, and story shape and change us. Each author bends form in a manner reflective not only of their influences and inheritance, but of their own artistic evolution, uniquely capturing a glimpse into their ongoing, ever-changing creative and personal lives.
Rebecca Solnit is perhaps most well known for her fiery, insightful activism and place-based environmental writings. But in this 2013 experimental memoir of mothers and daughters, illness and memory, travel and story, Solnit weaves a remarkable tale of identity through narrative and association, mapping her life via objects and symbols—apricots, mirrors, ice, breath—alongside the literature that shaped her approach to writing and living alike. At once a travelogue, a reflection on Frankenstein and the fairy tales of her youth, a reckoning with her mother’s memory loss and the vicissitudes of the body, The Faraway Nearby is a storyteller’s memoir that defies chronology in favor of a kind of nesting doll structure, or perhaps that of a tapestry woven and unraveled with masterful precision.
“Coming of age in a theater of black and white,” the subtitle to Sloan’s debut essay collection, perfectly encapsulates the author’s pseudo-frauenroman as a mixed-race woman growing up against a backdrop of cinema, photography, literature, music, and art in late 20th century Los Angeles. These essays employ fragmentation, numbered sections, and associative leaps to explore the artistic influences that defined her young life, from Thelonius Monk and her father’s photographs to Italian neorealism and the New York art gallery scene. Meanwhile, each essay honors and explores her parents’ interracial love story (set in Detroit, a second home that Sloan returns to repeatedly in her writing), and its aftermath. Throughout, Sloan reflects on racism, bigotry, Blackness, history, and family, always seeking great depths of understanding and evolution in her relationship to art and to the world.
A meditation, a list, a scrapbook, a sculpture. All of these and more might describe Zambreno’s Book of Mutter, a work of memory, testament, art, and grief making sense of her mother’s life and legacy. Written over thirteen years, the book borrows form from artist Louise Bourgeois’ Cells series of sculptures, and blends critical reflections on the works of Bourgeois and other artists and writers (including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Henry Darger, Anne Carson, and Roland Barthes) with the narrative of her mother’s illness and passing, investigating the difficult work of loving and losing a mother with whom one shares both intimacy and animosity. At once spare and sprawling, making frequent use of white space and yet spilling over into Zambreno’s companion text, Appendix Project, the materials and forms that make up Book of Mutter constitute a singular approach to the mother/daughter narrative.
Brown Neon is a revolutionary experiment in place-based writing. Operating as a memoir of queer family-making and cultural influence up and down California and across the Southwest, the book also explores the evolution of the author’s critical, racial, community, and class consciousness. The result is a travelogue as stunning in its depictions of landscape as it is articulate in challenging the colonial status quo. Throughout these essays, Gutiérrez blends critical perspectives on art, immigration, and performance with moving, richly detailed family dynamics of all kinds: from the love and sartorial tutelage of her mentor and “father”—butch activist Jeanne Córdova (or Big Poppa, as she is known to Gutiérrez)—to stories of her biological parents, youth, and found family of fellow punk rock fans and artists in 1990s San Diego. Described by Myriam Gurba as a work of “Latinx mysticism,” Brown Neon is singular in its perspective on intergenerational memory, identity, and ecology.
In 1969, Maggie Nelson’s aunt Jane was horrifically murdered. Her killer remained a mystery, and her violent death haunted Nelson’s family. In Nelson’s hands, the story of Jane’s death became the subject of a beautiful, genre-blurring work shapeshifting from page to page: now lyric, now historical record, now speculative reimaging—titled simply Jane: A Murder. But just before Jane was published, new DNA evidence pointed to a new possible suspect. Thirty-five years after Jane’s death, Maggie Nelson and her mother find themselves witnessing the suspect’s trial—and with it, the excavation of family ghosts. The Red Parts is one of Nelson’s more narrative prose works, though one wouldn’t go so far as to call it “conventional memoir” (or, as far as Nelson is concerned, “memoir” at all). Anchored by the true-crime story of the trial, and the family stories evinced by its drama, Nelson’s book also investigates media and society’s fixation on murder—especially the murders of young white women—as well as her own.
Wrong is Not My Name opens with a kitchen table, a tragic loss, and an inherited diary. “Was my mother an artist?” Cardwell asks, recollecting the kitchen in her childhood home and her mother’s many ways of making and creating within that space. From here, the book—a memoir, a work of art criticism, an activist’s record of Black, queer, and feminist identities recalling the works of bell hooks—unfurls into streams of memory and making. In grieving her mother, Cardwell crafts a singular work of hybrid art writing.
The White Dress by Nathalie Léger, translated by Natasha Lehrer
Léger’s trio of prose works exploring her mother’s story alongside those of three well-known women—artists at once operating as subject and object, active maker and passive muse—concludes with The White Dress, a haunting examination of the female body and mind striving for creative agency. Léger shifts back and forth between childhood memories, scenes of conversation with her mother, and researched details unpacking the art and death of Pippa Bacca, a wedding-dress-clad performance artist who was killed during her attempt to travel on foot across Italy and the Middle East. As Léger’s research into Bacca’s motivations unfurls, so too does her understanding of her lineage—as a woman, as a daughter. “Whatever it is that you’re touching with your fingertips is filled with history,” she writes, “ordered, as ancient and familiar as our origins.”
I always seem to find one of Louise Erdrich’s books exactly when I need them most, thanks to some combination of a trusted recommender and fate. A dear friend texted me in the middle of reading Love Medicine, Erdrich’s first novel, to tell me that I absolutely had to go pick it up. I discovered Future Home of a Living Godafter an old boss could not stop gushing over it.The Sentencecame into my possession during a “book fishing” event run by my local independent bookstore, Brookline Booksmith: You describe your literary taste, and an astute bookseller—hidden behind a large sheet of paper made to look like water—attaches a title they think you would like to a faux fishing rod for you to “catch.” I can’t recall now how I explained what I love most in a book (there are a great many things), but I’m not at all surprised that a Louise Erdrich title was what I reeled in.
Erdrich is an absolute master of fiction. Her characters come alive on the page, each of their voices as distinct and consuming as the last. Her work is infused with an incredible depth of humanity—both piercingly clear-eyed and deeply empathetic—that is, to me, the very best of what fiction can do.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author is back this spring with a collection of short stories, Python’s Kiss. I couldn’t be more thrilled that she took the time ahead of the book’s publication to answer Electric Lit’s 23 Questions.
– Katie Henken Robinson Senior Editor
1. Describe the process of writing Python’s Kiss in a six-word story.
Louise Erdrich: Duck, Duck, Duck, Duck, Goose. Run!
2. What book should everyone read growing up?
LE: Charlotte’s Web. Tension, death, kindness, hope, and regeneration somehow squeeze effortlessly into this book. When a young child learns about death it is a betrayal. This book is consoling.
3. Write alone or in community?
LE: Alone, for as long as possible.
4. How do you start from scratch?
LE: I rummage around in the notebooks I keep for random ideas and follow the most interesting thread.
5. Three presses you’ll read anything from:
LE: I’m not taking this literally, as I can’t read everything, but Coffee House, Milkweed, and Graywolf are local presses that publish thought provoking books that go around the world.
6. Hardcover, paperback, or e-reader?
LE: Hardcover, ideally, for favorite books. If I can’t get a hardcover, then a well made trade paperback. And I do love a book with French flaps.
7. Describe your ideal writing day.
LE: It is a day in summer by Lake Superior and I am completely engaged with my narrative. Every so often I leave my desk and jump into the water, which is very cold and pure. I sit in the sun until I am warm. Then start writing again.
8. Typing or longhand?
LE: Longhand.
9. What’s a piece of writing advice you never want to hear again?
LE: From a book reviewer reading a book of mine set in a small town—Louise Erdrich should go back to the reservation.
10. What’s a piece of writing advice you think everyone needs to hear?
LE: If you try to defend your writing to someone by saying what you meant, you failed to get what you meant across. You might as well stop talking, go back, and try again.
11. Realism or surrealism?
LE: Quite often there is no difference.
12. How did you meet your agent?
LE: Through a friend who was looking out for me.
13. Best advice for pushing through writer’s block?
LE: Do some tangential research around your subject and eat some ice cream.
14. What’s your relationship to being edited?
LE: When I started writing I decided that criticism would be my friend. I appreciate any response to my suffering manuscript. I pay attention to every suggestion although I might not ultimately make a change. Trent Duffy, my longtime copyeditor/editor, is a sort of guardian angel. Terry Karten has been a staunch friend and guide. Jonathan Burnham is brilliant, fearless, exacting. Deborah Triesman is a passionate expert. I have been lucky.
15. Write every day or write when inspired?
LE: Joseph Albers gave the best advice: Leave the door open. So every day.
16. What other art forms and literary genres inspire you?
LE: Art Heist books—fiction or non-fiction.
17. Book club or writing group?
LE: Family.
18. The writer who made you want to write.
LE: George Orwell.
19. How do you know when you’ve reached the end?
LE: A sensation of inevitability.
20. Writing with music or in silence?
LE: A gently snoring dog.
21. What’s the last indie bookstore you went to.
LE: Birchbark Books—I like sitting in the office with anyone on our peerless staff (my daughter Pallas is a manager) and working out problems. I also like browsing through the latest as chosen by our buyer, Nate Pederson, who does a tremendous job and has been there nearly as long I have. This is our 25th year.
22. Activity when you need to take a writing break:
LE: Walking around outside, or, with a sense of aggrieved resignation, cleaning the house.
The sound in the large room was subdued, kind of muffled. There was a worn gray wall-to-wall carpet, and the ceiling was covered with spongy polystyrene tiles, tiles that absorbed the hundreds of telephone conversations that took place every evening between people who would much rather be doing something else.
I logged on to the computer. The system was old, the text large and pixelated, and the graphics were simple and clumsy, only two colors. I put on my headset, adjusted the microphone and clicked on the first call. It rang out for quite some time before anyone answered.
“Sundström,” said a female voice.
“Hi,” I said. “My name is Hanna and I’m calling from VQS, Vision Quest and Survey in Gothenburg. I was hoping to speak to Yvonne Sundström.”
“That’s me,” she said in the slightly wary tone almost everyone adopted when I had introduced myself.
“Great! We’re currently conducting an investigation into consumer habits, and you have been chosen at random to take part. So I was wondering if you have a few minutes to answer some questions?”
A few minutes was a deliberately vague statement, it rarely took less than fifteen minutes, sometimes twenty or more.
“Is it about how I vote?” she asked.
“No, we’re looking into consumer habits and product knowledge. It’s mainly concerned with groceries and household products.”
“Do I get paid?”
“Unfortunately there is no payment for this particular investigation, but your answers are important for the statistical analysis.”
This was a cunning formulation, designed to evoke a sense of obligation and responsibility, and I was slightly ashamed every time I had to come out with it. She sighed with an air of resignation. The power of the telephone was remarkable—older people seemed to feel that they had to answer and then cooperate when someone called them. Presumably things would soon change, when the sought-after consumers came from a younger generation with a more careless attitude toward the telephone.
“Well, I was just about to make a start on dinner, but . . . okay.”
“Perfect. First question: How often do you eat jelly?”
She was silent for a moment, confused perhaps by the contrast between my formal introduction and the banality of the question.
“How often do I eat jelly?” she said suspiciously.
“That’s right.”
“Do you mean ordinary jelly? Like . . . strawberry jelly and . . . lingonberry jelly, that kind of thing?”
“Yes, ordinary jelly.”
She laughed. “I guess . . . a few times a week.”
“Would you say once or twice a week, three to five times a week, or more than five times a week?”
Another silence.
“Well, I mostly have it with my porridge, so that’s maybe three times a week. So I’ll go for three to five times a week.”
“Excellent. So my next question: How often do you buy jelly?”
“I sometimes make it myself, but maybe that doesn’t count?”
“This particular question is about jelly you buy from a store. But I bet your own jelly is delicious!” I added.
She laughed again. “Let’s see . . . I’d say I buy jelly a few times a year.”
“Would you say once or twice a year, three to five times a year, or more than five times a year?”
“I guess that would be three to five times as well. The children eat quite a bit.”
“I understand. Now, what brands of jelly are you familiar with?”
She sighed. “Let me think . . . Bob, I guess.”
I selected Bob from the options on my screen.
“Can you think of any other brands?”
“Er . . . Önos, maybe?”
“Önos, good. Any more?”
“Felix?” she said hesitantly. “Or is that mainly peas and that kind of thing?”
“I’ll add it to the list. Any more?”
Silence. “Coop, I suppose, if they have their own brand? I’m not sure. And ICA too.” She suddenly sounded enthusiastic. “And maybe Willy’s? And Hemköp?”
“Perfect. Can you think of any more?”
She fell silent again. She really was taking this seriously.
“No, that’s it I think.”
“Excellent. Can you tell me what brands of jelly you’ve bought in the last fourteen days?”
“I haven’t bought any jelly lately.” She sounded a little defensive now. “We’ve just been eating the lingonberry jelly we’ve already got.”
“No problem, I’ll make a note of that.” The fact that she hadn’t bought any jelly meant that I didn’t need to ask her what brand she had bought, which would speed things up a little. “Next question: what brands of jelly have you seen advertised during the last fourteen days?”
“Advertised . . . Do you mean like leaflets through the door?”
“We’re thinking of all kinds of advertising. For example, leaflets through the door, ads in newspapers and magazines, on public transport, at the cinema, on TV or the radio.”
She laughed. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard jelly advertised on the radio!”
“No, maybe jelly doesn’t come up too much on the radio,” I said in a friendly tone of voice. “But how about the other types of advertising I mentioned?”
This time the silence went on for quite a while.
“I think I might have seen something on TV.”
“Do you remember what brand it was?”
“These are difficult questions.”
“There’s no hurry.”
“Can you help me out with some brands?”
Her desire to get it right was touching.
“I’m afraid I’m not allowed to do that. This investigation is concerned with what you have seen and what you remember.”
She sighed. This was going to take some time.
“Think about the brands you mentioned just now,” I prompted her. This was actually off-script, but I wanted to move on. “Have you maybe seen an advertisement for one of those?”
“I might have seen Bob advertised,” she said eventually. “On TV4.”
“Fantastic.”
Neither of us said anything while I filled in her responses, then clicked through to the next segment.
“Is that it?” she said optimistically.
“Not quite. The next question is about ready-made and frozen pizza. How often do you eat ready-made or frozen pizza?”
It started raining as I headed toward Korsvägen. According to the display the number five was due in seven minutes, so I went into the newsagent’s and flicked through a few magazines to pass the time. When the tram came rattling along, the rear section was full of young guys in expensive clothes on their way from Örgryte into the city as usual.
I usually tried to avoid walking to the tram stop with anyone from work, I hurried away quickly after the last call of the evening. Sometimes I failed, but if it was someone who talked so much that I didn’t really need to contribute, it wasn’t too taxing: Samir, who usually babbled about some new sci-fi movie, or Tilde, who would tell me all about the party she’d been to over the weekend and the party she was going to next weekend. It was more difficult if I ended up with someone who wasn’t as chatty as them, because a conversation that demanded input from me was almost painful. After five hours on the phone my brain was anesthetized. Sometimes I thought it might have been different if the surveys I was conducting were about politics or social issues, if they were genuine opinion polls where people gave genuine, well-thought-out answers. At the same time, it was quite appealing to do something that didn’t require me to think at all, to sit there almost like a robot typing in witless answers to equally witless questions. Sometimes I really got into it, regarded it as a challenge to lead the interviewees through the conversations, tease out the next product name, make them feel important. Maybe I ought to work in a similar field, I thought occasionally, but for real: become some kind of counselor, listening patiently to people struggling with their bad relationships, nodding and making appropriate comments, giving simple advice that was seen as meaningful, because people who ask for advice on that kind of thing are ready to believe that any opinion on their situation could carry a truth within it.
It was quite appealing to do something that didn’t require me to think at all, to sit there almost like a robot typing in witless answers to equally witless questions.
Vision Quest and Survey was a company where you worked until you found something better, or something you would rather do. Most employees were students just like me, sitting there for several evenings a week to supplement their student loan. Some were middle-aged or older, I felt sorry for them because the reasons why they were there were never positive. Some had lost a better job because of downsizing or disagreements, and hadn’t yet managed to find anything else. One had suffered burnout and was easing himself back into work. One man who must have been in his fifties had worked there for many years, and still believed he would soon get his breakthrough as a composer. Most of this older group worked days, the shifts were longer and presumably quieter, because fewer people would answer the phone. My nightmare was that I would end up like them, that I would be sitting in the same staff kitchen in ten years, waiting for the career as an artist that had never taken off, working long shifts to pay for a studio that led precisely nowhere, but I couldn’t let it go because that would mean the final failure. As long as I had my studio, there was still some hope of success.
The calls were generated at random by the computer, and every time I hoped that a man in Stockholm wouldn’t answer. Men in Stockholm were just the worst—always stressed, often condescending. “Don’t you have anything better to do?” was a frequent question, and it always got to me. Of course I have, I would think, and then: Do I really? And I would get angry, because it felt as if they had won. I pictured their lives as a distant and exotic image of success, a fantastic career and beautifully ironed shirts, a suntan that lasted well into the fall, a big house and a wife and children, maybe a mistress, an impressive golf handicap, overseas vacations, and a rich social life with others who shared the same status in society. And then someone calls from Vision Quest and Survey in Gothenburg, making demands on their time to ask questions about their cell-phone contract, what a joke. “Fifteen minutes?” they would sometimes yell after they’d asked how long it was going to take, and of course I was lying anyway, because if they answered in a particular way there would be more questions, questions that would require them to fetch a pen and paper and write down support words and rate their phone operator. I always hoped they would say no to the survey, because if they said yes I would hear their frustration increasing after only a few minutes. Sometimes we had only gotten halfway through after the promised fifteen minutes and it was already seven thirty, they were having a barbecue, they were going out, they had to put the kids to bed. I would miss out a question or fill in the wrong answer to avoid the need for a follow-up question, always aware that a supervisor could be listening in to our conversation, I might be called in and told in a stern voice that I was endangering the statistics, and that if this happened again I might lose my job.
I was invited to a party at Tilde’s on Saturday. I rarely went out with my coworkers on the weekend, the parties my fellow students organized were always more fun, but she had made it seem as if it were important to her that I went. Her apartment was on a street off Linnégatan, which made no sense at all to me. How could she live there, when she was studying and had a badly paid part-time job, just like me? Then I realized there were parents who could help out financially, that the hundreds of thousands of kronor that made no sense to me obviously didn’t come from her job as a market researcher.
Tilde was studying Education and was going to be a teacher, which sounded stable and well-considered. I found it slightly embarrassing to say that I was doing an art foundation course, it sounded more like a hobby than something you could actually live on. Maybe I should stop thinking that was a possibility, and become a teacher too, an art teacher, it might even be enjoyable. Encouraging a particularly gifted pupil to pursue art, making a difference to another person’s life.
Tilde provided box wine, Franz Ferdinand was playing in the living room, some people were already planning to go on to Pustervik later. Samir was talking to a girl I didn’t recognize, maybe one of Tilde’s fellow students, they were standing close together, closer and closer as the evening progressed.
I sometimes wondered when love would come to me. As if love were a resource that was shared out through the providence of someone else. Like the tax declaration form from the IRS or a summons to the dentist: if it didn’t show up there must have been a hitch at a higher level where these things were dealt with.
I thought that was how it seemed to work, people around me got together in an almost mechanical way that maybe didn’t always have much to do with love, it was more a sense of responsibility or duty, a need to fulfill the task of being part of a nice couple who enjoy long, lazy breakfasts on the weekends, go for a walk in the botanical gardens, measure a wall in order to put up a shelf they’ve driven to IKEA to buy. There was something irritatingly fabulous about this togetherness, and I often wondered to what extent those involved really wanted to be there. They didn’t seem excessively happy, but they weren’t unhappy either, they accepted their relationship with stoical equanimity: This is what you do, this is how you create a grown-up life. After spending several years doing everything to break away from exactly that kind of life, represented by their parents, they suddenly performed a U-turn and accepted that they ought to become exactly like them, accepting their money for the deposit on a place to live, buying their IKEA shelf, having cozy dinners at home instead of going out partying, maybe getting a dog, eventually upgrading to a child.
Personally I half-heartedly went back to someone’s apartment from time to time, without imagining that it would generate anything other than a brief closeness, or lead to anything else. What did I want from life? It stressed me out that I didn’t actually know.
I often dreamed of Erik at night. Sometimes we were children again, lengthy dreams with no clear action or content, when the endless summers of our childhood played out in my mind like idyllic postcards from the past: Erik and I trying to paddle a canoe, Erik and I picking wild strawberries in the cow pasture at Grandpa’s summer cottage, our hearts in our mouths, Erik and I fighting for space on a Lilo in a forest pool, the warm, amber-colored water all around us, gray mountains and tall, straight pine trees lined up against the backdrop of a completely cloudless sky.
Sometimes the dreams were different. In one I was in the forest, on the track leading up to the railway, when a deer suddenly appeared in front of me. It looked straight at me, and I got the feeling that the deer was in fact Erik, that he had come back, in the form of a deer for some reason, but that didn’t matter, the important thing was that he had come back.
“Don’t go,” I said, but when I cautiously took a step closer I trod on a twig that snapped. The deer stiffened for a second, then turned like lightning and fled through the forest.
In another dream I was at Mount Verity searching for him, and as I stood in the cave I saw an opening in one corner, with light pouring from it. How strange that no one has seen this opening before, I thought and stepped inside. I found myself in an enormous hall, like in a fairy-tale palace: columns and crystal chandeliers, gold and jewels, everything sparkled and shone. Erik was sitting at a table. He was wearing brightly colored clothes, he was older, and his hair had grown into a golden pageboy, the same style he had had when he was little. He looked like a handsome prince in a painting by John Bauer.
“Have you been here all the time?” I asked him.
He nodded.
“Won’t you come home with me?” I said.
I felt as if I had been tasked with living in a certain way, that this would compensate for the fact that Erik never got to grow up.
“I have to stay down here,” he replied.
I always woke up with a strange feeling in my body, simultaneously sad and comforted, everything felt kind of woozy, like a slight hangover, and I would try to cure it in the same way: a long shower, coffee, a walk. But however far I walked I couldn’t forget that I was the one who had been allowed to live, that I was walking around, I was alive, while Erik was still missing. I ought to be more grateful, I thought, I ought to take better care of my life, but how do you do that? I felt as if I had been tasked with living in a certain way so that justice would be done, so that this would somehow compensate for the fact that Erik never got to grow up. It was a debilitating thought. Nothing I could do would ever compensate for that.
I ate at work on the evenings when I was there. I had a thirty-minute break, I would heat up a frozen ready meal in the windowless staff kitchen, where lamps hung from the low ceiling and spread their artificial light on the plants that just about survived in there, like we all did. I ate Findus cheese schnitzel with béarnaise sauce and fried potatoes, or rissoles with potato croquettes, herb butter, and cherry tomatoes. Both dishes were salty and greasy, with a few obligatory green beans. I often thought that I ought to make myself a packed dinner to bring in, I ought to start eating better, but it never happened. I also hated the idea of my coworkers taking an interest in what I had, with curious looks and comments. That’s the way they behaved with one another, especially the slightly older colleagues who clearly cooked delicious and nutritious dinners and brought in the leftovers. It felt personal, private: as long as I ate ready meals, I wasn’t responsible for what was in them.
If I was going straight home from my art class I often bought something tasty for dinner, usually from the Chinese restaurant on the way. It was like a throwback to Sweden as it used to be, with old men drinking beer and reading the evening papers in a big restaurant where I had never seen more than a handful of customers. A neglected aquarium stood in one corner, while a TV mounted on the wall was showing the day’s lottery draw.
The man at the till recognized me and was always pleasant. I usually ordered chicken with cashew nuts, or occasionally a chicken dish flavored with ginger, maybe beef in a dark soy sauce with onions or bamboo shoots, it was perfectly ordinary food, delicious in a perfectly ordinary way that I liked. The portions were generous, there was always enough for at least two meals, so even though I was buying takeout pretty often, it wasn’t really expensive.
I would sit at a table and leaf through Expressen while I waited, glancing at one or two album reviews. Then I would collect my bag containing the warm plastic boxes and cut across the square to my apartment. Winter was almost over and you could sense spring in the twilight now, it was cold outside, there were still gritty patches of ice on the ground, but the thin strip of light that clung to the horizon lingered for a little bit longer each day.
Home was a sublet in one of the big blocks on Wieselgrensplatsen. It was close to the tram stop and several large grocery stores, sometimes there was a florist’s stall in the square selling cheap, lovely plants, I filled both the apartment and the glassed-in balcony with them because it wasn’t particularly cozy, it was an impersonal mixture of IKEA and old stuff that seemed to have finished up there by chance, nothing really went together. And yet I was happy there, the location suited me very well: the big building on the modest square that had a small-town feel, it managed to be magnificent and unassuming at the same time, carefully and benevolently designed in the finest tradition of the Swedish welfare state.
Otherwise I wasn’t too fond of Gothenburg, I thought it was oddly planned, a collection of different parts of the city randomly thrown together, a kind of limbo where you waited for life to begin for real, hopefully somewhere that wasn’t Gothenburg. In fact the entire city was like an enlarged version of my workplace: a temporary stop on the way to something else. It didn’t feel as if anything was really real in Gothenburg, I always thought: it’s cool that you have a morning paper, but it isn’t a real morning paper. Cool that you have art schools, but they’re not real art schools. Cool that you have a city, but it’s not a real city.
Hisingen was also a weird place, the suburbs were sort of eating their way into the city center but were hindered by a bridge that could actually be opened; if they wanted to they could stop us from getting into the city, raise the drawbridge and shut us out. Hisingen was city yet not city, it was intersections and suburbs and large grocery stores, a place to catch a bus that would take you even farther away, McDonald’s at Backaplan shopping center that was a fragment of the real world, between old men boozing and parking lots and superstores.
My hallway was small and dark, I picked up the mail: mostly advertising leaflets, a bill, and then a window envelope that looked both formal and fun at the same time. The edges were decorated with a border of balloons.
“Where does the time go? It’s crazy, right?” it said in a cheery typeface on the piece of paper inside. “It’s ten years since you left high school, and to celebrate Reunions R Us are inviting you and everyone else who graduated from your school in 1994 to a party. A party that will go on all night long! With music from back in the day, of course—will you have the nerve to ask the person you had a crush on to join you in a slow dance this time?”
I didn’t want my food to go cold, so I tipped one portion onto a plate and sat down at the table with the invitation in front of me. The party was to be held in the school dining hall, a simple three-course menu would be served, drinks at cost price, please inform the organizers of any food intolerances or allergies.
I was no longer in touch with anyone from Kolmården, not even Marcus. After graduating he had moved to Lund and I had come to Gothenburg, and we had stopped communicating. I googled him occasionally, he had already achieved a doctorate in theology. There was a small picture of him next to the presentation of his research on the university’s home page, and he looked just the same, but older, more serious. He had written essays and articles with titles such as “Imagining the apocalypse—revealing the revelations of Nordic folk tales,” and “Does God live in the forest? Animalistic features in 20th-century Swedish literature.” It all looked very highbrow, it made me feel inferior to him in a way that I found frustrating.
Throughout high school I had thought that I would make something special of my life. It had annoyed me that many of my classmates had such a casual attitude, bordering on indifference, to the future at the age of fifteen. Didn’t they have any dreams? My grades were good, I was going to study, move far away, maybe overseas. I would live in a place where no one knew who I was, where my life was not tainted by my past.
I often thought of the evening when Marcus and I were at The Burger King on Drottninggatan, when it felt as though we had sealed an unspoken pact. “I’m going to leave too,” I had said, it was as if it became possible when I spoke those words. “Of course you are,” he’d said, and we both did it, we left Kolmården, but for what purpose? Those who stayed probably had better lives than me, who couldn’t get into a proper art school and spent the evenings asking people what brands of jelly they were familiar with. Not exactly something to boast about at a school reunion. I could imagine the surprise on their faces, the way they had to bite their tongues to stop themselves from saying what they were thinking: that they had expected me to be doing something considerably more impressive by this stage.
I had started running in the evenings, and as the spring progressed, I ran more and more. Every evening when I wasn’t working, because there was nothing I liked more than spring evenings, and at the same time nothing I liked less. I ran to be absorbed by the atmosphere, the shimmering magic of the blue hour along the quaysides of Eriksberg, then through the residential areas where everything was bursting into life, a suburbia with rhubarb leaves like ears directed at space, perhaps the rustle of a hedgehog moving through last year’s brown leaves, it was like running straight back to my childhood.
Running was a solitary pastime, anonymous in a way that appealed to me. It was one of the few situations where I felt as if I were no one. No one took any notice of a runner who was out when everyone else was out running too, and even though the quaysides and the shopping mall parking lots were busy in the evenings, I could run there without anyone paying attention to me, a body among other bodies, without a specific errand, with no goal other than to keep moving. I particularly liked mild, misty evenings, it was as if I became one with them, dissolved and became part of them, I turned up the volume in my earbuds and increased my speed, felt my heart pounding, felt the blood pumping through my veins, felt that I was alive.
At the same time it was those spring evenings I was trying to run away from, because they were revolting, the misleading hope of the lighter evening, the false promise that everything would return. Sometimes the memory of Erik seemed so distant that I began to doubt whether it had really happened. Whether I had actually had a brother. Maybe it was just something I had dreamed, an intense dream full of details, but a dream nevertheless. I had absorbed the memory, just as a mussel places layer after layer of mother-of-pearl over a grain of sand, I had buried it inside me, turned it into a hard, shimmering sorrow deep, deep inside. It was like an echo from eternity, a myth from ancient times, a whisper from space: Once upon a time I was a part of something else, something bigger. Once upon a time I was whole. Once upon a time I had a brother.
Down Time, Andrew Martin’s second novel, is a hilarious, unconventional, and thought-provoking millennial coming-of-middle-age page-turner, and one of the first great novels to directly engage with the 2020 pandemic and its unresolved tremors. This is the kind of juicy, zippy, compulsively readable book that goes down easy but will leave you chewing on its questions—how to be honest with oneself and others, how to exist in a world burning beneath our feet without self-immolating, how to balance passion with responsibility and doubt, how to love and be loved despite ourselves—long afterward.
When Martin’s much-lauded debut novel, Early Work, appeared in 2018, I hesitated at first to read it. The book seemed practically concocted for me specifically to enjoy, and I was struck by the same uncanny parasocial feeling as receiving a friend request from someone the algorithm had been pushing for months, a People You May Know But Haven’t Bothered To Yet. When I finally picked up a copy, I couldn’t tell if I’d love it or hate it, but I felt certain whatever reaction I had would be a strong one. Early Work turned out to be the rare book I inhaled in a single cackling sitting. In Martin’s sharp, sly, and self-implicating prose, I found an unsparing portrait of a certain kind of callow, ambitious creative, equal parts fuck-up and artist, that I recognized from dive bars and dating apps and my own mirror. I was jealous I hadn’t written it myself.
Little did I know that when I began my own writing life in earnest, it would be Andrew Martin guiding my first MFA workshop, and my suspicion that I’d want to be friends with whoever wrote Early Work would be confirmed. In contrast to the characters he puts on the page, Andrew is a warm, unassuming presence whose generosity and gentleness soften the exacting precision of his craft, though he’s every bit as witty and observant as his work.
I sat down with Andrew in a quiet Brooklyn café to discuss sex, drugs, and lockdown; the stickiness of writing about relationship dynamics; and how narrative instability might conquer AI.
Sarah Bess Jaffe: Not that the characters in Down Time are having a good time in any conventional sense of the term, but I found myself envious of the pandemic they’re having. They’re indulging in really plush, luxurious depressions and substance abuse and weird sex stuff. I wasn’t doing any of that shit. But they’re socializing. They’re having affairs. Was it the pandemic setting that coalesced these characters around this particular novel?
Andrew Martin: Yeah, the pandemic really brought them together! I wrote this book in an unhelpfully abstruse, totally all-over-the-place way over many years, and it was exciting to see the pieces eventually coalesce around certain themes and around a certain period. The way I wrote the book accidentally ended up working well with the subject matter, because it ended up simulating the way that time slowed down during the pandemic years, but also that when things did happen, they felt so sudden and extreme. When the characters in the book do interact with other people, it’s almost always a crisis.
SBJ:The form kind of echoes the content, mimicking a lot of how we maintain friendships.
AM: Especially now. In the previous decade of my life, I moved around a lot, and then with the pandemic, I didn’t see some people for years. When we emerged, I was suddenly seeing them for the first time in forever, and it felt very weird.
A lot of the formal features of the book also ended up echoing some of my dissatisfactions with contemporary social life more broadly. Early Work is certainly not utopian, but it’s also a certain vision of life lived IRL, where everyone’s just hanging out all the time. That was sort of what life in grad school and the years after was like for me. And Down Time feels much more like what my 30s were, much more diffuse and discursive. Harder to pin anybody down, harder to pin yourself down.
SBJ:One of the things I admired about this book is that it gets at this idea that you can be living through historic, unprecedented times, and you’re still completely obsessed with the narcissistic minutiae of being a person.
AM: It’s true, I think! The novel probably plays down the degree to which I was in a total panic about the pandemic for at least a year, sometimes in ways that didn’t even make sense in retrospect. I tried to capture that a little bit: the abstract fear of doing the wrong thing and getting in trouble for being bad. For me that became more present than actually being afraid of getting sick. Before the vaccine, I also didn’t want to get COVID, obviously, but it became clear at a certain point that it probably wasn’t going to kill me. It did kill my grandmother, and other people in my life. So the worry was warranted, but the worrying didn’t change anything. But life was also going on. I got married during the pandemic. Other people I know got married or had kids during those years because we were in our mid-to-late 30s and if it was going to happen, it had to happen. A few people I knew were giving birth in, like, April 2020. It was just a mess. I felt like there hadn’t been much written about how life had to just keep happening and people had to figure out ways to make it work.
The world I want to live in is one where people are much more fluid.
SBJ:The novel has three third-person POVs and one first-person POV, which creates interesting gaps in reliability.
AM: The one first-person character, Malcolm, is sort of anchoring the novel as the only direct speaker. The implication is not necessarily that he’s writing the whole thing, but I think the fact that he’s a novelist made it make sense to have him be the one narrating voice, because he’s the guy who fancies himself the storyteller, in a fairly egotistical way. He’s the most obnoxious person in the book, and also the character who looks the most like me from the outside, so I was willing to let him take the fall as the bad guy.
My other thought was that having one first person narrator does something to unbalance the smoothness of a traditional third person roundelay, and maybe it’s more interesting if there’s this weird thing sticking out of it, to make you realize it’s a written piece, and forcing you to switch gears while you’re reading.
SBJ:It also allows a nice window into being able to write about his partner Violet’s experience as a doctor during the pandemic without having to inhabit that character.
AM: I can’t decide yet whether it’s a failure of nerve not to have narrated the doctor from inside the hospital. Full disclosure: My wife is a doctor who was in the hospitals during the height of COVID, and had an experience not unlike Violet’s experience. Even being that close to it—probably because I was that close to it—I felt like I couldn’t narrate it. It didn’t feel like a violation, exactly, but it was something I couldn’t quite get my head around inhabiting. It’s not a perfectly balanced novel, and I tried to embrace that imperfection as a feature rather than a bug. I did think for a while, Oh, gosh, I really need to do Violet’s POV. And then I just couldn’t make it work on a technical level.
SBJ:In addition to being a doctor, your wife [Laura Kolbe] is also a writer. It’s a very sensitive thing to use somebody else’s material.
AM: She’s written beautifully and extensively about her experience being in the hospitals during that time. And so, right, my book creeps up on “her material,” but I ended up writing it from the me-character’s side of things. I haven’t seen this perspective as much, what it’s like to be at home worrying while your partner is out there on the front lines. I thought it was territory that was sort of unclaimed.
For whatever reason I find it more interesting to write more cowardly, more unkind, less talented versions of myself.
SBJ:What was that like, to write through that relationship while living your real relationship?
AM: I mean, we’re both writers, as you noted, and we very much believe we should write whatever we need to write. We also read each other’s work and give critiques of it on what is, theoretically, a craft level. But then we’re also humans who have feelings. And so one finds oneself in a very strange position where she might say, You know, I think you need to beef up Violet’s character a little bit. And we both try to sort through the craft side of a note from the personal side. She writes poetry that’s sometimes about me, about our relationship, and at a certain point the ability to judge it on a pure craft level becomes pretty much impossible. At certain points we’ve both had to say, “This isn’t how I see it, but I bless the work.” It’s messy. I feel like it would be harder if we weren’t both writers, because at least we both understand fundamentally what’s going on. To me, it’s exciting and interesting and ultimately good to have to work through those things.
SBJ:You mentioned the fear that I think we all had during the pandemic: I don’t want to do the wrong thing, it feels like we have this group project and I don’t want to fuck it up for everybody. But the characters are so not concerned about doing the right thing interpersonally.
AM: Maybe this is the millennial condition. Very worried about how it’s all gonna look, but not that worried about fucking each other over.
SBJ:Speaking of fucking each other, there’s so much interesting stuff going on in the book about gender and sex and power. Can you talk a little bit about how you see that working?
AM: I used the word utopian when I was talking about Early Work, and though there’s very little in Down Time that feels utopian on the surface, the book is messing around with gender binaries and sexuality binaries. The world I want to live in is one where people are much more fluid. That’s something I’m interested in putting on the page and trying to will into existence through the writing. It’s aspirational for a lot of the characters, as it is for many humans; actually acting upon it is harder. The reality of other people, the reality of trying to pin down your identity or define it, is quite hard. Most of the characters are lapsed Catholics and have all kinds of shame and guilt and fucked-up feelings about their desires that’s affecting everyone’s ability to act on what they want.
SBJ: These are all characters who are grappling with their ambition and self-worth and identity during a time of widespread breakdown between public and private personae.
AM: And spoiler alert: one of the characters comes into his sexuality as, at least, bisexual over the course of the novel. Part of it is prompted by him being in rehab, but then him trying to figure out how to be out, or the degree to which to embrace that, gets very tied up in pandemic logic. Like, he can’t really go out, he has this relationship with a guy that is almost entirely over text. A lot of the relationships in the book get very tangled in being stuck together versus wanting to be able to explore other possibilities. I do think sometimes that if only everyone had a fully transparent picture of each other’s feelings, we’d all be in a better place.
SBJ:Hearing you talk about it, there’s so much optimism and desire for utopia. And a lot of your writing is so pessimistic.
AM: It’s really dark, I know. But I think I’m trying to show the obverse, or I’m showing the failures of communication that lead to so much of the unhappiness, I guess. Maybe it’s a fantasy of what I wish were possible.
SBJ: There’s also the fantasy element of making people behave so unbelievably badly in fiction, in ways the writer would never do.
AM: So you think.
SBJ: Right. Obviously there’s some kind of latent desire to behave badly or you wouldn’t write about it.
AM: I feel like this is a real Philip Roth thing. He talks about this very eloquently in some interviews. What does a writer get off on (metaphorically speaking)? For some writers, it’s imagining a worse version of themselves; for some, it’s imagining a better version of themselves. This is an extreme example, but [Roth] talks about Céline, who was an anti-Semite and fascist, but apparently, according to Roth, quite a good and compassionate doctor. But in his writings, he’s an evil, bad doctor, because he gets off on being evil. And William Carlos Williams, for whatever reason, is inspired to make himself a good doctor. He was, apparently, a pretty good doctor, but the image of himself in his work is heroic. There’s no reason I couldn’t write more heroic versions of myself. For whatever reason I find it more interesting to write more cowardly, more unkind, less talented versions of myself.
SBJ: The book is almost a Rube Goldberg machine of trapping these characters in a momentum of worse and worse decisions.
AM: That’s what I like to see! In books, that is, not in real life. This comes up with my students a lot. One in ten fledgling novelists is too protective of their characters, and I find myself arguing that they need to be harder on them. You need to let them do something worse or have something bad happen to them. You can’t protect them. And they might say, Well, but in real life, everything kind of worked out. Yeah, this is why we have an opportunity here.
I understand the instinct. Even saying that, I’m probably still not hard enough on my characters sometimes. What Aaron is doing to himself early in the novel is suicidal. It’s very self-destructive, this kind of drinking, this kind of drug use, this kind of total recklessness with your being. I’ve seen a decent amount of that up close, and so I feel comfortable—I mean, not comfortable—but I feel like I can write about that with confidence.
If it’s not made by a human, it’s not good.
Some things in the book were very hard to write, because they’re inchoate, hard-to-talk-about things. Aaron and his relationship with his father is one example. He’s trying to figure out how to talk to this man of another generation about his complicated sexuality and complicated desires: To me, that’s really interesting, this intergenerational stuff. It’s hot material because I genuinely don’t know if they can understand each other.
SBJ:If you’ve created characters who feel like they’re really living on the page, you can kind of do social experiments with them.
AM: Right. I’m always having characters that are sort of like me or sort of like my friends think or do things that I or they didn’t do. But: What if they did? It can get hard to keep track of what actually happened versus what you make up, especially with a book like this that I’ve lived inside of off and on for, like, six, seven years. Some of it feels more real to me than my real life. And my books all sort of take place in the same world and are speaking to each other in all these ways. The timelines, if you tried to make them, would not make any sense. Bolaño is one of the writers I love who does this—characters across his books might even have the same names, but they’re clearly different people. I like the instability of these doppelgangers and narrative dead ends. I like an unstable text.
SBJ:An unstable universe or an unstable work of fiction and unstable work of art is maybe something that is fundamentally human.
AM: The tech may reach a point soon where it figures out that what makes something great is having some weird flaws in it. Like if you keep telling the AI that Moby Dick is the greatest novel written in English, it’s like, okay, so great novels involve narrative instability, monologues that the point of view character couldn’t have heard, digressions about marine biology . . . I’m a full techno-pessimist, but maybe part of my full techno-pessimism is that, yeah, of course the machines are going to figure it out. To me, it’s almost religious, the degree to which you just have to reject it. I don’t care if it’s better. Or, you know, “better.” It doesn’t fucking matter. If it’s not made by a human, it’s not good. You just have to take it on faith. I know it’s kind of stupid to say that, to say, I will reject work that is objectively better; if the machine makes something better than Tolstoy, I will refuse it. But you just gotta be stupid.
SBJ: I mean, you have to be stupid to make anything, too.
AM: You have to. I remember when I was younger somebody asked me what my goal was as a writer. I was like, I want to write Anna Karenina. And they were like, Well, you’re not going to. Yeah, I know. But if you’re not trying to do that, what are you doing here?
When I was a college senior, I used to sit in my favorite coffee shop, hook my laptop up to the free wifi, and pretend I was an editor at Electric Literature. This is a true story.
Now, as EL’s incoming Deputy Editor, remembering my slightly delusional daydreams makes me feel mildly embarrassed, but more importantly, extremely proud that all these years later I get to be a part of an organization I’ve admired for so long. (Not to mention impressed by my younger self’s impeccable literary taste!)
It’s not by chance that EL was the literary magazine I set my sights on. With my limited cash going straight to books for class (and, way, way too much coffee), I was starved for contemporary literature I could access for free. Electric Literature offered me exactly that: strange, wonderful stories that, true to EL’s mission, were exciting, relevant, and inclusive—an education in literature that went beyond what I was getting in my classes. And I was able to read those stories because of supporters like you, who ensured that people like me could access Electric Literature’s digital pages without fees or paywalls.
Back then, I needed free literature. Now, I get to provide it. Back then, I wondered if I would ever be paid for my writing. Now, I get to ensure that each of our writers is compensated for their work.
By donating to our spring fundraiser, you help ensure that readers like you, my college self, and millions of others maintain free access to our extraordinary and growing archive of short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction, graphic narratives, cultural criticism, and insightful coverage of forthcoming books—all written by contributors who are paid for the work they do.
Donate today to help us keep literature accessible for everyone. You never know—your donation might just allow an over-caffeinated college student with big aspirations to read her way into her dream job.
Gratefully yours,
Katie Henken Robinson Senior Editor and incoming Deputy Editor
To viewers grieving the death of Stranger Things—by death I mean not the finale of the Netflix series this past January, but the show’s unfortunate decline, after the third season, into a plodding, convoluted ghost of its former self—let me offer something of an analgesic. Travel with me, if you will, back to the superb first season, where Winona Ryder’s Joyce Byers, a broke, chain smoking, seemingly delusional mother, opens a can of paint and scrawls the alphabet onto a wall of her home. Joyce hopes her missing son will use the letters to communicate with her from the Beyond. Ryder’s performance would count as one of the most convincing portrayals of insanity in recent screen history, if it weren’t for one thing: Joyce is not mentally ill. Her son is trapped in the Upside Down, and her love is so powerful, she’s able to ignore the rules of logic and perceive what no one else can.
I became a fan of Stranger Things around the time I became, in my own way, Joyce Byers. To certain people in my life, I had recently morphed into a neurotic, monomaniacal woman. Not because I thought my child had been kidnapped by supernatural beings, but because I was convinced I was sick even though no tests could prove it. At 34, during my first year of a doctoral program in literature, I began to experience an electric-shock like pain in my pelvis. Sitting exacerbated the pain, so I bought a standing desk. Exercise beyond walking hurt, so I gave up biking, yoga, and rock climbing. Through regular physical therapy and rest, I managed the pain for several years. Then, in early 2020, my symptoms mysteriously worsened.
By the end of 2020, simply getting out of bed was excruciating. I left my graduate program with my dissertation halfway done. From bed, I booked appointments with a new round of doctors: radiologists, pain specialists, pelvic specialists. Everywhere I turned, practitioners doubted me when I said walking and standing were excruciating. A psychologist whom I was required to see as part of my treatment at a pain clinic asked if my parents had treated me well, hinting the source of my symptoms resided in childhood trauma. In her assessment, she concluded, “Ms. Cutchin has some symptoms and behaviors known to be unhelpful for pain including: some fear, avoidant behavior, pain anxiety.”
When a physical therapist saw me limping, she said, “Ask yourself, ‘Why do I feel I have to walk like this?’”
Worst of all, someone close to me hinted I was unconsciously refusing to walk because I “liked the bed and the bath.”
Holed up in bed—a bed that had become for some a symbol of my mental instability—I began watching science fiction. I’ve long been a fan of murder shows and spy thrillers, series in which the culprits are certifiably human and logic more or less carries the day. I binged The Americans,The Bureau, and Bosch, along with some less illustrious procedurals. Then, for want of new programming—it appeared my pain could outlast even Peak TV’s flood of content—I began to watch sci-fi
Not only did sci-fi keep me entertained; it gave me strength. A recurrent trope of sci-fi is the woman who is not believed. There’s Joyce Byers and her can of paint. Iconically, there’s Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in Terminator 2, locked away in a mental institution because she claims—accurately—that cyborgs from the future want to kill her son. In Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 film Contact, based on the book by Carl Sagan, Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) tells a senate committee she traveled through wormholes to meet an alien disguised as her father. The (male) chairman points out that video evidence contradicts her account and accuses her of suffering from a “self-reinforcing delusion.”
Not only did sci-fi keep me entertained; it gave me strength.
Also delusional, or so a male colleague insists, is DCI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger) in the excellent near-future dystopian series The Capture. When DCI Carey confronts a superior, Commander Danny Hart (Ben Miles), with her suspicion the UK government is altering CCTV footage in real time using deep-fake AI technology, he wastes no time gaslighting her. “You’ve had a shock tonight, Rachel. Why don’t you get some rest.” If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a male character tell a woman she needs some rest, I’d be able to upgrade every streaming subscription to premium. In the German limited series The Signal, it’s a case of “space sickness” that plagues astronaut Paula (Peri Baumeister), or so a dismissive colleague would have her believe. Aboard a space shuttle, Paula hears a signal she knows can only come from aliens. She records the signal, but when she plays the recording for the rest of her team, there’s nothing on the tape. Her (once again, male) colleague, Hadi (Hadi Khanjanpour), who initially heard the signal, too, tells Paula she’s unwell. “Go lie down.”
Riddled with pain, facing disbelief from those around me, the stories of Joyce, Paula, DCI Carey, Ellie Arroway, and Sarah Connor brought me solace, and a shred of hope. I belonged to a genre of female characters who had to fight to be believed. In the worlds these narratives portray, women’s claims are outlandish, otherworldly, weird, and also true. Eventually, each character finds someone who believes her. Sometimes it’s a man, like Jim Hopper (David Harbour) in Stranger Things, who learns to trust Joyce. Sometimes it’s a woman or girl: Paula’s most steadfast advocate in The Signal is her disabled nine-year-old daughter, Charlie (Yuna Bennett), who, working with her father, figures out the time and place of the aliens’ arrival and proves her mother right.
Watching these films and shows between visits to doctors bent on dismissing me, I grasped sci-fi’s genius: It taps into our culture’s deepest anxieties about the trustworthiness of women. In our real-world political climate, when a woman speaks her experience, whether she’s talking about sexual abuse, harassment, or illness, we wonder, Where’s the proof? And yet, our standards of proof are devised by the same systems—legal, educational, medical—built by men to protect male interests. In the medical system, imaging and other tests count as “proof” of illness or pain, but such tests screen only for well-researched diseases, and what we know about those diseases largely comes from research on male subjects. No definitive tests exist for a host of conditions that predominately affect those assigned female at birth, like myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. A woman with this kind of disease might as well be telling her doctors: Cyborgs are coming. Aliens have made contact.
By exploring whose testimony counts as reliable, and on what terms, sci-fi provides a template for what ethical philosophers call epistemic justice. “Epistemic” refers to knowledge. In our everyday lives, we convey knowledge to others by sharing our expertise, by relating our experience, and so forth. When a speaker offering knowledge is dismissed because of who they are—a woman, a trans person, a Black or Brown person—they are wronged in their “capacity as a giver of knowledge,” as philosopher Miranda Fricker puts it in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. The one who speaks loses out, but so does a community of hearers who would benefit from the information the speaker seeks to convey. Sci-fi dramatizes epistemic injustice and proposes a different way: We must practice epistemic humility by taking stock of our prejudices and admitting that someone who looks and sounds different than us might be right.
In the eyes of Western medicine, there is little stranger than a malfunctioning female or gender nonconforming body. According to TheNew York Times, “Women are more likely to be misdiagnosed than men in a variety of situations.” A stunning 72% of millennial women report feeling gaslit by medical professionals, a Mira survey found. If you’re nonwhite, it gets worse. Black women are less likely to develop breast cancer than white women—but 40% more likely to die from the disease due to delays in diagnosis and care. Delays in diagnosis stem partly from lack of research into women’s health. Until recently, women were considered inferior subjects to men in basically all research. “There are parts of your body less known than the bottom of the ocean, or the surface of mars,” Rachel E. Gross writes in Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage. On top of it all, there’s medicine’s age-old tendency to see women’s maladies as psychogenic in nature—think of the prevalence of the hysteria diagnosis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Today, women are less likely to be told our pain or fatigue is “in our heads.” Instead, in a sophistry-laden twist, we are told our symptoms stem from a “brain” gone haywire. According to the brain-based model of chronic pain, when symptoms persist more than three to six months with no obvious organic cause, the brain is at fault, or more precisely, a “maladaptive plastic reorganization in central pain processing circuits.” A spate of recent self-help books and pain reeducation programs promise to teach your brain to unlearn pain via cognitive-behavioral interventions. The problem with these treatments is they fail to account for the instances when pain persists because doctors and tests miss its underlying cause. Around 70% of chronic pain patients are female. Women are more likely to suffer from underreached conditions like fibromyalgia, autoimmune disease, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, pelvic pain, Long Covid, Lyme disease, and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. Telling a woman her pain stems from a “maladaptive” brain is today’s version of “it’s just hysteria.”
Given sci-fi’s uncanny ability to channel and critique these medical biases, I’ve put together a quiz: Can you tell the difference between a real-life sick woman and science fiction? The following statements were uttered either in a science fiction film or TV show, or in a real-life medical setting where a female patient came in complaining of physical symptoms. Circle the correct answer:
Answer key: B, D, F, H and J are from science fiction—The OA, Manifest, Stranger Things, Terminator 2, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, respectively. A, C and I are from medical records shared with me by a female patient with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome; E was uttered by the doctor of an Instagram user living with ME/CFS and POTS. G is from my own life. A noted Bay Area pelvic pain practitioner insisted I download a pain therapy app that could, he said, “re-wire” my brain so I no longer felt pain. “The app will teach you that you can’t use the word ‘pain’ any longer if you want to heal,” he told me.
I’m not saying mind-body tools aren’t helpful in managing symptoms. In the early years of my pain, I did quite a lot of psychotherapy and embodied meditation. These tools helped, especially when it came to managing the stress of illness. By the time I became bedridden, I knew I’d gone as far as I could with mind-body modalities. I told anyone who would listen I believed my symptoms had a biomechanical source, but, as time went on, I doubted that source would ever be found. After all, I’d had an MRI, the gold standard for diagnosis of pelvic disorders, and it had revealed nothing.
Still, I kept searching. For years, I’d been hearing about a world-famous pelvic pain specialist in Arizona. Seeing him would mean traveling seven hundred miles and paying for the visit out of pocket. By early 2022, I was out of other options. A friend and I rented a van and drove seven hundred miles from our home in the San Francisco Bay Area into the Arizona desert listening to crime podcasts. Actually, my friend drove; I laid on a mattress in the back.
The Arizona doctor took by far the most careful, thorough patient history of any provider I’d seen. He recommended a round of pelvic floor botox, and, when that didn’t work, he offered a diagnosis.
When a woman speaks her experience, whether she’s talking about sexual abuse, harassment, or illness, we wonder, Where’s the proof?
“All the signs point to pudendal nerve entrapment.”
The pudendal nerve runs through the lower pelvis and innervates urinary, bowel, and sexual function. I’d long known my nerve was irritated. But none of the pelvic specialists I’d seen had raised the possibility it might be compressed. Compression, the Arizona doctor explained, doesn’t show up on an MRI; the nerve is too small, too hidden. Compression typically arises from a traumatic injury, or repetitive stress. The year before the onset of my symptoms, I’d biked one thousand miles down the California coast. The pressure of the bike seat against my pelvis caused scar tissue to build up around the nerve. To protect the nerve, paradoxically.
It took 11 years from the onset of symptoms to receive the diagnosis. The treatment: a fairly straightforward decompression surgery.
Pudendal nerve entrapment is an underresearched condition that affects—you guessed it—women more often than men at a rate of seven to three. Childbirth is a common trigger. Diagnostic criteria do exist, but none of the chronic pain or pelvic disorder specialists I’d previously seen were familiar with those criteria. Pudendal entrapment isn’t common, but it’s not as rare as one might think, either. Studies indicate it affects up to one percent of the general population. Because pudendal entrapment lacks an ICD-code—such codes are used globally to classify medical diagnosess—insurance companies view decompression surgery as experimental and refuse to reimburse it. (In contrast, ICD-codes exist for “Sucked into jet engine V97.33X” and “Struck by turkey W61.42XA.”)
Four months after surgery, I began to see improvement. Within 15 months, I was leading a normal life again: walking, sitting, and traveling—without a van and mattress. I made plans to return to the PhD program.
Today, I’m grateful to the Arizona doctor who took the time to listen and believe my story. I’m also, frankly, enraged when I think about the time, energy, and pain I would have been spared if the medical system had the patience and trust to take my symptoms seriously. If it had, I wouldn’t have become Joyce Beyers and spent years getting others to see the writing on the wall.
Every March, we gather for the time-honored literary tradition of trying to make a pun out of March Madness. Last year, you helped us decide the best campus novel ever written in our March Gradness bracket. The year before, March Sadness. Now we’re back again with March Cadness, a quest to find literature’s best (or worst?) cad!
Okay, we’ll admit it: We’re running out of puns. For this one, we had to reach back—way back—to the 19th century, when cad was a popular term to describe a dishonorable man who uses charm and seduction in pursuit of selfish ends, often leaving wrecked relationships in his wake. While cad may feel dated or unfamiliar, the archetype is not. The cad has never really gone away; he’s just changed names. From Don Juan to player to fuckboy, literature has always been populated by these disreputable men.
What remains true about the cad is that he is narratively irresistible. He generates plot, accelerating conflict, stoking desire, and inviting humiliation. He is, for better or worse, the engine of many books. And yet, what often makes this archetype so compelling is not his bad behavior, but his slow unraveling—the moment the mask slips and he is exposed for what he is: a cad!
For this competition, we’ve gathered the worst cads across literary history: the smooth talkers, the liars, the self-mythologizers. You can start making your picks on Monday, 3/30 at 12 PM Eastern on our Instagram stories. Check out the bracket below and download it here to fill out your picks, then follow along to see if your (least?) favorite cad wins!
Below is a sneak peek of the Round One match-ups, featuring 32 of the best cad novels out there, ranging from classics to contemporary takes on the cad.
blush / river / fox is the English language debut of Swedish writer, artist, and translator Anna Nygren. Part of Milkweed Editions’ Multiverse series, which “gestures toward a correspondence—human and more-than-human—that lovingly exceeds what is normal and normative in our society, questioning and augmenting what literary culture is, has been, and can be,” Nygren’s book of poems and drawings plays with multiple styles and registers. The series, which includes the work of Hannah Emerson, whom Nygren has translated, pushes against the flattening that occurs when talking about neurodivergent and disabled people. Nygren’s work has its own rhythms and approaches, but demonstrates what the best poetry does: shares a different perspective and approach to language, and invites the reader into that world.
I spoke over Google docs with Nygren and their Milkweed editor, Morissa Young, who is also the founding co-editor of Strange Hymnal. The shared inquiry into language was evidenced by the working relationship between Nygren and Young. The ways that Nygren responded to both of us in conversation demonstrate a similar linguistic dynamism that can be found in their poetry. The inventive ways that they think about language, describing a word “like a tentacle stretching for another version of the word that could help the word’s world to expand in the reader’s mind.” This playful curiosity is part of how they think and work in both English and Swedish, something that Young said “collapses the limits of language.” Instead of worrying about not being fluent in English, they leaned into that in ways the language gap could open up exciting possibilities. It was a pleasure to talk with Nygren and Young about how they worked together, the double meaning of the book’s title, and the color pink.
Alex Dueben: I wonder if you could start by introducing yourselves.
Anna Nygren: Oh, I think this is the hardest question. I want to answer that I am a fish and not. Also, I live in Sweden with [my] cat Zlatan.
Morissa Young: My name is Morissa, and I’m an editor at Milkweed Editions. I manage production for many of our books, including all of our Multiverse titles. Milkweed’s Multiverse series publishes work by neurodivergent, autistic, neuroqueer, mad, nonspeaking, and disabled creators to surface and explore the different ways we use and interact with language. The series is curated by poet Chris Martin, who acquires manuscripts and works developmentally on them with authors before handing them over to me for production and final edits. As a neurodivergent editor myself, I find Multiverse to be one of the great joys of my work. I love thinking about language—how to both follow and break its rules, how to experience it with all five senses, how to live within, alongside, between it.
I live in Minneapolis, and like Anna, I keep company with cats and consider fish my kin.
AD: Anna, this isn’t your first book, but it is your first one published in English. What language do you prefer to write in? What does writing in English offer you that Swedish or other languages don’t?
AN: I think for me, using a language other than Swedish means a kind of expansion of the world, like, words are like things I feel a strong relation to. In a way, I find it a bit difficult to think that languages exist. I prefer to think about words, and words are like friends (that does not mean that they are not difficult, mean, evil, strange things, but they are friends, creatures) and English gives me more words. But the English words also have Swedish siblings, so they come with translation. And translation for me is always something sort of in-between, so a word might have a sound that reminds me of another word that comes from another context, and then the words have this as a kind of parallel sibling-meaning. Also it makes things a bit slower, andI find new things and words when translating.
MY: The way Anna thinks about words and translation and the way they explore this understanding in blush / river / fox are some of the many reasons I was so excited to begin working on this project with them. blush / river / fox gives body to complex ideas and emotions, like family memory, a fraught sense of gender and identity, and what it means to become, but it’s also deeply connected to play, which collapses the limits of language. The Swedish language, its sounds and the way it interacts with English, its cognates and false cognates expand and complicate this world of words. This book is written in English for an English-speaking audience, but at the same time it exists in this liminal space between languages.
I find new things and words when translating.
AN: Also, I am not flawlessly fluent in English, I make mistakes, andI like mistakes in spelling because I think of them as secret spells inside the words.But then sometimes I want to write correct, and I feel frustrated that I have not learnt, but then other times I think of not learning as a kind of refusal to make the right thing. But it is difficult to know what is a friendly reminder of the words’ worldly agency and what is just me being lazy. I think everything is difficult, but then I think that is the reason to do it.
MY: There are also many places in the book where, instead of defaulting to a correct English or Swedish spelling, we landed on something in between, an invented word. In the line “miss the forehead / slints / the wounds,” I asked what “slints” meant, and Anna replied that it’s a sort of mistranslation. They explained, “‘slinta’ in Swedish means ‘miss,’ sort of, like when using a knife and making a mistake and maybe accidentally hurting yourself.” My understanding of this mistranslation is made richer by Anna’s explanation, but I also still felt an understanding without it—in my brain, “slint” echoes off of words like “splint” or “sling” or “sprint,” which creates a new definition that can only be explained by the way the word feels to the reader.
The editing of this book was not so much searching for outright errors but instead finding spots where language sticks and reaching until we grasped the thing that felt right. What resulted was a kind of internal grammar built on wordplay, linguistic overlap, breaking rules to expand language, and following rules when structure became too slippery.
AD: Has your process changed from your earlier work? How much of that was related to the language? How much of that is this book, or working with Morissa?
AN: I think all works have their own process, but also, I think of everything I am doing as part of the same thing. I have worked with different editors on Swedish texts. The editors make the texts and processes different. I think it is like playing maybe, or just like, being together, I think it is like, one of my favorite ways of being together, being in a text. So BRF had multiple editors and we have never met in other ways than in text (or, I have met Chris on Zoom but that was after). I think there is something about having different relations to the words, or the language, that makes us meet in the text as a kind of careful strangers. I am so happy for that because it makes the word-world grow.
MY: I love the idea of meeting one another on the page and being together in a text—it’s absolutely true. The editorial process for blush / river / fox was very much a collaboration, and the book itself became this really beautiful medium for conversation and expansion.
Anna, I remember you mentioning a while ago that you’d composed some parts of this book in Swedish first, then translated into English, and other parts—“fox,” I think—you wrote directly in English without the Swedish intermediary. We haven’t talked much about that before, but I’m curious about those two different writing processes and how they impact the resulting work.
AN: Yes! I think in my head it is like, I don’t know, the three parts are like very different times or modes, and that has to do with translation, I think. Blush came first, and first it was in Swedish, and I translated it, and then when translating I sometimes use a dictionary and learn new words, and then sometimes I forget them again. The feeling of blush is also very much memory of childhood, and there is an aspect of blush that is difficult and angry and sad mixed with desire and longing and trying. So the translation is also a trying and tiring process . . . Fox yes, I wrote most of it in one evening, it just came like magic. Also, while we started working on the editing, I started to have more of these magic moments of words coming to me in English, so this summer I wrote so much poetry in English, except it was not me writing it but the words writing me, or something like that. And sometimes I think when writing directly in English, I use only the words I already know, but when translating I sometimes learn new words. [Writing] directly in English is more like a flow, while translating is more a slow kind of playfulness. But in both cases, there are ghosts of translation or Swedish (and sometimes more) languages.
AD: This book is primarily a book of poetry, but there’s artwork, there’s color. Was there a model for how you were thinking about combining these elements, either your previous work, or others work? And how does one edit work built around the interplay of such elements?
AN: Okay my answer is yes and no and I don’t remember. I am very much inspired by the other books in the Multiverse series. But I had not read all of them before writing BRF. Sometimes inspiration comes afterwards, or maybe it was a ghost from the future (I like ghosts and I like futures) and I always think it is so difficult to name single works or authors or artists, because I am afraid of forgetting some and remembering some and it feels unfair to do so . . .
I like mistakes in spelling because I think of them as secret spells inside the words.
MY: When it comes to the color and images in this book, my editorial approach wasn’t actually different from the way I edit poetry in general, which is very much informed by the way the words sit on the page, interact with negative space, and fit within the physical book. White space, color, and Anna’s drawings work together with the words themselves to express a mind’s topography, so I didn’t really think about them as separate elements to work around, but rather as inherent parts of the poems. For any book with a non-standard interior, I work closely with the designer to be a kind of intermediary between them and the author. Alex Guerra, our design fellow, did an incredible job typesetting blush / river / fox and doing a kind of translation of his own to move the book from the screen to the physical page.
AD: The book is titled blush / river / fox, which are the three sections of the book. To what degree do you think of the three sections of the book as distinct pieces? And how much are they three parts of one book?
AN: I try to remember (but I also think maybe I should try to forget and find new connections, but I don’t know). About a year ago I wrote this about the different sections:
“First part is blush. It is maybe: body, girl-fail, family, memory. Last part is fox. It is running, fur, forest, but also language. I think a lot about more-than-human animals, I think about writing about them. It is metaphor and it is not. It is violence when trying to love, I think, and that scares me. When writing this I wanted just to be. Therefore it is difficult to describe. I think the book is trying. River maybe like RIVER. Is more like prose, maybe, between forest and family is a translation. I never felt like human, never felt like girl. I think river is a play, with translation, words inside words, I think it is fun and sad. I think love is fun and sad. I try to describe but it is hard and I feel I don’t want to. I think of a river that is, between the lands of not-water, it is separating and glueing together, stitching together, scarring together, tearing apart. It is like becoming something, I don’t know if I want to write free, I don’t know if I want, free, I want try, to try and to follow and to try to continue and to listen.”
Is that an answer?
MY: Definitely! I leaned on that paragraph you wrote quite a bit when I was working on the book’s description.
Sensory and sensual perception mesh through the liquid movement of the book’s three parts as the speaker queers the notion of difference, exploring fraught ideas of gender and identity by tapping into the profane and the physical body. blush, hungry and dysphoric and tied inextricably to family memory, begins rooted in the corporeal before moving outside of it, calculating the speaker’s orientation to others and to the world. fox, meeting love with violence, characterizes pain with short, dissonant syntax and finds reprieve in the cover of forest. And between forest and family is translation, river, which simultaneously stitches together and tears apart as it bears witness to the epistemology of becoming.
AD: I love that idea of being rooted to the corporeal before moving outside of it. Related to that, what is the relationship for you between the lines of a drawing on the page and the shape of the words on a page, because they are both physical actions?
AN: I write a lot by hand. And then the word is a drawing. One of my favorite things is to just draw one word that is on my mind and then fill the rest of the page with color or like, movement of coloring . . . I don’t know really if I have thought about it in other ways. There is something thinking inside the words or inside me or in the drawing in the hand in the air . . . like the thought is always a bit strange, like something I don’t understand.
AD: Could you talk a little about the color pink and what that means to you?
AN: Oh! I like this question, I have already answered it. The answer is in the book as a note, and the note is super true, but also, the pink words were not my idea from the beginning! It is a stolen idea or borrowed or a gift. I mean, it is like all this is made together.
The book itself became this really beautiful medium for conversation and expansion.
MY: In one of our correspondences, Anna asked me if I wanted to know something about the color pink in translation, and of course I replied yes. I loved their response so much, and, like they mentioned, we wound up adding it to the book’s notes. I’ll include that passage below:
“The word PINK, and also the word KISS, means PEE in Swedish. The Swedish word for the color pink is ROSA, like a rose is a rose, but it is also one of the most common names for cows, like individual cows named Rosa. There is another, maybe older, word for ROSA that is SKÄR. SKÄR also means CUT. It is like a soft cut and a blushing cut a rose a romantic thingcolorword cutting across. SKÄRKIND is the name of the village where I was born. KIND has a meaning in English yes! In Swedish KIND means CHEEK, so SKÄRKIND is like a pink cheek like blushing but also a cut, in the cheek. It is like hurting. SKÄR also means a rock in the sea, I don’t know the English word, it is like a stone a thing in water it is cutting it is a rose and it is. And the sea. When I was a child I peed in bed every night for many many years and I was woken up by my parents changing sheets and I sometimes think of this when I think of bodies of water and so. On the other side of the sea closest to where I was born there is Finland and the Swedish word in Finland for PINK is simply LJUSRÖD, light red also like a red light. I love fish and all the creatures living in lakes and rivers and oceans. The flesh of salmon is PINK. I often think of this. There is also crayfish. The Swedish crayfish are of two kinds. Those living on the west coast (where I live now) become PINK when they are cooked. Those living in lakes on the east coast (where I was born) become red when cooked. The Swedish word for CRAYFISH is KRÄFTA. KRÄFTA is also the name of the star sign CANCER in Swedish (I think it is more of a crab in English but stars refuse to know anything about species, it is also my star sign) and also an old name for the illness CANCER I often think of this eating ocean stars and tumors the thing inside like pink and so.
This is not the reason why the words are pink in the book because of blushing, but also it is.”
AN: The reason for pink is always changing and tilting and growing and . . . So I had a CD with the artist P!NK when I was 13 (and blush is so much a 13 thing and that time was so important and difficult and much more) and I listened to the song “Family Portrait.” I only remember the line ”we look pretty happy” and then there is something about pretending. And I think there is a sad meaning in this. Because family and photos are difficult, but also much more. I wrote BRF for my family. And I also think pretending is not always a bad thing, I think it is also making other worlds, and I think that is very much needed [at the moment]. Like there is a thing in pretending that reminds about the possibility of other worlds, or that this world can be different. Then pink is also such a difficult color! But I like it.
AD: Some of the artwork is pink, and throughout “blush” there are words and phrases in pink. I kept thinking about that in relation to how you think about language, and the ways that sounds and spellings and meanings are tucked within words.
AN: That is just, I don’t know, how I imagine the words or phrases want to be. They feel pink.
Recently, I’ve been distracted by the fact that all the Black men in my family are gone. I’m the last one. And these dead guys won’t leave me alone. Every essay, poem, and cryptic Facebook update for the past five months has veered into my obsession with them.
What a joke it is to be haunted.
I tell this to Josie, and she stares at me. I suspect half of her therapy schooling was spent honing this stare. It’s dreadfully effective at getting me to run my mouth.
I cave and eventually say, “It was either commitment issues, suicide, or white women.”
“You need to unmute, Mar.”
New-fashioned therapy. I was so excited for a virtual platform because—and Josie would love that I’m admitting this—it’s much easier to be vulnerable with the shield of an unstable connection, non-working camera, and therapist who isn’t technically licensed in your state.
Unmuting, I say, “Oh, my bad. I was saying that these family members either died by killing themselves, or abandoning their family, and—well, my great-grandfather was actually shot because he was having an affair with this white woman.”
I leave a dollop of quiet after I say that, trying my hand at the therapy stare.
. . .
I cave again. “It must run in the family. Claire is white.”
. . .
. . .
Damn, she’s good.
. . .
“And maybe there’s something real to that. Maybe I’m afraid—”
“Mhm?”
“Well, yeah, you can probably guess what I’m thinking.”
“I can guess, sure. But mind-reading isn’t my gig.”
I tell her how these Black family men keep coming up for me. First, I call them distractions, then generational curses, then, “I wonder what they were like.”
Josie gives me a Buddhist anecdote before telling me, “Being the lone anything in your family can be a lot. When do these distractions happen?”
. . .
On a Facebook video call, Mar tells Momma he’s been officially diagnosed with depression.
My computer desk sits in front of an open window. I’m cold. No, frigid—that’s a better word. I often gaze at this same tree. Well, he’s not much of a tree now. He looks like a map of a city’s roads, his branches crisscrossing each other, with shrivels of pink flowers dotted about his wooden hands like sleeping butterflies—oh, I see it now. My special tree looks like one of the online interactive maps I used while researching for essays. There are spatterings of pink dots along backroads, and if your cursor hovers over those spots, a picture of a hanged Black body, or a burned Black body, or beaten Black—
“Mar?” Josie is still with me.
“Sorry. I get flashes of my great-grandfather’s face. I don’t see him literally,” I say. “I’m not seeing things—no need to worry.”
“I’m not worried at this particular point,” Josie says.
I tell her my Granny kept a portrait of her father, “Lefty,” atop her shelf collection of porcelain cows. It’s been thirteen years since I’ve been in the same room with that photo of Lefty, but I can envision him perfectly. In the picture, Lefty has a leather army jacket and motorcycle cap. He has pretty eyes, and I hate that I remember them. In 1954, he snuck around on my great grandma with a white woman. The white woman’s brother gathered a few buddies to shoot Lefty at the end of his workday. I still can’t find his pink dot on the map.
“Maybe I’m so obsessed with this dude because I’m dating a white woman,” I say. “Think I’m onto something?”
“There’s probably a reason this idea is coming up.”
More staring. Only this time, I don’t cave.
“I’d like to try something I hardly ever do,” she finally says. “There’s something called writing therapy.”
I perk up.
“We can try this out if you’re willing. Here’s a prompt: Keep a diary—or it could be one of your stories—where you write your life in third person.”
“Mar is afraid that’ll make his head bigger than it already is,” I say.
“Mar shouldn’t feel forced to try this. But if he did feel comfortable, Josie thinks he’ll enjoy it. And this might stir up some different writing, so you won’t have to keep—”
“Beating dead horses,” I interrupt.
“That wouldn’t have been my choice of phrasing.”
[2. HAVE MOMMA SLAP-TEST THE BATTERIES]
Dear diary that only Josie reads, I tried telling my mom
On a Facebook video call, Mar tells Momma he’s been officially diagnosed with depression. Mar has battle plans depending on her reaction. He could tell her this was only cooked up by his therapist to screw over the insurance company.
First, Momma says, “But what about all your accomplishments?”
“I’m not sure that’s how it works,” Mar responds. “It’s more like I don’t like myself.”
“Oh, baby. But you’re an amazing man. And I’m so proud of you—your Momma is so, so proud.”
“Thank you, Momma.”
. . .
“Can you do something that makes you happy? Are they going to get you meds for it?” Momma’s voice starts buffering.
“It’s really not that big a deal. I just feel cold sometimes.”
“Cold?”
“Yes—maybe not cold, but numb, you know? Like a robot. I need to think about feeling before acting it out. Does that make sense?” Mar says (Josie, the third-person thing feels off. It’s not my kind of dorky. Can I go by Robotman after the Doom Patrol comics?).
“Yes, Momma gets that way from time to time, too.” She stills. “What about your writing? Isn’t that going well?”
“My writing is—to be honest, I’m not sure anymore. Weirder,” Robotman says (No, that doesn’t feel right either).
“Ain’t nothing wrong with weird, baby,” Momma says.
Gizmo sees Momma contemplating. She sighs, puffs, jitters, and grits her teeth. It’s like watching an electron avalanche. Gizmo doesn’t wish to say it, but her anxiousness peer pressures him. “This is probably all coming out of my situation with Claire,” he beeps.
“Are y’all going through a rough patch?” Momma calms. Now she has her answer.
“Yeah, kind of. I told her I wanted to break up.”
“Ah. That’s a rough patch, alright.”
. . .
Momma says, “Do you think you’re dating the right sex—are you gay, honey?”
When Gizmo searches ‘How to cry as a Black man’ on TikTok, he finds a video with 1.3 million views.
“No, I don’t think that’s it.” Gizmo proceeds to giggle. He wonders how long she has suspected her little machine was gay. He wonders why she didn’t ask a more helpful question—or maybe that question was helpful. What had he done to be so unknown to his own mother? Gizmo’s last book was about Momma: learning grace from her and all other Black mothers across the country. It wasn’t the best researched, it seems.
As he stops his giggle fit, he realizes this conversation will make its way into a future essay: She’s the motherboard that keeps giving.
. . .
“Did you hear me, Mar?” Momma’s question cuts through.
“Maybe you need to get some more Black friends. Remember you’re still Black.”
Something crumples within Gizmo’s chest. Gizmo squeezes his eyes in—pain? Maybe Gizmo can feel.
“Mar, I’m for real; you’re all the way up there. And white people make everyone feel lonely.”
“Sorry,” Gizmo says. “You know, there’s only two other Black students in my grad program, and we’re each separated by genre, so I never see them.”
“That’s alright, baby. There’s got to be someplace close to D.C. with some Black folk. Because you got to remember you’re a Black man. And—I know you love white girls—but maybe look for a Black girl next time.” Momma snickers, and Gizmo files the sound of it away.
Local Disk (D:) Internal Storage>>Essays>>>forFam|
Her_laugh_like_sweet_neighing.mp3|
[3. RENEW ANTIVIRUS SUBSCRIPTION]
Claire does not want to break up with Gizmo. She asks him to give their relationship a chance, to fight for it. “After we moved here, we stopped going on dates—that’s the problem.” Claire is sure about this. “This happens all the time to couples. Let’s try dating again. Please. Please. Mar, I love you. Say something, please.”
. . .
Gizmo accepts the terms of the agreement.
Six days later, Gizmo is on a Smithsonian date with Claire. After a selfie with C-3PO and R2, Gizmo and Claire’s silhouettes hold hands under a Barnum and Bailey banner with elephants balanced on beachballs. Each elephant’s eye is too honest. Gizmo can’t bear looking into those dots of ink that form their irises. He imagines the elephants whispering, “Yes, we really were whipped until our trunks flourished convincingly for the crowd. Yes, humans, we really were true.”
Claire disrupts Gizmo’s trance to say, “I can’t believe we did this to those animals. Let them get away with doing this.”
Gizmo’s teeth grind with desperation. He wants to tell her so many things at once, like: This section of the museum really is hilarious; only nine paces away from here—from Prince’s guitar and a circus poster—there is a room no one stays in for long where recordings of famous minstrel performances loop. And also: Isn’t it funnyyou just said “we.” And also: What’s the hard part to believe—that the We had the idea or that the We were able to realize their fantasy? All so that the We could cackle and awe at what can be made possible with a master, slave, and bullwhip.
But those words would come across far more combative than Gizmo would hope, and it’s so damn difficult to be articulate when he looks into her eyes. So, instead, Gizmo says, “I know. Shit was wild.”
They skip the Jim Crow show to marvel at Captain America’s shield. In person, its white stripe is gunmetal grey. The Handmaid’s Tale dress stares down at Claire like a weeping angel.
“Realer every day with Roe v. Wade,” she says.
Gizmo likes Claire’s speech. She is accidentally musical when she’s bleak. They make their way to a shrine of PBS heroes. Claire maraca-bounces her head and sings along to the “won’t you be my neighbor” coming from the speakers. In a photograph above a red, hand-knit cardigan, they see Mr. Rogers dipping his toes in a kiddie pool with Officer Clemmons. Claire catches Gizmo lingering on this photo longer than he should. “There are so many Black cops on TV,” he says. Gizmo is not sure why he says this out loud, but kudos to Claire for the respectful nod in response.
As they *click click* past Dorothy’s slippers, Gizmo is startled that he can’t wipe Officer Clemmons’s face from his vision. There was something about his face—
(There I go again, Josie. My distractions.)
Officer Clemmons bears a resemblance to Gizmo’s great-grandfather: the bountiful glean on his cheeks, the sepia pupils. Though Lefty was lynched before he could grow grey hairs.
“You hungry?” Claire speaks. “Not sure if we should eat here. It’s probably the most expensive cafeteria food you’ll ever see in your life.”
And Gizmo is glad Claire said something, because, “You’re so right, and there’s this awesome place called Busboys and Poets on 5th.”
[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. Didn’t Uncle Pete write poetry? The one who shot himself in his bedroom. His momma’s shotgun. Never realized the Hemingway connection.]
“Busboys and Poets?” Claire asks.
“Yeah—they have books. And food.”
Leaving the museum, Gizmo and Claire pass a street performer bludgeoning a steaming-hot tempo against the winter air. He’s a paint pail riot thudding from the sidewalk.
“Fuck me—he’s amazing.” Oddly erotic phrasing, but Gizmo couldn’t have gathered more truthful words. “I have a ten. I feel bad he’s beating his hands that hard in the cold.”
Gizmo gives Claire the bill, and she bows after placing it in the performer’s hat. She bows like this is her performance. The drummer starts howling a thank you song—fiddling the spellbound chords within his throat. He’s so young and yet he sounds like a medieval war siren. His voice is so graveled and textured that you could touch the rivulets it leaves in the air—run your fingers over the sound as one flips through albums in a record store.
Gizmo says, “Otis Redding. That’s who he sounds like.”
Claire says, “Ah, I love Otis Redding—grew up listening to him with Dad.”
The drummer’s song bellows behind the two as they walk up the sidewalk.
“Really?” Gizmo can’t hide his shock.
“Yes!” Claire’s voice heightens over the drummer. “Didn’t expect a white girl to have grown up on Otis, did you?”
“I’m starting to expect the unexpected with you.”
[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. When I was a boy, I imagined all the disappeared Black men in my family would have voices like Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, and Marvin Gaye.]
“Ha. What a writer thing to say. You’re also unexpected.”
[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. Grandma told me her brother, my Uncle Rat, was killed by a log truck. He was driving too fast behind the truck when the trucker hit the brakes. The log sawed through his Impala, and parts of him. Granny said Rat was funny, so I gave him the voice of James Brown in the stories she’d share.]
“Being a writer is definitely unexpected,” Claire says.
[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. Such a dramatic way to die. Why couldn’t he have been like Mr. Perkins and simply left his family in the middle of the afternoon? Our family loves its flair for dramatics. Then, there’s what happened with Uncle Rat’s son: my cousin Derek. He overdosed on—what was it again?]
The paint pails are still thrumming.
“Did you find something in there to write about?” Claire’s eyes hook into Gizmo.
“Mm. Yes, yes, I think so. I might try my hand at non-fiction,” Gizmo says.
Paint pails thrumming.
“Oh, really? How will you manage not to lie?” Claire pokes his arm in a delightful way. [disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. I remember thumbing through the box of Lefty’s vinyl stored in Granny’s closet to recover a trove of the unsung and unscratched.]
“I’ve been writing about my family, but I know so little that it might as well be fiction, you know? I basically only know how they died.”
Paint pails thrumming.
“Could I read some?”
Do you think they cried? All the disappeared Black men who share my round cheeks and songful eyes.
[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. My great-grandfather was shot nine times for dating a white woman. He’s still thrumming. My uncles wanted to die and did something about it. Thrumming. Thrumming. Lonely little Black boy, Truth is the executioner’s blade kissing your nape.]
“Only if you want to share, of course,” she says.
Gizmo never shared his essays with Claire, because he thought they’d be a healthier couple without those hard conversations about race dominating their time together (which is why I’m not sure this essay will help me, Josie. Writing has always been my hiding place).
This would be a fair time for Gizmo to dig into why he broke up with Claire, why he—out of the blue—saw her more as a friend than a future wife. But if Gizmo wants this to be non-fiction, the truer question—the non-rhetorical question—would be about the drumming. Gizmo has honest questions about the drumming. So let’s go back to that afternoon, with the paint pail man and that sound. What if it wasn’t really paint buckets? What if it were hooves? What if Gizmo turned around to see the street drummer on a horse? What if he would see a lynching rope in one hand of the drummer? Then, Gizmo might have seen the eyes he hadn’t noticed before. His eyes were sepia and glossy-burned. What if it was a daymare, and the drummer started galloping toward Gizmo, howling a strange laughter. Would this have been too obvious?
[4. SCAN FOR MALWARE]
Auntie called young Gizmo “little nigga” and “white boy” depending on the situation. Mixed inputs scrabbled his mind. Before his mother came back into Gizmo’s life, Auntie raised him. Momma, then Granny, then Auntie, then Momma’s second go—three Black women he’d trot between. All the hurt these women endured, and they’d never tried therapy. Gizmo wants to recommend it to them, but he’s fearful about Auntie’s reaction.
Gizmo admits he was hesitant, too. He never considered therapy an option until Claire proposed it. Claire convinced Gizmo therapy could overwrite his decision to leave 28 days after they moved in together, 28 days after they U-Hauled from Texas to start grad school together. Normal people don’t change their minds that quickly. Gizmo was malfunctioning. After all, he only applied to George Mason—was only here—because it was near Claire’s dream university. They had been together for nearly two years. What switched inside Gizmo?
Claire pulled up “Zocdoc: Find a Doctor” on Gizmo’s desktop one evening after his writing center training. On the intake form, it asked something to the effect of, “Do you have any idea what’s wrong with you?”
“Why yes, I think I do, Doctor Zoc,” Gizmo typed.
Gizmo remembers (and you already know this, Josie) putting that he felt like a robot. For his whole life, people have seemed too . . . fleshy. Gizmo doesn’t understand how people can feel so deeply. After he told Claire about “his feelings” that they’d be better as friends, she cried in such a red-faced way. She was crying for them both. He couldn’t even well up one dry eye.
Claire asked Gizmo when he last cried. He said, “Elementary school. I fell playing kickball.”
“That’s not normal, Mar. That’s not normal.”
A list of Black men Gizmo has seen cry: Barack Obama, Idris Elba on Hot Ones, Michael Jordan in that meme, Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther after his father was bombed, Will Smith in situations involving Jada Pinkett Smith.
When Gizmo searches “How to cry as a Black man” on TikTok, he finds a video with 1.3 million views of a groom seeing his bride for the first time. The title: “Black Man Trying Not to Cry.” The groom’s tuxedo is made of pearls, and his lineup is devastatingly gorgeous—it’s one of those hall-of-fame cuts the barber would put on their wall. There is a warning that this video is “very emotional.” The groom cries so profusely at the sight of his wife that his neck glistens. Gizmo recalls that he and Claire would watch Burn Notice back when the love was mutual, and she’d mimic a tactic from the dangerous woman dating the stoic man on screen: She’d threaten with a smile. “You better cry at our wedding,” she’d say.
He’d play his part. “Of course I will. Even if it’s only one tear. It’ll be one big tear.”
[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. Do you think they cried? All the disappeared Black men who share my round cheeks and songful eyes. Or do you think they swigged their lives down like Irish car bombs with stoney faces? According to my family’s women, they’d often leave in autumn when even the trees were indecisive about what direction to die in. I have this fantasy where our family’s men are free-range horses: one of two expressions, engineered for running, heartbeats so strong they’d strip skin off the palm of anyone who put a hand to their chest. In the fantasy, there’s only the simplicity of what we are, not what we’ve been trained for.]
[SYSTEM ERROR]
Josie, Gizmo is getting uncomfortable. Gizmo is getting uncomfortable with sleeping. He takes caffeine pills to stay up all night to write this essay or doom scroll for instructions. [SYSTEM COLLAPSE] He can feel his heart now. He wants to [Esc] with humor; how will he [Fn] with a disease his body has no willingness to fight?
Nina Simone’s voice stands like a gargoyle in each corner of this dark living room. Gizmo has lied to Claire that he needs to sleep on the couch. It’s 2am. He is writing this with music in his earbuds at his desk. Claire opens their bedroom door. He is whispering binary and dictating pop-ups when Claire catches him. She will soon give up the repair effort. She lingers through the chill melody of the room to reach him, asks for his promise to stay in therapy—to stay even after he leaves.
[6. REBOOT]
Two years after the breakup, they will both be much happier. Gizmo will still feel guilty. Though it will be nice to know he’s feeling. Gizmo will move in with fellow grad students: poets, who—he will come to understand—are big fans of crying. And he’ll love that. On a fall day, they will invite Gizmo to a nearby park to write. Katey will point to a tree splotched with color, and say something blissfully macabre: “In autumn, things are either dead or dying beautifully.”
And that will lead Gizmo back to his desk, to his window, to his tree, still dotted with pink. He’ll scribble verses where kids climb it, play pirate ship.
Youth is such a scarcity for a Black child.
Under this circus tent, performing Blackness is worth more on the market than the lives of its performers.
The pirate children will find stick swords, launch into their “en gardes,” and he will watch them from a distance. He will build an imaginary castle wall around joy to sit outside and stare through its cracks, pushing his eyeballs in like quarters slotted through a gumball machine.
Eyes again. Always the eyes. That obsession came after Gizmo’s mother swore you’d always be able to spot a lying man by their eyes.
[disk management(C:) software.exe| popup_block_fail. Except Claire. She couldn’t spot it in my eyes. And when I nightdream my younger self playing in a tree with other kids, they can’t either.]
[7. CALL SUPPORT]
Gizmo never
Josie, I never finished the essay.
I stopped coming to therapy because I was afraid you would tell me I shouldn’t feel guilty. I was afraid of confronting defense mechanisms, and masking, and core beliefs, and pre-screenings for ASD, and moralizing, and hearing you say that there’s no instruction manual on repairing a robot Black boy. I was afraid you’d be warm when you asked me to do an imaginative exercise in which I speak to my younger self and realize it’s much easier to be kind to him because I don’t feel guilty about him—I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for him because he’s just a lonely kid trying to survive. Because he didn’t choose any of that for himself. Then you would ask me how I’m feeling, and I would say, “I don’t know. I can’t decide if I’m better because I feel better or because I can rationally prove why I should feel better. And maybe I would finally let you read this, and let you ask, “Would a robot feel all this—” feel all this feel feel
I thought I needed to be something steel and indelicate. I’m only 22, and I’m running out of family examples of living through this. Cousin Derek and Uncle Rat didn’t make it to 24 because, under this circus tent, performing Blackness is worth more on the market than the lives of its performers.To ringmasters, even dead elephants are worth their weight in ivory. That’s why I made the decision to come back to therapy; maybe I can be an example for those not yet here.
Working on myself, I won’t want to repeat the same mistakes and lies with Rachel (my deus ex machina). Tomorrow evening, she and I will attend a “Dining with Baldwin: Culinary Homage with Jessica Harris” event at the National Museum of African American History. It will be hard chowing down in front of folk I don’t know, but Dr. Harris will remind me of Granny. Rachel has turned me on to Ethiopian jazz, which we will listen to on our drive. She will tell me these songs remind her of Sundays in her home country. I’ll let her look into my eyes, and hope she trusts me when I say the songs remind me of a family I have not met.
Josie, you told me that writing what I’d like to witness in my dreams before going to bed may help avoid nightmares. So here goes:
Outside cookout. Not too hot. The grill whistles like a steamboat, and the kids blow bubbles in each other’s faces. Granny is showing Uncle Rat (ever the impatient one) how to sop his injera in doro wat without it falling apart. Momma is raising hell with Lefty because he’s a horrible domino partner. Derek is trying to convince Auntie and Uncle Pete that the tere siga is fine to eat raw. I’m—as always—overdoing it on the berbere, so Rachel offers to feed it to me. There is the sway of old pine. She and I go back-and-forth: She feeds me, I feed her. I look into her eyes, and she looks into mine.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
