Electric Literature

A Long-Lost Mother’s Embrace Is an Obliterative Fate

Posted on June 15, 2026June 11, 2026 by Preety Sidhu

“The Ominous Shaft” by Marlena Williams

Cole set out early, when the fishermen of his hometown were just beginning to cast their nets into the sea. Claudia Bernard, the woman that Cole was journeying towards, had no idea that he was on his way. Cole made the drive from Astoria to Fortuna in one white-knuckled shot, terrified that if he lingered anywhere for too long, something awful would happen—a nosy traveler would report him as a teen runaway, or he’d simply lose his nerve and drive back home. At hour five, a massive traffic jam snagged its way down the interstate, delaying Cole’s arrival in California by hours. Night had fallen by the time he reached Fortuna. All around him the shadows of great redwoods loomed. Cole pulled into the parking lot of the Fortuna Inn a little after 7 PM, its blinking red vacancy sign burning like a flare in the dark.

The Fortuna Inn was a classic low-rise motel in the shape of an L, its rooms accessible by an exterior pathway lit by a single exposed bulb. Cole parked his car and walked inside to a small lobby that smelled overwhelmingly of cigarettes. He couldn’t tell if the smell was emanating from the large woman seated behind the counter or if, over time, smoke had gradually seeped into the very matter of the place, becoming one with it.

“One room, please,” Cole said. At seventeen, he’d never checked into a motel by himself, but this seemed like the logical thing to say. Still, the woman behind the counter eyed him suspiciously. She wore a green flannel shirt, with a pin that said “Jan” affixed over the formidable mounds of her breasts. Cole, in his exhaustion from the drive, imagined sinking his head into the soft bounty of them, closing his eyes, and falling asleep.

Jan lit a cigarette and continued to stare.

“You alone?” she said.

“Is that relevant?” Cole replied.

“It is if you’re being trafficked,” Jan said. “Or smuggling drugs.”

“I’m here to visit Tracker,” Cole said, which was partly true.

“Don’t parents usually come along on college visits?”

“My dad couldn’t get the time off work.”

“And your mom?”

“Not in the picture.”

It was the kind of statement that usually softened people to him. Over the years, Cole had learned that, if you were a white-skinned teenage boy and you alluded to a dead or absentee mother, you could get away with almost anything. Jan just nodded and turned around to grab a key off the wall behind her. Cole slid his debit card across the Formica counter.

“Kind of quiet here,” he said. He’d only seen one other car in the parking lot—a mint green Ford truck that presumably belonged to Jan.

“You’ll be in 6A,” she said, ignoring his comment. “Down the walkway, on your right.”

“Do you have room service?” Cole asked.

“Do I look like I have fucking room service?” Jan replied.

Cole took the key and stepped back outside. The night was chilly and damp. He could sense but not see the towering redwoods that lined the road opposite the motel, enforcing, like sentinels, an almost frightening stillness. The lightbulb buzzed faintly over the cement walkway as he hurried to 6A. All the other rooms were dark, the curtains drawn tight behind their windows. Between the motel and the highway was a patchy stretch of dirt and grass with two pink plastic lawn chairs set up in the middle of it, like Jan was trying to make things nice. The look of them made Cole feel mournful—though for Jan or for the empty chairs or for himself, he wasn’t sure.

Inside the surprisingly clean room, Cole stretched across the bed and pulled out his phone. A few hours earlier, he’d sent his father a text letting him know that he’d safely landed in Palm Springs. Mr. Hansen was under the impression that Cole had driven to his friend Austin Whittaker’s house that morning, left his car in their driveway, and joined the family on their annual spring break trip to Palm Springs. Cole’s father was a simple man, a former minor league pitcher who now ran a sporting goods store in Astoria. He’d responded Aloha! to Cole’s text and sent emojis of a pineapple and crashing wave.

There was also a text from Cole’s girlfriend, Mikayla—the only other person on the planet who knew where he actually was. Let me know when you make it in., she’d written, her intentional use of punctuation artfully signaling her lingering bitterness. She’d wanted to come on the trip, but Cole had told her that this was something he had to do on his own.

Cole had been dating Mikayla since middle school. She had fire-engine red hair, skin as white as milk, and glorious red nipples that reminded Cole of oversized pepperonis, though he knew better than to share this observation with her, even if to him it was a compliment. Cole ignored Mikayla’s text. Already, her flushed complexion and frenzied moods were starting to feel distant and unreal. Or maybe it was the version of Cole that Mikayla knew that was starting to feel unreal, the Cole who had not yet left on his journey to meet Claudia Bernard.

Cole pulled his fraying copy of The Ominous Shaft out of the backpack he’d dumped by the bed. On the cover, Claudia Bernard stood in a column of white light, her knees bent, her wide shoulders and lank arms almost vampiric as they crooked towards the glow, either conjuring it or succumbing to it, Cole wasn’t sure. She had short, dark hair, thick eyebrows, and a mole flecking the tip of her pointed, almost feline chin. She looked, Cole realized the first time he’d seen the book’s cover, just like him. Cole stared at the cover again now with a kind of longing recognition. He’d always felt gangly and out of place in his paternal line, stocked as it was by stout, pale Nordic types. Looking at Claudia Bernard, Cole’s olive skin, long limbs, and angular features finally made a certain kind of sense.

Cole closed his eyes, opened to a random page, and pointed.

The psychological chasm between the male and female can be traced to the architecture of their respective forms, namely the genitalia. While the male phallus is a kind of feat of engineering—a straining, skyward skin tower, compulsive in its questing, forever extending towards the unknown, ready to master and transform it—the female vagina is a barbed and swampy abyss that has never seen the sun, a crude and cavernous vestige of the netherworld from which we all came and to which we shall all return—a place of great danger and mystery, offgassing fumes and vengeance, archaically content in its dark and winding depths, the putrid and pulsing center of all life.

Cole dropped his finger and closed the book. He’d been practicing this form of bibliomancy ever since his father had sat him down at the dinner table the year before and informed him that his mother was the controversial Italian American feminist Claudia Bernard, author of, among other works, The Ominous Shaft: Sex, Art, and Nature from the Dawn of Man to Bill Clinton. This book was Claudia Bernard’s first, published in the mid-1990s, just a year after she’d graduated from Cambridge. It lived up to its name, covering, in an exhaustingly meandering fashion, everything from Stone Age fertility goddesses to Madonna’s fifth studio album Erotica, along with other, more idiosyncratic flourishes, including an inexplicable, twenty-five page passage about the telepathic powers of cats. Claudia Bernard thought Euripides’ The Bacchae and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus were the greatest works of art ever created. The book’s most famous line—“There will never be a female Beethoven, because there will never be a female Ted Bundy”—continued to incite the ire of feminist critics everywhere. Cole had tried to read the gigantic text linearly at first, but found it so inscrutable and dense he’d put it down in reverent defeat. He found it was far easier and more pleasurable to read The Ominous Shaft like this, in disconnected bits and pieces.

When Mikayla had attempted Cole’s ritual herself, she’d flipped to a random page, read it aloud, and burst out laughing.

“Holy shit, that was the worst thing I’ve ever read,” she’d said, tossing the book onto the floor of Cole’s bedroom.

But Cole didn’t think so. Next fall, Cole was headed to MIT on a full scholarship, while Mikayla said she was “still deciding.” Cole knew this meant she’d eventually enroll at Clatsop Community College just like everyone else from their hometown. So, when Mikayla said that The Ominous Shaft was the stupidest thing she’d ever read, Cole had thought but didn’t say that maybe Mikayla was just stupid.

To be fair, he didn’t understand the book either, but that didn’t mean there was nothing to understand. Cole was convinced that deep within the book’s convoluted, never-ending sentences, its brick after brick of protracted paragraphs, its wandering tangle of words and phrases that began in one place and ended somewhere entirely different (or, more often than not, went nowhere at all, as if even the writer herself had forgotten where she was headed), was a message, a secret code meant just for him.

This belief had been confirmed late one night when Cole, alone in his room, had waded through a particularly unwieldy paragraph of The Ominous Shaft to find the first simple and somewhat declarative sentence of the entire book:

Every man, which is to say every Son, must sooner or later set out on his great and perilous journey, a journey that will inevitably end where it began: The Mother.

Cole had underlined the sentence and read it again and again, until a plan began to take shape. Though Claudia Bernard had spent most of her career teaching on the East Coast and in the Midwest, she’d recently decamped to Tracker College, after writing a scathing review of a young woman’s otherwise very well-received college sexual assault memoir. Students had revolted, and Claudia Bernard had fled. Now, she was less than a day’s drive away from Astoria and—perhaps to Cole’s advantage—at a personal and professional low. Cole saved up money working weekends at Hansen’s Athletics until he had enough to make this trip. He would go to his mother and she would welcome him, grateful that he, like her psychic cats, had heard her silent call.

Cole was about to turn to that sentence when there was an abrupt knock at the door. He stood up and peered out of the tiny peephole to the shadowy walkway of the Fortuna Inn, to the barren lot with its yellowed grass and lonely pink table and chairs. Hesitantly, he opened the door. When he looked down, sitting on an oily paper plate was the saddest sandwich he had ever seen: two pieces of thumbprint-dented white bread, rubbery pink lips of baloney sticking out between them. Cole picked it up and sniffed. It reeked of cigarettes.

Though he was starving from his journey, Cole walked to the bathroom trashcan, opened the lid with his foot, and threw the sandwich away.

The tour the next morning was led by a junior named Evan, who was majoring in Philosophy and French, the most obnoxious and useless combination of majors. Evan was distressingly handsome, with blue eyes and a head of brown hair that was somehow both boyish and urbane. He dressed how Cole imagined an Ivy League grad student would dress—oversized tweed blazer, loose-fitting jeans—rather than how a student of presumably average intellect, at a little-known liberal arts college in Humboldt County, would dress. Cole took this to mean that Evan was out of touch with his station in life.

Cole had signed up for the tour as a kind of plausible deniability for being on campus, which now felt silly and unnecessary. The group was small, three other visiting families and Cole. Tracker College, which sounded less like an institution for higher learning than a training center for bomb-sniffing dogs, wasn’t overflowing with applicants. It was the kind of school people went to when they couldn’t get in anywhere else. People like Mikayla. As Evan led the group through the heavily forested grounds, Cole felt the immensity of Claudia Bernard’s professional downfall.

The morning was overcast, a damp coastal fog hanging drearily in the air. Cole had slept poorly the night before. Despite the cool weather, he was sweating beneath the polyethylene-slicked tarp of his rain jacket, jittery with exhaustion and nerves. Evan took them to the bookstore and the dorms, to the chemistry labs and the arts center, before winding towards the squat brutalist structure that was the humanities building. From regularly scouring her faculty page on the Tracker website, Cole knew that Claudia Bernard’s office was located on the fourth floor of this building.

Cole was pretty sure that he had a memory of his mother. It was dark, either late at night or very early in the morning, and Cole was lying awake in his crib. A shadowy face loomed over him. He was scared at first, too scared to cry out, but he reached for the shape anyway, trusting it. As soon as he did, the shape lurched jerkily out of view, like someone caught staring. Cole knew about infant amnesia, knew that most people could not recall events that occurred before the age of two, but later, when he looked at the picture of Claudia Bernard on the cover of The Ominous Shaft, he was certain the shadow had been her.

For much of his life, that memory was all he’d known about his mother. “She left,” his dad would say, and leave it at that. Though Cole knew she wasn’t technically dead, he’d always pictured her birthing him in the woods like an injured animal and then slinking off to a cave to die. Asking his father for more details had seemed like an insult. During Cole’s sophomore year, his English class had read “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, and the poem had made Cole so unspeakably emotional that he’d run out of the classroom and cried in a bathroom stall. The poem affected Cole not because his father physically labored every day in the bitter cold, but because he did things like fold Cole’s laundry and drive him to robotics competitions on the weekends. Other kids’ moms fawned over this young single dad and assumed that Cole’s mother had died tragically, maybe even in childbirth. Their fridge was forever stocked with gifts of lasagna and the ingredients for beef tacos, as if Cole and his father were in a perpetual state of mourning.

That past December, shortly after Cole had been accepted into MIT through early admission, his father had finally told him about Claudia Bernard. It was late at night, and his dad was still wearing the tight-fitting Hansen’s Athletics polo that showed off his sculpted pitcher’s arm. Cole fixated on that arm as his father spoke, how it was muscular and mighty in a way that Cole’s would never be. Long past were the dreaded summer nights spent in the Hansen backyard, Cole’s father trying to hide his disappointment as Cole’s fastballs spun loosely and limply into the dirt.

Don’t aim, his father would say. Command.

Cole found the sentiment compelling, almost poetic, but he could never quite get his body to follow through on what his brain was telling it.

“Your mother didn’t leave because of you,” Cole’s father explained in the kitchen that night. “She left because she is a selfish woman.”

Mr. Hansen was almost certainly going off script. Surely the guidance was to tell his son that his mother still loved him, in her own way. Instead, his father explained that he’d met Claudia Bernard when he was playing in the minor leagues in Columbus and she was a visiting professor at Ohio State. He was twenty-one. She was forty-three. They’d met at a dive bar, gone on a few dates, fell out of contact. Then, seven months later, she showed up at his apartment door unannounced, her round, straining belly pointed at him like an accusation. In that moment, he’d fallen in love with her. They lived together for a month or so before the birth, shortly after which Claudia Bernard disappeared back to the East Coast in the dead of night without a word, leaving Cole’s father with no choice but to raise his infant son alone. He retired from the Clippers and moved back to his hometown of Astoria, where he opened Hansen’s Athletics and learned the value of a humble life. He hoped Cole, too, might come to appreciate the value of a humble life. That’s why he liked to take Cole to the West Basin Marina on summer evenings, just as the fishermen were docking their boats for the day. To Cole’s father, the fishermen were a living symbol of everything he’d come to cherish: the grounding force of family, the pleasures of physical exertion, the honor of a hard day’s work.

“I don’t want you to feel guilty,” his father said, after finishing his story. “You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me, bud.”

At this, his father had started to cry.

To Claudia Bernard, childbirth was a humiliation and motherhood a trap.

The next day, Cole and Mikayla went to a used bookstore on Commercial Street and bought all of Claudia Bernard’s books. Cole quickly learned, through reading her work, that Claudia Bernard’s thoughts on motherhood were complex. She’d once written that, the nuclear family is a fiction created to forestall the natural maternal impulse to eat one’s young. For her, the lengthy rearing period for human children was evidence of the human woman’s inferior status in the biological order. Starlings leave the nest just three weeks after birth, Claudia Bernard pointed out. Foals walk just one hour after they are born. And yet human children—those helpless, greedy flesh parasites—were dependent upon their mothers for years, often decades, gradually sucking the great life force out of her until she was left a weak and drooping crone, crying out in pathetic derangement for the thing that had destroyed her. Claudia Bernard thought Eve’s Curse was real, but that it could be overcome through medical intervention and mental fortitude. She was a staunch advocate of abortion and an equally staunch critic of assisted reproduction, which she saw as misguided: women stepping in front of the very bullet they had miraculously dodged. What her ideas implied for the fate of humanity, she never quite clarified. To Claudia Bernard, childbirth was a humiliation and motherhood a trap.

Motherhood isn’t creation, she wrote. It is nature taking control.

And yet Claudia Bernard had also written that it was the fate of every Son to journey towards his Mother. As Cole gazed up at her office in the Tracker College humanities building, he found these words beating in his chest. He balled his hands into tight fists to keep them from trembling. He’d envisioned their meeting more times than he liked to admit, and it always went more or less the same: Claudia Bernard would take one look at him and instantly recognize him as her own. If he didn’t set things into motion soon, he knew it would be too tempting to continue on with the tour, like he was just another aimless high school student with depression and a 2.2 GPA, rather than what he really was: a person chasing his destiny.

He broke for the door to the humanities building.

“Hey!” Evan called out, as Cole ducked inside. “You have to stay with the group!”

But Cole was already halfway up the building’s back stairwell, taking the steps two at a time. Everything felt inevitable and preordained.

Claudia Bernard’s office was located in the far corner of a drab U-shaped suite papered with flyers for open mic poetry nights, asexual affinity groups, and support services for survivors of emotional abuse, all things Cole had read enough by and about his mother to know she actively despised.

Her door was shut. Cole hesitated before knocking.

“It’s open,” a voice called from within.

Cole recognized its clipped nasality immediately. After the publication of The Ominous Shaft in the ’90s, Claudia Bernard had been an occasional presence on a certain subset of quasi-intellectual evening talk shows, where she was brought on to critique or defend whatever cultural flashpoint touched upon the amorphous concept of “contemporary feminism.” In videos of these appearances, which Cole had unearthed on YouTube and watched obsessively, she would stride onto the stage in black tights and a leather jacket, wearing no makeup except for a swipe of red lipstick, and talk rapaciously at the host for fifteen minutes, not ceding a second of her airtime. Claudia Bernard wasn’t beautiful, so to speak, but the sheer force of her presence on the stage made beauty irrelevant. Cole admired her utter self-containment, her ability, through the power of her intellect alone, to turn ideas into something real, an object—in her case, a book—you could touch. She spoke with the frenetic speed and intensity of a person whose thoughts were forever outpacing her ability to verbalize them, giving her the slightly crazed affect of a greyhound chasing a mechanical rabbit around a track, her prize forever a snout’s length out of reach.

Cole’s hand shook as he opened the door. Claudia Bernard sat behind a desk, pen in hand as she stared angrily at a piece of paper laid out before her, her dark eyebrows almost comically aslant. She wore a white linen shirt, left unbuttoned over a black tank top. The skin on her chest had turned leathery and dark, in the way that the skin on all white women’s chests seems to turn leathery and dark sooner or later. Her short brown hair was shot through with wiry strands of gray. She seemed older, more tired, than Cole had expected, but with the taut, sinewy frame of someone who ate very little and swam laps every day. She looked like a woman who had fought valiantly against the urge to buy chunky turquoise jewelry and won.

“Seminar’s full,” she said, without looking up.

“What?” Cole said.

“The 401 seminar is full and I’m not taking any more applications,” she said. “You’ll have to apply again in the fall.”

Claudia Bernard’s office was airless and hot. Cole scanned the room, hoping to find something to comment upon, but it looked how he assumed every other professor’s office looked: dim lighting, book-lined shelves, a wilted fern in the corner. To the right of her desk sat a tower of what Cole recognized as her latest book, You’re Overthinking It, a 700-page critique of the left’s gender politics. It had sold poorly and received almost universally negative reviews.

“I’m not a student here,” Cole said. “My name is Cole Hansen.”

At this, Claudia Bernard put down her pen and looked up, her expression difficult to read.

After a long pause, she stood and walked out from behind her desk. For a flash, Cole thought it was happening, that she was opening her arms and coming to him. Instead, she stopped at her bookshelf and pulled off an ancient-looking hardcover.

“I thought you’d applied to the seminar,” she said, flipping through the book’s yellowing pages before returning it to the shelf. “It’s one of the most popular in the department. Students pick a feminist from history and role play as them during our discussions for the rest of the semester. They like it because it’s basically theater. I like it because I don’t have to listen to any of their actual opinions.”

Claudia Bernard pulled a second book off the shelf and returned to her desk. She did not invite Cole into her office or offer him a seat. He leaned his weight against her doorframe. Claudia Bernard looked down at her paper and drew what appeared to be a very large X across it.

“I’m actually having the students over for a party tonight,” she continued. “This generation is very strange. None of them drink. None of them have sex. I buy bottles of wine for these things, but all they want is flavored seltzer. I’m so sick of looking at those fucking cans.”

Cole wasn’t sure why his mother was going on to him about flavored seltzer—if her aimless chattering was a sign of anxiety, or if she really was as she seemed: completely unmoved by his arrival.

“I hate flavored seltzer,” Cole found himself saying. “And I have sex.”

Claudia Bernard looked up from the paper and stared at him placidly.

“Sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you that,” Cole said. “But I do. I have a girlfriend.”

Claudia Bernard turned and stared out her window for several minutes, as if lost in thought.

“I always thought my son would be gay,” she finally said. She turned back to him and shook her head. “Are you touring Tracker?”

“Yes,” Cole replied. “Well, no. I start at MIT next fall.”

“MIT,” Claudia Bernard repeated, nodding in what Cole hoped was approval. “I know an Egyptologist in the archeology department there. Carl Freir. You should look him up.”

“I’ll be in the School of Engineering,” Cole said, “but yeah, maybe.”

Claudia Bernard again put down her pen.

“Why are you here, Cole?” she asked. “Your father isn’t dying, is he?”

“No,” Cole said, the tops of his ears burning. “Of course not. It’s my spring break.”

Cole knew this explained nothing, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He felt dizzy and short of breath, as if there was something tightening around his neck like a vise. He tried to inhale, but the breath caught in his throat. Claudia Bernard blurred before him.

“Are you alright?” she said.

Cole nodded and turned away, bracing himself against the doorframe. His mother let out a belabored sigh.

“Party starts at 7 PM,” Claudia Bernard said. “1422 Rose Hill Road. There’ll be food.”

She returned to her grading with a level of concentration that Cole understood to be her version of a goodbye. He turned and walked back down the hallway towards the stairwell, only realizing when he exited the building moments later that he was shaking.

That morning, he’d parked his car behind the library, in the far corner of a quiet lot canopied by weeping fir trees. He staggered back there now, pawing at his neck and heaving the damp coastal air into his lungs.

Once safely inside the steel womb of his car, Cole rested his skull against the headrest and tried to steady his shuddering breaths. The persistent gray of Fortuna’s skies was just familiar enough to calm him. Rain pattered lightly on the car’s roof. Slowly, the invisible grip around his neck began to weaken, and Cole, succumbing to the heaviness in his lids, let his eyes drift closed.

Cole dreamt he was in freefall, tumbling down some long and narrow passageway—an elevator shaft, maybe, or a well. Images flashed as he fell. Great cats prowling in deserts. Gold stone edifices breaching and rising up from the sand. Flowing red hair and scallop shells. Old hands crooked with cold.

Eventually, he hit the passage’s bottom and found himself in a dark and dripping cave, its damp tunnels twisting and disappearing into endless black. Cole began crawling through the cave on his stomach, dragging his limp body over rubble and slime. The atmosphere around him was sulfuric and thick, devoid of all oxygen. In the distance, he saw a blinking brightness, but couldn’t tell if it was fading or growing brighter.

Like some limbless creature, apodous and belly-bound, Cole inched towards it, straining for the light.

Cole awoke to a ding from his phone. It was 5:45 PM. Outside the car, darkness was descending slowly. Mikayla had texted him steadily elongating strings of question marks. ??? ???? ???????? Once again, Cole did not respond. Instead, he typed Claudia Bernard’s address into his phone. It was a fifteen minute walk from campus. If he left now, he would arrive at his mother’s house an hour before her party.

To steady himself, Cole pulled The Ominous Shaft out of his backpack.

Every man, which is to say every Son, must sooner or later set out on his great and perilous journey, he read. A journey that will inevitably end where it all began: the Mother.

Cole closed the book, tucked it into his backpack, and set out on foot towards his mother.

Claudia Bernard lived in a squat, ranch-style house that sat alone at the top of a steep hill. Its front windows glowed amber from within, beckoning as Cole approached. When she answered the door, Claudia Bernard was holding a fat-faced gray cat with gigantic jade-green eyes. In her other hand, she clutched an alarmingly full glass of red wine.

“You’re early,” she said.

Claudia Bernard did not attempt to hide her annoyance, but she ushered Cole inside. The entryway opened up into a pleasant, warmly-lit living room. It was furnished with a burgundy and gold rug, an overstuffed sofa, several arm chairs, and a dark wood coffee table, topped with a stack of oversized art books, arranged at tasteful angles. Claudia Bernard let the cat drop to the floor. It scampered to a chair by the fireplace.

“I’m cooking dinner,” Claudia Bernard said, already turning and walking down a short hallway towards what Cole assumed was the kitchen. “Make yourself at home.”

His mother disappeared through the doorway without inviting him to follow. Unsure of what to do, Cole took a seat on the sofa, his backpack still on. He crossed his hands politely in his lap. The cat watched him from the armchair with the same placid stare as Claudia Bernard. Cole stared back, wondering what it knew.

After a few minutes, Cole stood up and examined the collection of objects lining the mantle of his mother’s fireplace. He hoped he might find displayed there some evidence of her enduring love for him: an ultrasound photo, his first-ever baby shoe. Instead, Cole’s gaze caught on a small replica statuette of the Venus of Willendorf, a Paleolithic limestone idol that Claudia Bernard had written about in The Ominous Shaft. Cole remembered the passage because of its strangeness. Claudia Bernard had described the Venus as a primitive art object, from a time before beauty, before identity, before the fierce Apollonian line arrived to shape and contain the unwieldy and ugly proliference of nature. Cole picked up the statuette and held her stone weight in his palm. She was bulging and bulbous, swollen with herself. Her breasts were poorly-formed mounds, her stomach rising up over her hips and pouring down over her pubic bone like dough, the stubs of her legs footless and fat. Cole stared at her. She had no face or eyes with which to stare back.

Without thinking, Cole shoved the Venus into his backpack and looked towards the door. He considered fleeing, running back down the hill to his car. Instead he forced himself towards the enticing garlic-and-onion smell emanating from the kitchen. The cat followed, surveying the intruder’s movements.

Cole’s mother stood with her back to him at the stove, the glass of red wine to her left, a giant steel pot to her right. The lights were dim. Along the counter sat a neat row of wine bottles and glasses. Cole realized only then that he hadn’t eaten anything since the day before. The smell in the kitchen was so good, and Cole’s hunger so sudden and deep, he thought he might pass out from the sheer proximity to food. He hovered in his mother’s doorway, waiting once again.

“Um,” he finally said.

Claudia Bernard turned around.

“Oh,” she said, almost like she had forgotten he was in the house.

Cole stepped towards the stove. Claudia Bernard moved aside so he could peer over the lid of the pot into a deep, bubbling red.

“My mother’s Bolognese,” she said, giving the pot a gentle stir.

“Can I have some?” Cole asked.

“It should really simmer for another hour,” Claudia Bernard said, but she gestured towards the round table at the center of the kitchen. Cole took a seat and dropped his backpack on the floor. After a minute, Claudia Bernard placed a plate of pasta and a glass of red wine in front of him. She picked up the cat and took a seat across the table.

Cole nearly groaned as he took the first bite. It was perhaps the most exquisite thing he had ever tasted—rich and sharp and unexpectedly sweet, the kind of deliciousness that hit like a drug, so intense that it almost reconfigured his sense of self. He twirled the noodles around the tines of the fork and slurped the sauce from each one through pursed lips. Claudia Bernard watched in silence as he ate. The fading light cast long shadows across the room. When he was finished, Cole pushed the plate aside and drank until his glass of wine was empty. The cat purred, its jade eyes trained on Cole.

“You seem like a smart boy,” Claudia Bernard finally said. “I take it you’ve read my work?”

“Some of it,” Cole replied.

“Then you know where I stand on all of this,” she said, gesturing vaguely.

“All of this?” Cole said.

“You, me, this whole thing.”

Cole could only assume that she meant being his mother.

Claudia Bernard picked up the wine bottle and refilled his glass.

“I was forty-three when I got pregnant,” she continued. “I didn’t even think it was possible to conceive at that stage in my life. I half-convinced myself that it was some kind of miracle, that I had a divine duty to see things through to the end. But as soon as I did, I knew I’d made a horrible mistake. I’d betrayed myself and everything I’ve ever believed in.”

She looked down at the animal on her lap and added, “It wasn’t personal.”

Cole scoffed defensively. He searched his brain for something to say but nothing came.

“Look, Cole, I know you’ve come a long way to see me,” Claudia Bernard said. “What exactly is it that you want?”

Cole reached into his backpack and pulled out his copy of The Ominous Shaft. Opening to the underlined page, Cole slid the book towards his mother. She widened her eyes and blinked at it, like she was looking at something from her past that she didn’t even know if she remembered. She picked a pair of reading glasses off the table and scanned the text, mouthing the lines under her breath.

The Mother will meet the Son and consume him, devouring him with the obliterative force of her embrace.

“Oh, Cole,” she said, when she was done. Her voice was disappointed, almost pitying. “Did you even finish the paragraph?”

She pushed the book back to him. Cole read on.

And at the end of this long and fruitless venture, this slow march towards fate, the Mother will meet the Son and consume him, devouring him with the obliterative force of her embrace.

Cole placed The Ominous Shaft back on the dinner table.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

Claudia Bernard stood up and the cat leapt from her lap. She laughed to herself as she walked to the counter and opened another bottle of wine.

“No one seems to, do they?” she said. “But that’s not my problem, is it?”

The doorbell chimed.

“Shit,” Claudia Bernard said. “The students. Grab some glasses, will you?”

Claudia Bernard snatched the freshly opened bottle of wine from the counter and hurried out of the kitchen. The cat followed. Cole trailed a few feet behind, clutching wine glass stems between his fingers. He waited in the darkened hallway as his mother rushed towards the door. The first of the seminar students had arrived and were standing in the entryway, cool night air blowing in. Two of them held cases of pink and yellow seltzer in their hands.

“Close the door!” Claudia Bernard shrieked. “Don’t let Dianna out! And put those fucking cans away. Tonight, we are drinking wine.”

Cole emerged from the hallway with the glasses crowded in his hands. He recognized one of the students as Evan, the handsome tour guide from that morning. He was wearing the same tweed blazer and loose blue jeans as before, except now his blazer was adorned with a nametag that said Simone.

“Bring those here,” Claudia Bernard said to Cole.

He began handing the students glasses, which Claudia Bernard then promptly filled.

“Hey, I recognize you,” Evan said. “You’re the kid who bailed on my tour earlier today.”

Claudia Bernard looked back and forth between Evan and Cole, as if put off by the fact that they knew each other.

“This is Cole,” she said curtly. “He’s visiting Tracker. We’re going to show him a good time.”

In The Ominous Shaft, Claudia Bernard praised the Dionysian. She believed something vital had been lost in culture when the logical, restrained Apollo prevailed over the ecstatic, primal Dionysus. Cole knew this, and so, it seemed, did her students, because they did as Claudia Bernard demanded that night: they drank. Cole drank, and so did Simone and Gloria and Audre and Emmeline and bell and Susan and Maya and Judith and Angela and Betty, names that belonged not to the students themselves but to their classroom avatars.

Cole stood in a corner with his wine glass in hand. The students had commandeered his mother’s living room with a sense of entitlement he would have found disrespectful if Claudia Bernard hadn’t so clearly welcomed it. They had sprawled out across his mother’s floor and piled themselves on her couch and armchairs, balancing heaping plates of Bolognese on their laps. Claudia Bernard walked proudly amongst them, filling up their glasses and nodding abstractedly as they spoke to her. They all called her by her first name, suggesting a closeness that Cole envied. By the end of the next hour, the students had consumed five bottles of wine and plunged into the liquor cabinet to bring out the gin, which they were now mixing with the lukewarm seltzers.

Claudia Bernard was the hot and frightening sun around which the entire party revolved. Her work, which Cole guessed most of her students would find distasteful and dated, was beside the point. The point was her. Around her students, Claudia Bernard seemed to simultaneously expand and shrivel. She became louder and brighter, at the same time that something inside of her seemed to sink in on itself, like the very thing that was giving her life was also slowly taking it away. She was drinking just as heavily as the twenty-year-olds in the room, and Cole thought he could see it making her unsteady on her feet.

As the night went on, the party grew. What had begun as a small gathering of ten seminar students ballooned to a party of fifteen, twenty, thirty. Cole assumed that the students had invited friends, and that Claudia Bernard, in her commitment to hedonism and her lax attitude towards campus decorum, was more than happy to accommodate. Someone turned off the lights and pushed the furniture against the walls. Evan—who, as far as Cole could tell, was the only boy in his mother’s seminar—put on Madonna’s Erotica.

As the opening club cover of “Fever” pumped through the room, Claudia Bernard pushed her way onto the dance floor. She began writhing slowly, swaying her hips and running her hands up and down her thighs. The room fell silent and still, watching her—in horror or enchantment, Cole couldn’t tell. Claudia Bernard threw back her head and bared her neck to the crowd, who contemplated it, contemplated all that blood coursing towards that brain.

The song went on and Claudia Bernard’s movements took on a more interpretative approach. She crouched and crooked her long, lanky arms towards the ceiling, towards some invisible light. She remained hunched there, bobbing up and down ever so slightly on her knees, as if energy was coming up through the ground and out through her outstretched fingertips. Cole saw a flash of Claudia Bernard’s former self, posing on the cover of The Ominous Shaft. Madonna sang, What a lovely way to burn.

“She’s so amazing,” a voice next to him whispered. Cole turned. A tall, bony girl was standing by his side. Her brown hair was cut to her chin, and she had the kind of tiny bangs that looked less like an aesthetic choice and more like a hairline issue. She wore a short floral dress, black tights, and a heavy canvas jacket. The corners of her lips were stained red, either from the windsor his mother’s Bolognese.

“I’m Melanie,” she said, then winced. “I mean, Betty.”

“As in Friedan?” Cole asked. He knew Betty Friedan—she was one of the only feminists they’d learned about in his high school history class.

“I wanted to be Catharine MacKinnon but Claudia threatened to kick me out if I was,” Betty continued. “Do you go to Tracker?”

“No.”

“How do you know Claudia, then?”

“I don’t,” Cole said.

Betty nodded, as if she didn’t quite hear him, and kept talking. Cole was drunk. It wasn’t his first time drinking alcohol, but Cole always wound up walking Mikayla home when she got too wasted and never drinking much himself. Now, the world was churning beneath his feet. Betty’s words seemed to come at him from a far off place. She was saying something about consent and carceral feminism, and how Claudia Bernard was a true radical because she didn’t care what anyone thought about her, she only cared about the work.

“I mean, what other professor would throw a party like this for her students?” Betty said. “Apparently, last semester, she got so fucked up at one of these that she passed out in the bathroom. I guess she went on some nonsense monologue about how she has a gay son named Sandro who lives in Ohio.”

“What?” Cole said.

Betty smiled.

“That’s all I know,” she said. “Do you want to dance?”

Before Cole could answer, Betty took his hand and pulled him onto the dance floor. Between the end of his mother’s performance and the start of the new song, the floor had filled. The living room was now seething with sweating bodies. Cole’s sense of time squirmed. He scanned the fray for his mother but she was nowhere to be found.

Betty pulled him close and parted his legs slightly with her knee. Cole put his hand on her shoulder, decided that was too high and put it on her hip, and then decided that was too low and settled on her waist, the gentle curve that widened to her hips. Madonna was singing, Go down, where it’s warm inside / Go down, where I cannot hide / Go down, where all life begins. Two students, who had earlier introduced themselves as Judith and Angela, were dancing next to them in a similar way, only slower, sort of out of step with the music, but in tune with something else Cole couldn’t hear and maybe couldn’t even understand, something totally internal to them. Cole tried to copy their rhythm. Betty seemed to like that, because she leaned in closer and started kissing his neck.

“You look just like her, you know,” Betty whispered into his ear, rubbing the side of her face against his neck.

Cole knew in that moment that he could probably go back to Betty’s place and sleep with her if he wanted to. As exciting as the prospect of having sex with a college girl would have seemed to him mere days ago, he didn’t want to, not now. Cole felt hot and panicky, drained of all desire, that same claustrophobic sensation of something tightening around his windpipe. He pushed Betty away and fumbled down the hallway towards the kitchen, grasping at his neck in an attempt to free it from whatever invisible confine was slowly contracting around it.

The kitchen was dark. Cole lurched towards the sink in search of water, but a pair of bodies was intertwined against the counter there, lit from behind by the moon’s white glow. Cole recognized the back of Evan’s tweed jacket. A pair of slender hands were wrapped around his head, long fingers digging into the dense curls of his brown hair. The moonlight illuminated the copy of The Ominous Shaft that Cole had left on the table.

Evan grunted slightly and lifted the body onto the counter. As his partner reangled, Cole saw that it was his mother. Her legs clutched around Evan, securing him closer to her. Evan was working his way down her body, kissing first her mouth and then her neck and then her chest. Cole again struggled to breathe. The invisible hand closed tightly around his neck.

If he didn’t leave, Cole thought, he would almost certainly die.

Claudia Bernard opened her eyes and her gaze caught Cole’s. She held it through the darkness, her eyes steady and bright, as if daring him to hold on for a moment longer.

Cole knocked into the kitchen chair as he grabbed his backpack off the floor. Heaving for breath that didn’t come, he ran out of the kitchen and through the living room, past the dance floor, and to the front door.

Dianna, his mother’s cat, sat in the entryway, her tail curled around her soft gray body. When Cole opened the door, she bolted outside, bursting across the lawn and disappearing into the blackness, as if she had never existed at all.

Cole followed her into the cold night, sucking air into his lungs. When he reached the gravel sidewalk, he turned around to face the house. Through the window, he could see the students dancing. They had ceased to be individual bodies and become one undulating mass.

Cole reached into his backpack and dug around until his hand hit something solid. He pulled out the Venus of Willendorf and tossed her up and down in his palm a few times, savoring her satisfying stone weight, before pulling his arm back as far as it would go.

Don’t aim, he thought. Command.

For the first time, Cole’s body listened to what his brain was telling it.

Claudia Bernard’s window shattered as he ran.

Cole wasn’t sure where he was going, but he ran until he was too tired to run anymore and then he walked. A light rain fell from the darkened sky, slowly soaking through his shoes to his socks. Cole’s car was still parked on the Tracker campus, but he’d forgotten where that was, and he was too drunk to drive anyway. He had no sense of time and place, but he vaguely understood, somewhere deep in his addled subconscious, that he was stumbling towards the highway, towards home. Not once but twice, Cole bent over and puked into the roadside grass, his vomit as red as blood. His phone was dead, which meant he couldn’t call his father, or Mikayla, or anyone else.

Night was beginning to lift by the time Cole made it to the highway, the soaring redwoods emerging through the misty shadows. He walked along the road’s shoulder for what seemed like miles. He knew his drunkenness was fading when he became aware of the frigid ache in his feet.

A car slowed down behind him, bathing the road in a white glare. Cole dropped into the ditch lining the road to let it pass. The car slowed further. For a brief moment, Cole thought that it was his mother, coming to find him at last.

“What the shit are you doing?” a voice called from the front seat of a mint green Ford.

Cole turned around. It was Jan, the woman from the Fortuna Inn.

“Get in,” she said. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”

Cole didn’t argue. He climbed out of the ditch and into the passenger seat of the car and let Jan take him wherever it was she was going, which, as it turned out, was just five minutes down the road, back to the Fortuna Inn.

“What happened, son?” she asked, as she parked the car.

Cole began to cry, big sputtering sobs so overpowering that his entire body shook. When Jan reached out to him, Cole collapsed into the softness of her body, letting the dense smokiness emanating from her engulf and lull him.

“It’s alright, baby,” she said, rubbing her hands down his back. “It’s alright.”

Once his weeping had subsided, Jan walked him, like an injured athlete, to the pink plastic chairs sitting on the patchy lawn between the highway and motel. Cole was still sobbing, but his cries were softer now, coming out in little chirps, like a baby bird. The cars driving by sounded like gently crashing ocean waves. Cole shivered in the early morning cold.

Without a word, Jan disappeared briefly and returned with a blanket, two mugs of coffee, and the same type of dismal sandwich she’d brought him the night before. Cole wrapped himself in the blanket and took the sandwich and steaming mug. The coffee tasted grainy and bitter.

“Good boy,” Jan said.

The sky was brightening now, softening into the muted pink of a kitten’s nose. Mist clung to the branches of the trees across the highway. Jan studied them, looking untroubled and at peace. Cole picked up the plate and took a bite of the sandwich. It tasted smoky and stale. He swallowed anyway. It was exactly what he needed.

As he chewed, Cole remembered the copy of The Ominous Shaft that he’d left on his mother’s table, marooned in that brilliant shaft of moonlight. He had the urge to go back for it. He let the urge pass. This felt like wisdom.

Memoir Is a Form of Drag

Posted on June 12, 2026June 11, 2026 by EL Assistant2

Why is the act of painting one’s face so charged with gendered implications? How might makeup smear the lines drawn between “feminine” and “masculine”? And what can drag culture teach all of us about the role of artifice—and art—in constructing identity?

Although our books differ in genre and scope, they shimmer with striking similarities. Montesanti’s Drag Thing is a memoir by a millennial writer raised in Michigan and Alaska; G’Sell’s Lipstick is cultural criticism written by an author about a decade older. But a quick glance at the covers reveal the books’ obvious connection: makeup, glam, and the undeniable pleasure of self-adornment.

An ode to alternative drag culture, although not without forays into the mainstream, Drag Thing explores Montesanti’s mental health crisis and how it becomes entangled with her onstage persona. Starting out as a drag king, she soon becomes a “drag thing”—a performer who defies gendered classification. Set against a backdrop of increasing danger for queer and trans people, Drag Thing is both high camp and a rallying cry for building queer community as a form of resistance.

Rather than a traditional history of the object, Lipstick is a roving exploration of gender, sexuality, power, and performance—from MAC to Glossier, from Marilyn Monroe to Chappell Roan. Crucially, the book includes the voices of women (cis and trans) and nonbinary folks interviewed by the author in 2024. The final chapter, “A Femme-Friendlier Future?”, honors the ways in which changing attitudes toward lipstick reflect larger generational shifts.

Both books aim for multi-faceted—and glittery—forms of truth-telling. We conversed online to discuss our books, the power of radical reinvention, and the magic that comes with it.

Eileen G’Sell: You describe the art of drag as an intoxicating blend of “grandiosity . . . exaggerated personas too large to be contained by any conventional human body . . . and sometimes offensive self-confidence and self-admiration.” As you experimented with being a “drag king” versus a “drag thing,” how did your approach to painting the face evolve?

Gabe Montesanti: I am surprised how suddenly my evolution from “king” to “thing” happened. When I started performing as a king, I was painting my face with three layers of concealer, followed by bronzer to accentuate my temples and widen my nose, and I always topped it off with an eyeliner mustache. At that point, before I discovered “thingness,” I was aiming for some version of a working-class, heterosexual version of Fender Bender. All it took was one trip to Mimi’s Beauty Supply and I was an uncategorizable “drag thing.” There were several big changes to my wardrobe, and some small changes to my face like fake eyelashes, but the most significant change was the lipstick.

EG: Really? That’s fascinating. Lipstick really can be identity-reconfiguring. It just changes the way your face looks more than anything else.

GM: I put black lipstick on my lips and a pink matte lipstick mustache that perfectly matched my 14 dollar wig. Maybe if I had read your book around this time, Eileen, I would have had some clue why lipstick was a portal for me into the complicated territory of “thingness.” It wrenched me into another version of a performative self: one that craved whimsy and reinvention and despised classification.

Lipstick was a portal for me into the complicated territory of ‘thingness.’

EG: For both of our books, the ability to visually reinvent yourself is key—which can be a real challenge when it comes to doing justice to it in writing. What motivated you to include your own illustrations?

GM: Drag Thing is a book about self-invention, self-creation, and art. I had two partial versions of the manuscript. One was a traditional, full-text version, and one had a watercolor on every page and a small amount of text. Arsenal Pulp Press bought the book, and together, we designed a hybrid version that worked better than both versions I had previously: 41 watercolors placed only where they really counted.

EG: In your hand-drawn images, many of the figures present two faces or silhouettes. Given that your book candidly explores your experience with bi-polar disorder, was that double-face motif intended as a gesture to what you were going through?

GM: I never thought that I was drawing people with two faces to represent the poles of my disorder. I was just drawing, which evolved into this somewhat cubist style soon after I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. But I still sometimes flip through the notebooks from group therapy sessions when I was crawling out of my skin with mania. The therapist gave me colored pencils, hoping I could chill out, or at least not distract the other people who were talking. I drew anything that came into my buzzing mind, but the double faces were a constant motif. Only about a year later during COVID lockdown when I was doing a virtual art group with some roller derby friends did I realize that my faces might be trying to tell me something.

EG: I love how openly your book, both in prose and in image, questions not only gender essentialism, but the idea that sexual orientation itself is fixed. You write of a drag king who took joy in complicating “queer girl desire” through performative maleness onstage. In the process of writing, did you find yourself encountering any new forms of desire—for the queer subjects you write about or for yourself?

GM: The first king I witnessed was in Houston, at age 19, when I had recently come out and was learning more about drag history. That king was sexy, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. But like Madonna for you, he also opened up an entire new realm of possibilities for who I was becoming. I guess you could say I desire myself when I don’t doubt myself. That’s a big theme in the book: selfhood. Since Drag Thing opens at an emotional low, I naturally encountered a lot of queer people in the drag scene who fully embodied what I thought of as a full and complete self, or who knew exactly who they were when they stepped into their persona. Those were the people I desired: to be with or to become, especially in the beginning.

I desire myself when I don’t doubt myself.

EG: Like your book, if more subtly, Lipstick traces an attraction to self-adornment and performance to a working-class, Catholic, Midwestern background—where, in my case at least, bright lipstick felt rebellious rather than capitulatory to patriarchy. Your book engages more directly with family trauma, and how drag helped you reinvent yourself in light of estrangement. Did you feel closer to your family in writing about them so closely? Or was it more a way of carving out a space for yourself outside their conservative, homophobic parameters?

GM: I was once in a poetry class with francine j. harris, and we were talking about how the only way to write about a hole is by describing the dirt left around the hole. How else can one possibly write about nothingness? I guess I felt the same way as I was trying to write about my family. All I had was nearly 10-year-old information to try to describe the grief of an absence. I’m not sure if that made me feel closer to them or further away. What I do know is that I had no idea that so many forms of grief would surface in this book when I started it. Now that I’ve written two books that required full immersion, I have realized that’s just part of the gig. I can’t go in thinking I know where I’ll end up or what the themes will be. I just have to live it . . . and take a lot of notes.

EG: In a way, memoir might prove its own sort of drag. What are the challenges in representing yourself in such a pivotal and creative—but also torturous—time of your life? How does the art of writing about queer identity, joy, and pain compare to performing in front of a live audience?

GM: I definitely believe memoir is a sort of drag. In workshops, I was taught not to refer to myself or the writer as “I” or “you,” but as “the narrator” or, even more fittingly, “the persona”—a way of acknowledging that the persona depicted on the page is just a description of the you who has a body. One of the most challenging parts of representing myself during the time depicted in Drag Thing is that it is incredibly vulnerable, but so is drag. It takes nerve to be a writer, knowing that anything could happen once those stage lights flicker on and the curtains open.

Some of my favorite moments in Lipstick were where you touched on how a painted lip crossed into drag or gender deviance, commenting, “Bowie’s and Poison’s heterosexuality [was] intact; Boy George’s and RuPaul’s homosexuality inferable.” Many drag artists would agree that putting on makeup can be a form of art, not conformity to fashion or method of self-improvement. What are the most significant examples of this distinction between art and fashion or self-improvement that you’ve witnessed?

I have no interest in appearing ‘naturally’ beautiful in a feminine way. Artifice is it for me.

EG: Part of why I wanted to write about lipstick specifically is that it has long been such a conspicuous signifier of femininity—so much so that even when cis, straight men might dally with nail polish or eyeliner these days, it’s unusual for them to paint their lips. But at the same time, as is the case with drag especially, challenging the typical hyper-femininity affiliated with bright lip color can be a source of play.

In my second chapter, “Painted Ladies and Painted Men,” I build off philosopher Becca Rothfeld’s argument that, as she put it in her essay collection All Things Are Too Small, “the aesthetic resides in excess and aimlessness, in wants that spill far beyond the narrow bounds of need.” To address your question about art versus “self-improvement,” when a person—usually a woman—feels the need to paint her lips to perk up her femininity, then at best it can be a creative take on a practical goal, not art. Lipstick is art when the goal and effect is to be excessive—even disruptive—for its own sake. That’s why lipstick often feels the most “artful” outside the context of cishetero femininity.

GM: I totally see that excess and disruptiveness in drag. Have you ever seen yourself, as a cis woman, as a kind of drag artist?

EG: I have never performed in drag onstage, but I’ve long embraced unexpected, excessively bright lipstick shades as a way of denaturalizing my own femininity. The older I get, the more it feels aberrant. It’s my own everyday micro-drag, I suppose. I have no interest in appearing “naturally” beautiful in a feminine way; artifice is it for me. And as I write in the book, looking fake feels more honest.

GM: I love that. As a person who has rejected lipstick at various points of her life and also embraced it, I resonated with the paragraph in which you asserted your love of lipstick while also asking the question, “Was I, like millions of other women, unwittingly participating in my own subjugation by painting my pucker a piquant pink?” You immediately answer that question. Of course not. But then came this line: “I’m inclined to see vanity as neither vice nor virtue . . . But just because something isn’t inherently good or bad doesn’t mean it can’t lead to good and bad outcomes for different people.” Why did you choose lipstick out of all the cosmetics that are perhaps neither vice nor virtue?

EG: Quite simply, because lipstick transforms the face the most overtly and the most efficiently. It’s also the beauty tool conflated the most with femininity, which is why phrases like “lipstick lesbian” or “lipstick feminist” even exist and conjure up a sense of inherent contradiction—even though, as I argue in the book, they needn’t!

Self-adornment has always felt risky, erotic, and daring.

GM: Lipstick was the key ingredient in transforming my aesthetic from “king” to “thing”—unlocking that discovery was really important for both of us. You mention the pressure to adopt a more subdued style, but say, “I’d rather be a gadfly in a glittery dress (and a matching lip) than conform to what feels bland and predictable.” I totally agree. You say in the acknowledgments that almost 100 people contributed to a lipstick questionnaire and made themselves available for conversation and follow-up questions. How did that process of collecting data change your own lipstick habits? I’m thinking of your interview with Smitha, a Gen Z woman who witnessed slut-shaming and stigmatization of girls who wore bright lipstick in middle school.

EG: A woman from an older generation than Smitha might have felt judgmental or protective of a young teen wearing lipstick. Collecting so many stories from women and nonbinary people across generations threw into relief what I already suspected: Attitudes toward self-objectification and self-adornment are predicated largely on when and how you grew up. If anything, writing the book made me feel more empathetic—both to women older than me who experienced more overt forms of sexism and the strict beauty standards that usually came with them, and younger women who don’t necessarily see beauty culture as fraught or sexist at all.

Writing the book also made me feel more queer in a lot of ways. My fascination with lipstick, fashion, color, excess—none of it really felt attached to attracting a male partner at any point in my life. If anything, my flamboyance has been a turn-off with straight men! Self-adornment has always felt risky, erotic, and daring in ways that I think are linked to my own attraction to both the hyper-femme and hyper-masc. I grew up fishing with my uncles and wrapped the worms around my fingers as rings. Who does that?

GM: Mad respect for finding the bling anywhere you could! You were way more imaginative than me with the worms. I loved seeing photographs of you as a girl—in addition to the images of pop culture icons, suffragettes, and historical advertisements. What was the selection process like for the visuals? And, out of all the questionnaire answers you received, how did you pick the handwritten ones published in the book?

EG: Securing image rights was mighty difficult, but imperative for representing key lipstick icons like Grace Jones and kd lang, the first openly lesbian brand ambassador for a lipstick. With both the images and handwritten testimonies, I chose those that conveyed a narrative and identity that was entirely not mine. I’m a pasty white, femme-presenting xennial. There is no reason to include images of other women in this category—or close to it—if my goal is to reflect the fabulous spectrum of lipsticked faces over the last half century. As far as the handwritten stories, they are separated into generations, to reflect a salient lipstick memory for one particular woman (some cis, some trans, some gender-fluid). Handwriting is another means of visually reflecting both generational and gendered expectations and norms—which is why I wanted to include it. It’s also very personal, even vulnerable, as arguably every woman’s relationship to self adornment is at some point.

I Glimpsed My Future at a High School Speech Tournament

Posted on June 11, 2026June 10, 2026 by Katie

Original Oratory by James Davis

In every speech kid, I see a version of myself that I love with frightening intensity: 14 years old, a closeted freshman at Liberty High School with long curly Weird Al Yankovic hair, thick glasses, blisteringly cheap dress shoes, and something to say.

It was the second week of the new millennium. The Columbine massacre was less than a year old, its aftershocks still rumbling in my hometown, Colorado Springs. That Columbine High School was still holding its annual speech-and-debate tournament struck my whole team as unlikely and courageous, a tribute to the value of our shared nerdy passion. Everyone had signed up to compete in at least one category, motivated by reverence, ambition, and, at least in my case, morbid curiosity. I imagined inspecting the walls for bullet holes and the corners of the halls for spent casings, a different sort of forensics.

This line of thinking was a distraction, though. Mostly, I wanted to win. Columbine was a Denver tourney, and Denver tourneys were a big deal: swanky, prestigious, competitive. I had never been to one, nor had I ever competed in this category, Original Oratory. Mostly, I had done Interpretation of Humorous Literature, putting on a little one-man show called “Bloodless Macbeth: A Humorous Reading or Skit.” It didn’t know exactly what it was, and neither did I, but I did okay with it. I placed third at a couple of novice tourneys, got Honorable Mentions at two varsity meets, but had yet to distinguish myself among the big dogs. Original Oratory, I thought, might be my chance.

The Friday night before the tournament, I went down to the basement in my black pleather loafers to practice my speech. At the bottom of the stairs, an unplugged treadmill gathered dust, its belt stained from our dog Max’s pee from when my older brother, Mike, tried to make him run. The basement was Mike’s territory. His windowless bedroom occupied one corner, and a mess of his unfinished schoolwork, football equipment, and dime bags covered the green baize of our secondhand coin-op gulley table. To my great relief, Mike wasn’t home, leaving me free to rehearse in the empty family room.

I laid all five pages of my speech on the pool table beside Mike’s bong and set the timer on my digital watch. Despite the five A.M. wakeup call, I stayed up till at least midnight delivering the speech over and over to the basement walls. When Mike fought with Mom, he would sling the Bakelite balls into the plaster; I used the dents to practice my eye contact. My speech would be judged on thesis, evidence, word choice, and organization, but delivery was the most important, I knew.

Here’s what I remember of the speech, 25 years later:

The Gift of Individuality

Ah, individuality. Perhaps no gift is more precious. But wait a minute! Why do we treat it like a sweater from that aunt nobody likes?! [Pause for laughter.] Our individuality should be recognized for its value, both monetary and otherwise.

[walk left]

Individuality can be quite profitable. Take Macy Gray, for instance, the chanteuse whose inimitable, scratchy voice made her the subject of mockery as a kid [source: VH1, Before They Were Stars]. Or what about Tyra Banks, top modèle, whose classmates would make fun of her beanpole body and enormous forehead [ibid.]? They capitalized on what set them apart as individuals, and did it ever pay off.

[walk right]

Individuality can also help you resist people who want to take your money. I’m sure you’ve seen those horrible GAP commercials where a bunch of expressionless oatmeal-colored models sing Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow” and then the screen says “Everybody in cords”? If you asked the average high schooler their opinion on school uniforms, 99 percent would probably say no way, Jose—because they want to “express themselves.” But do they really? Or do they just want to wear the uniform worn by the majority and enforced by corporate masterminds just trying to make another buck? As James Frank Dobie put it, “Conform and be dull.”

But conformity doesn’t just make you boring and take your money. [walk toward audience]

It takes your very soul, as exemplified in the poem “The Man in the Glass,” by Anonymous:

You can fool the whole world down the pathway of years

And get pats on the back as you pass

But the final result will be heartache and tears

If you’ve cheated the man in the glass.

[return to center]

In conclusion: a metaphor:

A butterfly flutters toward a soothing white light. All the other bugs are doing it. Then: bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt [convulsions]. The once beautiful butterfly has become a fuming, indistinguishable corpse underneath a bug zapper. Don’t be like the butterfly who flew too close to the light. Revel in your individuality. Celebrate your true identity. And, as Fiona Apple so eloquently put it at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, “Go as yourself!”

The real thing was better, I promise.

It had to be memorized, and it had to be under 10 minutes and 15 seconds; otherwise, I could not be ranked first in the round. By the time I finally went to bed, it clocked in around 10:10. It wasn’t perfect, but I slept with the satisfaction that I had authored it. It was complete, original, and mine.

When my alarm screamed me awake at five A.M., I put on my not-altogether-very-formal tournament garb: an orangey plaid button-down tucked into wheat-colored corduroys fastened with a brown web belt that clashed with my black loafers. No blazer, no tie. I scarfed a bowl of Great Grains, threw on my thrifted houndstooth overcoat and backpack, hopped into a teammate’s car, and boarded the District 20 schoolbus idling in a Ramada Inn parking lot, packed full of teens from four different high schools, all of them in blazers, most of them in ties, spewing exhaust into the freezing morning air. The sound of my speech reciting itself in my head drowned out whatever was on the radio.

At the heart of every speech kid is a conflict between competition and care.

When I remember forensics, I picture the Columbine cafeteria on a Saturday morning, suddenly and completely taken over by teenagers reciting their speeches to the walls between piles of backpacks and snacks and good-luck stuffed animals and Rubbermaid tubs of evidence for cross-examination debate, waiting for the nine A.M. Round One postings, which they will scan for their speaker numbers and disperse, antlike, to their sections’ designated classrooms, where they will each speak, clap for each other, and hope for the One, a digit their judge marks on a ballot designating them as the best, the funniest, the most eloquent.

At the heart of every speech kid is a conflict between competition and care. Their world runs on ratings, rankings, ballots, and trophies. They disparage rivals who break to semis despite the corniness of their interpretation of ’night Mother or the shallowness of their views of South American trade policy. And yet, of the thousands of students in their high schools, they alone have read ’night Mother or have anything to say about South American trade policy. They care about clarity and storytelling and connection. They care about foreign and domestic policy, utilitarianism versus altruism, definition versus evaluation, comedy versus tragedy. They care about domestic violence, terminal illness, genocide, and structural racism. Most of all, they care about their teammates. They melt into little business-casual cuddle puddles on the cafeteria floors. They watch each other’s final rounds and applaud raucously at the awards ceremonies often beginning well past nine P.M. They share hotel rooms and bus seats and secrets. They cry into each other’s shoulder pads when they don’t break to semis or finals or nationals. They know the depths of this sorrow runs deeper than this one exclusion.

Around the time I turned 11 or 12, Mike started calling me his little sister. He was disgusted by my soft, unathletic body, my love of jigsaw puzzles, my belief that it was past time our country had a woman president. He and his handsome friends would corner me at the bus stop and squirt lemonade onto my glasses. Eventually, I became too inured to wipe the syrup off the lenses. I was far from popular in middle school, but I was mostly left alone. My only real bullies were my brother’s gang, who, unfortunately, followed me home. My bedroom adjoined the driveway, where they would play shirts-and-skins two-on-two with the hoop mounted above my mom’s garage and shout taunts through my window whenever they caught me watching. “Like what you see?” some shirtless Justin would ask, tracing his nipple until I grew so full of rage at him and myself that I punched through the screen.

When I saw pictures of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, I saw my brother and his friends. They dressed similarly, backward baseball caps and Old Navy plaids unbuttoned over Unionbay t-shirts. I thought about their delight in cruelty, their love of first-person shooters. Their smiles were sneers. I was glad they were dead. I’d wished I’d killed them myself.

But then I thought about punching through that screen. Or the time I lost it in the back of the R.V. on the way to my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary, whaling on Mike in a sort of fugue state, snapped by some forgotten jab. I knew what it was to hold something unspeakable, to be pushed too far.

My speaker number at Columbine was 26B, one of about 70 Original Orators. I would give my speech in three prelim rounds for three different judges as part of three different groups of five other speakers, some of them very good. Luckily, tournament rules kept me from competing in the same prelim section as 26A, Maria Bennett, a Liberty junior whose speech was about persevering through the adversity of a dance injury and nurturing her other talents. She had placed in every varsity tournament that season, and she was poised to continue her streak. Each judge would rank the group of six from one (the best) to one of three fours and assign us speaker points from 50 to 35. The six orators with the lowest cumulative ranks at the end of the prelims, with ties broken by speaker points, would advance to Finals.

Round One was in a sunny room with Spanish conjugation posters. I wrote my name, code, and speech title on the whiteboard with a black dry-erase marker. First in the speaker order, I took my place at the front of the classroom and got it out of the way, managing not to stumble once for the entirety of the speech. While I spoke, I watched the middle-aged white judge give time signals—three fingers for seven minutes elapsed, two for eight, one for nine. My speech ended right when he gave a fist for ten minutes. I soaked in the polite applause and sat down to enjoy the rest of the speeches. One of them was an incredibly moving story of the speaker’s childhood in Vietnam, the legacy of the French and American wars there and how they affected her family. She won the round, I was certain.

Round Two was in a choir room with tiered seating and no desks. The first speaker, a greasy-haired white boy, clutched a few sheets of notebook paper and droned a speech in favor of the legalization of marijuana that he had very obviously written in green magic marker. Everyone else had their speeches memorized. He seemed to be competing under duress. It was as if my brother had been conscripted onto the forensics team as part of some community service. He saw speech-and-debate as he saw me: derisively feminine. He bragged about the time he improvised a mock Poetry Interp performance in his English class after a female classmate had practiced her competitive interpretation of “Annabel Lee” for extra credit. “I can get up and pretend to be tragic, too,” he said after she ended her piece. Then why don’t you? his teacher asked, expecting, probably, for him to either chicken out or make an ass of himself. Little did she know how much he enjoyed the latter. He got up in front of the class and free-styled some lines about wilting flowers and bittersweet kisses, punctuating each sentence with a sweeping arm gesture or arabesque. To hear him tell it, the class’s applause after he took his final bow was deafening—and I didn’t doubt him. Had my brother had any actual interest in performing, he would’ve kicked ass at Humorous Interp. I told him as much, not to recruit him, but to corner him into some sort of appreciation for what I loved. If it worked, he kept it to himself.

I knew what it was to hold something unspeakable, to be pushed too far.

Between rounds, I cruised the halls of Columbine, the pleather of my loafers digging into my heels. The library was still under renovation, paint tarps and plywood panels marring the face of the school’s otherwise spotless, airport-like interior, its almost Grecian color scheme of light blue and silver. I didn’t know a school could be this beautiful—how wide and clean and sunny its hallways, how spacious and modern its restrooms, how posh its jewelry-making studio! I had only ever competed in tournaments in Colorado Springs and farther south in Pueblo. Pueblo’s high schools seemed out of the ’50s; Colorado Springs’s, the ’80s. Columbine felt like it came from the future.

Round Three must have been in an art history room, for there was a poster of Van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night, unless, I thought, this school also taught Dutch, which wouldn’t have surprised me.

It was in this round that one of the speeches finally mentioned the massacre. I had expected more of this and was pleasantly surprised by my competitors’ reticence on the topic. I couldn’t quite suss out what this speaker, let’s call her 14C, was arguing by bringing it up, but the rhetorical gesture was, essentially, wow. “Look where we’re sitting today,” 14C effused. “Doesn’t that say it all?”

I was confident I placed higher than 14C—her and Marijuana Boy—but the rest was up in the air. My respect for my competitors grew with every round. They were sharply dressed, smart, funny, sociable kids, most of them older than me and most of them girls, juniors and seniors at their schools all over the Front Range. They spoke eloquently about ideas I’d only ever heard discussed on 20/20: race, consumerism, environmental peril, foreign policy, workaholism, how to live a life well lived. Their brightness and sincerity were better responses to the shooting than any memorial I could have imagined.

By the end of Round Three, about five P.M.., the sun had mostly set over the Rockies. Satisfied but pessimistic about my hopes for advancement to Finals, I walked down the huge set of stairs to the cafeteria, which looked like a mall food court with all the storefronts grated. I gravitated back to my team’s tables, empty for now. Everyone was off in their own little worlds, finishing the prelims of their own little categories: Extemporaneous Speaking, Dramatic Interp, Lincoln-Douglas Debate. In the cafeteria men’s room, I adjusted my web belt, pushed my hair out of my eyes, breathed on my glasses and untucked my plaid to wipe the lenses. I bought a slice of cheese pizza from the Snacks table, chomped on some chocolate-covered espresso beans, and waited for Finals to be posted. Who knows? I thought. Stranger things had happened.

The Thanksgiving before the tournament, Mike got me drunk for the first time. My mother and soon-to-be stepfather were off on vacation with his family in Durango, leaving us full reign over her house, where it was Mike’s wont to throw keggers in her absence. In the empty garage, surrounded by a circle of dozens of Liberty football players and cheerleaders and burnouts and high-achieving stoners, I downed a foamy red Solo cup of Fat Tire, relaxing my throat as Mike instructed so the beer could pass freely into my body. His cheering when I dropped the empty cup was more intoxicating than the alcohol. His friends chanted James, James, James, and I felt like I did onstage at the end of a forensics tournament: accomplished, included, free.

What I didn’t want to admit about my brother at the time was how much I loved him, how much I wanted to be him. He was beautiful in high school, a varsity offensive lineman, well-built and mischievously handsome. He did not have my scoliosis; his acne was less severe than mine; his hair was straight, ruly, center-parted, mahogany brown. I would overhear girls in my class giggling about him during study hall—perhaps they didn’t know he was my brother, our last name being so common and our bodies differing so markedly. But in that garage, for the first time in years, I felt like his brother, not just in blood but in spirit.

Later that night, after three more cups, I was ready to barf. Mike taught me how to do this, too. Bent over Mom’s kitchen sink, he stuck his first two fingers instructively down his throat and regurgitated the better part of the Thanksgiving dinner we’d eaten together at our father and stepmother’s house that afternoon. Mike ran the tap, flicked on the garbage disposal, and left the sink so I could take my turn.

I woke up Friday on the living room couch next to a cluster of half-empties on the coffee table and my brother’s handsome Iranian friend Arya, who had passed out shirtless on our fireplace. “The brick feels good,” Arya explained. “Cold. Nothing worse than hot when you’re hungover. And nothing better than hair of the dog.” I looked over at Max, our black Lab mix, with a touch of concern before Arya picked up a Solo cup with an inch of ale flattening at the bottom and downed it like a shot. In the center of his chest was a deep concavity. I imagined filling that concavity with beer, lapping it up like Max did the night before when my brother filled a frisbee and set it on the ground of the basement like a water dish. Max got so drunk he started headbutting the closed door of my brother’s bedroom, desperate for the dark and quiet. I laughed. I couldn’t help but laugh.

Arya picked up another half-empty and handed it to me. “Down the hatch,” he ordered, and I obeyed.

Lying down in a pile of bookbags, blankets, and peacoats in my team’s corner of the Columbine cafeteria, unshod, waiting for Finals to post, I took a moment to appreciate that I was coming of age at the dawn of a new millennium. The VHS was giving way to the DVD. The 13-note Nokia ringtone had invaded every public space. Britney Spears had declared she was “not that innocent.” I, too, was changing.

In that garage, for the first time in years, I felt like his brother, not just in blood but in spirit.

I’d been growing my hair out since the beginning of freshman year, when I’d been cast as Riff, a guitar-toting beatnik in the fall musical, The Nifty Fifties. At the first read-through, I hammed up every syllable of dialogue like Ned Flanders’ dad. In rehearsals, I belted all four lines of my solo in “Rebel with a Cause.” One of two freshman given a speaking role, I got taken in by the theatre and forensics upperclassmen as a sort of pet. By January, my frizzy pouf had grown to a weighty, chestnut, ringleted mane I let my new friends run their fingers through.

One of those upperclassmen was Matt Lira, a senior and speech team captain who T.A.’d for my Honors Algebra II class and took me under his wing. Matt competed in Foreign Extemp, the most hardcore of the speech categories. Extempers spent all tourney in the school library (or, in this case, the teacher’s lounge); for each round, they drew three choices from a pool of prompts, picked the one they wanted to speak on, and then had 30 minutes to research, outline, and rehearse a seven-minute speech, which they finally recited to a judge. “How will Ecuador’s economy react to the transition to the dollar?” “What is the future of English foxhunting?” That kind of thing. The best extempers’ delivery sounded completely fluid, as if they had written, revised, and memorized their speeches months in advance. Matt was one of those extempers. He’d gone to Nationals twice. He told me we were going together that summer.

Maria Bennett and Matt loathed each other—something to do with a friend of Maria’s whom Matt had spurned—and, because I had become Matt’s protégé, Maria was not too fond of me, either.

Around 6:30 P.M., when the O.O. Final Round roster was finally taped to the big plate-glass windows of the cafeteria, it was Maria who joined the mad huddle to scan the six finalists’ codes while I lay on the team coat pile and watched, too unsure of my odds to risk the disappointment. For about a minute, the crowd jockeyed for view, the din of the cafeteria punctuated every few seconds by a squeal or “Yes!” Maria’s voice was not among the squealers. She shouldered through the others and limped back to our team’s outpost.

“Check the posting,” she said, taking off her heels, her eyes refusing to meet my own.

By the time I made it up to the little white sheet of computer paper, the crowd had dispersed. Fifth on the list was a 26—and a B next to the number.

I stared at it for a while. At first, I still thought it was Maria who’d made the cut and I had misremembered my own code. Maybe her disappointment and shoe-doffing were an elaborate ruse designed to humble me. But it didn’t take long to set in: 26B was me. It had been all along. And there I was, in Finals, at Columbine, with a speech I’d never competed with, never even rehearsed with our coach.

The elation of this news was tempered by the realization that I had work to do, and soon—Finals started at 6:45. I noted the room number, found Matt and threw my arms around him (he’d made Extemp finals, of course), slipped my loafers back over my raw ankles, and offered Maria some breezy condolence before I clambered up the stairwell to give my speech. From the balcony above the cafeteria, I heard her let out a deep, primal “GODDAMMIT.” And I didn’t blame her.

I don’t have the ballots anymore, but I do remember my rankings for each of the prelims: one, two, two. A cume of five, just low enough to make the final cut. Maria got a one, two, three. There’s something sweetly sad about my retention of these numbers, evidence of a worth I still struggle to internalize. The facts are still so meaningful, so helpfully determinate of how good I was and, perhaps, still am.

It was around this time that I began to realize my memory made me beautiful in a way my brother’s social skills and athletic prowess and good looks made him beautiful. I had no trouble learning my lines for the Nifty Fifties, off-book by the first read-through. I soaked up the vocab lists for my French classes like a nice crouton in a crock of onion soup. And beyond words, I remembered feelings. I remembered the rules of the gameshows my brother would set up for me in the basement of the house dad and mom shared before the divorce, throwing paper airplanes at rows of toys worth 10, 20, or 50 points the farther they were from the staircase. I remembered him playing host, like Mike O’Malley on Nickelodeon’s Get the Picture. “I wrote this song,” he sang to me in the middle of the show, “to make you hap-peeee!” And I remember feeling very, very happy.

But I couldn’t remember feeling anything about Columbine—the shooting, not the tournament. Or, rather, I could remember feeling nothing: a certain nothing, an emptiness I have come to know intimately over the course of the 574 school shootings since April 20, 1999. It’s an emptiness roughly the shape of the cave in Arya’s chest. It’s an emptiness I have filled with beer and smoke and forensics scores from 25 years ago. It is beautiful in its inwardness, its frailty. And it’s never going away.

The final round was, oddly, in the smallest room of any of the four rounds I competed in that day, a windowless nondescript mathematical-seeming room tucked away in some corner of the second floor. Of all the categories in speech-and-debate world, Original Oratory has among the most competitors but among the fewest observers. They flock in droves to final rounds in Humor or Drama Interp—people want to laugh, to cry. O.O., at its best, makes you go huh!, a sensation with a small cadre of appreciators. Such a cadre filled this modest classroom, making it seem even smaller than it was.

I was the fifth speaker of six in the final round and the only boy, including the panel of three judges. All six speakers were white. The judges took their time penciling in our names, speaker numbers, and speech titles in their packet of ballots before the oldest judge finally called the room to order with a round of applause for the finalists for advancing. She identified which of the judges would be giving time signals, the woman seated farthest in the back, and the round began.

The first speaker was a bob-haired, pants-suited gal I’d had in my first round. She was great—her speech had to do with not wasting too much time at work and spending more time with your family. “You can’t take it with you,” basically, was her thesis. She had the warm, professional cadence of a teenage Diane Sawyer. I felt proud to see her there, proud to be among such good company.

The third speaker was a tall, athletic blonde in a gray skirt-suit. Her speech was on the dangers of consumerism. Midway through, she cited the same GAP commercial my speech did, for more or less the same rhetorical effect: “Don’t be like those weirdos.” I saw the first speaker’s eyes dart toward me when the third speaker made the reference. She remembered my speech from Round One, I deduced, flattered.

Somewhere, somehow, he learned that enacting his anger is better than questioning it, holding it in.

The fourth speaker was dressed in a black top, gray skirt, black leggings, and black Doc Martens. Her speech was about the plight of the American Indian. It brought up the Trail of Tears and broken treaties and her experience volunteering on a reservation. It ended with about 10 seconds of her making the sound of a drum gradually fading into silence: “RUM pa-pa PUM, pa-pa pum, pa-pa pum.” She looked toward the carpet as her foot punctuated the final pum.

Thunderous applause.

Two minutes or so of chicken-scratching while each judge fills out her ballot.

The syncopated whisper of paper against paper as each turns to the fifth page of the packet.

Finally, one calls for 26B.

I take the front of the classroom crowded with applauding spectators.

“Judges ready?” I ask, de rigueur. They nod.

“Audience ready?” I ask. Unanimous nods.

Begin time.

I gave the speech I memorized, of course. But here’s the speech I should have given:

The Gift of Individuality

About a year ago, my brother pushed me down the stairs into our basement.

Well, kicked, actually. We were at mom’s house that night. She was working the graveyard shift at Lockheed and left Mike and me with a blank check for Domino’s, as usual. When the delivery guy rang the doorbell, I couldn’t find the check. I remembered calling in the order, cradling the receiver in my shoulder, writing down the total in digits and letters. I checked the dining table, the kitchen counters, in between the couch cushions, all the usual places.

The doorbell kept ringing.

Mike stomped up, answered the door, asked the delivery guy to hold on, and told me to go downstairs to get a 20-dollar bill from a birthday card in his bedroom—he’d turned 16 a few days earlier.

As I lifted my leg to step over the dog gate, Mike kicked me squarely in the ass.

I fell—onto the gate first, then sideways down the narrow well, landing against the treadmill at the bottom.

I could stand. I could walk to his room to find the card on his nightstand and pluck the bill from the sleeve with my grandmother’s handwritten declaration of pride. Holding onto the railing, I could walk back up the stairs and give my brother his money for our dinner. I could take a couple of slices out of the box to my room. I could lock the door.

Why did he do it? You might ask.

Because he could. Because he didn’t really like me all that much. Because somewhere, somehow, he learned that enacting his anger is better than questioning it, holding it in. Because my back was turned. Because no one was there to stop him.

It doesn’t matter why he did it. It matters that I survived.

I don’t remember crying. I don’t remember hating my brother or wanting to hurt him back. What I remember feeling most distinctly was—nope. Nope: that most positive of negations, with its terminal plosive. No-p.

This won’t do at all, I thought.

I started spending more time in after-school activities:

Theater rehearsals, where I was funny
Forensics practice, where I was heard
French club meetings, where I was talentueux
AP study groups, where I was smart
Choir trips, where I was loved.

Mom told me she was proud I was coming out of my shell. She didn’t know—and neither did I, exactly—how necessity drove the molting. I wasn’t going to be something to kick down the stairs. I couldn’t be.

My brother once told me he got made fun of in fifth grade for saying his favorite snack was Wheat Thins. Then, he stopped eating Wheat Thins. This, I think, more than anything, explains why he kicked me down the stairs. He wanted me to stop liking my favorite snacks, in a matter of speaking, because they’re not everyone else’s favorite snacks. Because some jerk might make fun of me if he saw them in my lunchbox.

I am going to love what I love, think how I think, be who I am.

Let me be crystal clear: I hate Wheat Thins. They are somehow both bland and too salty, and they cut the roof of my mouth. But you know what? I have never felt sorrier for my brother than when I learned he was too scared of another boy’s opinion to hold on to his own. I wish him Wheat Thins by the boxful.

And me? I’ve decided to eat whatever crackers I want, with stinky French cheeses. I am going to love what I love, think how I think, be who I am. I am going to listen to the Rent soundtrack on repeat and wear my mother’s magenta sports coat and get a full-ride to college. I am going to be the weirdest, smartest, gayest James Davis there ever was—and there have been lots of us. And no matter how far anyone kicks me down, I will always get back up.

I have just finished reciting the poem by Anonymous when I see the head judge hold up one bent finger: 30 seconds till 10 minutes elapsed. I didn’t account for so much laughter. My speech takes on a new urgency. I see the 10-minute fist right at the end of the bug-zapper routine. As I utter the very last word of my speech, “yourself!”, I hear the head judge say “STOP,” the regulation signal that the grace period has elapsed. Any speaker who exceeds those 15 seconds cannot be the One.

After the applause dies down, I return to my desk and ask for my time, a standard nicety of forensics etiquette.

“10 minutes and 15 seconds,” the head judge says, matter-of-factly. Then: “Don’t worry. You won’t be zapped for that.”

The rum-pa-pa-pum speech came in second.

I hope everyone has experienced something like the sweet exhaustion of riding a schoolbus back from a speech tournament they’ve just won—taking off cheap dress shoes, blisters on heels, and lying across an acrid-smelling vinyl seat cover in the dark while the radio plays Top 40. Dehydrated, ripe with cortisol-rich B.O., I clutched a blue-and-silver first-place trophy the size of my forearm and read my ballots’ glowing comments by the light of passing street lamps.

I went straight ones in Finals. That never happened, especially not to freshmen at Denver tournaments. The judges said I was a natural: Everything worked.

“You’ve got it goin’ on!” one of them wrote.

That night, Columbine High School became a site of transformative joy. It was where I learned I was good. It was where I fell in love with myself. Squinting in the lights onstage during the awards ceremony while each of the other five finalists’ names was read off before mine, I could catch the first few glimpses of a future in which I became my own person, loved by beautiful boys instead of ignored or tormented by them. A future in which my brother would become a friend, make amends for the ways he hurt me, and name his son after me. The brightness of this light washed out the tragedy such that I was slow to grieve what happened there, the senseless, brutal violation of children’s lives. I was so focused on saving my own.

Exclusive Cover Reveal of “A Cow Gives Birth at Night” by Pajtim Statovci, Translated by David Hackston

Posted on June 11, 2026June 11, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of A Cow Gives Birth at Night by Pajtim Statovci, translated by David Hackston, which will be published on January 26, 2027 by Pantheon Books. You can pre-order your copy here.

From the celebrated author of Crossing, a finalist for the National Book Award, a piercing, candid novel about a man haunted by the violence of his past and a family ruptured by the war that ravaged their homeland, for readers of Douglas Stuart, Jenny Erpenbeck, Ocean Vuong, and Garth Greenwell.

1996: A boy raised in Finland spends the summer at his grandfather’s house in Kosovo, a time that will mark him for the rest of his life, isolating him from his family and ensconcing him in a life of the mind, the complex escape of imagination.

Decades later, having grown into adulthood and built a career as a celebrated author, he travels with his mother again to Kosovo, a country that has since been savaged by war, where fear still guides people’s everyday lives. The journey forces him to delve into a past both real and imagined, into a mire of trauma and illness. Can memories be trusted? What can be forgiven? And what demands revenge? His questions spiral through his every interaction—with his relatives, with a family in need, with a seemingly duplicitous community leader—until he’s confronted with the ultimate, the most suffocating question of all: What will it take to survive history?

Staggering in both its psychological acuity and tour-de-force prose, A Cow Gives Birth at Night shows us what it is to live a life without safety, to be drawn towards danger, and the haunting truths of what can happen in a family after the lights have been turned off.

Here’s the cover, designed by Linda Huang and Emily Mahon:

Linda Huang and Emily Mahon: The author wanted the cover to reflect the restlessness and claustrophobia of the novel. We felt like there needed to be something human and vulnerable, and the hand in red almost swallowing the calf spoke to his desire for an unexpected and “fleshy” element. The type is set in a simple serif, with the title and author on opposite corners, which nicely reinforces the angle of the hand. A black sky with specks of gold cascades down the top left—a specific request from the author. To us, the painterly cow in the red palm is such a tender, striking image, almost womb-like, evoking the “birth” in the title.

Pajtim Statovci: Sometimes I get asked whether my books have a particular look in my mind, whether there’s a figure, an image, or at least a color present for me while I’m writing. The answer is—a rather unsatisfying—yes and no.

I draw a lot of inspiration from the work of other artists, from fellow writers to theater professionals and architects, so my artistic space is filled with different voices and visions. I have felt especially grateful and humbled when I have been lucky enough to have my work staged, turned into an adaptation. To be able to provide other artists with something that they have offered me is one of the greatest gifts I’ve received as an author.

There are, of course, the adaptations that are not spoken of enough. Cover artists and graphic designers have an almost impossible task at hand: to create a cover, from scratch, that is supposed to do all of, but not only, the following:

capture the essence, the spirit, of a massive amount of text, however abstract it may be;
support the story and everything it has to say, however impalpable it may be, through typography, color palette, composition, concept, etc.;
meet the possible hopes and needs of the publisher, author, booksellers, reviewers and also readers, however varying those may be;
create something distinctive, unique, never-before-seen, surprising, no matter how impossible that may be.

Easy, right?

In my eyes, the color of the world in my novel A Cow Gives Birth at Night is dark green, dark blue, and silvery. It is early in the morning, and somewhere in the distance there’s a cow, living its lonely life, always on the outside, escaping our sight. Yet, she is dependent on the care of a fellow animal, someone as sensitive as she is, a child who is able to see himself as her equal. There are no stars, no sun, no mercy here, and nothing leading to safety.

When I first saw the US cover of my novel A Cow Gives Birth at Night, a breathtakingly striking, gorgeous design that the magnificent Emily Mahon—one of the most gifted designers I know and have had the privilege to continue working with—created in collaboration with Pantheon’s incredible art director, Linda Huang, I immediately thought: That’s it, that’s my book, all of it, and it’s everything and more, from every direction.

So much better than in my imagination.

I Store My Demons Next to the Pickled Beets

Posted on June 10, 2026June 3, 2026 by Preety Sidhu

Ball Jar Demon

The demon lasted a good month, emitting low moans and sandpaper coughs into her ear, before Celia found an old Ball jar in the cellar, plucked the being off the cutting board with a pair of chopsticks where it had writhed since its summoning, screwed it in tightly without any empathy, and slotted it between the crunchy peanut butter and the wax beans.

This one, her first, lasted longer than she expected. She’d heard stories of demons scuttling away into nothing within hours. She was so busy in the kitchen these days. Her own house in disrepair. Social calls gone unanswered. Those weekly visits to her mother’s house to read cheap detective novels out loud while the old woman sipped nettle tea under a cotton counterpane. The frail hand in hers, a confused gathering of bones and time. But business pulled at Celia. So much so that when death had pulled at her mother, she’d barely had space to attend to what her mother left behind in that house. Stacks of cardboard boxes and dusty closets. All those canning supplies, unused.

She’d meant to bake a simple cursed cake for her boss. Necessary for the recipe: a tiny piece of her flesh. Crafting curses was a subtle art what with all the complicated branches of dark chemistry that split off from skin as part of a recipe. She must have added too much skin. Now she was monitoring this accident of personal mismeasurement.

Each day, Celia would slide the canned goods aside and the demon’s face would be pressed against the wall of the jar, gasping and blue. The tongue distended like a rock band’s logo. The eyes rheumy and desperate. (Did demons breathe? Surely not. Oxygen couldn’t have been a requirement for something so unholy.) She only checked in on it. Never poked the jar or asked it questions. Her mother once off-handedly said that asking demons questions drove holes through your soul.

But the demon grew less antagonistic to its prison. Less energetic and furious. On the fourth day, it slumped in a corner and lackadaisically slapped the Ball jar. The sound was like a small branch brushing up against a window in a rainstorm. Celia closed her eyes and enjoyed the moment.

The demon was a mistake, of course, but one that could be dealt with. Had the portion of flesh been a hearty Shylockian amount, the house would’ve gone up in flames, her whole neighborhood a fuming sulphureous pit of black nacre and glistening pitted onyx. Instead, what she created was a measly demon. Ragged and weak. Nothing to be pitied or excited about. She re-made the cursed cake. Then got on with a poisonous jellyroll her friend requested for an HOA soirée.

It never tried to communicate with her. Instead it glared at her when it had the energy. After two weeks, she knew it needed no oxygen, but there must’ve been something she was depriving it of, a necessary substance. Part of her wanted to make the same mistake a second time. Create a partner for this imprisoned imp.

One morning, when she opened the cabinet and moved the wax beans aside, the Ball jar rolled out and fell between her hands onto the kitchen floor. The glass shattered and the metal lid rang in an annular dance. She jumped back. The demon was unmoving, its body a deep cerulean and flaking. The claws faded to nubbins and the face drooped. The tail wilted off and the smell was like a paperback book that has been left on the dashboard of a car in the hot summer sun. Grass and vanilla. She inhaled violently as if she’d heard a terrible secret.

She bent down and cradled the demon in her hands. She brushed a thumb across its chest. She smelled the demon again and thought of the first trip to the library with her mother as a seven-year-old. The vaulted ceilings. The hush of librarians shelving hardback books wrapped in mylar jackets. The protracted and protected silence, the fragile yet enduring shell of imagination she’d exuded while inhaling that smell. She brought the demon closer. No low moans or scratchy coughs. It was now a gone thing.

The lignin of the decaying book pages faded in her nose, as did those tender-folded times as a child. And as she begged for the demon to return to life, she wondered if she’d been wrong, all wrong, about what it was she’d created.

Writer’s Block Is Part of Maggie O’Farrell’s Process

Posted on June 9, 2026June 9, 2026 by EL Assistant2

When I brought Maggie O’Farrell’s The Hand That First Held Mine to the women at the Ahmanson Senior Citizen Center’s writing class, many of them working on their own short stories about motherhood and family, they couldn’t stop talking about Lexie—the ambitious, young, single mother who refuses the provincial life laid out for her and escapes to 1950s London. What struck everyone in our upstairs computer room was how O’Farrell conjured a woman hungry for more, unwilling to apologize for taking up space in the world. O’Farrell writes about lives and places that history wants to minimize: ambitious midcentury women like Lexie; the steadfast resilience of Elizabethan women like Agnes Hathaway in Hamnet; and the trauma buried in Ireland’s soil during the Famine in her latest novel, Land. She gives voice to those who are footnotes in other people’s stories, and that act of attention makes them luminous.

So, beaming with excitement at the opportunity to sit down on Zoom ahead of Land’s publication, I was curious about what illuminates the life of an author whose stories make countless others, including the senior citizens I see almost daily, inspired to share their own. I discovered the urgency O’Farrell has carried—a refusal to sleep, a compulsion to craft a world different from the one she’d been taught—since she was in her early twenties. A need to make something true of her own runs through everything O’Farrell does, coursing through her words, her pages, and even the granolas in her breakfast.

— Shandela Contreras
Editorial Intern

1. Describe your publication week in a six-word story.

Maggie O’Farrell: It is very hectic, but fun.

2. What book should everyone read growing up?

MO: The Color Purple by Alice Walker

3. How do you start from scratch?

MO: Don’t worry about the beginning. Beginnings are really hard and it’s really hard to know what you’re doing when you start, so I would say just plunge in anywhere because you can always make bad writing better, but a blank page is always just a blank page.

4. Map your novel point A to B, or pivot as you go?

MO: I map it out as I go. I don’t necessarily have a strict plan. I tend to start out and just kind of explore what’s there and then I draw maps and flow charts and plans while I’m in the middle of it.

5. Three presses you’ll read anything from?

MO: Oh, wow. Well, I don’t tend to choose books by publisher. Sometimes I will read authors that I know and trust and love, and sometimes I’ll just go by a really interesting blurb or if my eye is caught by a cover that beckons to me. I don’t limit myself to publishers. I’m more interested in themes and people.

6. Hardcover, paperback, or e-reader?

MO: I don’t really use e-readers. I don’t really have to. I can see that if I was on a long commute like I used to be in my 30s then I probably would, but I always go for paperback

I love a paperback book, not too heavy. It’s perfect to carry around.

MO: Yes, but hardbacks feel so sumptuous don’t they? You can treat yourself to a lovely hardback sometimes

7. Describe your ideal writing day.

MO: I tend to ring-fence my mornings for just writing and thinking, so I don’t answer any emails, I don’t pick up my phone, I go down to my studio, which is at the bottom of our garden, and it doesn’t have any connectivity. And sometimes it happens, I end up writing something, and sometimes there are those days when nothing is really coming, but you can just daydream and read and think about what might come next.

8. What’s a piece of writing advice you never want to hear again?

MO: Write what you know. I think you should write what you don’t know. For me, the best start is writing something you don’t understand, something that baffles and confounds you.

9. What’s a piece of writing advice you think everyone needs to hear?

MO: Just to keep going. Keep going—that’s the main thing. And remember that writing is in some part inspiration but a lot of it is just graft.

10. Favorite and least favorite film adaptation of a book:

MO: Oh, that seems really mean. I think there was a brilliant adaptation of Edward St. Oban’s Patrick Melrose novel called Patrick Melrose. I can’t remember which channel it was on, but it was written by David Nicholls. I thought that was brilliant, and was really, really close to the book. I have to say, there have been some really quite painful Jane Austen adaptations, some of which I cannot watch because I love Jane Austen. Some of the adaptations set my teeth on edge.

11. What’s your favorite comfort snack?

MO: Dark chocolate, preferably with orange or lime in it. It’s very good if you feel like you’re flagging slightly, when you’re writing, and you just don’t quite have the time to make a meal. You can have a few squares and it keeps you going for a little bit longer.

12. How did you meet your agent?

MO: Well, actually, my agent and I almost met at university. We were at the same university on the same course, same year, and we never met. We met a bit later in an office, which is quite boring, but I love my agent. She’s one of my favorite people in the whole world and when I went to the Oscars I took her with me.

13. Best advice for pushing through writer’s block?

MO: You have to know that those times when your confidence falls are part of the process. When you have a surge of optimism, that’s when you get words down on paper and then you have a crash in confidence, but the crash in confidence is when you look at it with a critical eye, so that’s to do with editing and finding the right path. Don’t think of it as writer’s block, think of it as a necessary part of a process.

14. What’s your relationship to being edited?

MO: I really welcome being edited. I have had the same editor, amazingly, the whole time. I’ve never written a book without her and I really rely on her feedback and her eagle eye and her intuition. Sometimes she says things to me which I don’t entirely want to do, but I look at my work and I think: Well okay if I want to keep this bit then I have to make sure it works. I have to do the work, I have to do the buttressing, and I’ve got to redesign the architecture of the book if I want to keep it. But sometimes she says something and I think, oh, my God, she’s so right. I have to rush home and get rid of that page! What was I thinking?

15. Write every day or write when inspired?

MO: I don’t tend to write every day, just because I have a very busy domestic life. And I think you can’t always wait till you’re inspired, because then it might not happen.

Daydreaming is a very important and very underrated part of writing. Your work isn’t always writing on the page. Sometimes it’s just thinking and the book will fix itself in your head sometimes.

16. The writer who made you want to write?

MO: I’ve always wanted to write, but I think when I read Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, that was when I really thought I wanted to do this. I read it in Hong Kong. I was living in Hong Kong for a while when I was about 21, 22. I remember reading it, and I closed the book and I tried to go to sleep and I couldn’t go to sleep. So I got up, and I remember writing something. Getting up in the middle of the night and writing something thinking, I really want to do this.

17. How do you know when you’ve reached the end?

MO: I find it really hard to know when I reach the end and I usually rely on either my husband or my editor to basically wrestle the manuscript out of my hand and say, “Okay, that’s enough.” It’s really hard because you can just go on and on, you know, finessing it and fiddling with your adjectives and crossing things out. There is a point at which I think you do need to ask someone and they have to say, yes, it’s finished.

Is your husband one of your first readers?

MO: He is, he always reads, I mean, not my first draft, because no one reads that, but I’d say he probably reads my earliest draft that I’m happy to show someone. And then he also reads my penultimate draft.

18. Writing with music or in silence?

MO: The actual writing itself I have to write in silence, but I usually have a playlist for every novel which kind of gets me in the mental space for the book. When I’m opening my laptop and laying out my notebooks, getting my pens (I write with old fountain pens). I fill my fountain pens and while I’m doing that I’ll have my playlist on and then when I start to write I turn it off. I find that it kind of helps me. Music is very useful for making the bridge between your quotidian life and your writing life.

19. Describe your writing space.

MO: I’m really lucky that in the last five years, we have built a studio in the garden, which is glass, it was an old greenhouse which fell down. So it’s glass and it’s like sitting inside the rib cage of a sea monster. It’s lovely.

20. How do you keep your favorite writers close to you?

MO: Re-reading is something that’s really important to me, there are certain books that I re-read every year, five years, 10 years, and you always see something really different in them. Sometimes you need to let your well refill. So if you’re feeling that you can’t write any more, if you are having one of those moments where you hit a brick wall, just go back to something that really sustains you. And even if it’s nothing to do with the book you’re writing or the piece you’re writing, it will somehow refill you.

21. What does evolving as a writer mean to you?

MO: I think that with every book it’s really good to set yourself a new task or a new hurdle to clear. With every book you write, there’s a learning curve, you learn so much and then with your next book you want to put it into practice and try something new.

22. Book club or writing group?

MO: You know, I’ve never been in a book club. No one has ever invited me. And I don’t do writing groups so much now, but I found them incredibly useful and supportive when I was starting out. I think it’s a great thing to have, especially when you’re starting. They can give you lots of encouragement and feedback when you haven’t necessarily got a professional editor yet. Also, writing groups can get you into a kind of regular habit of writing which is really good, so maybe every month or every week you have to produce something. That’s a really good discipline.

23. Outside of literature, what are you obsessed with?

MO: I love cooking. I love cooking a lot. I love cooking lots of soups and bread. I make my own sourdough. My own cereal. And I love growing things. I grow lots of herbs and lots of flowers, and my children—I’m very obsessed with my children, and my cats. And I go swimming.

You make your own cereals!?

MO: I make my own granola cereal!

My Boyfriend Is a Wounded Animal I Want to Save

Posted on June 8, 2026June 2, 2026 by Preety Sidhu

“Porcupine” by Sarah Braunstein

We met in a bookstore, the Strand. The late nineties. I was trying to decide between E. B. White’s books, the pig or the swan or the mouse. He saw me deliberating. For my sister’s kid, I told him. “The mouse,” he said, with appealing confidence. He had chin-length hair, a square jaw like Kurt Cobain’s. “I’m Edgar.”

“Susannah.”

Edgar said he identified with the mouse, a New Yorker like him, born inexplicably into a family of humans. I went with that one. He said I was a good aunt and asked me out for coffee. This led to dinner, drinks, bed. He was threadbare and grungy, which didn’t necessarily mean poor. He wore vintage Brooks Brothers pants in what he called aubergine. Battered designer boots and luggage. A high-class hippie, I decided. He was between apartments, staying with friends, had just returned from Europe. I was in the process of finalizing a divorce and had a decent sublet for that month on Twenty-Second Street. We fell into—something. He was twenty-five; I was forty-two. Robbing the cradle is the expression people use, which sounds dastardly. I couldn’t believe my luck.

Several weeks into it he said, “We should go to my island in Maine. It’s perfect this time of year.”

It was early May. We were sitting in the window of a cafe in the East Village.

“You don’t have an island.”

“I do. I actually do! A farmhouse on its own tiny island. There’s a little bridge. You don’t need a boat. No one else in my family uses it, which tells you everything about my family.”

He asked if this surprised me. I said it did.

“All stockbrokers. Money managers. Criminally rich. I don’t like to talk about it right away. You understand, don’t you, Susannah?”

He smiled, leaned closer. I could see that he liked my expression, whatever I was doing with my face to hide my abject greed. At this point in my life, I longed above all else for a wealthy man. My parents were dead and had left only debt. It was the family weakness, like a flaw in the genetic code. My sister had finally found her way to money in the form of her husband, who worked in office supplies, but I was helpless, always sputtering.

“My family can only breathe in the city,” he told me. “Only polluted air. Country air’s toxic to them. Sunlight to vampires.” I sensed a sort of shifty glee, the energy of an exaggerator, but I didn’t mind. Coming out of a difficult period, low on funds, I was in a mood to value novelty. To go with the flow . He told me that women his own age depressed him profoundly. It was all status with them, all social climbing.

A week later we got on a bus, then two more buses, then took a cab into a town. Barely a town. Just a general store, a single old-fashioned gas pump standing out front. The taxi left us two miles past the general store, where the dark road intersected a darker road. It was late, and I remember being stunned by the completeness of the dark. Relieved when he pulled out a flashlight, though he didn’t seem to need it. He walked briskly. We moved along a dirt road until we came to a short footbridge, crossed the bridge dragging our suitcases. I saw the farmhouse in the flashlight’s beam—cedar shingles, copper drain, rooms and rooms. He took the key from a hiding place in a stone wall. Inside it smelled like money: wood, leather, furniture oil, mothballs. In the morning I followed him around while he got the water running, unlatched the shutters, primed various pumps. I saw the property. The sky screamed blue. I screamed too.

“You didn’t believe me, did you?”

“I did. Sort of. I wanted to.”

He gazed at me happily.

“Is it winterized?”

“Well enough.”

I imagined never going back to New York. I imagined telling my sister: I met a man and I am moving to Maine!

He smoked all day. Smoking did not undo the sense of health, as it would these days. Back then it made everything better. I took drags too. The air was fluid with insects. A flowering meadow spread out before us like a quilt. On our bed inside was a pile of quilts made by his relatives. I loved the house, its nooks and ornate hinges, creaky stairs and glass cabinets, and I loved the woods surrounding the house, and the meadow. But the shore—a hundred yards down a brambly trail—I found sinister. Rocks upon rocks. Rockweed and barnacles. No sand. No place to get your balance. The ocean hissed, produced curious froth. Even before he died, I was suspicious of that cold water. I’m going to jump ahead to say he went for a morning swim in late July and never came back. The death was ruled accidental, and I believe it. Still, I suspect the current wasn’t unwelcome. He’d been swimming farther and farther out in the previous weeks, alternating between backstroke and crawl. I saw this, talked to him about it. Didn’t he himself tell me to be careful after storms, when tidal currents were stronger? Didn’t he say it wasn’t safe beyond those rocks?

“I like when you worry about me, Susannah,” he told me, out of breath, patting his pretty torso with the towel I’d brought down for him. “I like when you worry, but only a little.”

The first days he took real pleasure showing me around: the claw-foot tub where he’d read comic books on rainy days, the spooky basement, all the secret shafts and cupboards. He gave me a tour of the woods as though it were an extension of the house, rocks he’d hidden under, trees he’d climbed. He resurrected the clothesline, where he’d hung his underwear, between the shed and the southwest corner of the house. “I can’t believe it,” he said, watching our delicates tremble in the breeze. I imagined his past in a glowing montage, beautiful rich children, sexy boys, summering, figuring things out, zinc on their noses. He was the sensitive, inward one, the River Phoenix. He showed me the well where he’d plunked stones. The dry, hot attic, crumbling leather diaries of his ancestors in a chest up there. An antique teddy bear in a cradle. A porcelain doll missing an arm. We spent a lot of time in two wooden chairs in a meadow. I took drags off his cigarettes. I loved watching him smoke. I knew that if my sister could have seen him—the way he blew smoke, quizzical, pondering some deep idea, handsome as a movie detective—she’d call him smoldering. My sister’s husband, nearly two decades older, office supply king, was the opposite of smoldering.

I peppered him with questions, but he didn’t like to talk about his childhood. I got the sense of chilly parents, absent a lot, permissive, drinkers. Old money. He’d gone to school in Manhattan, he explained to me, but spent every summer out here. Then he stopped coming. He hadn’t been back in many years. But why? When did he stop coming? Why if he liked it so much? “I went other places,” was all he said. I asked where but he didn’t say, just flicked his ash, and I didn’t press him because I wanted to stay there, to keep the arrangement copacetic.

One day he told me, “There was a groundhog I made friends with one summer. I’d feed him breakfast cereal. Cheerios. I bonded with that groundhog.”

“I didn’t know they were bondable.”

“Every mammal is, give or take. You’d be surprised. But you have to be steady.”

I would have been cynical but saw it happen. Twitchy squirrels stilled in his presence. Once a deer allowed him to come within two feet. I was in the kitchen opening a can of beans and watched him in the meadow, talking to that deer.

He sought a perpetual present, he said. If I had been rich, that’s what I would have done too, but I wasn’t rich. This fact began to concern me. He did not show interest in my work schedule, which should have been a warning. If I mentioned the job I was supposed to start in September—office administrator for a sociology department at a college on Long Island—he’d bristle and say, “I don’t want to think about that yet.” And since I didn’t really want to either, I didn’t. One night after dinner, he was sweeping the kitchen, I was doing dishes, and I said, idly, “Maybe for Christmas we can go to Chicago. I’d like you to meet my sister.”

He had a way of making reasonable worries dissolve. I credited his wealth.

My poor sister. Now I might have more empathy, but back then I was so angry. I wanted to get back at her for something she’d done after my marriage failed. A look she’d given me, holding her new baby in a swaddle, a pitying smile: you’ll never have this. If I took Edgar there, I could give that look back to her. Such was the nature of our dynamic, petty as our parents.

Edgar said, “I don’t like planning,” and must have imagined a critique, because he added, “Look, if you want mature, find a retiree.”

He had a way of making reasonable worries dissolve. I credited his wealth. One of those people free to be anything, which includes being nothing, being depressed, riding the wave of his moods. Too rich for a planner, for a wallet or good watch. His was a Timex. All of it made sense. Of course this was the kind of rich man I’d get, I thought, the melancholic kind, the adorable ne’er-do-well. I could handle it. But he began to get more withdrawn, vacant. I’d wake up in darkness and he wouldn’t be in bed. I’d find him in the grass outside the kitchen door, in his baggy underwear. He spent a lot of time in the gingham chair, whittling pieces of balsam fir with a penknife, or just looking out the window. He would ask odd questions, apropos of nothing.

“Do you think Charles really loved Diana?”

“Do you know that one termite queen produces five hundred million children?”

He didn’t sleep much. He ate toast and jelly at night. In the morning I cleaned the crumbs. He got tan, so looked healthy enough, and in bed we could not get enough. He was so game. He could do it whenever I wanted, two or three times in a row; most men would be prideful of this fact, but he expected no congratulations.

One time, holding me afterward, he said, “My great-great-great-grandfather came here when the land belonged to the Wabanaki. His son married a native woman. I’m part native. It’s strong in me. Stronger than in the rest of the family.”

He was a kid, I decided, like a boy with a construction-paper headdress. A Mayflower descendant, cherished but aloof, the black sheep, his difference from the others manifest in a fantasy of Indianness. I thought I had him pegged.

Then we found the porcupine. Near the bridge, in the road, struggling to breathe, bleeding from its hind leg. Likely a juvenile, he thought. He put alcohol on its wound. He kept it in the shed, in a cardboard box, and fed it lettuce, strawberries, saucers of sugar milk, and finally decided it needed to be held, like any living thing. It would heal only once it was held, he told me while eating dinner one night.

“You know that experiment with the baby monkeys? They got a bad choice. Two mothers. A cuddle from a soft monkey but no food. Or a wire monkey and dinner. They chose a cuddle, those poor guys. They’d rather starve.”

“It makes me nervous. You can’t hold a wild animal like that.”

But the animal needed a friend, so he put the antique teddy bear into the cardboard box with the recuperating animal, tucked the toy next to its sleeping body. The bear had no eyes or nose left, just a piece of dangling red yarn that had been its mouth. Once it had soothed a relative. Maybe it would soothe the porcupine? After an hour alone with the animal, the bear was annihilated. It had been filled with sawdust—dust and chips from trees that grew before this was America. The sawdust for some reason made me sadder than the ailing porcupine did. At the end, he tried to cuddle the porcupine wearing oven mitts and an orange life preserver, but it hissed and showed its teeth.

“Nothing lasts,” he said when it died. “Intervening makes it worse. I killed him. I made him sicker.”

We looked at the animal in the box. I knew the animal stood for someone else . . . his mother, or his old friend. I wasn’t totally interested in who, if I can be honest. I only wanted to bring him back from this dark place. “You gave him a death with dignity. You showed him love and he took it wherever he went.” You have to understand how unlike me it was to say such a thing. I cared about him, I realized. I didn’t want him to suffer. He wiped his eyes and seemed to feel better and I suggested we make some Jiffy Pop.

He buried the porcupine in the woods and wouldn’t tell me where. He was quiet all day. The next day he’d shout my name and I’d go to him and he’d look at me as if he had no idea why I was standing there.

“You called me.”

“I did?”

Shit, I thought. I understood he was not well. But what sort of not well? Old money not well. I was not smart back then about mental health matters. No one was. Interesting people struggled in interesting ways. I thought his behavior romantic, in doses, and so when the next day he was brighter again, I put my concerns away. He brought me cut flowers, a piece of mica in the shape of Idaho. In the afternoon, we sat in the chairs and watched bees and butterflies over the meadow.

“I keep feeling my parents are going to show up. Appear without warning.”

The phone in the house was not in working order, and this was before cell phones.

“Would that be so bad?”

“It wouldn’t be good.”

“I’d like to meet the vampires.”

I wondered if he’d be embarrassed by me. I was a divorced person, older, lacking his beauty. What would his parents see? But I wanted them to show up. I was curious about them too, of course, and hoped I could win them over, that they’d recognize how good I was for their son.

“They make me feel like an outsider. Like a freak.”

“My sister does that too.”

“They don’t know me at all,” he said. “They think they do, but they don’t.”

I told him about my passive-aggressive sister. How since childhood we’d always been so competitive. I told him about Christmas gifts she’d given over the years, gifts that seemed chosen to create a problem. A giant lazy Susan, the collected works of Agatha Christie. Gifts to highlight the smallness of my apartment.

They make me feel like an outsider. Like a freak.

“Once she had an ergonomic desk chair delivered to my office at work. Her husband sells them. A colleague of mine saw it and said, wow, holy shit, you really sprang for a nice chair, and I did some research and found out the chair cost fifteen hundred dollars.”

“This is the sister you want me to meet?”

“Not until Christmas.”

“I bet the chair was comfortable.”

It had been. So comfortable. But everything between us had become so warped, so stupidly warped, the chair felt like a big fuck-you, and I gave it to a colleague who had a bad back.

One day in July I was reading in the gingham chair when he came down from the attic holding an old book, a leather-bound diary. He’d been looking for this one and finally found it, he told me. The diary talked about Lewis Gordon, who’d lived here back in 1873. In the winters, Lewis used to take his white horse across the frozen sound to the mainland to do his shopping.

“It wasn’t uncommon back then to ride a horse across the water during the deepest freeze. But Lewis was crazy about this horse. Too attached, his sister said. It’s the sister’s diary. The horse’s name was Jasper. His sister wrote about what happened.” He shook it in his hand like a preacher. “One day the ice wasn’t as solid as they thought. They fell through, both of them, Lewis and the horse, out in the middle.”

“He died?”

“He should have. But he gets lucky. The wind carries his screams. People come to the rescue. Ropes and pulleys. Dangerous business, rescuing a man in the ice. Lots of deaths among rescuers in those days. Lewis wouldn’t accept help until they agreed to help the horse too. This pissed a lot of people off, but guess what happened in the end?”

He lit a cigarette. Took a drag. I waited.

He said, “They saved it.”

“The horse?”

“The horse! And Lewis. Both. She was furious, the sister who wrote it all down. He had a family to support. It was crazy back then, to die for a horse. But I tell you what, Susannah, I understand it. Animals are better than people.”

That was his final decree. I could hear his jaw clenching. I wanted to lighten the mood. I told him my old neighbor in midtown had a poodle that wore a real Chanel backpack. She herself used an old nylon Jansport. Fiona has much better taste than me, the neighbor would say. This was one of our last conversations. The next day I found his shoes, clothes, and Timex sitting on a flat rock near the water.

After a while, I walked into town. At the general store, an older woman sat behind the counter knitting a hat. She had an old-fashioned bouffant died hard black, hair that made the strangeness stranger. “You want some water, honey? You look affright.” I remember how hard it was to speak at first. “Honey, you need to make a call?” An old rotary dial phone, shiny and frightening, like a beetle. I didn’t want to touch it, had to gather my nerve. But I did. First, the police. Then New York City information. I received several phone numbers. The first number I tried, no one answered. The second was disconnected. When a woman picked up on the third, I said I was trying to reach Grace S.

“Speaking.”

I blamed her, the vampire. I thought contempt would make it easier to say. I told her my name. I was her son’s girlfriend and we’d been staying at their house in Maine and he’d gone swimming, or—I didn’t know, really, what to say. I hoped he might be lost. Or hiding. And yet I had a terrible feeling.

“Wait a minute. Edgar is not in Maine. I had dinner with him last night here in Manhattan. Edgar does not have a ‘girlfriend.’ He is married to Vivian, who is expecting a child. Who is this? Who are you?”

I said everything several times. “Give me your number,” the woman said, “I’ll call you back,” and I read her the number in the center of the dial. We hung up.

“Take a pack of tissues,” said the shopkeeper, thrusting her chin at a shelf. “Quite a day you’re having. I’ve been through heartbreak too.”

I opened a small pack of tissues, wiped my eyes, thanked her. A few minutes later the phone rang. Edgar on the other end, authentically.

A fisherman found the body two days later, in a cove around the bend. His real name was Adam DeLuca. An old friend of Edgar’s, friend of the S. family, son of their former housekeeper and for a while part of the crowd. I was invited to go to the morgue and see his body, but I declined. Naturally my grief was complicated. I felt I’d been had. Betrayed. I was angry and confused. The actual Edgar arrived the day after that. He wanted to see the body and the house and to make arrangements. He drove a Toyota. He wore a gray Lehigh T-shirt and a Yankees hat. A basic watch too—a Casio. He was the same age as my boyfriend but looked older, middle-aged in his carriage. Burly and comforting. He showed no surprise at my age, though he must have expected someone younger. He went by Ed. Only his mother called him Edgar.

“I’m not sure what to do,” he said, shyly. “Can I hug you?”

He wore a blue button-down and khaki pants, Nikes. He smelled like the men’s section of a department store. We drank the end of the whiskey in the chairs in the meadow. He loved the guy, he told me. For a period of time they were like brothers.

I said, “Things like this only happen in books!”

“They happen more than you might expect. People maintaining that they’re us. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon. Of course, most people are after money, and Adam wasn’t. He just wanted—” He pauses, doesn’t say. It wasn’t the first time Adam had squatted here. But never with someone else. “Never with a woman,” Ed said, his eyes moving to the clothesline where our underwear still hung.

Adam’s mother had been hired to be their city housekeeper when the boys were six. They had been close, Adam and Edgar, from this age onward. “But his mom was troubled.”

“Troubled how?”

“Addict, bad boyfriend, robbery. Sentenced to five years upstate, and Adam—” It’s hard to hear him being called Adam—”got removed from her custody when he was eleven.”

“Jesus.”

“It could have been worse. He got sent to live with an old aunt in Queens. Even then, he’d come here with us for the summers. Until he got a little strange.”

“What do you mean by strange?”

But of course I knew.

“My mom says schizoid, but she uses that as a catch-all for anyone crazy. Who knows. Maybe it was depression. Manic depression? He slipped off.”

Otherwise Adam’s stories checked out. He didn’t lie except colossally. He’d fed Cheerios to the groundhog and had a peculiar ability with animals and spent long days in the woods. Everyone liked having him around, until he got—whatever you want to call it.

“Look. It’s not my business, but clearly you shared something. He’s not a con man. I know Adam. No one tells their own story straight.”

“You’re awfully forgiving of the man who was impersonating you.”

“I feel bad for the guy.” Ed blinked. “He was only trying to impress you.”

It got dark. He would stay the night, we decided, sleep in the den. We went inside and ate baked beans and toast. He sat in the gingham chair but was too big for it. His knees came up too high. I had to remind myself it was his house. I remembered what his mother had said on the phone.

“You’re having a baby. Congratulations.”

He gave a wincing smile. “Viv’s better, finally. At first she could only eat oyster crackers.” He looked queasy. “She carried a plastic container in her purse to puke into.”

I felt that closeness to a body with money. The safety, the suspension. This time the money was real. When it was bedtime, he said, “I won’t kick you out. You’re a nice person, Susannah. And you cared about Adam, I can tell. If you want to stay until the end of summer, I’ll show you how to close up the house. It would be a favor, to be honest. You could stay until you go back to your job. Would you?”

I told him I’d be happy to take care of the property. How much did they pay the caretaker? Hurt gave me the courage.

“You do need a caretaker,” I said. “”What’s to stop another squatter from squatting?”

He put his big hand with its wedding ring to his heart. “I can see why he liked you.”

When he gave me a number, I doubled it.

I bet Adam would find it funny how much they paid me. I wanted to come the next summer too, but when I called Ed to ask he said they’d sold the property. He told me they’d made a big donation in Adam’s name to an organization that advocated for the mentally ill. I heard beeping and flapping behind him, the wheels of industry churning. I asked about the baby. He told me it was a boy—another Edgar, legit. The rich do that, deal out the same name like a winning hand of cards. I never ended up telling my sister about him, or anyone else. That was probably a defensive strategy. I kept the whole thing at bay very well. Not until now do I feel it acutely, and only because I happened to come to Maine with my niece for a long weekend.

My niece has had a hard go of it. Her own parents have turned pettier even than ours had been. My niece came to me when her father’s business failed and her parents moved out to the Nevada desert in search of a new plot. Now that she’s older, spending time with her feels like having a sister again. It’s curious. I had been looking forward to the trip, and Acadia was beautiful, but I couldn’t have predicted how much it would hurt to see that island. I had the urge to see that old house again, so on the way back to the airport we stopped there, in the rental car. More than twenty years have passed. The dirt road is paved now. The lovely old house is gone. Just: gone. Deleted. The woods have been razed. On the shorn land is a new house, enormous, a wraparound porch, a stone-edged swimming pool, a gazebo dripping wisteria.

It broke my heart but my niece was impressed. “You spent a summer here with a mysterious younger man? Not bad, Aunt Suze. This place is great. Is that a sauna over there? That cedar box?”

“It wasn’t like this. It was a creaky old house. Shingle style. Woods. Meadow.”

“This is so nice,” my niece said, putting her hand on the glass of the car window, making a face I knew well, the same expression my sister had.

I remembered our first interaction in the bookstore, Adam and me, the book for this same girl, who’d been so small then and was now grown up. I remembered my desire for a man with money, how for so many years that longing was the motor that carried me along. Sometimes I could not see straight for how badly I wanted it. I would fall for anything. I missed so much right in front of me, got caught on the wrong details. My niece turned and put her hand on my arm, as if sensing my grief, but only said, “You know what I’d really like, in my heart of hearts? A boyfriend with an inground pool.”

The Most Anticipated Queer Books for Summer 2026

Posted on June 5, 2026June 5, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

Like many of you, I wake up each morning with the feeling that they’re coming for us. But then I think, they have always come for the queers. And we have always, throughout human history, stood watch all night over the fire. We have always taken care of each other, and we will keep on doing it.

I’ve been joking lately that I’m just going to get gayer. I’m going to make up new pronouns. I’m going to keep going out, dancing with my friends—which we call Church—and I’ll go on gay marrying my loved ones as an ordained minister with the highest of internet credentials, and I’ll watch Queer Ultimatum if I have to and Heated Rivalry because I want to, and I will honor the memories of our BIPOC queer and trans ancestors. I will fight for trans youth, and I will keep writing and sharing our stories no matter how much they try to silence or censor us.

Electric Lit’s Most Anticipated Queer Books List was launched by Michelle Hart, who centered and uplifted LGBTQ+ writers and the queer stories that “deserve not only to be included but centered” in literary discourse. Michelle tells us, “Let these new books be a reminder: Even in the face of despair and erasure, we’re still here—reading, writing, and refusing to disappear.”

It’s an honor to continue the work Michelle started in 2022. She reminds me—these books remind me—that queer is the future: It has always been the future.

This summer, to celebrate Pride, I invite you to save a queer, read a book. We keep the fires lit ’till morning.

With thanks to Amulya Tadimety, Annie O’Brien, Lennie Roeber-Tsiongas, and Shandela Contreras for their assistance with this list.

Mother Tongue by Sara Nović (May 5)

Following Nović’s novel True Biz, this crip-queer memoir reads as a Deaf manifesto on motherhood. At age 12, Sara Nović began to lose her hearing, but almost no one noticed—not at home, not at school. For much of her adolescence, Nović masked both her disability and her queerness, until an experience of spiritual humility led her to claim not only her deafness, but Deafness: the political act, the community. The book’s raison d’etre seems to be about honoring that experience, resisting erasure, and changing the sociopolitical landscape to be one that celebrates difference, rather than trying to stamp it out. As Nović tells us, no one is a villain in their own story, and in Mother Tongue she sets out to expose the oralist frameworks and audist lobbies that continue to disenfranchise disabled people. Initially conceived as letters to her sons, the work is also a tender examination of family. Nović touches on the challenges of pregnancy, those sleepless nights when her first child S was inconsolable and she’d have to belt out her own rendition of “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” It ends, movingly, on her adoption of her second son, K, a deaf child in Thailand living in an orphanage, and who lights up when he finally learns to sign.

One Leg on Earth by ‘Pemi Aguda (May 5)

“Is it possible to be aware and not feel dread?” asks ‘Pemi Aguda. In One Leg on Earth, Aguda’s debut novel, pregnant women in Nigeria are jumping off of bridges and walking into water to drown themselves—and no one knows why. Yosoye, a recent graduate, relocates to Lagos (“a city looking forward only, hustling forward”) to complete her compulsory NYSC internship; she finds herself working for an architecture firm set to develop the new Omi City out of reclaimed land. Dazed by freedom, Yosoye wanders the dark streets of the city. Following a spontaneous encounter, she discovers that she, too, is pregnant. Amid judgments from coworkers and friends and forces that would seek to mysticize her for having one foot in heaven, Yosoye falls in with the dangerously seductive Beloved. There is a touch of body horror, as there is with all of Aguda’s work—including unforgettable stories of madness in pregnancy—but when the surrounding sand and water start to take on an ominous glare, both Yosoye and the reader find themselves haunted by the dead women. The novel draws on Aguda’s own research with members of the displaced Otodo Gbame community whose waterfront homes were demolished by the Lagos state government. For fans of Samanta Schweblin, Helen Oyeyemi, Rachel Heng; for lovers of Sula.

John of John by Douglas Stuart (May 5)

Departing Glasgow for Scotland’s Hebrides islands, Douglas Stuart’s third novel asks a question quintessential to queerness: Can you ever go back home? This is the tender, sore storytelling we’ve come to expect from Stuart, with some pages reading like a summer shower, others like a squall. Having graduated from art school, John-Calum Macleod (Cal) is called back from Edinburgh to take care of his loving, mischievous grandmother Ella, and to work the family croft and sheep farm in bone-cold winter. Cal’s father—also a John, also running from himself—is embattled in a spiritual reckoning few know about. A leader in the local Presbyterian church that gleefully chains down swing sets on Sundays, John pushes his faith and way of life on Cal, at one point telling him, “You look like a cross-dresser that’s thrown on a coat because he’s run out of milk.” Stuart’s secondary characters are outrageously memorable, as with the set of brothers who live together but refuse to speak, demanding a translator even when they’re at the same kitchen table. The novel, a flurry of domestic violence, is also one of warmth and color (literally: To make ends meet, the men work a loom, following a cultural tradition that has not changed very much since the industrial revolution, and one scene includes an erection knit into cloth). Tensions spike when the son, seeking closeness, reaches for his father’s best friend. In John of John, we witness what it means to live side by side, each inside a lonely secret: the very definition of family.

Turn (W)here by Chet’la Sebree (May 5)

If what you seek is belonging, go to the poets. Following the gorgeous Blue Opening, Sebree’s most recent collection, Turn (W)here is not a mere travelogue but a “travel song,” a panoramic love letter to the poet’s own itinerant spirit. With this project, Sebree takes to the road and searches for home across 16 countries and 38 states, alert to the threat of Black people’s modern day sundown encounters in small towns. Along for the ride, we travel from Jackson, Mississippi, to Dante’s tomb, to the French streets Baldwin walked. Sebree also returns to those places that birthed her people, a father she calls her “guy,” a mother who put herself through law school so that her children might know a different America. She traces her matrilineal line of free Black women in Maryland and asks what owning property means for her family; while the news of the police murder of Philando Castile plays through her radio, she grapples with what it means to be a citizen of a racist nation. Sebree asks: What is required to bring a Black child into this world, this country, of rootlessness? But also, there are table gatherings, and food rituals, and visits with friends—unforgettably, that one luxurious, intimate afternoon spent in Wisconsin when, in a surprising act of kinship, she and her friend do up their hair. In the words of Tina Campt, whom Sebree invokes, Turn (W)here “shifts the optics of ‘looking at’ to a politics of looking with, through, and alongside another.”

Again, Harder by Alice Stoehr (May 12)

One of Stoehr’s devoted readers describes this book as “a lightning bolt into my brain . . . I want to hug and run away from every woman [the writer] creates.” Again, Harder chronicles a sisterhood of trans women living in a large Midwestern town. In the linked short story collection, attractions flare and fizzle, polycules rise and fall, texts come hot and heavy until the fetishism starts, nights end in ass slapping. Money is always an issue, girls are continuously honing their emotional maturity. Harsh, sexy, tender, these stories remind us what we love about queer community, even when the closeness is suffocating (e.g. “I love that girl, but she is a stress.”). The dialogue is delicious, as are the hook-ups. One character laments, “Something’s going to break,” another replies, “Breakage comes with transition,” and still another reminds us, “Nothing is bad, everything is dangerous.” Stoehr, beloved cult author, plays with point-of-view and form. She flirts with the epistolary and the confessional but always makes it funny—an allusion to the Brave Little Toaster is foreplay—and keeps to a razor’s edge the pain, regret, loss. Again, harder, please.

Mighty Real by Barry Walters (May 12)

Storied journalist Barry Walters’s extensive history of LGBTQ music from 1969 to 2000 spans genres, regions, and movements to trace a throughline of a revolutionary queer ethos. The chapters of Mighty Real explore artists whose music and impact have bent boundaries and expectations for gender and sexuality, from the Velvet Underground to Whitney Houston to the Indigo Girls. Walters, a longtime writer for outlets like the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and the Advocate, also weaves in his own stories throughout; as a music journalist and columnist for decades in San Francisco and New York, including during the AIDS epidemic, he captures for us those memories that stay with him. Walters encyclopedically archives moments of queer and trans joy, expression, and resistance, and even spotlights LGBTQ pioneers who have been overlooked in music history. This is the perfect book to read before stepping out onto the light-up queer dancefloor this summer.

Take Me with You by Steven Rowley (May 19)

What do you do when your husband of 30 years literally disappears into thin air and you’re the only witness? Steven Rowley takes this deliciously bizarre premise and spins it into something all-too real: a meditation on how we never fully know the people we love, even after decades of shared life. Jesse del Ruth, left behind in their Joshua Tree home, must navigate not just grief but the maddening ambiguity of abandonment without closure, the not-knowing that’s somehow worse than any definitive answer. Rowley, who gave us The Guncle‘s perfect blend of humor and heartbreak, returns with his sharpest work yet, a novel that lays bare the essential unknowability at the heart of even our most intimate bonds. It’s speculative fiction as emotional excavation, and it’ll wreck you in the best way.

The Maidenheads by Benny B. Peterson (May 26)

If you think texting your ex is toxic behavior, Jamie and Mari take it to a whole new level in The Maidenheads. A debut novel, Peterson sets their story of tragic teenage passion to the soundtrack of early 2000s grunge, pop punk, and indie rock music, appealing to fans of romance and music fanatics. As lonely teenagers in DC, Jamie and Mari start a punk rock band together. Just as the band is about to get its big break, a messy romantic breakup between the young musicians ruins their chance at fame and leaves Jamie emotionally paralyzed. A decade later, an opportunity for Mari and Jamie to reconnect presents itself. Jamie, feeling stuck in her life as a copyeditor in Baltimore, jumps at the chance to sing alongside her first love again. Ensue romantic chaos draped in bold vocals and angsty melodies. The Maidenheads is a balm for anyone who yearns for the recklessness of the teenage years without the soul-wrecking consequences of adulthood.

Inspiration Porn by Ryan O’Connell (May 26)

After years of candid introspection that fueled a popular blog, a memoir, and the Netflix series Special, writer Ryan O’Connell found himself embarking on self-reflection for an entirely new reason. He and his long-term boyfriend had opened their relationship, thrusting him into unfamiliar terrain: What would sex with strangers look like for him as a disabled gay man? This life-altering moment and more are chronicled in his debut essay collection, which seamlessly swings from discussing growing up with cerebral palsy and an alcoholic mother to chronicling wild sexual awakenings and misadventures. O’Connell approaches each of these stories—about social media, sex, disability, and addiction—with a trademark breezy, witty style honed through early internet and television writing. Unabashedly raunchy and hilarious, O’Connell’s essays normalize the messy, beautiful, and complicated intersections of his life.

Mad Eden by Morgan Thomas (June 2)

Publishing too often uses the word groundbreaking, but in the case of Mad Eden, something about this rings true. Mad Eden, a debut, is nearly impossible to categorize yet joyful to inhabit. Ro, a trans, autie patient advocate, lives in Florida with their oh-so patient partner Liam in a partnership that is built on mutuality. Thomas writes, “There was joy, somehow, in our surviving this place that intended to be inhospitable to us.” The two look after their “adoptive son” Quentin, a minor who is looking to transition but, like countless others, is thwarted. Danger comes in the form of constrictive state laws, false allies, and anti-trans legislation. When a TERF influencer targets the medical facility Ro works for, their tiny queer utopia is threatened. The book feels less like a novel and more like genre spilling into other genres. A work of meaningful intertextuality, Mad Eden weaves together an online fantasy series that builds its lexicon from an essay on autism. There are also dragons, alligators, talk of homemade T, and elegant treatises on time.

There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood by Rasheed Newson (June 2)

Old-school Hollywood glamour meets the razor-sharp wit of the HBO dramedy Hacks in Newson’s searing industry takedown. It’s 1958 in Hollywood, and Aaron Touissant knows where all of the bodies are buried. A backlot fixer for Skyline Pictures, Aaron conceals the secrets of the production company’s most renowned actors—whether it be a star’s queerness or a torrid affair with a mobster’s young daughter. He’s good at his job; a closeted Black gay man himself, Aaron has fine-tuned his muscles for secret-keeping. Aaron, however, meets his match in Xavier C. Barlow, Hollywood’s latest dashing Black movie star, who doesn’t care to hide his queerness (and, perhaps, someone that Aaron has known carnally once . . . or twice). When Xavier’s activism has dire consequences, Aaron picks up his pen to tell the real story of Xavier C. Barlow. Pulling tidbits from candid memoirs by Black stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age as well as archival material, Newson’s novel—like most Hollywood stories—is an irresistible blend of fact and fiction.

Earth 7 by Deb Olin Unferth (June 9)

Too many of us queer earthlings have been eagerly awaiting Earth 7 since Deb Olin Unferth’s groundbreaking heist novel Barn 8. The newest work is sci-fi/cli-fi/homosapien criticism in a way only Unferth could write—entirely within and outside of genre. Each sentence introduces us to a vibrant and inescapable future just outside of our imagining, with some of the most moving passages on sand ever written. In a distant (but not too distant) future, after we have completely ruined the planet, two women meet on a fake beach. Dylan, who grew up in a pod at the bottom of the ocean of our de-pop(ulated) world can’t help but be drawn to Melanie, a person so full of plastic and enhanced DNA sequences that people believe she’s a robot. Both Dylan and Melanie are, in their own way, “sidling so far from human that humans didn’t recognize [them] as one of their own,” finding each other, and then coming apart. Meanwhile, Dylan’s researcher mother uploads her consciousness onto a chip hurtling through space. Dylan’s final creative act is one that Unferth, too, seems compelled by: to capture life before it’s too late. Earth 7 is an adventurous, wry, utterly human novel (that “original root of sadness and wildness”), and it will be here long after we’re gone.

Nymph by Sofia Montrone (June 9)

Set in a crumbling hotel in the Italian countryside, Nymph is written for those whose idea of a perfect summer vacation consists of long, slow walks in a rustic setting rather than sunburning at a beach club. Our protagonist, Leo, lives in Manhattan but spends every summer cleaning the guests’ rooms in her family’s agriturismo alongside her rapidly aging grandmother. The summer before Leo leaves for college, her grandmother hires Dolores, a sun-tanned California girl who came to Italy to study violin making. Romance, of course, ensues between Leo and Dolores, an inevitable response to the nutty aroma of freshly-brewed espresso, sprawling orchards, and winding alleys of an old-school village. While the romance brings the cat to the cream—or the tourist to the vineyard—the complex family dynamics keep the pages turning. Smuggled between teenage longing and retellings of The Odyssey, Montrone asks what happens to a family that would rather wipe snot from a stranger’s headboard than clean their own dirty laundry.

What I Made for Dinner by Krys Malcom Belc (June 9)

In the early pages of his memoir, Krys laments, “What was the adulthood I imagined? I hoped it wouldn’t be this, this middle-aged drudgery my mother was in.” Belc, a transgender man, performs most of the domestic labor for his wife, two sons, and daughter. His memoir, following his family during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, structures the narrative around his favorite internet chefs. He cycles through a seemingly endless loop of Claire Saffitz recipes, Ree Drummond’s The Pioneer Woman reruns, and Stella Park’s YouTube oeuvre. When pandemic restrictions loosen their grip, Belc, perhaps desiring to stay in domestic bliss, decides to have another baby. Filled with relatable frustrations about parenthood, as well as well-researched tidbits of food TV history, come hungry to What I Made for Dinner. You’ll leave inspired to try your own hand at making the gorgeous cinnamon bun recipes that look anything but simple.

Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer (June 9)

If you take one book to the beach with you this summer, let it be Villa Coco. Fresh from undergrad, fumbling through life as if tasked to do “someone else’s shopping,” a young man takes up residence in the Italian countryside after answering an ad for an adjutant. Instead of cataloging Picassos and priceless artifacts as he’s been hired to do, he becomes an assistant to the Baronessa (known to her friends as Coco), is promptly nicknamed Giovedì, and is tasked with pruning roses, fixing septic tanks, and responding to his employer’s every whim. After many bad choices in love, our young gay protagonist has taken a vow of no more men for a while, has yet to learn that wherever you go, there you are. He enters into an affair with a married man and must choose between want and freedom. The novel, as charming as Greer’s Pulitzer-prize winning Less, is full of witty aphorisms, tall tales, and superstitions: At one point, Giovedì, mistakenly setting a hat on a bed, is ordered to touch a man’s testicles so that nobody dies. In Greer’s world, servants and guests never speak the same language, villains seduce diamonds from Sicilian prices, someone is always related to the queen, and every conversation becomes a delightful conundrum. Each passage is a flirtation with food, or light playing on water beneath a bridge, or the Baronessa’s Italian cousin. Or the Baronessa herself, who holds together her world (the only world) by sheer will and scheming. Villa Coco, laced with wistful, playful nostalgia, reads like youth itself.

As If by Isabel Waidner (June 16)

If your doppelgänger came along, would you be tempted to switch lives? What if the people who love you end up liking them just a bit more? What if you found yourself taking their sadness for your own? In this surrealist work reminiscent of Rivka Galchen’s fiction, two desperate men who appear to be identical are mistaken for one another and decide to swap lives. Lewis is a failed actor and grieving widower, Korine is a failed father and husband; each covets the illusory freedom the other seems to have. After the swap, Korine spends nights beneath an overpass studying to be an actor, while Lewis cares for Korine’s child, who isn’t fooled by the dupe, but still teaches Lewis how to behave like his father. Amid double-bluffs and suspicions, pretense and envy, this is spy versus spy on an existential level—and simmering beneath, a restlessness that has to do with class, grief, and dreams deferred. Queer literature always wants to know if we are brave enough to imagine a life outside of the one we’re contained by. As If is a book that asks: What keeps us alive?

Sourland by Ariel Delgado Dixon (June 23)

Trust a lesbian to tell you everything you need to know about sex, cows, and weed. It’s 2010, and Sapphire, the purveyor of an illegal cannabis farm and a pansexual known for her trysts with much younger lovers, goes missing. In her absence, her ex-girlfriend Frankie, a former ballet dancer, faces off against Fizz, the current male lover, for control of the property. Sourland is a lush, hidden land tended by bands of drifters, some with professorial knowledge of weed: It has the potential to pull in millions. It’s also overrun by rats, runaway bulls, runaway tractors, and wild pigs, all of them out for blood. Additionally out for blood are the rippers who target the outlaw farm, locking Frankie in a barrel. But the story really heats up when JJ, Fizz’s ex-partner, returns for revenge. Sourland, which Delgado Dixon dedicates to “the farm,” is full of sinewy desire, deception, shootouts and chases, and characters you might meet in a Delillo novel. Atmospheric, with an eye for people, it reads like no other crime novel.

Perverts by Mac Crane (July 7)

“We were in love, and we were perverts, and for a while we didn’t have to think about anything else,” Crane writes in their title story. They go on to say that actually, they were not perverts at all, but “human proof of boldness, of desire, of terror.” In 2026, this reads like queer manifesto. These 17 stories are not about perverts, but perversion—resisting boundaries. “Smear the Queers”—told in the sly, wounded voice familiar to queers everywhere—is about a boutique service that allows straight people to hunt queers in role-playing scenarios that become all too real. Other titles include “Alex Adams, the Dyke Who Wouldn’t Grow Up,” “Topping is Not for the Grief Stricken,” and “Have No Records of Your Ass.” There are failed messiahs, sex parties, seashell porn, blackmail, wealth gaps, hatchlings, rebellious Futurewives™, excellent descriptions of hugs and how we fail each other, and so, so much disappointment. Parenthood resembles nothing you’ve thought up before. Even as these stories demand more, more, more, they point to an absence, and everything is distraction from “spooky” pain. Perverts is in conversation with writers like Allegra Hyde and Lydi Conklin; everyone is on their worst behavior. We know we’re at the right party.

Chosen Family by Madeleine Gray (July 14)

Coming hot off of her debut novel, Green Dot, Madeleine Gray offers up a witty and delicious lesbian coming-of-age story. Two best friends who have known each other since high school and do not in any way feel a thing for each other (wink wink) decide to have a baby together in the spirit of queer utopianism. Eve and Nell first meet at an all-girls school in Sydney in 2007, where they are plagued by mean girls, The OC, and having to mask queerness in adolescence. As their families of origins having woefully failed them, they are propelled towards both queer interdependence and emotional isolationism. After a painful falling out, one that asks us how any of us made it through high school, the two reconnect in college, where they find selfhood, art, and chosen family. Plenty of U-Haul lesbian jokes abound in these pages, plus a toying with gay male stereotypes that hints at being in-crowd while reckoning with heteronormativity. (“Straight people raw dog while queers have to actively family plan.”) The book is so funny (and fun!), the quips finally for us, not at us. Gray shows us that chosen family is really about the connections that carry us through our lives.

Living, Together: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection by Samantha Paige Rosen (July 14)

In an era when what we mean by home is constantly shifting—thanks to Covid, ongoing economic crises that make house ownership untenable, private catastrophes—Living, Together celebrates every queer expression of cohabitation. At age 29, Samantha Paige Rosen moved in with her parents, found she loved being part of an intergenerational household, and got her curious about all of the other joyful, creative ways people live in community. In Living, Together, more than 20 writers and activists share how they make new, collaborative spaces. Contributors range from their twenties to their nineties, in varying genders, races, classes, mobilities. The work is structured in three thematic sections spanning from biological and chosen families, to collectives arising from shared ideologies, to radical departures from communal living. Debutiful’s Adam Vitcavage writes about living with his sister as adults—watching Drag Race, arguing over which Thai spot is best—and departing as friends. Sarah Thankam Matthews, relaying the mutual-aid organization she initiated during the pandemic, talks about “the we of Bed-Stuy Strong.” Kristen Arnett gets married and, touchingly reflecting on the power of chosen family, realizes she doesn’t have to do it all on her own.

Dooneen by Keith Ridgway (July 21)

Go down the rabbit hole, wind up in Dublin. In this alternate near-future Ireland, the sidewalks move. There are spinners and clickers . . . whatever that is . . . and the city is hot with protest. The government stalks the streets in shadow, and everywhere is “the fucking noise of the fucking progress.” Mew steps through a portal that connects London to home, where he is to speak at a literary conference—but nothing goes straight in Ridgway’s imagination. Mew writes to his beloved, whom he aches to see again, and the novel becomes an unrequited epistolary love story. One black night, he gets (eagerly) claimed by the insurgency. Dooneen is full of absurdist tautologies, counterfactuals, mysterious figures, mysterious horses, songs sung, parents disappointed, gay soldiers, ripped trousers, boy ghosts, and clandestine missions through city tunnels. Ridgway draws on The Troubles without ever quite naming them, and speaks to ones we have yet to face. To Americans, the book will read all too close, with extrajudicial killings and housing disparities, but it is also very funny, spry, reminding us that the Irish are the best at getting through periods of absolute intolerance. For fans of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Anna Burn’s Milkman, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, and resistance even when it’s futile.

The Most Anticipated Queer Books of Spring 2026

Don’t forget to check out the following titles, published January through April 2026!

Genderqueer Menopause by Lasara Firefox Allen (Jan 13)

This groundbreaking handbook, written by a genderqueer doula and accredited menopause coach, offers tools, insights, and solidarity for queer individuals going through menopause. Author Lasara Firefox Allen foregrounds perspectives that have been sidelined and systemically erased in mainstream medical care. They identify resources that are both genderqueer and binary-gender-oriented, integrate quotes from real people they have surveyed, and include an appendix for health practitioners. Firefox Allen centers queer experience, affirming care, and community support, moving beyond heteronormative conceptions of menopause to empower, relieve, and demystify.

Hemlock by Melissa Faliveno (Jan 20)

In this gothic novel dedicated to Faliveno’s parents, a woman fleeing her own life escapes New York for her family’s cabin in rural Wisconsin, leaving behind a boyfriend, an apartment in Brooklyn, and a job as an editor. After almost a year of sobriety, Sam, grappling with her family’s history with alcoholism—and her mother’s disappearance into the nearby woods—begins to drink again. The book is full of shadows and longing, a prolonged sense of uncertainty about where the danger lies. There are poison plants, conversations with a doe, and flirtations with a cute local named Gina. Faliveno’s crisp prose evokes an ambiguous haunting that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has been through it: “It’s like I’m turning into something else . . . like something is opening up, or making its way out.” This “butch Black Swan” captivated Austin Carter at Pocket Books Shop, the queer-feminist indie bookstore owned by three best friends (with a new second Lancaster, PA location!)

Two Women Living Together by Kim Hana & Hwang Sunwoo, translated by Gene Png (Jan 20)

Two Women Living Together is not a queer book—technically. Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo use the language “cohabitants” to define their relationship, and the best-selling Korean memoir clearly casts the two as women who value their independence. After turning forty and being confronted by the loneliness of living alone, the two move in together. Still, there is undeniable intimacy in these pages: their four beloved cats, shared playlists and guilty pleasures, the little noticings of habits. During a hospital stay, Hana stays by Sunwoo’s side. One section is titled: “If We Broke Up.” In switchback chapters, Hana and Sunwoo create a new domestic sphere that is undefined by patriarchy and social expectation. Sly, subtly subversive, a wonderful companion, Two Women Living Together is anything but straight.

Just Watch Me by Lior Torenberg (Jan 20)

For seven days, across seven chapters, Dell Danvers live-streams her life for the internet, eating hotter and hotter peppers for cash donations. This self-exploitation might sound all too familiar, and at best, Dell is “a morally gray heroine” who would undoubtedly be played by Natasha Lyonne. (Even Torenberg admits she probably wouldn’t like her protagonist in real life!) Nevertheless, like her followers on Live Cast, we readers are eager to know if Dell will do it: will she eat the ghost pepper. Like Dell, we anxiously count every coin that passes through her hands—we’ve seen her paycheck ($0) and her apartment (formerly a closet, no bathroom); most of all, Dell has allowed us a glimpse into her pain, how she is grieving for her comatose sister and reaching for the impossible. Funny, chatty, weird, and at times unexpectedly poignant. You can devour Just Watch Me in one gulp, but, like a habanero, it’ll be sitting with you for hours.

One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson (Jan 20)

“Stories are there to change what is into what if,” Winterson tells us. This is feminist manifesto, literary criticism, personal narrative, oral storytelling—a book that refuses to be categorized, much like its author. Fans of Winterson know she grew up as a lesbian adopted by ultra-religious Evangelical parents: That is, she was told one story about who she was, and the only way she could be saved was to go out into the world and tell another. Many others. Calling on One Thousand and One Nights’ Shahrazad, who tempts and tricks her would-be executioner, the Sultan Shahryar, Winterson tells us tales to keep us on the hook, all while confronting issues like capitalism and consumerism, climate change, and “everything-bagel liberalism.” In One Aladdin Two Lamps, Winterson reminds us that stories are a way to reshape our world, by which she means: our future.

On Sundays She Picked Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield (Jan 27)

Yah Yah Scholfield’s simmering debut is arriving hot off the heels of her selection for The Best American Short Stories 2025. The book follows Jude, who flees her childhood home and abusive mother, finding solace in a house whose dark history is immediately familiar to her. Developing a solidarity with the spirits of the house, Jude becomes a healer, although the darkness of her past continues to lurk in the shadows. When a mysterious, alluring woman arrives at the house, Jude must come to terms with her desire, demons, and the legacy of violence within herself and the walls of the house.

Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack (Feb 10)

The incomparable Catherine Lacey calls Murder Bimbo “Gone Girl for the Luigi Mangioni era.” A sex worker is recruited to become an assassin at the hands of the US government—and on page one, she’s running for her life. We are seduced by this unreliable queer narrator, caught up in her ex and writing late-night emails about justice and a man named Meat Neck! Propulsive, electric, Murder Bimbo conceals and reveals and conceals again, as any disruptive queer act must. The political assassination at the heart of the book is eerily resonant, though the novel was written before Charlie Kirk was killed. Rebecca Novack, who has a master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard divinity school, plays with our readerly expectations about motive, audience, authorship, and the genre of true crime.

Last Seen by Christopher Castellani (Feb 17)

Last Seen, a speculative literary thriller, follows four young men—Caleb, Steven, Matthew, and Leo—each of whom disappeared between 2007 and 2020, and whose bodies were later found in icy rivers across the United States. The book alludes to the true-crime theory proposed by retired NYPD detectives, suggesting the series of deaths might be linked murders rather than accidental drownings. Many people are convinced the boys are victims of the Smiley Face Killers, an insidious group targeting white, college-aged men who have been drinking. Castellani’s writing tenderly captures the voice of the four boys, and all they’ve lost, as they watch over their loved ones in death: “I am one of those boys they keep finding in the river . . . Caleb Aldrich who was too beautiful to live.” An exploration of grief, masculinity, and homecoming, Victor LaValle calls it “a ghost story, an elegy, a love letter to young men who go missing without a trace.”

So Old, So Young by Grant Ginder (Feb 17)

What’s more queer than following a group of friends to five parties over twenty years? In this tragicomedy full of wit, wisdom, and sizzling dialogue, Ginder shows us how tender and complicated chosen family can be. Six friends try to find each other as they drift apart. Pick the hard adult thing: unrequited love, bad taste in men, job loss, infidelity, binges, unrealized potential. “While this is a distinctly millennial set of characters, their stories of heartache and searching is a universal one,” says Claire Benedict of Bear Pond Books, Montpelier, VT. Ginder’s fourth book, follows Honestly, We Meant Well and The People We Hate at the Wedding, which was adapted into a major motion picture starring Allison Janney and Kristen Bell. Reading it, one realizes that nostalgia is a decidedly queer emotion. At heart, it’s about the little fights between friends that become great distances to travel, and the ways we find our way back to one another.

Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky (Feb 17)

It’s 1970s San Francisco, and nineteen-year-old Celia Dent demands her freedom from her domineering husband. After Vivienne Bianco is murdered at the phone company where Celia works “the elephant graveyard of jobs,” she begins to seek “revolutionary changes . . . violent changes, even.” Celia buys a knife, she fires a gun, she seeks real love. “We can take forever to arrive at the most obvious truths about ourselves, because the will to conform is mighty in us, and the fear of somebody find out we’re not normal is a mighty fear.” This dark, unconventional comedy is quirky, surprising, and sharp!

Ladies Almanack by Djuna Barnes (Feb 17)

In her introduction to this new edition of Ladies Almanack, Sarah Schulman tells us, “No one loves the lesbians as much as a lesbian in love.” The Ladies Almanack proves that lesbians have always been sly, pissed off, underpaid, but also funny and innovative. The work is a roman à clef about the vibrant lesbian expatriate community in 1920s Paris, focusing on Natalie Clifford Barney’s salon. The mock almanac celebrates and only thinly veils the real people at the heart of the work, including Thelma Wood, Djuna Barnes’s impossible, often drunk, charismatic lover (who apparently also seduced Edna St. Vincent Millay). This is all at once high queer court, social satire, love letter, and flirty literary gossip written in a pastiche of Restoration literature that asserts, “We don’t feel about men the way they feel about themselves.” Reissued by Dalkey Archive Press nearly a hundred years after it was re-written, the work now comes complete with Elizabethan-style woodcut illustrations. Shoshana Bockol at The Head & The Hand bookstore in Philly put this one at the top of her list. She says, “This is the one I’m most excited for!”

Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg (March 3)

Night Night Fawn is undoubtedly the Marxist, trans, comedic dystopia we need in 2026. Initially conceived as nonfiction, Jordy Rosenberg’s second novel subverts form to become an inherently transgressive unauthorized fictional “memoir” that reads as hysterical manifesto. Barbara Rosenberg, a character modeled loosely on Rosenberg’s own mother, is a terminally ill Jewish “yenta.” High on opioids, looking back at her origins in post-war New York—where she grew up with aspirations to be a wealthy Jew—Barbara wonders where she went wrong with her estranged trans son and her ex best friend. As Barbara takes an “unrepentant account of all her failures,” she seeks to understand how her child ended up becoming her greatest fear—queer, unrecognizable, anti-capitalist, manly. As with Rosenberg’s first book Confessions of the Fox, the prose crackles.

Whidbey by T Kira Madden (March 10)

I’ve been eagerly awaiting this title since I heard T Kira Madden read from her manuscript at the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. The book opens with Kira’s letter to the reader, explaining that this revenge story is fiction but also revealing just how much she had to live through. Whidbey, in many ways, is unfinished business for Madden, who wrote about her assailant in “Feels of Love” in the memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. Her debut novel begins on a boat to an island: A woman running from the man who abused her as a child, a chance meeting with a stranger who promises to kill him—and then, days later, the murder. But in Madden’s hands, this is so much more than a noir story. The sentences are exquisite. The novel gives voice to survivors of sexual abuse and rape, claiming power not only from assailants, but from a broken justice system and the media. Madden, unflinching as ever, even drops us into the perspective of the mother of the convicted sex offender.

A Lady for All Seasons by TJ Alexander (March 10)

From the Lambda Literary Award finalist comes the sequel to A Gentleman’s Gentleman, named one of The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of 2025. It’s 1820s London, and the cunning Verbena Montrose at the heart of this queer Regency romance tricks her newly rich best friend Etienne into marrying her. This is a comedy of errors full of yearning and hijinks and genderfluid lovers. You can expect scheming, gossip, a lavender wedding, genderplay, and even a cameo by Lord Byron. Just in time to pre-order from BookWoman for Valentine’s Day, you fans of trans historical romances!

Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran (March 10)

This lesbian gothic horror set in 1928 at the “pash” Briarley School for Girls is set in the long boarding-school tradition of young people being forced to rely on no one but themselves. The rules are different, the food is terrible, the mood is always brooding. Everybody is always watching, but nobody sees the two girls kissing on the grounds. Emily Locke, who is “not good at discerning the contours of what to be afraid of” is in her final year when her best friend falls mysteriously to her death. Violet, a cunning beauty envied by students and teachers alike, is the first to die, but certainly not the last. This lesbian phantasmagoria has everything: silk gloves, sour milk, clandestine visits to mystics, potentially evil yet sexy French teachers. It brings to mind Meg Wolitzer’s Belzhar, Tana French’s The Secret Place, and even the salty teen-girl quips of Christine Schutt’s All Souls. This one was a favorite of Emerson at The Head & Hand bookstore.

Hell’s Heart by Alexis Hall (March 12)

Described by Sarah Gailey as “Moby Dick meets Treasure Planet by way of Fleabag,” Hell’s Heart is a sapphic journey through the depths of space and human desire. Earth is abandoned and its remaining inhabitants have taken to the stars, where they survive by harvesting spermaceti, a hallucinogenic fuel produced by massive whale-like creatures. Society has deteriorated into a desolate landscape of corporate accumulation and morally bankrupt religious institutions. With no other options, the narrator—called “I”—joins a voyage hunting for spermaceti, and quickly becomes infatuated with the ship’s female captain, “A.” As the hunt progresses and the captain’s delusions mount, the narrator’s grasp on reality and her sense of self is thrown into question.

My Lover, the Rabbi by Wayne Koestenbaum (March 17)

In this much anticipated novel, nearly two decades after he published his first, Wayne Koestenbaum performs for us the inexhaustible gaze of the lover. “All I ever wanted,” our speaker says of the rabbi, “was to be smothered by his nakedness, to be walled off from the world by the sheer interfering magnitude of his flesh . . . between my body and the rest of existence.” This is a gay, gay book, often told in poetic, staccato chapters, with some sentences going on for pages. One conversation about “the best dermatologist” gets interrupted by “quaint” fellatio and an allusion to Odysseus, ending many lines later in a recommendation to go to Charlottesville. Fans of Garth Greenwell will delight in Koestenbaum’s demonstration of the sublime against corporeal obsession, play, need, humiliation, grief, desire, camp, refusal to engage in any heteronormative norms.

Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro (April 7)

From the incomparable New Directions comes a gorgeous work of collective witness set against an urban landscape. Giada Scodellaro, whose debut Some of Them Will Carry Me was listed by The New Yorker as one of its best books in 2022, archives Black women’s experiences in this poet’s novel. Scodellaro writes, “The community is made up of predominantly black people . . . it’s a place we’ve created for ourselves, okay? Or a place we were forced into and have reimagined.” Conjuring the spirit of Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Ruins, Child weaves folklore, botany and the body—always the body. One chapter is entitled “groin,” another, “sole of the foot.” Ruins, Child is a surrealist, cinematic telling with an eye towards the future.

Honey in the Wound by Jiyoung Han (April 7)

Set in the 20^th century during the Japanese occupation of Korea, this multi-generational, historical novel follows a family of women with astonishing gifts: one who disappears and returns a tigress, one who can force a liar to speak the truth, one who can see into dreams. The work centers on Young-ja, who infuses food with her emotions, and ultimately uses that power to resist colonialism. In 1931, after Japanese soldiers crush her family’s defiance against the Empire, Young-Ja is taken by a Korean resistance fighter to Manchuria, where she joins a clandestine world of teahouse spies. Han’s writing is lush and moving, and the work is both inventive and deeply researched—sometimes reading as fable, other times as historical account or ancestral narrative. Kirkus describes this stunning debut as “a revelatory work of harrowing fiction . . . [that] validates the hidden powers of ‘powerless’ women.”

Surrender by Jennifer Acker (April 14)

Jennifer Acker’s Surrender is a tale of reinvention, baby goats, and grown up teenage love. After decades of city life, 47-year-old Lucy returns to her childhood home in rural Massachusetts to take over her father’s farm. Almost immediately, challenges arise: Lucy’s lack of experience is compounded by loss and the worsening health of her husband. Lucy finds a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of Sandy, her childhood companion-turned-more-than-a-friend, but Sandy’s presence at the farm also draws the attention of her employers, a solar energy company. Exploring grief, desire, and the second adolescence of middle age, Surrender is a must-read of 2026.

Harmless by Miranda Shulman (April 14)

Two years after the fact, Bea is still reeling from the death of her twin sister, Audrey. Where Bea is brusque, driven, and deeply lonely, Audrey was bright and extroverted, and her absence has become a ruling force. Now living in Brooklyn, Bea throws herself into an old dream she shared with Audrey: to start a dog kennel. When old friendships rekindle, desires spark, and the lingering weight of Audrey’s death threatens to sink Bea’s budding dream, she must come to terms not only with the loss, but with the secrets it has brought to the surface.

Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg (April 28)

It’s easy to see why the short story is Emma Copley Eisenberg’s first love, even as Fat Swim follows the author’s wildly successful debut novel and memoir. Eisenberg treats her characters with such tenderness, whether it’s young Alice at the pool (or grown-up Alice at camp), or Jules, the trans assistant to the famous elderly gay writer, or Mama, trying hard to migrate to her queer child’s elastic definition of love. Or, for that matter, any minor character that, in Eisenberg’s loving gaze, is celebrated in all their fulness. The collection resists the erasure of fat bodies in American letters, mostly by giving us all too rare portraits of pleasure and desire. Grace Paley is in these pages, as is summer, and ice cream, and Ray’s Birthday Bar, and refusing to be defined in binary terms.

Revisiting “Silence of the Lambs” in the Age of Trans Backlash

Posted on June 5, 2026June 3, 2026 by Katie

Sometimes you are reading a book—not even one by a well-known transphobic children’s author—and are struck, halfway through or near the end, by a bit of transphobia. Sometimes it’s load-bearing: Both Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan end with revelations that their villain characters are caricatures of trans masculinity (Oyeyemi’s, in particular, “resolves” this by having the primary characters agree to tell him he does not need to be trans anymore). Sometimes it’s more by omission than by the letter itself: In Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, a non-medically transitioning woman named Akash is treated by every character as a man without correction or regard for her sense of self. Every time, it’s disappointing. Not only that the author would think that these ideas are okay, or that they would make it through the editorial process, but that they would be so under-discussed in the public acclaim these books receive.

It may seem silly, but I prefer to read books that are much more explicitly transphobic and a few decades old. You’d be forgiven for not knowing how broadly blasé people were even 10 years ago about transness. In 2014, Rush Limbaugh, never a paragon of wokeness, actually apologized to a trans caller to his show for using the slur “tranny.” Famously, when Christine Jorgensen returned from abroad with her gender newly affirmed, it was treated more with intrigue than with anger. “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty,” the papers reported in 1952.

Don’t get me wrong: Even with all the attacks against trans people now, it is better to be trans in America in 2026 than at almost any other time or place. But I do get a real enjoyment from, say, reading Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge and seeing both how much and how little Vidal understands about trans women.

In this complicated space of retro transphobia, it’s hard to think of a book that has had a greater impact on the representation and public imagination of trans people than Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs. Most of you have probably seen the movie; maybe you’re even trans and you really adore it—the canon of trans villains provokes diverse and complex responses from their transsexual audiences. I am not one of the trans people who has an easy time watching the film adaptation of Lambs, though I acknowledge that it is in most respects a perfect film.

In case you don’t know, or have forgotten, Lambs is about a person the press call Buffalo Bill (“because he skins his humps,” girl detective Clarice Starling explains) who is killing women in order to make a suit out of their skin for himself. The novel was inspired by the press coverage of Ed Gein, a man who, in 1957, was found to have killed two women and robbed the graves of many more. Among the many handicrafts he made with these bodies were a “corset made from a female torso” and “masks made from the skin of female heads,” which, along with some leading questions by investigators, led to him being branded as gender-deviant. (This coverage also gave rise to Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.) The film version of Lambs is generally regarded as pretty transphobic, and even prompted director Jonathan Demme to make Philadelphia as an apology to the queer community. (Which was of course unnecessary; Demme was still at queer net-zero in my books for directing Stop Making Sense.)

Both film and book go out of their way to clarify that Buffalo Bill (who I will henceforth call by their government name, Jame Gumb) is not a transsexual. In the novel, Clarice tells Hannibal Lecter (a cannibal and more acceptable monster) there is “no correlation I ever saw between transsexualism and violence.”

There is a long history of breaking trans people into categories that boil down to ‘real’ and ‘fake.’

“Billy’s not a real transsexual,” Lecter replies, “but he thinks he is” (emphasis mine). “He tries to be. He’s tried to be a lot of things, I expect.”

There is a long history of breaking trans people into categories that boil down to “real” and “fake.” Most famously, if you wanted to transition into a straight woman (“heterosexual transsexual” or HSTS) you were allowed to; if you wanted to become some kind of degenerate lesbian freak, you were an “autogynephile”—a man turned on by the idea of being a woman.

So how, in the imagination of Lambs and the late 1980s, are we to distinguish between these categories?

Lecter instructs Clarice to check the three extant gender clinics for people who have been rejected from transition. In particular, he suggests she look at a test called “House-Tree-Person,” in which a subject is asked to draw the titular trio. “Look for someone who didn’t draw the female figure first,” Lecter says. “Look for a house drawing without the rosy-future embellishments” like baby carriages and flowers and curtains. “You get two kinds of trees with real transsexuals: flowing, copious willows and castration themes . . . [but] Billy’s tree will be frightful.”

This is the sort of detail that is, understandably, missing from the Best Picture-winning film adaptation. But it’s what allows me to enjoy the book. Instead of distinguishing Jame as a fake, it exposes how absurd this entire taxonomic enterprise is.

Jame is “not a transsexual, he just thinks he is, and he’s puzzled and angry because [the gender clinic] won’t help him.” Early on, a doctor at Johns Hopkins says, “To even mention Buffalo Bill in the same breath with the problems we treat is ignorant and unfair and dangerous . . . it’s taken years . . . showing the public that transsexuals aren’t crazy, they aren’t perverts, they aren’t ‘queers,’ whatever that is . . . these are decent people with a real problem, a famously intransigent problem. They deserve help.”

The book does not want to be sympathetic to Jame, but it is so interested in spending time with her that, in contrast to the (excellently acted, very upsetting) performance in the film by Ted Levine, I can’t help but see myself in Jame (or “Mr. Gumb,” as the narration insists on calling her). Jame has gotten electrolysis, started HRT. As she goes about her day, she notes that her “hands and feet [are] a little stubbly,” but she decides that “they would do.” She loves her dog Precious, coos frequently that “Mommy’s going to be so beautiful.” The first time I read Lambs, I had just adopted a cat; I was eight months on hormones—just past the edge of the most uncomfortably in-between period—and I remember thinking: This is exactly how I talk to my beloved pet. I, too, move between attempts at eradicating all hair from my torso and legs and thinking, eh, what’s a little stubble? The narration calls this an “earnest inept attempt . . . or hateful mocking” of womanhood, but to me, for better and worse, it just looks like womanhood.

Like Jame, I have also been puzzled and angry that a gender clinic won’t help me.

What the book fails to ask or answer is what the difference is between being trans and merely thinking you are. What is the source of Jame’s apparent gender euphoria when she tries on her in-progress woman suit? Some post-Freudian obsession with her beauty queen mother, the book suggests, but we get no clearer answer than that.

Like Jame, I have also been puzzled and angry that a gender clinic won’t help me (and they didn’t even ask me to draw a tree!). I know from experience that insisting all the more that no, really, I am really trans, and I can tell you a thousand truths and lies that confirm that fact if you will just give me some fucking estrogen doesn’t work when the system really wants you to stay where you are. I haven’t killed anyone over it, but it is easier to understand, in the context of Harris trying, again and again, to assuage any concerns you might have about the nature of Jame’s identity, why Jame might have.

It is far more pleasant to have an understandable trans villain than the ones Oyeyemi or Yuknavitch gave us. Their books have little interest in the psychologies of their trans characters or the arbitrary systems that aim to define what makes someone a “true transsexual.” How delightful, in contrast, to see the absurd system break down in Harris’s Lambs. Because despite occasional claims to the contrary, the only people who care these days about distinctions between “real” and “fake” transsexuals tend to be other transsexuals—crabs kicking and screaming to stay at the top of our particular barrel. J.K. Rowling and Pamela Paul and Graham Linehan do not care how you embellish your tree or decorate the female figures you draw. They would rather I and all my friends and perhaps you, too, reading this be immiserated if not outright dead. They look at the taxonomic absurdity and decide we are all monsters. Reading Lambs, you could conclude something similar: that trans women are freaks who would kill and skin a woman if that was the only way to be one; but you can as easily—and more accurately, I think—look at it and ask: What is the rational response to an irrational stricture?

We see something of ourselves in these stories, even if they make us out to be monsters.

Taking after Lambs, this became one of the chief questions I asked while writing my own novel, All Us Saints—in which a closeted, abused trans girl sees, like Jame, no future for herself, and decides maybe it is better to kill and to die than to go on feeling the deep horror of living. She doesn’t die, and fails to kill her sister (taking out only her sister’s three best friends).

Early in the writing process, I went back to the accounts of Ed Gein to see how those initial murders were described; as with Gein’s murders, my trans murderer can only be understood by the sensationalist true crime media complex as a freak of nature. In Harold Schechter’s account of Gein’s killings, he writes that Gein’s “transvestism” was a consequence of an Oedipal obsession with his mother, leaving Gein wishing he had been “a woman instead of a man,” wondering “whether it would be possible to change his sex.” But as scholar K.E. Sullivan points out in the seminal essay “Ed Gein and the figure of the transgendered serial killer,” there is little evidence of this beyond words that police put into Gein’s mouth, asking “Would you ever put on a pair of women’s panties over your body and then put some of these vaginas over your penis?” To which Gein responded, “That could be.”

That could be. That’s more or less the basis for decades of transphobic slasher stories.

But having been, as Jame Gumb is, blocked from medical transition, and having lived, as Gein did, deep in repressive territory where if I hadn’t known a handful of trans people, I might not have understood I was one, the false story—the idea that Gein might have been someone like me—has always filled me with an indescribable melancholy. Every trans slasher movie—Lambs, Sleepaway Camp, Texas Chain Saw—has its trans defenders. I think this sort of melancholy is one of the reasons why. We see something of ourselves in these stories, even if they make us out to be monsters. To paraphrase Norman Bates, we all feel a little monstrous sometimes. It was this melancholy—this desire to look past the dominant narrative, not only of Gein’s gender identity but the killings themselves, and understand what it might be like to feel so confused and alone—that gave rise to my novel’s killer.

Unlike Harris’s depiction of Jame, I don’t try to quarrel about real or fake or identity at all; my trans killer doesn’t even know enough to call herself trans. But as with Jame, I wanted to take the abuses, the roadblocks, the violence that trans people face every day, and turn it back against the cisnormative nuclear family that is so often responsible for those horrors. I do not wring my hands, like the Johns Hopkins doctors of Lambs; instead I say, Okay. You’ve made us into monsters. Now what?

My Brain Told Me Food Was the Enemy of Love

Posted on June 4, 2026June 3, 2026 by EL Assistant2

“Reader, I Gained Weight”: On Eating Disorders and Romance by Katherine J. Chen

I had forgotten the taste of bread. Of salmon and chicken. Of chocolate and figs. My tongue held the memory of these foods, of a cube of Kobe beef so tender that it felt a profanity to chew, of a spoonful of gelato, which seemed to carry a lesson of its own: how the initial shock of cold will give way to the warmth of sugar. For nearly half a year, I drank in large gulps water, tea, and cold brew. In the mornings, dry-mouthed and lightheaded, I would go to the bathroom, pee, and strip naked before stepping on the scale. I would try to ignore the sensation of feeling like a calf on display before its slaughter; I would ignore the paradox of both winning and losing, winning because the number on the scale had dipped since yesterday, losing because I sensed, in the way a runaway train barrels towards the precipice, that if this continued, as it must, absolutely must, I was probably going to die.

In one of those conversations, which if the contents were leaked would likely prove to be career-ending, I told someone that I believed that every woman, no matter how accomplished or intelligent or talented, desired to be called beautiful. In hindsight, I think I said this because, at the time, I equated beauty with simply existing. Wouldn’t it be nice, I suggested, to be congratulated for showing up: for sitting, then standing, then crossing the room and opening a window? Instead, one had to get degrees, to write and publish books, to hold one’s own on Derrida and Lacan and Marx, to listen to Bach and Shostakovich and be conversant about French New Wave. Not that I’m complaining, I said, complaining, and I quoted a favorite line from The Wings of the Dove, “…her easy injunction, tossed off that way as she turned her beautiful back, was like the crack of a great whip in the blue air…” Of course, James understood.

I’ve always wondered about the path by which we arrive at certain truths and how these truths are constructed. In 2016, I read an article about a four-year-old child, who told police officers that her name was “idiot.” This detail stayed with me longer than other features of the story, such as that the child was bruised and malnourished with marks on her wrists from where she had been zip-tied to a bed. I know about black eyes and bloody mouths, how the pain will not last but the sense of degradation will. I know that the body in such cases is merely a vessel, that it isn’t really the eye or the mouth or the tufts of hair like lambswool that is the true target but something else that takes more time to wear down until it won’t move, won’t even cry out. I thought about what it means for a child, particularly a girl, to believe her name is “idiot,” and to introduce herself as such to others in earnest. And because I am not above self-pity, I thought of myself, though I hadn’t endured the same horrors as this child, not even close. If police officers showed up, I would have used the words, “ugly” and “fat,” and uttered those words in two languages, because I had been called “ugly” and “fat” in more than just English. I didn’t know that these were “bad” words. I might even have said, “I’m ugly and fat,” with a good deal of pride. Often, the missives that are loosed from their strings in youth and adolescence don’t land until one has waded deep into the waters of adulthood. Children are hardier than we give them credit for; it’s possible I was stronger as a kid for the sole reason that I didn’t overthink what was happening to me. I rolled with the punches; I learned to raise a ruckus before others could, and if people spit poison at me, I learned to spit the same, or worse, back. Somewhere in my early thirties, I grew soft. I knew I wanted to be loved. I knew, too, I was ugly and fat. So, this was the truth I constructed for myself: Because I am ugly and fat, I am not loved.

Concerning my rapidly shrinking body, I made these observations. Sitting, I could not stand up again without experiencing momentary lightheadedness. Certain tasks, such as vacuuming, which required basic strength, became more difficult. To combat hunger, I would tuck a hot water bottle under my t-shirt, where the heat gave the illusion of making me feel sated. I was always hungry. As I pedaled away on my exercise bike, I watched videos of hot women give food reviews while taking huge bites of overstuffed burritos and slices of cheesecake. On more than one occasion, I escaped to the movie theatre, because the dark, the noise, and the large screen proved an effective distraction from the fact that I had consumed, in the span of 24 hours, a single hardboiled egg. I had only to glance at the mirror to be able to delineate the outline of my scalp, now visible because I’d lost so much hair, while what hair I had left turned soft and thin.

This was the truth I constructed for myself: Because I am ugly and fat, I am not loved.

These observations were true, as was the fact that a sales associate at Neiman Marcus had embraced me when I told her why buying a pair of Helmut Lang shorts in size zero meant so much. In my presence, an elderly neighbor gushed to my mother, “Your daughter is beautiful,” and these words alone carried for the rest of the day the heft of a three-course meal. My new body was so mind-boggling to a member of the maintenance staff in my apartment complex that he spread the word to all his colleagues before beginning his own weight loss journey, telling me whenever he got the chance, “You inspired me.” What I had accomplished did seem, on some level, Herculean. At my heaviest, standing five feet two inches, I weighed 227 pounds; at my lightest, I weighed under 100. I marveled at small moments: how people seemed more willing to sit next to me on the bus and subway; the ease with which I could glide past cars parked far too close to each other in the parking lot; how the gazes of men appeared more inclined to linger; how department stores seemed, at last, to yield up their treasures; how one by one, like the slow unearthing of some ancient landmark beneath my skin, I could count my ribs. I emailed a friend, aware of how silly I sounded, and informed her that recently, I had set foot in Nordstrom and could choose, actually choose, what I wanted to wear, and that among these choices were dresses. I joked that I no longer looked like a beer barrel wearing a skirt.

It is strange now to consider the logic by which I linked the “preparation” of my body with my “preparation” for love. I am thin; ergo, I am ready to date. In my new body, I had plenty of time to think about food and love. To eat is one of the most primitive forms of self-care, just as to feed another is to show care. There must be a reason why during long-distance phone calls with relatives, we always, subconsciously or otherwise, circle back to the same questions: Have you eaten yet? Are you eating well? I wonder what it is about food that conveys affection and concern, why, for instance, certain foods—macaroni and cheese, chocolate chip cookies, cinnamon rolls—are well known for imparting comfort and a sense of security, the edible equivalent of a baby blanket or child’s favorite stuffed toy. For many, particular dishes conjure an almost totemic power, as a tangible and sensory-laden substitute for actual people. I cannot eat or even look at a spring roll, for instance, without also remembering a scene from my early childhood, that is, of my mother standing on our ramshackle back-porch, painted the color of rust, frying spring rolls on a portable gas burner. The frying of spring rolls always felt less cooking than ritual, less food prep than sacred offering. No spring roll has ever come close to burning the inside of my mouth, of bringing happy tears to my eyes, as I cried, “Hot! Hot!” while choking down the first simmering bite. The filling of my mother’s spring rolls was alive and bubbling, not the stale, lifeless creations sold en masse in cardboard boxes at the supermarket, or the lukewarm appetizers tossed halfheartedly into cheap plastic bags at one’s local takeout. If I needed any physical proof of food’s connection with love, I had only to look at my mother’s hands and wrists, which have known as mine have not how it feels to be burned with hot oil, with steam, with boiling water. Her skin is a constellation of scars, as tough as tanned leather.

I think about food and the relief that comes with knowing someone you care for is well-fed and sated, that there exists, at least in this moment, no possibility that they will go hungry, that they will starve. I think about how when there is nothing more to be said, food becomes so easily, even naturally, the default subject of conversation. When big, existential topics are exhausted, when there is no more to be discussed on love or Sartre, on Jean-Pierre Melville and Big Pharma, one can still talk for hours about bread. Just bread. Shokupan. Sourdough. Babka. Ciabatta, focaccia, schiacciata. Brioche, baguettes, and boule. There has always seemed to me a direct connection between loving someone and watching them eat. When I was young, my mother watched me eat, and as a child, growing up in Shanghai, her mother watched her eat. There is comfort to be had in fending off starvation and malnutrition, in providing sustenance, in the observation, the mere witnessing, of the simple pleasure food gives to one who is near and dear to you.

I know all this. Just as I know what it means to live in a fat body. At some indistinguishable point, the chubbiness of a well-fed child becomes a fat child, a fat girl, then a fat woman. At some indistinguishable point, one begins to notice that though food gives pleasure, it’s still thinness that’s prized, and if you believe that anything has changed, really changed, if you start to believe in all the rhetoric around body diversity, inclusivity, and the ugliness of fat-shaming, then I feel sorry for you. You have been fooled. Somewhere in life, these lessons are learned, and the brain develops its own logic and twisted reasoning. My brain told me that food was the enemy of love, that the only obstacle to love and being loved were the pounds of myself that needed to disappear. One has essentially to unlearn everything that is taught in childhood and in school: It’s the inside that counts; don’t judge a book by its cover; intelligence matters more than appearances. Don’t believe any of it, for they are lies.

But believe in the growing number of likes on dating apps. Believe in the potential matches who tell you how beautiful you are, how well you photograph, and how they would be honored to know you better, if you only gave them the chance. Believe in the friends who, wide-eyed and mouth agape, tell you how great you look, how you seem like a different person, how you are a different person.

Better believe that there is a price to be paid for everything. Better believe that love must be earned.

As much as I despise giving credit to an algorithm where matters of the heart are concerned, Hinge delivered. Sebastian, or “Seb,” as he called himself, was an early match. For nearly two weeks, our only means of communication was via text. We didn’t talk on the phone. Nor did we make any concrete plans to meet in-person. He didn’t share his surname, and I didn’t share mine. But we sent each other texts that ran the length of the mobile screen, texts in full sentences and whole paragraphs that discussed what I was working on, creative ideas, and opinions on film and art and music. When I pressed him on what he did for a living, he replied that we would have plenty of time to get to know each other and that he preferred for details of our lives to emerge organically in the natural flow of conversation. He told me when he wouldn’t have his phone on him because he was playing basketball, one of his great passions. He mused on saṃsāra and the cyclical life of cell phone batteries. He liked lox, Woody Allen, and Truman Capote and asked me if I didn’t think “vestibular” was a strange word. His texts read like miniature essays; his sentence structure rivaled William Trevor’s, and he used multisyllabic terms that implied at least some familiarity with Latin. I fell for him. I fell for him well before I knew his last name, before we spoke on the phone, before we even met.

During my weight loss journey, I had stayed away from restaurants. Entering the dating scene, however, threw me back into a world I’d left behind. It wasn’t a surprise that the first snag I hit with Sebastian was over where we would meet for our first date.

“Balthazar?” I suggested, trying to think of restaurants in his neighborhood. “I have good memories of that place.”

“A tourist trap,” he replied. “For our first meeting, I prefer somewhere casual where we can sit outdoors.”

“What do you mean by casual?” I said, feeling testy. “And how casual is casual?”

“Casual means easygoing,” he said. “Casual means not a big production. Balthazar would be a production.”

“Would it? You make a reservation, you go in, you sit down, you have dinner. Is that a production?”

“What about Fanelli Café?” he asked.

Better believe that there is a price to be paid for everything. Better believe that love must be earned.

“What’s that?” I answered, furiously Googling. I scrolled the menu and made a face. Buffalo wings and chicken fingers? Are you serious?

“I’m not sure I’m a fan of pub food,” I said. “Or pubs, in general.”

This continued, until we circled back to my original suggestion. “I will go to Balthazar only because you want to go,” he said, giving in.

Online, I checked for reservations and came up with nothing. Calling the restaurant proved equally futile.

“They’re fully booked,” I informed him. “What do you want to do?”

By then, we had narrowed our choice of cuisine down to three possibilities: American, French, Japanese, or some cross-pollination hybrid of the above. We had excluded Italian because, as an Italian, he preferred not to eat at Italian restaurants. “I can make everything they can—and better,” was the explanation, which given his background as a restauranteur, seemed perfectly viable. I offered more possibilities, none of which passed muster. “We’ve officially landed in options territory,” he said.

“I don’t really care where we go,” I answered, losing patience. “But I’d prefer somewhere quiet with spacious seating, sufficient air to breathe, not congested. Clean restrooms. And, most important, I’d like to actually meet you.”

It seemed ironic, a trick of fate, that we ended up at an Italian restaurant, the space of which felt positively cavernous compared to other spots in Manhattan. The lighting was sufficiently dim to render most everyone in the space mildly attractive, and as the hour was still early for dinner, customers were few. “Spacious enough?” Sebastian asked, as soon as we settled into a large banquette.

“Spacious enough,” I said.

In going through life, it is hard to delineate ends and beginnings. All the times I’ve had toothache, which have been numerous, I thought the pain would never end. I would never know again what it would be like to live without the sensation of someone holding a blowtorch to my gums. On the occasions I had a fever, which was common when I was a child, it was the same, the whole world atilt; likewise, with grief over a dead dog; with bad colds and coughs; with hiccups; with writing a book. How does one chapter become thirty and counting? I still don’t quite know. When does a toothache or a cough give up the ghost, the world right itself again, a new dog appear on the scene? It always seems impossible, until it isn’t.

I mention this because I couldn’t, at the time, foresee how my struggle with anorexia would end. I did not want to return to my former self; I also did not want to die.

I couldn’t know that my healing would begin that evening of our first date, that if one chapter of my life ended with renouncing bread, a new one would commence with a bread basket, a plate of tagliolini and sea beans, and a lemon tart topped with toasted meringue. That it is commonplace, even mundane, for a relationship to start with an invitation to dinner suggests to me that there is latent within food the possibility of intimacy and romance, its very presence implying potential communion. In the restaurant, I studied the menu. I drank copious amounts of water because it was hot, the height of summer, and I was nervous about eating too much. Somewhere I had read that it was good to drink at least two glasses of water before a meal, that there is a delay in the signals the stomach sends to the brain. The brain is apparently slow in registering satiety, making it easy to overeat. Therefore, eat slowly. Therefore, I tell myself, eat smaller and smaller portions. Therefore, I tell myself, perhaps, better and safer for the body not to eat at all.

In the throes of my eating disorder, I often wondered what women are supposed to do with food. To be frank, there are still moments when I seriously ponder the question. What are women supposed to do with food? At the risk of stirring the reader’s ire, I promise I’m not being deliberately obtuse. Having no health insurance, I didn’t have access to a nutritionist or dietician; I had no concept of what it meant to eat well-rounded meals, to occasionally indulge but in moderation. My thinking was dangerously simple and reflected a lifelong tendency to take things to extremes. Dieting was deprivation. If for decades I’d enjoyed a surfeit, now I had to withhold, to punish myself, and to starve.

To this day, I don’t know how I came to order the dish of tagliolini and sea beans. Perhaps it was the cheapest item on the menu. Otherwise, it doesn’t make much sense. Pasta (a carb!) was strictly verboten. Likewise, I don’t know how a piece of bread from the bread basket ended up on my plate, the crust left to soak in a small puddle of olive oil garnished with pepper. I remember watching Sebastian, who casually remarked that he loved bread but preferred only to eat the crusts. I remember smiling when he said this, breaking off a very small piece of crust, and touching its toasted warmth to the tip of my tongue. I swallowed. Nothing happened. The roof didn’t cave in. The waiters didn’t trip over their feet and spill their platters or tumble headfirst into the banquettes. No one stopped to stare. But suddenly I remembered the taste of bread. I looked down at my plate as if a small miracle had enacted itself without my knowing. Sebastian took another piece of crust and dabbed it in olive oil, and I did the same.

I fell in love in stages: a lemon, a mint leaf.

The brain doesn’t register everything. Possibly, it doesn’t need to, and perhaps it’s better that it doesn’t. The body holds its own laws, its own yearning and awareness of the world. That evening of our first date, I ate slowly. I cut my sea beans into ridiculously small pieces and lined them up in neat rows, as if I were preparing to feed a fussy baby. I talked about my books, my work. I showed Sebastian the Henry James tattoo I got in Paris on my right forearm. “The best possible souvenir,” I said. “Beats a tattoo of a croissant, doesn’t it?”

We talked about French cinema and the bad acoustics of the restaurant. At one point, he looked over his shoulder at the chatty group of young women in the next banquette and said, “Someone turn the radio off,” and I laughed.

Somehow, I don’t know precisely how, the plate of tagliolini and sea beans disappeared. I tasted oil on my lips and forgot to wipe my mouth. I remarked to myself how good Sebastian looked in the ambient light, and with every such thought, another bit of pasta vanished from my plate. I stopped refilling my glass of water. It was the day before my birthday, so we ordered dessert.

“Una vela, sin cantar,” Sebastian said to the waiter, and some moments later, the lemon tart arrived with a single silver candle.

Under the table, we held hands, and I told him my wish was that I would have the chance to see him again. For the first time in months, I forgot about food. I forgot about food because I was full.

Falling in love isn’t a distraction. Rather, I think more and more that it is a guide. I see love as filling in those parts of the self that need care. Holes are patched over, rough edges whittled to smoothness, wounds aired and given the chance to heal. In Sebastian’s kitchen, I watched him squeeze a lemon between his hands over two plates of salad, and I wondered that such a sight could inspire so much awe and make my heart swell to the point of pain. “Do you know what you do with mint?” he asked over a dish of strawberry panna cotta before rubbing the sprig in his palms, inhaling, and offering the gap between his thumbs to my nose.

Reader, I gained weight. I fell in love in stages: a lemon, a mint leaf. I fell in love over butter-soft sashimi, over rainbow trout, clams, and yellowtail rolls, over margarita pizza and porcini mushrooms, over chocolate mousse, chocolate cake, and chocolate soufflé. The physical trail of my path to healing could be found in plates and bowls scraped clean, on paper and cotton napkins bearing lipstick stains, over bare and candlelit tables on which I left water rings, scattered breadcrumbs, and the stray piece of arugula. Is it possible in life and in love for food not to serve as some point of reference? Particular dishes conjure precise memories. Cod and matchstick vegetables remind me of New Year’s Eve, where a live bossa nova performance made up for the fact that my fish was over-salted. In a parking lot outside a Greek restaurant, the honey of baklava still on my tongue, I remember being pulled into the combined shade of an SUV and pickup truck and kissed. The music of Chaka Khan brings to mind a cup of sencha, sipped in a hotel bar not far from Carnegie Hall, where Sebastian and I had just watched a concert. The concert had been awful, reminding us both of the kind of grating, nostalgic entertainment performed on cruise ships and in senior homes with pastel wallpaper; the young woman singing “Through the Fire,” on the other hand, possessed a voice that could fill Stern Auditorium—and then some. Over a plate of linguine frutti di mare, he said for the first time, “I am in love with you,” and if I did not swoon, it was only because we were waiting for the tartufo. Manhattan, in especial, the Lower East Side, has become a landscape scattered with small monuments, significant only for how personal they are to me. Washington Square Arch can’t compare with any of the wooden benches outside of La Colombe in NoHo, where on a starlit evening, the autumn chill settling around us, we drank hot cocoa and talked of the past. Later, on the same bench, Sebastian would hold my hand, as he worked patiently to remove a splinter, his nail gently scraping at my skin.

If I fell in love in stages, then my healing also comprised individual moments and lessons internalized by my body. I learned that food wasn’t to be feared. To indulge was not to let myself down. I could control what I ate. I possessed the intelligence to determine what was good—and less good—for my health. I learned, too, that many things in life existed beyond the reach of mere nutrition labels, that you cannot hope to measure the value of a memory in grams of protein and fiber. If there is nutrition for the body, then there is almost certainly nutrition for the soul. This is wisdom that is acquired bite by bite, dish by dish; the kind of lesson one absorbs watching the remnants of a previous night’s charcuterie board turn into an omelet as if by magic. Jambon de Paris. Gruyère. A sprig of rosemary pilfered from a Japanese restaurant’s window box. Three organic eggs and a splash of olive oil. “It’s more a frittata,” Sebastian said, bending over the skillet and sprinkling in a pinch of sea salt. When the omelet arrived, I did a little dance of happiness. I broke my own rules around taking pictures of food (the remit of influencers) and snapped photos of the omelet from different angles. I kissed Sebastian on the cheek. If this is all life had to offer, I thought, just an omelet on a glass plate with two parsley leaves for garnish, then it would be enough. I could die happy.

Perhaps there is some degree of mimicry in love that manifests itself in habits and in convictions about food. I discovered I liked smoked salmon, Balocco’s Buongiorno biscuits, Manchego cheese, and split pea soup. I became highly opinionated about bagels: Plain was the way to go; a bagel with the dough scooped was always better than an unscooped bagel; a bagel was not a real bagel that did not also have a hole in it (not a squished hole, a proper hole); a plain bagel without lox hadn’t achieved its full destiny as a bagel. Neither of us could understand the copious amounts of cream cheese that seemed to accompany every bagel; certainly, neither of us would ever stand in line outside Apollo Bagels. No food in the world was worth waiting for, we agreed, if it took more than five minutes to place an order. I began to dip cookies in tea and coffee and to drink a mug of peppermint tea before bed. I bought a cheap French press, which until it broke, played as vital a role in my morning routine as the chalice during Mass. I think of a moment in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice when Mr. Darcy says, “I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love,” and now I wonder if the food of love is, in fact, simply food.

In saying this, I do not mean to be reductive about how an eating disorder is managed, much less conquered. Often, far more complex issues are at work, and the journey to healing can be long, full of reversals, false starts, and regressions to harmful habits. What I had to face was that my broken relationship with food ultimately mirrored a broken relationship with myself. This isn’t about receiving permission from someone else to eat. Rather, it’s about the realization that to eat and to be loved are not mutually exclusive. If this should strike others as being self-evident, then consider yourself fortunate. It wasn’t long ago that I recorded on small slips of paper every item of food ingested; if I consumed 200 calories for breakfast, I would work off at least 400 calories at the gym. Once, having eaten out for a celebratory dinner, I proceeded from the restaurant to the elliptical and exercised for three straight hours, terrified of sodium levels and what my weight would be the following morning. Body-checking and laxative abuse became second nature. The most insidious aspect was my own self-awareness. I knew I was slowly killing myself, and still I jotted down every hardboiled egg, every banana and apple slice, every dozen blueberries and half-serving of nonfat Greek yogurt. My period stopped. My right knee, likely from over-exercise, started to appear misshapen, bending outwards and making me look partially bowlegged.

The physical trail of my path to healing could be found in plates and bowls scraped clean.

If I was aware of being caught in a destructive cycle, I also knew what I needed to heal: someone, who wasn’t myself, to encourage me to eat, to show, by gesture, by words, by simple kindness, that to feel sated was not to engage in an act of self-harm, far from it. In the end, I became the only person who didn’t want to celebrate my new body. Instead of receiving congratulatory remarks, I wished people who’d known me from before I lost weight would tell me I had always been beautiful. No one did. Instead, they were curious. “Did you use any GLP-1 drugs?” they asked. When I told them no, I had no insurance, and I couldn’t afford the medication out of pocket, they expressed amazement. “I can’t believe you lost that much weight on your own!” they enthused. It isn’t fair, but it would be naïve to ignore that, in any society, there doesn’t exist some correlation between aesthetics and attraction. The standards may vary; the desire for beauty, however that may appear to the individual person, does not.

Many friends and acquaintances have drawn a direct line between my weight loss journey and the love I now have in my life, a cause-and-effect story that I reject with some vehemence. They say that if I didn’t lose half my weight, I could forget about having a partner. Who would even look at you? In other words, my willingness to starve was also a sign to the universe that I was ready to love and be loved. I will never attribute to bullying, abuse, and harm the credit of enlightenment or happiness. But I will draw a connection between the act of sharing a whole branzino and the act of sex, between snacking on pane carasau with a sharp cheddar and kissing with tongues. In both instances, the mouth has achieved its telos. To taste my lover’s cum, I have found, brings the same warmth and satisfaction as the first bite of a cinnamon sugar donut.

It seems a natural progression to move from food to sex, for one form of hunger to replace another. The salt of the omelet still in my mouth, I returned to the bedroom and watched Sebastian take off his clothes. A soccer game was on. Neither of us bothered to turn it off. I lay on the bed and sucked him. Later, after we had finished, I took his hand and tasted the tips of his fingers. I thought of a time when we had gone to a bakery, and because my hands were full, Sebastian held the cookie he had bought to my cheek so that I could feel its warmth. The boy behind the counter had told him a new batch had just come out of the oven, wasn’t he lucky? “Cookie kiss,” I said. You could have offered me the Hope Diamond in exchange, and it wouldn’t have swayed me. As we left the bakery, I cupped the cookie as if it were the Holy Grail. I licked the mixture of dark chocolate batter and melted peanut butter chips from the wax paper bag and felt like a teenager about to write a bad poem.

Another discovery is this: The body wants to heal. If I had starved myself for love, then it was love that also saved me, that anchored me to the earth by giving me weight and heat and substance, and, therefore, strength. If men were at one time in my life both the enemy and the goal, it was, I confess, a man who steered me back to the path of nutrition, of consistent but not copious exercise, of the occasional indulgent sweet treat. For the dream of having a date, I had forgotten the taste of bread; it was on a date that I remembered it. I now know what Anna Karenina meant when she says to Count Vronsky, “I am like a hungry man who has been given food. He may be cold, and dressed in rags, and ashamed, but he is not unhappy. I unhappy?”

In an Italian restaurant, faced with a serving of tagliolini and sea beans, I had felt a rising panic. I recall inching the dish towards Sebastian, and when he didn’t respond, trying to fork as much of the pasta as I could on to his plate. He shook his head, refusing. “That’s all yours,” he said. Then, looking at me, he added gently, “Eat.”

I ate. I have been eating ever since.

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“Reader, I Gained Weight”: On Eating Disorders and Romance by Katherine J. Chen

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