Electric Literature

A Goat Farmer Is Only as Vulnerable as Her Goats

Posted on April 6, 2026April 2, 2026 by Preety Sidhu

An excerpt from Surrender by Jennifer Acker

I was a small child, my head the height of theirs, when I noticed the black parts of their eyes were shaped like shoeboxes. But I didn’t know then that their rectangular pupils are adaptive. Goats take their meals on savannas or other wide-open spaces that leave them vulnerable to predators and the beating sun. Horizontal pupils let in less light from above and allow a wide field of vision.

Living with five Nubians—four does and a buck—I witness how nimbly they manage difficult terrain and remain vigilant at the same time. Because a misstep can be fatal.

The does greet me this morning by nibbling my flannel shirt, which I imagine tastes of woodsmoke and chicken broth. The barn smells of sweet-sharp hay, of pine dust, a wisp of ammonia that lets me know the straw bedding needs to be changed. It’s the heart of winter, and I pull the girls close.

The does are two months pregnant, so I’ve stopped milking to allow the young mamas to build their strength and keep their vitamins, which they’ll need to give birth to healthy kids come April.

A lot of people choose not to freshen does in their first fall, but I was impatient to grow my herd, to get a revenue stream going to stabilize the farm, and Judy said that as long as the girls were good sized and healthy, they’d be fine to breed. I’m thrilled every time I look at this burgeoning pack of curious females.

Yet it’s my first time as a goat midwife. Can I really manage the upcoming births on my own? We have no money to hire a helper or to call the vet if something goes wrong.

At least I have Judy on speed dial.

Opening the chicken coop, I let the birds loose and empty a bin of kale stems and squash rinds as an enticement to venture farther afield. Few eggs to collect this time of year, when the days are so short. The birds are healthy but they look horrendous, the runts and weaklings’ backs picked clean of feathers. Their bare pimpled skin shames me, even though my father’s hens looked the same, no matter what he did. “Lucy,” he’d tell me, “there you see the meaning of pecking order.”

I’d planned a lot of indoor projects for the winter milking break, but that was before Michael lost our money and we needed immediate income. So today, instead of YouTubing a toilet fix, I’ll be testing the endurance of my gluteal muscles, sitting on my flat butt at the Edin General Store.

I hear Michael calling me as soon as I take my boots off downstairs. He’s perched on the side of the bed, eyes a faded brown, head bald, just a few stray tufts to the side. A birdlike Roman nose that anchors his still-handsome face.

He tells me he wants to go for a ride in the new snow. He gestures out the window at the thick layer smothering the fields. We look together at the boot prints I’ve made between the house and the barn. “You’ve already been out in it,” he says. “Now it’s my turn.”

Not only does he want to see the snow, but there are library books being held for him, and a bacon and egg sandwich at Franco’s with his name on it. “Let’s go out for breakfast, bella. I’ll read you the obituaries. You love the life stories.”

Of course I do, and I love it when he reads to me, but we don’t have enough time for an outing. I offer to run out and pick up the books and the sandwich.

But no. He wants to get out of the house. His voice is both firm and pleading.

Changing his own socks into thicker woolens and wedging shoes onto his swollen feet can stretch to a quarter hour. Then getting his arms into each sleeve of a parka, plus scarf and hat. The driveway has been plowed but there’s still a slick of ice, and I shiver just thinking about leading him across it to reach the passenger door, then holding the full weight of his seventy-nine-year-old, six-foot frame to transfer him into the depths of the car seat.

I don’t want him to feel a burden, and I don’t want to pity him, so I tell him simply that we don’t have time. I’m due soon at the store.

This does not sit well. Michael’s forehead reddens and the corners of his mouth press down. He repeats his desire for an egg sandwich.

In case what he really wants is to be doted on, I say, “Why don’t you come into the kitchen, I’ll fry you eggs and toast, and you can admire the snow from there. See if there are any deer in the back field.”

“You’re just being selfish,” he mutters.

I pause, startled. These short, angry flares are new and I’m not yet used to them. They’ve arrived in the wake of the giant loss Michael incurred, which has thrown me back into the vexed center of my parents’ financial strain. We always had enough, but there was no fat in the budget, and Mom and Dad never once took a vacation longer than a three-day weekend, or pricier than an unelectrified lakeside bungalow. I have, it seems to me today, simply given up city comforts for the quaintly beautiful privations of the country.

I shower quickly, warmed by the hot water if dismayed by the rusting tub. I emerge with a soothing voice and suggest to my husband that I put on a movie. Make popcorn. We have a complete library of Gilbert and Sullivan and he chooses The Pirates of Penzance. “Watch with me, bella,” he says invitingly. He pats the couch cushion next to him. Removes his glasses and rubs his eyes as if to better appreciate me. Smiles. His bad mood has apparently already vanished, as quickly as our savings account dropped to zero. But I cannot stay. I have too much to do.

How do I manage my anger and despair? Well, that’s why a woman has a barn.

Because I’m late—flustered by the regrettable exchange with Michael, then by trying to settle him down in front of the TV and set aside something for his early dinner, labeling the container with masking tape that says eat me—Shruti is behind the counter at Edin General, where I should be, ringing up two Slim Jims, a string of lotto tickets, and three packs of Camel Lights. I’m sweating, my scarf trailing to the floor to the extent that I step on it and nearly choke myself.

“I can see how it’s going,” Shruti says, pointing to my pink face and hair matted across my brow. She takes the scarf, the hat, and my jacket, putting each in its cubby or hook to the side of the counter. As always, she looks immaculate and yet perfectly casual in her jeans and clean sneakers and brown and cream cardigan with coconut shell buttons. The color combination makes me think of Felicia, my favorite doe, and for a moment I long to be back in the barn surrounded by lop ears and so many beating hearts.

“Tough morning?” Shruti asks with concern.

If I say anything about the murky state of my husband’s mind, or the dire straits of our financial situation, I’ll cry myself a river. A nod is all I can manage.

Shruti tries another tack. “Did you see the game last night?” She is a Celtics superfan, having become hooked on the NBA through trying to bond with her son, now an assistant professor at one of the nearby colleges. “If he doesn’t give us grandchildren in five years, we’re going to sue him,” she joked recently. Shruti is dying to attend a Celtics game in person, though when I ask her why she hasn’t looked for tickets, she shrugs sheepishly and says her son is too busy to go with her. Apparently, Hari, her husband, does not share her passion.

“Sorry, hon. Missed it,” I say.

She tells me “our” team lost to Philadelphia 89–80. “Kyrie didn’t play,” which I guess explains everything.

Glumly thinking about her team’s loss, Shruti gives me a last look of concern, then leaves for the back room, where she has calls to make.

How do I manage my anger and despair? Well, that’s why a woman has a barn.

I open the cash register to the hand-worn scent of bills and coins and ink from leaky pens. The ding and thrust of the jaw opening and closing has the satisfying feel of childhood toys.

Shruti has given me the exalted title of associate manager to justify paying me ten dollars above minimum wage plus a small bonus at the end of the year. In addition to staffing the register, I help with inventory, checkout, writing and proofreading announcements and advertisements. Shruti and Hari hired me in part for my deep roots in the community, even though I explained that I’d been away so long, my contacts were limited to my parents’ now elderly friends and those from high school who never left. “Those are precisely the people we want to attract,” Shruti assured me.

“How much is this, and how do you eat it?” A lanky, dark-haired boy with bangs in his eyes holds up a package of Shruti’s frozen samosas. They are delicious, as good as Michael and I have eaten in any restaurant. I tell the kid what they are and how to reheat them in the oven so they get nice and crispy. A package of six is ten dollars, but because I want him to try them, I give it to him for five bucks and plan to slip the other five from my wallet into the register once he leaves.

“They go well with beer,” I say. “Try that IPA in the blue can; it’s from a brewery just on the other side of the river.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard of it,” he says, and shrugs. “Okay.”

I pack everything up and take his card. Then I hold out the chutneys, mint and tamarind, displaying them in the palm of my hand like precious stones. I explain they’re like salsa, a dipping sauce. “Come back and let me know if you like them.”

As much as I love Shruti, I often find the store disquieting, not only because I see people I used to know, or should know, or no longer want to know, but because I can be interrupted at any moment. That’s what makes retail the pits, as my mother used to say. It’s hard to believe that I worked for twenty years in a field where all you do is talk to people. I always found PR spiritually effortful, but I thought that’s just what a real job was. To make real money, you had to escape the provinces and do things you didn’t want to do.

I’m relieved when the doorbell sounds the young man’s exit. My eyes mindlessly follow him to his car waiting on the road’s shoulder, engine running.

Just then, the door to the house across the street opens, and a tall, well-shaped woman in stylish thick-heeled boots rushes down the stairs to the street.

My breath catches. I lean closer and jut my nose into the windowpane.

Then I rush to the back room, where Shruti is on the computer. “The woman across the street in the old Masonic Lodge. Do you know her?”

My friend peers at me over her computer glasses. “Alexandra Stevens? Just a little. I met her on the sidewalk last week. Why?”

“We went to high school together.”

“Were you friends?”

“Very close, for a time. Do you know why she’s here?”

Shruti looks at me curiously, a sly smile playing on her lips. “I guess she couldn’t stay away, like you.”

I shake my head. Back then, Sandy didn’t have a country bone in her body. That was part of what drew me to her.

I want to rush out and hug her. To share the shock of being back in Edin as adults. But I’m also hesitant. I’d always assumed Sandy left the way she did because she couldn’t stand to stick around our dumpy town anymore. And that included dumpy me. I look down at my wrinkled, untucked shirt and my dirty boots. Well, she wouldn’t be surprised at Lucy in the present day.

I return to the counter and watch out the window as Sandy fishes for her keys. I’m crouching. I don’t want her to see me. When I think of it through Sandy’s eyes, I’m embarrassed to be working at the store. More than once, living in New York over the years, I thought, If only Sandy could see me. She never did, and after all our teenaged talk about getting out of this place, it looks as if I’ve never left.

What’s she doing back, and what would she think of me now? I also can’t help but wonder if she’s sorry.

It was, at first, a triumphant return.

I quit Columbia’s PR office, and Michael retired from the university’s Classics Department. We planned to subsist on his 403(b) and our joint savings, while he enjoyed the writing life and I took over my father’s farm.

What a wonderful idea this was!

My husband was seventy-seven, and I was thirty years younger. We thought we had ten good years ahead of us. Michael was healthy, still walked all over the city, and his mother had lived to ninety-five. We still had sex most Saturday mornings. He’d never been self-conscious of our age difference. I wasn’t embarrassed, but I did notice the way people looked at us, wondering if we were a couple or father and daughter.

Five years before our move, during a stretch of intense craving that felt like the kind women describe when they want a baby, I suddenly wanted to keep goats and make my own yogurt and cheese. My father, thrilled, swiftly began a persuasion campaign. He was waiting for his heart to give out, and he told me bluntly that he’d die easier knowing the land would continue as a farm. He lived in fear of our family’s acres morphing into suburban sprawl. I was the only one left to save them. My mother was long dead, and my sister had left Edin at fourteen for boarding school and now lived contentedly in Westchester County.

Dad always said our land was more than a source of income. It was a landmark in town, referred to by our family name, the Richard Farm, and he’d been generous in allowing a local organization to build a section of trail across one corner of the back field that connected to a longer walking route through the conservation area. Dad wanted people to enjoy the farm’s bounty, whether by walking across it or eating what we raised.

Columbia gave me an unpaid leave, and I interned with Judy Martin at Birchbark Dairy in the Berkshires, two hours west of Edin. I’d called her after discovering her ash-covered, aged goat cheese at Murray’s.

Farming, that summer, was an urge I suddenly couldn’t ignore. And having reached my forties, I felt more entitled to follow such urges than I did when I was young.

Judy, who wore her hair in two gray braids, a whimsical daisy or dandelion woven in, would wake us before dawn and carry strong black tea with milk and honey in a thermos to the barn. After three hours of milking, feeding, and making the rounds, we’d return to the kitchen and eat hard-boiled eggs. Judy didn’t talk much until she’d eaten. If she thought I needed to witness something, she’d whistle like a whippoorwill and point. Those largely silent mornings of companionable labor were often my favorite parts of the day. Feeling a part of a natural rhythm and relishing the glowing sunrise on my cheeks.

Michael visited once during my months apprenticing with Judy, but for the most part he fell back into his urban bachelor routine of movies on Tuesdays and chess on Fridays. Cooking for a friend on Saturdays. In truth, that was still his routine after we married, except I didn’t play chess, and his social circle expanded slightly to include friends of mine from college and the office, women who were mystified by the age of my romantic partner but did their best to be supportive.

At Birchbark, I went to bed with earth under my nails and the smell of milk in my nose. I slept like the newly born.

At the end of the summer, I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to go back to city life. But I did, stuffing disappointment under my blazer each morning. I tried to imagine a way I could ease Dad’s worries about encroaching development and satisfy my own new craving for space, for the heady scent of summer soil, for raising bleating baby goats. Would my urban husband go for it?

He would. Michael still adored his graduate students and paternally advising them, but he’d grown distant from the undergrads and tired of his own performance in the lecture hall. I’m ready for the next adventure, he told me. A little house in the country in which to write his slim, popular Roman histories.

I took Michael to the farmhouse deck and spread my arms at the vision I had been nurturing for the better part of a decade. Behind us were the house, twenty acres of vegetables, and the country road. In front of us unfurled another twenty acres of relatively flat field, but then the land sloped upward into uneven hills, forested along the top ridge. You could see these hills from the road. Bikers and drivers often paused in the spring to photograph the flowering meadows and, in the fall, the brightly burning leaves.

Michael shook his head in wonder, the look that I was going for. The one that came across his face when he stood inside the Pantheon, no matter how many times he’d peered up into its dome. “Carina come una foto.”

These fields are more than a pretty picture to me, though. They’re a source of profound nourishment.

We decided to move to Edin, provided I agreed to first spend six months in Rome, the city he’d eagerly shared with me over the years.

When I told Dad that I’d take over his farm, I felt like the prodigal daughter. A grin an acre wide spread across his face.

“I never gave up on you,” he said. “No matter all your years away.” Then he cautioned me, “But you really have to do it. Work the land, I mean. That’s the only way to keep the tax breaks. Otherwise the property taxes and the upkeep will eat you out of house and home.” He died a year later, fully at peace, he assured me. My sister Sue was perfectly happy to leave the farm in my eager hands.

Of course I would farm it. I just needed to start small and learn along the way. At that point, Michael and I had plenty of savings to keep us going until the land turned a profit.

Our parallel visions of country cultivation and literary productivity worked according to plan our first year back in Edin, as Michael typed away on his Olivetti and I planted my first garden in thirty years. The harvest went smoothly, and I reopened the farm stand at the corner of the front field. I made a plan for our hundred and one acres. Built a rudimentary milking parlor and cheese room to get my state inspection. I wanted to start out all organic for the dairy, but the price of organic feed shocked me into making that a goal for a few years down the line.

After Judy’s does kidded last spring, I took home two mamas, Nana and Brie, and Nana’s two doelings, Bora-Bora and Felicia. Also a proven buck, Derek Jeter (Judy is a Yankees fan). I handled the kids from the get-go to accustom them to my voice and smell. It was love at first sight.

Also in April, I deducted the cost of every purchased animal and pound of feed and, in exchange for the near evaporation of my property taxes, swore to the government—as Dad had done—that I would not develop the land for ten years.

I handled the kids from the get-go to accustom them to my voice and smell. It was love at first sight.

Slow and steady, I’d build my dairy, consulting with Judy along the way.

And then six months ago, the whirlwind summer harvest underway, as we were dripping in tomatoes and melons and everything green, something curious occurred. When I went into the bank to apply for a home equity loan to replace our leaking roof and invest in more animals and equipment, I discovered a craterous hole in our savings.

Had we been swindled? I raced home to ask my husband what he knew.

As he explained, his eyes expanded, the pupils widening into larger and larger circles. A look I’d seen before. Sudden, extravagant purchases used to appear in our apartment from time to time: a top-flight Vitamix, tickets for a last-minute flight to San Francisco. Many of these luxuries on the border of affordability I was guilty of enjoying. Neither of us grew up with money, and we relished the finer things. His excuse was always some discount or time-limited window (truffles enjoy such a short harvest season!). In this case, he had “loaned” the money to Alfie Romano, a beloved former grad student, Italian-American like Michael. Alfie had always been special. He’d dined at our apartment nearly every Friday for five years. Michael had been devastated when Alfie quit the program, but I had seen that the young man was not cut out for the slow pace of academia. He was a thrill seeker with great ideas but poor execution. Unfortunately, Michael had never been able to recognize his brilliant student’s flaws. So when Alfie launched his machine translation company and exhausted his first and second rounds of funding, he’d come to Michael as a last-ditch effort. “I couldn’t bear to tell him no,” my generous husband said, his long face pulled down into sadness. “Besides,” he said brightly, “it can’t fail. We’ve gotten in on the ground floor!”

“There’s no ‘we’ here,” I said, still in shock. “What were you thinking, doing this without talking to me?”

“We’ll be fine,” Michael said. “We’ll get it back and then some.”

“When?” I reminded him about the leaking roof, the sagging barn. The dairy enterprise that lay dormant, waiting for funds to expand. My whole reason for moving back to Edin.

“Soon, my dear. Be patient. Genius takes time.”

I was furious. A hole gaped in the pit of my stomach. How would we manage?

But I also saw something terrifying in that moment. The flippancy of his answer told me that Michael had not thought through Alfie’s plan. When I asked him questions, he was evasive when normally he’d have exuberantly dived into the details. Something had clouded his judgment. Had Alfie pulled a fast one? Or was the problem internal to my husband?

Genius might take its sweet time, but I didn’t have to wait long for the results of Alfie’s venture. Michael woke up one morning three months ago, took a phone call in his office (my sister Sue’s old bedroom), and reported that Alfie’s business had failed. “It is no more,” is the way he put it.

There would be no return on investment. Nor a return of our investment. The ground floor had fallen through.

Yet Michael seemed to show no real understanding of the bind this placed us in. “I’m in my last years, I don’t need much. I’ll eat like a bird,” he said. Was that a serene smile on his face? Why did he show no remorse?

I called Judy in a cold panic.

“Good thing you’re freshening the does,” she said matter-of-factly. “Now you’ll have something to sell.”

I heard voices in the background. “You have company?” I asked. “I don’t want to keep you.”

“One of those silly talk shows,” she said in the same even tone.

I was too concerned with my own predicament to ask what she was doing inside at noon on a Saturday at the height of breeding season.

During my internship, I had asked a lot of questions. Usually, they were about the goats. But one morning, standing in the hayfield, Judy about to mount the tractor, the July sun shining down from high above, I asked if she ever got lonely; her closest neighbor lived two miles down a dirt road.

“Sometimes, at Christmas, I wish someone would roast me a goose,” she said, half smiling. “Big, luscious meals are for sharing. Of course, I have Brad, but he likes to travel with his friends and I’m not the hosting kind of mother, so I try not to put pressure on him.” She looked at me with eyebrows raised, wondering if I understood.

I did. Possibly I was so drawn to Judy because my mother died when I was in college; that would be the psychoanalytical interpretation. Except Judy wasn’t maternal in a classically nurturing way. She was about the transfer of information and valuing every living being’s special properties.

“So yes, I do get lonely for conversation. For sharing milestones. But the day to day . . .” She shook her head. “Nah. I have an abundance of life to keep me company.”

God, I admired her in that moment. I never again doubted her solitary contentment. I can do this on my own, I said to myself after hanging up. Just like Judy.

When I arrive home from the store, Michael is already asleep. I change into my barn clothes. A frigid sleet is from the sky.

But the does’ comically droopy ears lift my spirits. As I feed them, I admire Brie’s rich chocolate brown coat. She’s the most aloof of the four. Nana’s face is beige and white, and she’s still protective of her daughters, Felicia and Bora-Bora. Felicia has a wispy black beard and rubs her head against the side of my thigh affectionately. She’s my favorite, for the way she tilts her head when I speak to her, as if ardently listening.

All four paw the floor and bang impatiently against the slats that separate them from the feed trough.“I’m on it,” I tell them. I pour fresh water, noting with satisfaction the success of my low-budget solution to keep the water from freezing: a plastic bottle filled with saltwater floating on the surface, bobbing just enough to break up any ice. Someday I’d like to heat the goats’ drinking water in winter, to lessen the shock to their systems, but right now the extra electricity is beyond our budget.

I haven’t eaten since lunch but it’s been a long day. I chomp a wedge of Judy’s alpine-style cheese, call that supper, and get into bed.

Some hours later I’m awakened by a crash. Followed by a weak cry.

Michael is tipped over the sofa, his white T-shirt gleaming under a sliver of moonlight. Bare legs like plucked drumsticks.

He must have heard me come into the living room because he says, his voice muffled by the cushions, “I can’t move.”

My heart speeds up as I race toward him, nearly tripping on the coffee table. “What happened?”

“Lavatory,” he says. Where he was headed. “Carpet.” The shag that tripped him.

“Does anything hurt?”

Together we bend his knees so his lower legs are flat on the floor and he is able to wrestle his arms underneath him and push his torso up so he’s in a kneeling position. He’s sweating lightly and I feel his heat. Not once in the past few months have we been naked together, touching like we used to. He clasps his hands into a mock prayerful position. “Like the good Catholic I am.”

Please, God, let this not be the first of many. That is my useless supplication.

I get him up on his feet and walk gingerly to the bathroom. I wait while he waits—“Damn prostate”—and then support him as he walks back to bed, a noticeable wobble in his step.

“Do you need anything checked out? Sure nothing hurts?”

“I fell into the sofa, bella,” he says testily. “Not the bookcase. I’m fine.”

Despite his protests, I sit with him while he settles himself and falls back asleep.

And then I get to work. I turn on all the lights and pull on thick gloves, gather a pair of pliers and a large, sharp X-Acto. The first incision is tough, exhilarating work. I cut another strip and another, moving furniture as I go. With pliers I pull up the staples and then tug on the golden shag. Decades-old dust rises and I cough, remember a mask Dad kept in the pantry, and fit that on.

As I yank and pull with all my strength, I think about Sandy, the glimpse of her out the store window. An unnamable emotion rises within me. Am I still mad at her for leaving the way she did?

We were besties for all of high school—as soon as Sandy moved here from suburban Connecticut before the start of our freshman year and we both went out for soccer. We loved each other; I feel sure of that. We were always hanging our arms over each other’s shoulders, wrapping them around waists, sleeping with legs intertwined. This felt natural and normal, but sometimes we were made to think it wasn’t. Some guy would say, “Why don’t you two make out already?” But that didn’t bother us. It was strange that I was closer to Sandy than I was to my sister Sue, and for a while I think my parents felt bad about the contrast, but they liked Sandy so much, she was soon part of the family.

Summer after senior year I was working for Dad on the farm, which Sandy thought a bad idea. “Scoop ice cream with me,” she said. “All you’ve ever done is farm. Employers want to see a diversity of experience.” Something she’d read in the newspaper or heard from our drippy guidance counselor. She’d convinced the owner of the ice cream stand to give her the title of manager because she thought that would help her get better internships in college. But Dad counted on me, and I liked being outside. I didn’t want to sweat inside some tiny shack, even with Sandy by my side.

The plan that final day had been for me to ride my bike to The Big Dipper, then we’d put my bike on the back of her car and drive out to the lake. The previous night had been normal, cozy; we’d gotten tipsy on my father’s beer after swimming in the river all afternoon. Sandy fell asleep in my bed. The next day I rode the fifteen mountainous miles to the shack. But when I got there, her boss said she’d never shown up. Nor did she after I waited for her all afternoon, the boss finally taking pity on me and giving me a milkshake, an order gone wrong.

Too embarrassed to call my parents, and knowing they were busy anyway, I rode all the way back home, up and down the fierce hills, crying most of the way.

I called Sandy’s house, and her mother told me she’d left early for college. “She didn’t tell you?” Mrs. Stevens sounded surprised. “Guess that explains her bitchy mood.”

Sandy wrote one rambling, apologetic letter to me at Barnard once classes had started. I wrote back, holding my anger and pretending I understood that she was just “super anxious to get a job and settle in before Sept.” I asked if she’d be home for Thanksgiving, but I never heard from her again.

“Girls this age,” my mother said, shaking her head. “I know I was one, but I’ll never understand them. I can’t believe Sandy, our Sandy, would be so rude and heartless. Try not to take it too hard, chicken.”

Mom tried her best, but how do you get over such heart- break at eighteen?

I labor, sweating heavily, until the ghostly pre-dawn hours. Tomorrow I’ll call the plumber and fix up the back bathroom so my beloved no longer has to traverse the living room to pee in the middle of the night. Should have done that months ago. But months ago that haunted look didn’t flicker in Michael’s eyes. A look I mistook, at first, for guilt over throwing away our savings, but now I wonder if there isn’t something else going on. Something we both have chosen to ignore.

Lindy West Is Reclaiming Her Agency

Posted on April 6, 2026March 30, 2026 by EL Assistant2

When I call my pal Lindy West, she answers from the road. She’s driving down Interstate 69 (nice) through some rural stretch of Indiana and tells me she just passed a billboard for the Uranus Fudge Factory and General Store, with the tagline: “The best fudge is in Uranus!” Because of course it is.

She’s currently on tour, which she’s turned into a full-blown road trip—renting a van and committing to all the requisite rituals of extended life on the road. When we talk, she’s en route to Detroit for the first of two nights of events with our mutual pal—and my biological mother—Samantha Irby.

But this is—by now, famously—not West’s first road trip.

Her new book, Adult Braces, is about an even bigger journey: the one she takes to reclaim herself. After the public triumph of Shrill, she found herself in private crisis—her marriage on shaky ground, depression creeping in, and a sense that the “Lindy” everyone else saw didn’t match the one she actually was. Over the course of the book, West takes a road trip through kitschy tourist destinations (and traps), awe-inspiring natural wonders, and unexpected campground epiphanies. Along the way, she experiments with hiking, journaling, and venturing far beyond her comfort zone. All of this happens while she reckons with what love, fidelity, and partnership mean to her—including her path toward polyamory, which no one is talking about online at all!

What emerges is a memoir that is equal parts laugh-out-loud and deeply revealing: a story of a woman learning to be the navigator of her own life, even when the road—and the heart—is messy, absurd, and full of unexpected detours.

Greg Mania: Lindy, the book is out. You’ve arrived. Again. How does this particular arrival feel?

Lindy West: It feels surreal! I worked on this for so long and now it’s out there and it’s not mine anymore! Readers get to do with it what they will, which is always scary and exhilarating and really, really rewarding.

GM: So much of this book is about reclaiming agency—does letting it go out into the world feel like another version of that?

LW: Kind of. I thought it would be. I expected it to feel easier, more therapeutic, to release it into the world. But I’ve actually found myself feeling a lot more protective and defensive, which I think is a response to the backlash. There’s this dynamic that comes up in conversations like this: I wrote something, and then a lot of people had a mixed bag of takes—some of them really cruel and, frankly, offensive—and many of those people didn’t even read the book. Then, if I say, “Hey, that sucks that you did or said that,” there’s this second wave of people who respond with, “Well, you wrote a memoir and put it out there.” It’s so strange that people think that’s some kind of ultimate gotcha. I can still have an opinion about how people are talking about me. What’s been hard is that so many of those takes strip me of my agency. So it’s definitely been a challenge to stay grounded in the agency I do have and just let it be. I’m trying—and I’m mostly succeeding—because I do believe in myself and in my own strength and autonomy.

GM: You became such a public symbol of confidence and self-possession after Shrill, but Adult Braces starts from a much more vulnerable place. When did you first realize that the “Lindy everyone else saw” and the Lindy you were actually living with had drifted apart?

I can still have an opinion about how people are talking about me.

LW: Probably in 2020, when we were all trapped at home with our thoughts. I started going to therapy in 2019 but I was still in crisis mode at that point, because so many different parts of my life were broken. It wasn’t until lockdown that I had a chance to sit with what I’d learned and begin to try little experiments to feel better and more whole. Things like hiking, journaling, meditating, gardening, building a new routine, all the cliché stuff we were doing. Turns out, that stuff really works!

GM: When you say “that stuff really works,” what do you think it was actually doing for you?

LW: I think it was getting me out of my head—and out of my phone and my computer—and back into my body. Not to sound like someone who drones on about how phones are bad, because I love my phone; it’s a dear friend of mine. But there’s this vortex—honestly, like the one I’m in right now—where what’s happening on your phone feels like it’s just sucking you in. Being outside, using my body, getting dirty, feeling aches and pains, writing on paper—just being a person in the physical world—feels like such potent medicine for getting out of my head, which can sometimes be a scary place to be. There are certain things that just ground you in who you really are. It sounds like a cliché, but it’s true—and it works.

GM: Did it ever feel like you’d lost yourself—or like you’d outgrown a version of yourself that used to fit?

LW: I definitely lost myself, but I don’t feel like I outgrew an old version of me. Maybe I outgrew an old version of my life. But it’s more like I’d never bothered to stop and think about what I wanted my life to look like. And that’s because I didn’t know who I was; I wasn’t confident, and I didn’t necessarily think I deserved to choose my own life. I was like, “You guys pick first, I’ll take whatever falls out of the truck!” I always looked to other people to tell me who I was. I still do it. In some ways releasing a book and waiting for the response is a version of that, which I have to fight. Because I think at some point I realized that looking externally for validation or self-definition never works. You get trapped forever in the question, because the only person who can answer it is you.

GM: Once you set out on the road trip, you started recording voice notes to yourself along the way. What did speaking your thoughts out loud—in real time—give you that silent reflection didn’t?

I always looked to other people to tell me who I was. I still do it.

LW: It made it much harder to do any posturing. Even in my journal, I sometimes find myself imagining someone else reading it and then I pull back or try to sound more sophisticated than I am. Recording the voice memos—which I was fairly certain would never be heard again, even by me, because I’m lazy and who wants to wade through 20 hours of rambling voice memos?—while driving the van and navigating and looking at bison, I didn’t have the motivation or the bandwidth to try and be cool. And I got such a special, unvarnished account of the trip as a result.

GM: You write about interrogating your own patterns—especially around codependency and your initial resistance to nonmonogamy. What surprised you most about the beliefs you realized you’d be carrying into your marriage?

LW: I was really surprised to realize how much I relied on control to feel safe. Even that paradigm, which of course you learn in therapy, of feeling safe versus unsafe emotionally—none of that had ever occurred to me before. I just took it for granted, and truly never even identified that I was doing this, that part of a relationship is trying to push or guilt or condition your partner into being the person you want. I think that’s so normalized. Obviously you have to have boundaries and conversations about how you expect to be treated, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about, like, feeling panicked because your partner hasn’t texted you back in an hour so you call them crying until they pick up, even though you know they’re just out living their own life with their own friends, hobbies, whatever. That’s an attempt to clamp down on that person’s freedom and make them feel bad for having a real life outside of you. It also takes you away from yourself. It’s a scary place to live, yet we’re taught that it’s what safety looks like. I’ve never been more anxious and scared than when I was codependent. I have been surprised to learn how much I value freedom, both for me and for my partners.

GM: When those old instincts still show up—that panic, that urge to reach for control—how do you respond to them now?

LW: It’s still a struggle, for sure. But what’s helpful now is that I know what these patterns are, and I know what they look like. I used to trust myself completely as a reliable narrator—I trusted the voice in my head. Now, when those feelings start to come up, I write them down. It’s so much easier to look at them and see what’s actually going on once they’re outside of my head. Even now, during this tour and with the backlash happening, I can see the signs. There are things in the book where I list the stages of my deterioration—and I notice them. Like, even yesterday, I realized I hadn’t showered, and it was like, okay, I know what this is. It becomes easier when I just push past that initial resistance. All I really have to do is push through a hard moment—a barrier—not solve some huge mystery. The obstacle has already been identified, and the treatment is known. I’m never going to be perfect at it, and I don’t think that should be the goal. The goal isn’t to feel great all the time or for nothing to ever be wrong—the goal is to try to take care of ourselves.

GM: You’ve talked about feeling a responsibility to others as a public figure—that changing your body might feel like a betrayal. How did you come to the place where using your body for yourself became the key to moving forward?

I was really surprised to realize how much I relied on control to feel safe.

LW: It helped, again, that I wasn’t working much during Covid. Just home alone with my body. And almost out of boredom I started to wonder, what if I . . . went kayaking? Went on a real hike? Planted a garden and shoveled manure all day? All kinds of things that I’d been afraid to try because I didn’t know if my body would fail me or embarrass me. But then all of a sudden it was lockdown and no one was watching me, and I was in therapy and my body and brain were becoming more and more integrated, rather than two faraway strangers. And it became so obvious—sitting perfectly still forever, out of fear, doesn’t do me any good. And if it isn’t good for me, why would it be good for readers who are looking to me for guidance or commonality or inspiration?

GM: Since finishing this book, are there any conclusions you arrived at while writing that you still find yourself wrestling with?

LW: Oh, a million! I still don’t know what I’m doing! A foundational ethos of this book is that I know freedom and healing are a process, and I’m sure I’m going to learn a thousand new earth-shattering things in my next decade of life, and then I’ll have to rewrite myself all over again.

Electric Lit’s Smaller Numbers Tell a Larger Story

Posted on April 3, 2026April 2, 2026 by EL Assistant2

Dear Reader,

In my first letter as Electric Literature’s incoming Director of Operations and Fiction Editor, I am tempted to dazzle you with numbers. EL has such an impressive array of them—3.5 million readers! 300,000 social media followers! Upwards of 6,000 published writers!—and numbers are an easy way to quantify success.

But as I sit down to write, it isn’t the big numbers I want to talk about. They’re not why I’m here, and I don’t believe they’re what make Electric Lit special. The real numbers—the numbers that matter—are much smaller.

For me, the most important number is the smallest. Zero is the number EL is committed to protecting. It’s the number driving every fundraiser, and the number every donation supports.

Many other magazines charge readers, levy submission fees, or pay writers less (or not at all). Frankly, it would be easier for Electric Lit to do any one of those things. But without access points, without opportunities to read and fall in love with literature free of charge, our community suffers. It becomes less inclusive, less relevant, less exciting. Electric Literature was built on the dream of a vibrant literary ecosystem; by giving literature away for free, we ensure it remains vital and valued.

Electric Literature must raise $35,000 by April 15 to cover our expenses, and we need to reach $10,000 by Monday to stay on track. I hope you’ll donate what you can, and I hope you’ll spread the word. Tell your friends! Share on social media. Fight for writers and readers and free access to literature. And, of course, keep reading.

Gratefully yours,

Wynter K. Miller
Incoming Director of Operations and Fiction Editor

7 Novels About Sibling Rivalries

Posted on April 3, 2026April 2, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

We don’t choose our siblings, yet we spend most of our early lives with them. They’re our first intimate experience of the mystery of another person: Why are you like that? What are you thinking? These questions become more confusing when the world pits us against each other, when the questions turn back on us: Why are you not more like your brother, your sister? Why can’t you do what they do?

When we’re children, we’re thrust into a familial world whose history is opaque to us, and we have to figure out how to live in it. My own brother and I wandered side by side through this bewildering landscape, watching each other stumble over the rubble of our parents’ ambitions, each trying to be just like the other and trying to be the exact opposite. We could have helped each other more, is what I think now, if we hadn’t each been busy trying to prove that we were better at navigating this world than the other was. The tragedy of childhood is that such insights arrive only in retrospect. These two children, myself and my brother, each wanted to be understood and believed that no one could understand them. I want to tell them to listen to each other.

In my novel American Han, siblings Jane and Kevin Kim come of age in America feeling this same bewilderment and this same needless isolation, something Jane only begins to recognize long after it feels too late to change it. I wanted to explore this and the feeling that even though siblings don’t choose each other, we owe each other parts of ourselves and are implicated in each other’s actions.

The relationship between siblings has a literary history as long and varied as any other kind of relationship, though it seems to me that these stories are less noticed than the tragic romances and the endless stalemates between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. In the seven books below, we see characters who look to their brothers and sisters with uncertainty, envy, and love, looking for clues as to who and how they should be.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

East of Eden is a multigenerational saga set in California’s Salinas Valley. The story focuses on two pairs of brothers—Adam and Charles; Aron and Caleb—in two generations of the Trask family. The brothers are derived from the biblical story of Abel and Cain, in which Cain is so jealous of his brother that he kills him—the original murder, for which Cain is punished with a long life of utter solitude. In East of Eden, Charles frequently erupts in violent rage at his half-brother Adam, convinced that their father loves Adam more, just as Cain was convinced that God valued his brother above himself. In the next generation, Caleb Trask is so envious of the love his twin brother Aron seems to receive without effort that he drives his brother to certain death. Across generations, Charles and Caleb find themselves in the ancient predicament of Cain: unable to understand why they are not loved as their sibling is, and unable to accept it.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Sisters Ruthie and Lucille Stone spend their childhoods moving among guardians after their mother dies. Eventually, their aunt Sylvie, a wanderer, moves back to the sisters’ tiny hometown of Fingerbone, Idaho and decides to raise them. Their home reflects Sylvie’s transient nature, full of stacks of old newspapers, cobwebs, and assorted debris. The sisters are inseparable, but soon Ruthie starts to take after her aunt, while Lucille longs for a different life, one that mirrors the aspirations of the people around them. Lucille tries to convince Ruthie to build a life around the values of respectability and cleanliness, but Ruthie feels bonded to their aunt. Ruthie has to choose between Sylvie’s itinerant freedom and the more conventional (and safer) life her sister pursues. While the clash between sisters is quiet, it offers a deep exploration of the sibling as a mirror of the self, as each sister looks to the other as a model of who they want (and don’t want) to be.

Erasure by Percival Everett

This hilarious satirical novel takes on a publishing industry whose narrow and condescending expectations of the Black experience limit the kinds of stories that are published and valued. In addition to the razor-sharp satire, I was drawn to the family story: Monk’s strained relationships with his parents, brother, and sister. Monk is the favored child, the one born naturally gifted, even though his sister, Lisa, is the responsible one—a successful doctor who looks after their mother as she struggles with Alzheimer’s disease. Like Aron Trask in East of Eden, Monk basks in parental adoration without doing much of anything to earn it, while Lisa does everything expected of her only to be ignored or taken for granted. Their relationship captures the sense of intractable and even incomprehensible unfairness that has been at the core of sibling rivalry at least since the story of Cain and Abel.

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Danny Conroy and his older sister Maeve are kicked out of their childhood home—a sprawling mansion on the outskirts of Philadelphia—by their stepmother after their father’s death. From the age of 10 until her death, Maeve is a mother figure to Danny, assuming all responsibility for raising him. Hellbent on getting revenge on their stepmother, who inherited everything except an educational trust set aside for the children, Maeve encourages Danny to attend an expensive boarding school, then Columbia, and eventually medical school. Danny does as Maeve wishes even though his interests lie elsewhere. Like nothing else I’ve read, this novel conveys the slow accretion of choices by which one sibling’s life, almost imperceptibly, can be subsumed by the other’s obsessions.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Identical twins Desiree and Stella Vignes grow up in Mallard, Louisiana in the 1970s, in a Black community where light skin confers status and a modicum of protection from the virulent racism that surrounds the community. At age 16, the Vignes twins run away to New Orleans to chase their dreams. Over a decade later, their lives have completely diverged. Desiree is back in Mallard with her dark-skinned daughter after fleeing an abusive husband. Stella is passing as a white woman in California, where she lives with her businessman husband and their daughter. Stella chose to abandon her sister and give up her history and identity for a chance to claim the privilege that comes with whiteness. Desiree spends much of her life searching for her missing sister, who has vanished into whiteness as much as she has physically vanished from the sisters’ Louisiana home. In the divergent fates of Desiree and Stella, Bennett traces how race and racism shape the possibilities of life in America.

All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky

In this funny, deeply moving debut novel, a young woman’s life in Los Angeles begins to unravel when her toxic relationship with older sister, Debbie, implodes after a chaotic night of drugs and violence ends with Debbie’s disappearance. The unnamed narrator, cautious by nature, has always been drawn to the alluring and reckless Debbie, and has often emulated her against her own better judgment. Now, in Debbie’s absence, she spirals into addiction and a blurry relationship with Sasha, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union who claims to be a psychic. Will she try to find her missing sister, or find a new freedom by keeping her in the past? As she wrestles with her conscience, she confronts the same question Cain asked of God: “Am I my [sister’s] keeper?”

The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei

Another riveting debut, The Original Daughter explores family bonds and ambition in a rapidly changing 1990s and 2000s Singapore. The story follows Genevieve Yang, whose life is upended when her family takes in Genevieve’s long-lost cousin Arin. Genevieve and Arin grow up together in government-subsidized housing, navigating adolescence and precarious circumstances amid a hyper-competitive academic culture and an economic boom that only exacerbates inequality. The two grow close, forming a sisterly bond as they both give up having a social life in the quest for a successful future. A betrayal causes a rift between them, forcing Genevieve to choose what is important to her: personal ambitions or family bonds?

A Debut That Unearths Stories Lurking in Louisiana’s Swampland

Posted on April 3, 2026April 2, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

Back when Betsy Sussler founded the legendary BOMB Magazine in 1981, downtown New York was synonymous with DIY interdisciplinary artistic effervescence (rather than the commodification of lifestyle). Betsy has carried that maverick spirit into everything she does, including her distinct approach to crafting the interviews between artists that BOMB has published since its inception. These are vibrant exchanges that are as spirited and lively as they are focused and serious, eschewing the ums and ahs that epitomize Warholian cool. They drop the reader into the intimate space of a conversation between peers, a conversation whose meanderings allow for the interlocutors’ characters to reveal themselves gradually in the process of articulating their own narratives.

I served as senior editor of BOMB for nearly a decade starting in 2006, but only after having read Betsy’s stunning debut novel, Station of the Birds, did I realize that her talent at creating evocative atmospheres and complex characters, at stripping dialogue to its most resonant bits, had outlets beyond the editing of BOMB and her occasional writing for the magazine. Station of the Birds opens in New Orleans and immerses the reader in Louisiana’s Atchafalaya swamp, in its layered history and its many stories, to simply delirious effect.

We met on Zoom one Sunday in late February, during a snowstorm. She was in Brooklyn and I was in Queens, but for the duration of our 45-minute conversation we were transported to the balmier realm in which her book is set. Briefly outside time and place—like in the Atchafalaya, where the “the world below the waters, as the world above, lies suspended, murky with tree trunks, dense with moisture”—we delved into her novel’s palimpsestic layers.

Mónica de la Torre: Betsy, what an incredible book you’ve written! I didn’t know that you had a story like this in you. The last time we spoke about your writing, quite a bit ago, you were working on a family saga.

Betsy Sussler: I am writing a family saga, and I have just finished it. Station of the Birds is my first novel, which I wrote 30 years ago. It started as a screenplay, but when I took it out to Hollywood, they all said, “Wow, this is beautiful. Why don’t you make it into a novel?” And I thought, “Silly Hollywood!” I came back home and tossed the screenplay into a drawer. Then, about eight years later, my grandfather asked me to write a novel based on the story of his life. I decided that I’d write Station of the Birds first and use the screenplay as an outline to teach myself how to write a novel.

MDLT: What was the impetus for it?

BS: The kernel for Station started in the late ’80s. Two dear friends—Dickie Landry, the jazz musician, and Tina Girouard, the artist—had gone back to their hometown of Cecilia, Louisiana to be with their people. Dickie’s youngest son was in college at the time, and something horrible happened. While working at a gas station during summer vacation, he was murdered. It was a truly senseless act of violence. Then these crazy rumors started flying around. “He must have been selling drugs,” some said. “His father is a jazz musician who has played with musicians on both sides of the color line,” which in Louisiana in those days was forbidden. Dickie played with Black jazz musicians, Black zydeco musicians, and white musicians. Some thought that it must have been his fault, that he set the stage for wrongdoing.

I walk with my characters, I talk to them, they inhabit me, I inhabit them.

I had gone to college in New Orleans but I had not been to the Atchafalaya Swamp basin where Cecilia is located until I went down to visit Dickie and Tina a few years after the murder. I listened to everyone’s stories, everyone being Dickie and Tina and their friends. They were very generous with me. I took all these stories back home to New York and I let them gestate. Southern storytelling is almost mythological, dense and deep, so I started doing research into Jungian archetypes as well as the spiritual and religious influences that pervade the South. I wove the narrative from all of these elements.

MDLT: One of my favorite things about Station of the Birds is that it’s definitely not autofiction.

BS: The South, for me, has always been an enigma mitigated by the close friendships I made and still have there. The culture is utterly fascinating because of its complexity and divisiveness. How do I say this? The racism in the South—all across the United States—bears the seeds of its own destruction. When we work through that, we will become a better, stronger people. Everybody down South knows that the Black culture is the most vibrant and important source they have. They take from it all of the time.

MDLT: So you gathered all this material in the early ’80s for a screenplay.

BS: Because the Atchafalaya Basin is so mysterious and beautiful, I thought it would make an extremely provocative setting for a film.

MDLT: No wonder when I was reading the novel I kept seeing it unfold as a film in my mind’s eye. Everything is bustling in the landscape; no detail is inert. The writing displays this exquisite marriage of a vivid imagination and superlative powers of observation. It’s rare to strike such balance between the cinematic and the lyric—you’ve got an intricate plot, lots of visual details, and dense, writerly textures. And I love what you do with the birds. They’re ominous, alive, always lurking around. The taxidermized ones in the library are particularly animated. How did you manage to recreate the atmosphere of the place with such an incredible degree of detail?

BS: I wasn’t in the Atchafalaya for that long, but it had an effect on me. It didn’t leave me; it inhabited my imagination. When I was there I felt that I was breathing in all the collective stories embedded in the swamp; they entered through my breath.

But let me address a couple of things that you bring up. I came to writing from acting. I was married to a theater director who cast me in his plays because he wanted that second paycheck. I wasn’t a bad actress. I wasn’t a great actress, but I viewed it as an apprenticeship that would provide me with a better understanding of dialogue and character. And it did: I call it a kind of method writing. I walk with my characters, I talk to them, they inhabit me, I inhabit them. And it also affected the way I came to edit BOMB. Of course, when I edit, I am reading dialogues that are already on the page. I am looking to see where the narrative threads lead, if the participants have sufficiently explained their thoughts. I push things back, pull things forward, and see what’s missing. Writing a novel starts with a blank page and relies on the imagination, memory, and whatever observations or research you want to toss in there. It’s building a world that I’m making up as I go along.

Back to the birds. A blue heron in the Atchafalaya perched where Garland Frederick, my guide, docked his boat. He would ask, “Where do you wanna go?” And I would say, “Let’s just follow the blue heron.” We would literally track this amazing bird as it swooped through the swamp; that’s how we found one of the main settings, the outpost called Cane Island. For me, the heron became a character in the narrative. Later, when I was researching, I happened upon Aristophanes’ play, The Birds. It’s a satire where flocks create a city for birds, and they plan to charge a toll for messages sent from humans to their gods. So I lifted some of that. It worked rather nicely as a chorus.

Other influences: James Hillman, the Jungian psychologist has an interesting theory about the Oedipus complex. He posits that the most vital psychological component of the myth is that his father, after hearing the oracle proclaim that Oedipus would ultimately kill him and usurp his power, had his infant son abandoned on a mountain side. The father wanted to kill his son.

MDLT: That angle hardly gets any play.

BS: Exactly. There is another author who influenced me. Luigi Zoya writes about drugs and addiction. His theory is that addicts are practicing initiation rites but backwards. In other words, in an initiation right, you die and then you’re reborn. But in addiction, because of the high, you’re re-born and then, with withdrawal, you die. It’s a perpetual banging at the gate.

MDLT: So for the addict, paradoxically, sobriety equals death.

BS: Coming down off of the drugs, you die. You’re constantly hitting a wall.

MDLT: I suppose as a student at Tulane, you came across some folks who might have been a little bit like your protagonist, Daryl, right? I’ve spent some time in New Orleans, and the contrast between Uptown, where Tulane is, with its mansions and former plantations, and other parts of town, like, say, the Tremé, historically inhabited by free people of color, is pretty stark.

The racism in the South bears the seeds of its own destruction. When we work through that, we will become a better, stronger people.

BS: Yes, but I also had distant cousins who were lost boys: entitled, spoiled, and searching because their family fortunes were depleted. They didn’t know how to maintain the lifestyle they assumed would always be theirs. One of them in particular, rumor had it, became a drug dealer. I melded some of him into the novel’s protagonist, Daryl Monroe. This is where, as a writer, you transform a fantasy world into a real world and vice versa.

New Orleans, even though it’s a Catholic city, or perhaps because it’s a Catholic city, is incredibly decadent. To their credit, New Orleanians know how to live well. And then there’s this: when a Louisiana native starts telling you a story, they start in the middle. And maybe they meander and get to the end. And maybe they don’t. But they do not tell you the beginning. Because if you don’t know the beginning, that means you don’t belong and aren’t meant to know. So that alone was impetus enough to create these stories, to figure out the backstories, or make them up as in, “What if . . . ”

MDLT: In terms of your process, when did you rework the drafts that became the novel?

BS: The novel was written during the ’90s and since then I have periodically gone back into it. It was a first novel, and as such it was kind of over-the-top lyrical. It was turned down by many, many publishers, many of whom said, “Beautiful writing, send us anything else. We’re not doing this because it’s too dark, too dense, too difficult.” Over the years, I would go back into it and get rid of some of the meanders that weren’t guiding the reader or weren’t serving the story.

Once Spuyten Duyvil accepted it, thanks to my literary agent, the brilliant Madison Smartt Bell, I wanted to lose, not the nature of a first-novel, but get rid of the frills. I wanted to make it a more thrilling read. For instance, I would take a look at a word’s etymology and find one that worked more explicitly or contained a double entendre. What I call a spit and a shave edit. Before that, in the making of the novel, the drafts were rewrites. It would be like mushing it together: You weave, you meld, you see how things work together and, if they do, how they feed each other and my perception of what’s happening and why. Which takes me forever.

MDLT: You used the word thrilling. Plotwise, the novel is a bit of an action thriller. But you also bring a lot of psychological insight into describing the shifting relationships between characters. You used the phrase “push and pull” for your method of editing but it applies too to the relationship between Beau, the jazz musician, and his son Michael, Daryl’s partner in crime, not to mention between Daryl and Monique, his lover. You explore desire and attraction, hatred and manipulation, dependency and resentment, in racial, familial, and erotic terms. You even engage magical realism to a slight degree.

BS: Thank you, Monica. I trust the book lives up to your incisive description. In terms of magical realism, New Orleans really is a Caribbean city. Carlos Fuentes noted this, and he’s right.

MDLT: Yeah, and magical realism owes an enormous debt to Southern Gothic. García Márquez was heavily influenced by Faulkner, who appears at the beginning of Station of the Birds.

BS: Daryl reads Faulkner, and Ovid. That was my entrance into the South. When I first got down there as a 17-year-old northerner not knowing how to navigate the society, I skipped too many classes because I didn’t want to stop reading whichever Faulkner I was immersed in. And then in theater classes, they made us workshop an enormous amount of Tennessee Williams.

MDLT: What were your thoughts around genre when you were writing the novel then?

BS: I thought of the novel as containing endless entanglements influenced by the culture, by the characters’ desires, and by their psychology. I let the characters do what they needed to do. I’d watch them and then push my way into their psyches. I’m going to read something to you. Peter Cole is a wonderful poet, as you no doubt know. And also a translator. This is from his book Things on Which I’ve Stumbled. The first poem is called “Improvisation on Lines by Isaac the Blind.” Isaac the Blind (born 1160) was a rabbi and Kabbalist who lived in Provence. This is the first stanza: “Only by sucking, not by knowing,/ can the subtle essence be conveyed—/ sap of the word and the world’s flowing.” This has been a most influential piece of knowledge for me, only by sucking, not by knowing.

MDLT: Wow! Tell me more about what it does for you.

BS: Although I did lots of research, I really just wanted to suck it up and meander and see where it would lead. I tried constantly moving descriptions around to see how they related to the action.

MDLT: And the meanderings are key to the storytelling—you slow down and then speed up the pace very intentionally throughout.

BS: I’m very proud of being called a storyteller. That’s what I do. I tell stories.

MDLT: The pleasure is multiplied when you tell stories within stories. There’s another book that was also important to the writing of Station of the Birds that we haven’t spoken about: The Arabian Nights. You reference it when Daryl is trying to keep Michael alive by telling him a story.

BS: Well, it’s really interesting you bring that up because it’s just plopped right in the center of the chapter, that story from Arabian Nights.

MDLT: Oh, it is straight from The Arabian Nights?

BS: I mean, it’s reworked, I condensed it. It’s from a beautiful leather-bound edition that I have since lost.

MDLT: I wouldn’t worry too much about finding it since there’s no definitive corpus of The Arabian Nights. The collection of stories that we’ve come to know is the collective result of centuries of narrating, compiling, editing, and translating stories that were being shaped and transformed as they were circulating.

Southern storytelling is almost mythological, dense and deep.

BS: There are some stories that are so important to our psyches that they come back again and again, transformed. Those are the stories I’m interested in telling.

MDLT: The story of violence. The story of finding a scapegoat or someone to sacrifice so others can go on living their lives and doing “business as usual” happens with your Jorge character.

BS: Thank you for bringing this up. That was a big part of the plot line. Look what’s happening now in the United States. The cruelty and the vicious incarcerations and attacks, as if we’re all vigilantes. This scapegoating, projecting blame, sadly, has been going on for centuries.

MDLT: Jorge is not white, he is not Black, so he ends up taking the brunt of the violence. That he doesn’t speak English makes it easy for others to blame him.

BS: Daryl frequents his father’s library, and that’s where I was able to catalog many of my references from Ovid’s Metamorphosis to Aristophanes, to the Greek gods. But yes, scapegoating really is an age old tactic.

MDLT: I wonder if there’s a relationship between the play by Aristophanes and the Sufi poem The Conference of the Birds.

BS: I am not familiar with the Sufi poem. In Aristophanes, the Station of the Birds—now the novel’s title—was meant to become a city state built and occupied by birds. But men intervened and the birds became their subjects. The birds are, in my mind, messengers to the gods.

What Was Lost When My Daughter Gained Sound

Posted on April 2, 2026April 1, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

Goodbye, Mermaids by Christie Chapman

“Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.” – Jack Zipes, folklorist

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” – Carl Sagan, scientist

Wind brushed the trees, like a mother brushing the long flowy hair of a can’t-sit-still little one. My baby daughter, who was born deaf, and I lay on the soft carpeted floor of our townhouse and watched through the sliding glass door. The sight was peaceful, hushed (for me) by the glass, the slim waving branches like arms conducting a silent orchestra. I said to my daughter (out loud, out of habit; I was still learning her language): “Is this what the world is like for you?”

Later I stood and slid open the door. As a hearing person, accustomed to thinking of sound as beautiful, I wanted to sense the wind in this way, too. I pushed aside the glass and let it in. The roar seemed angry, agitated. I thought of giants from fairy tales, the tiger-headed guardian at the Cave of Wonders where the genie resides. “Who dares disturb my slumber?”

The Princess and the Frog

When a child arrives outside the norm—a selkie, a fae changeling; or, to be more mundane, a baby with a disability—some parents cling to facts. These feel like grip-holds as you scale a sheer cliff face, as your fingertips pinken and pulse, as your foot slips and sparkling rock dust scatters far below.

Fact: The medical community uses the caduceus as its symbol, two snakes twined around a winged staff. Even though there’s a snake, its members take an oath: “First, do no harm.”

We brought our daughter in for the six-hour cochlear-implants surgery when she was 13 months old. Tiny blue hospital gown, treaded socks in the smallest size that were still comically large on her. She carried her frog puppet into the operating room with her. She wasn’t supposed to, but the doctors broke protocol because she was scared.

After the surgery, as my husband and I hurried through antiseptic halls to see her, I heard a foreign, ragged cry. “Whose baby is that?” I thought. I saw a drugged, hungry baby flailing in the arms of a nurse who was not her mother. The tight-wrapped gauze bandage pushed down on my daughter’s brow so she looked like a tiny Neanderthal. My first, irrational thought: “What have you done to my baby?”

We spent the night at the hospital. A sweet nurse turned the TV to a station that just shows digital stars after 9:30 p.m., white specks zooming through blackness. The bandage on my daughter’s head was tied in a way that gave her Princess Leia buns, one over each side where her brain had been invaded.

Villainy

From Aladdin’s Jafar and the thumb-sucking lion king of Robin Hood to latter-day Slytherin, snakes are aligned with villains. When Harry Potter’s friends realize he’s a Parselmouth, fluent in the language of serpents, they regard him with suspicion and fear.

The old ASL sign for “cochlear implant,” I’m told, was a snake sinking its fangs into a person’s skull. This is how maligned the devices once were in the Deaf community, and still are for some. Far more than hearing aids, which do not require surgery, cochlear implants are seen as brain-damagers (even as the technology has improved) and culture-erasers (especially since the technology has improved, and the devices have become more common, leaving fewer people reliant on ASL).

The current sign for “cochlear implants” still looks like this to me, although supposedly it has changed. To make both signs, you crook two fingers and stab them at your head. In one case, the handshape simply replicates the bent-over-the-ear device. In the other, it’s a deadly bite.

The difference in meaning depends on how you interpret it.

Quest

Before my daughter’s surgery, I searched. I wanted to make sure we were making the right choice.

Fact: A Google search for the terms “cochlear implants” and “child abuse” brings up many articles that contain both.

Years ago, while walking to my then-workplace in Washington, DC, I saw a protest: Deaf people with signs saying deafness is not a disability, not a flaw to be fixed. I mentioned this to people at the time, mystified. Now I’m not mystified. I get it: They say the issue is systemic; they are a linguistic minority who are rarely accommodated.

After all, deafness does not hurt. Deafness does not cut your life short. In this way it’s separate from other abnormalities—minorities—of the body. Your deaf kid could live a happy life if the world would just cooperate. No need to get a scalpel involved.

Fact: A Google search for the terms “cochlear implants” and “cultural genocide” brings up many articles that contain both.

After the surgery, as my husband and I hurried through antiseptic halls to see her, I heard a foreign, ragged cry.

When our daughter was six months old—before the surgery—my husband and I brought her to an ASL-immersive program for deaf babies and their parents at Gallaudet, a university humming with deaf students and staff. We stayed in this program for two years, including after the surgery. Some of the deaf babies got “the surgery,” others did not. Some families chose not to get the surgery; a few babies weren’t eligible for medical reasons (no auditory nerves to make the devices work). It was an omnipresent topic for the parents.

Three of my daughter’s classmates had two deaf parents each, entirely deaf families, some with deaf siblings. A classmate’s father told us—through an interpreter—that he and his wife had emphatically told their doctor: “No surgery.” They had the doctor put a note in their daughter’s file. The father was a professor at Gallaudet; his wife was an administrator there.

Fact: ASL uses different syntax than English; typically, the most urgent item in a sentence comes first. I’ll try to approximate it here: Surgery, all Deaf people? = Deaf people—all-gone. Deaf people all-gone? = Deaf culture all-gone. Gallaudet all-gone. Home all-gone.

Realms

One of the first things my husband and I learned about after our daughter’s diagnosis was “big-D Deaf” versus “little-d deaf.” “Big-D Deaf” refers to a culture, a language that’s signed. A hearing child of Deaf parents who use sign language at home would be considered Deaf—that hearing child is part of the Deaf world, a citizen of the Deaf community. “Little-d deaf” is a medical term. You could be medically deaf but raised apart from the Deaf community, using your voice and devices, and no signs—you are deaf, but not Deaf.

You could be both. These can overlap. My daughter is deaf—in the paperwork at her “mainstream” school, where all of her classmates are hearing; at the audiologist’s office, where the focus is on the sounds she’s able to perceive with her devices. And, as someone who relies on sign language for part of the day, when her devices give her fatigue; as someone who’s connected to the local Deaf community, thanks to various programs we’ve participated in—she’s also Deaf, even though she has cochlear implants and chatters away vocally like any hearing child.

As a hearing parent who has spent my life in the hearing world, and still has my hearing, I will never be Deaf. Unless one day I am deaf—if, say, I lose my hearing in old age, and switch over to sign language. (A “CODA” is a hearing Child of Deaf Adults. According to the comments sections of Deaf influencers I follow on Instagram, there is no such term for parents of a Deaf child.)

At times it all sounds like a riddle, or the baseball joke about “Who’s on first?”

In this way, my daughter and I will always be native citizens of two different worlds.

Instruction Manual

At the heart of this divide are these banal devices. Pieces of them sit in our kitchen right now, their batteries screwed into a charger, on a shelf that also holds cookbooks and bags of chips—part of a domestic tableau, as unassuming as a block of knives.

The devices are ugly, if you go by sight alone. They would look at home encased in glass at a drab museum about some closed-down sanitarium. Band-Aid beige, the color of old nurse shoes and grandma undergarments. Yet in one way they’re beautiful: We chose the color that most closely matches my daughter’s hair. (Viewed in this light, they take on the color of sandcastles, or a butterscotch-topped treat on a summer day.)

They’re clunky, on her head, as she goes about her day; in the age of nanotechnology, you would think we’d have a stealthier design. Inspector Gadget head, especially when she was a baby, before her hair grew out to hide them. Too many components, like something you’d need a thick instruction manual for—we needed an instruction manual, when they were new to our household.

Three of my daughter’s classmates had two deaf parents each, entirely deaf families, some with deaf siblings.

The parts that conspire to bring my daughter sound: A flat, round outer magnet like a poker chip, connected to a short cord. The other end of the cord connects to the “processor,” a vaguely snail-shaped hunk of plastic that hooks over the ear; this is the part a medical expert must program, the part that costs a million bucks, give or take, if you lose it, say, in the ocean. Attached to that is a chunky battery you screw on.

And there’s the part you can’t see, another flat, round magnet under the skin on either side of my daughter’s skull. Over the years her hair has grown over these places, like a maiden whose locks conceal an enchantment. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.

Consumer Facts

Sometimes I lean down to kiss my daughter’s hair and kiss beige plastic instead.

I visit the website of the company that makes these devices. I try to read the most basic, dumbed-down articles explaining how they work. This is where I should find reassurance in scientific terms, the language of progress. Instead, I glaze over. Electricity and magic, I conclude. Lightning and pixie dust.

The lights on her processors blink green when they’re working. This is what I need to know. I see the green flashes when she runs around her grandparents’ yard with cousins at night. The others sometimes hold glow sticks and sometimes hold sparklers, depending on the occasion, but my daughter is the one I can always find in the dark. There she is. My firefly.

What do the devices feel like, to me? Smooth, like a life made easier. What do they smell like? Audiologist waiting rooms, scenes of cheerful complicity. I try to discern a scent other than “plastic,” but my brain gets rerouted and ends up at abstraction. If I try to assign them a personality, they come up void. They’re android by nature. My husband, a computer engineer, says with pride that our daughter has “bionic ears.”

Fact: Vicki, the child robot from a 1980s sitcom called Small Wonder, could shoot electricity into a car to jump-start its engine. She could jump-start a human heart.

Fact: If you ask Google whether a robot can get an MRI, the answer is no, because a typical robot contains ferromagnetic parts, and an MRI machine’s powerful magnet would rip the robot apart in a process troublingly called “the missile effect.”

My husband, a computer engineer, says with pride that our daughter has ‘bionic ears.’

Fact: On the seat-belt strap that goes across my daughter’s car seat is a sleeve that says: “No MRI! I have a cochlear implant.” It’s for a potential ambulance crew. She has magnets in her head; an MRI machine could be disastrous, although scientists are now creating implants that are MRI-safe.

Fact: An MRI machine is not the only hostile environment for cochlear implants. When entering water, such as a pool or the ocean, the devices must be shielded inside a case made of plastic.

Fact: Plastic is not natural; the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a “soup” of microplastics about twice the size of Texas or three times the size of France.

“I Want” Songs

I’ve heard that every Disney princess has a song about what she wants.

A “Faustian bargain” is when a character gives their soul to the devil in exchange for something worldly, and the deal ends in tragedy.

Fact: In the movie The Sound of Metal, a drummer named Ruben loses his hearing and joins a Deaf community that rejects the notion of deafness as a disability. When Ruben secretly undergoes surgery for cochlear implants, to restore the hearing he lost to years of harsh decibels—the community leader, a beloved friend named Joe, asks Ruben to leave.

Fact: At the end of Disney’s animated The Little Mermaid, Ariel stands with Prince Eric on his ship. She’s wearing a wedding dress, waving goodbye to the mer-people she’s left behind, her father and sisters and others. This makes me think of the surgery, of transformation, of realms entered and abandoned. In this light, Ariel appears to me as a traitor.

I realize sirens are associated with their songs, and Ariel bargains her voice for love, going silent to join the human world (not the reverse)—but the mer-folks’ way of life outside the mainstream/human world makes me think of the ocean dwellers as Deaf, the sea witch an unscrupulous surgeon:“Don’t you want to be part of that world? No matter the cost?”

Either way you look at it—when my daughter and I watch the movie, as Prince Eric and Ariel struggle to communicate on their boat date, the dire consequences and ticking clock, we always say: “This could have all been solved if they’d just learned sign language.”

Red Rover

My daughter makes up songs. “Never take our clubhouse away!” she used to caterwaul as a toddler, to the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” standing guard over her couch-pillow fort in a cowgirl hat and diaper.

Before her surgery, our family went to a Gallaudet homecoming football game. We wanted to immerse our daughter in her culture. One of our ASL teachers, a Texan who had wed his husband in matching cowboy hats, beamed down at my daughter in her stroller and greeted her in their language. They were members of the same tribe, and not just because of the cowboy hats.

In my daughter’s preschool class for deaf children, she had a little boyfriend named Sami. At recess, he took her hand and gallantly escorted her to the slides, like a prince charming. They held hands and ran laps around the playground, giddily paired up as if in a happily-ever-after. Sami also had the surgery but hated the devices. His parents, both Deaf, signed to him instead of forcing their child to adapt to a world that didn’t feel like home.

His parents, both Deaf, signed to him instead of forcing their child to adapt to a world that didn’t feel like home.

Starting in kindergarten, my daughter and Sami attended separate schools—my daughter in a class with hearing kids, Sami at a school for Deaf students. We see Sami’s family each year at an annual picnic for the local Deaf community. For the last two years that we’ve gone to the picnic, my daughter and Sami haven’t recognized each other. They speak different languages now; my husband and I sign to our daughter when her devices are off, but she replies with her voice, knowing we can hear her. She signed as a toddler but has lost her muscle memory.

Fact: In the children’s game “Red Rover,” one team chants for a player from the opposite team to “come over” and break the chain formed by children’s linked hands or arms. The object: You try and cross over to the other side. You try to break through.

Thumbs-Up

A scene: My daughter’s nursery when she was a toddler, bedtime. It’s the weekend, and the neighbors in the townhouse next door are having a party on their back patio. They talk and laugh at a respectable decibel level. My daughter has declined to remove her cochlear-implant processors, not finished hearing for the night. She stands at the backyard-facing nursery window in footie pajamas and the pink-bowed bonnet we use to keep the processors on. She scowls down at the audible mirth below, which she can hear even through the closed window. She looms, disapproving, like the world’s tiniest “Karen,” as if she’s going to report them to the HOA for a noise-ordinance violation.

Another: “Mama, I hear a woodpecker,” my daughter says, registering the percussive drill through hollow wood that resonates through the woods we’re walking through. She’s correct.

Another: While playing with blocks, my daughter shows me a new accessory she’s built for some angular, Lego-dimension character. I say, “Oh, cool pirate hat!” She says: “It’s a pilot hat,” detecting the minuscule difference.

One more: When getting dressed for school in her room upstairs, I hear my daughter sing: “You’re my soda pop! My little soda pop!” I think: From down here, I’d never have known if she’d been signing the song instead.

I share these scenes on Facebook. They’re easy for my hearing friends to like. People click on the thumbs-up, they click on the heart. Sometimes they even click on the laughing face.

Deaf Like Me

But there are things I mostly keep to myself, not wanting to seem ungrateful.

Such as: Sometimes I hate this.

How her brain has to work harder than other kids’ to process every word and sound, so that by the end of the schoolday, she’s as tired as if she’s crammed for college exams.

She removes her devices and dives in, able to breathe there.

Seeing her run on Field Day, the devices falling off, tripping her up, holding her back. Knowing that having the devices in her life means special equipment forever: Special headbands for P.E., sports, theme-park rides, bounce houses. Special waterproof cases for the beach. A special lanyard with a microphone for her teachers to wear. Everything “special,” like “special education.” My daughter has a sort of extra report card—an IEP—that grades how she’s doing with her disability (if you consider deafness to be one). One category is “self-advocacy.” This means: Does she speak up if she can’t hear?

The constant attention to battery power—are the lights blinking green, or orange? Are her batteries charged? Away from home—did we bring the charger? Forget about living off the grid. Power outages that go on for more than a few hours are cause for panic. We are a family powered by electricity. A modern family. Meet the Jetsons.

Yet, technical frustrations aside—my daughter seems proud to be Deaf. She says that she’s “rare.” She wants a puppy—a Dalmatian, because so many are deaf. She wants a deaf one. “He’ll be Deaf like me! I can teach him sign language.”

Fact: A 2020 study presented in the Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine showed that deafness among Dalmatians in the United Kingdom is in decline “thanks to careful breeding decisions,” which include selecting only hearing dogs to produce puppies.

The Ballad of Land and Sea

There are times my daughter goes to a place I’m unable to go, even to visit. I can never truly know it as she does. She removes her devices and dives in, able to breathe there. It’s a place beyond foghorn, beyond the churn of waves, beyond whalesong. It’s a slippery place of gestures. I can only reach her through gestures. There was a time when this scared me.

The lights on her devices blink orange when the batteries need to be changed. I used to bolt to the charger for fresh batteries—twist, twist off the old ones; twist, twist on the new ones. Each second in between felt like holding my breath underwater. I wanted to save her from that dark place that was so unknowable for me. It was the only choice I knew.

Now I know she’s okay there. It’s her natural environment. Like an empty nester, I only hope she visits me.

Now I see that in addition to facts, I’ve been clinging to fairy tales. Conquering my terrors through metaphor.

A metaphor: I stand on the shore and wave as my daughter plays in the ocean with others born like her. I can’t join them; I’m a landlubber, a dry-lander. Born with legs instead of a shimmering tail. I stand and hold a big fluffy towel for when she decides to come out. When she emerges—a shape-shifter, thanks to our deal with a sea witch—ready to join me, we wave to those who remain in the water, free from devices and noise. We snap on the devices, nestle them in her sand-colored hair. Her eyes are still blue like the sea. She is sand and sea; she is both.

The lights blink green when they’re working.

Blink, blink. Goodbye, mermaids.

Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Notes to New Mothers” edited by Rebecca Knight and Julie Buntin

Posted on April 2, 2026April 1, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Notes to New Mothers edited by Rebecca Knight and Julie Buntin, which will be published on September 1st, 2026 by Norton. You can pre-order your copy here.

65 writers and artists (many of whom are EL contributors whose work you can find here, here, and here) capture early motherhood in scenes and revelations: a vulnerable, kaleidoscopic record of postpartum life.

In the early days with their first babies, two friends began comparing notes on what, exactly, was going on in their postpartum bodies and minds. What was a wake window? How could anyone function under the weight of so much love? All their new-mom friends were overwhelmed too. In search of the book they needed, editors Rebecca Knight and Julie Buntin invited 65 acclaimed writers and artists—Julia Phillips, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Liana Finck, Jenny Slate, Naima Coster, and more—to riff on shared concerns: burp volcanoes, career shifts, breastfeeding logs, partnership dynamics, minor victories and major insecurities. Here is a bedside table companion for every mother who has wondered how she’ll make it through the wilderness of early parenthood, and a window into her experience for the family and friends desperate to better care for their beloved moms-to-be. Brave, unexpected, and revelatory, Notes to New Mothers offers a new map of motherhood as both a singular and communal experience.

Here is the cover, designed by Sarahmay Wilkinson, with original artwork by Kristen Diederich:

Rebecca Knight: It took us a long time to find the right cover art for Notes to New Mothers because the structure of the book is so unusual. It’s a new form: a 60-writer chorus singing 582 tiny notes, in and out of harmony. It’s a juicy giftable item and an experimental, literary text. What kind of cover could cover both bases? It couldn’t be too literal (stock photo of pacifier stack) or too droopy (Mother’s-Day-Monet) or too floral or not floral enough or too feminine or too Gothic or too discouraging or too perky. We wanted it to be an accomplished aesthetic object in its own right, a soothing visual companion to house the warm community of voices inside. We wanted it to be elegant, energetic, timeless, simple, strong. We came up with a million almosts. And then, perusing the L.A. gallery LOBSTER CLUB’s 2026 Frieze Week group show, we discovered the work of painter Kristen Diederich.

Diederich’s paintings and our book are devoted to polyphony. She too is building up her images from the innumerable contributions of small strokes. Her instincts as a colorist, and as an abstract scribe of the natural world, are as various, understated, rapturous, and surprising as the prose stylings of our disparate, acclaimed writers. Looking at a Diederich painting is an invitation to investigate, to think and look again, all while relishing in the physical, the sumptuous. We came full circle with the project when we learned that Kristen attributes her painting practice to her own mother, also a painter, who found a way to combine creative output and childrearing. This is the very balance our contributors are in the midst of calibrating. We have been giddy about our cover ever since Kristen agreed to come on board. Norton’s Design Director Sarahmay Wilkinson, herself a new mother, created the cover with expert composition and iconic typography, all while tending to her own young son. We can’t imagine a fuller, finer, or more fitting artwork to invite readers into Notes to New Mothers.

Julie Buntin: Rebecca has captured exactly how I feel about Kristen’s artwork and how it evokes our book! I’ll just add that in addition to suggesting, via the swirls and blooms of color, the polyphony of the contents, the painting evokes such a tangible sense of transformation—the way the pink seems to be an almost reconfigured version of the green, the interrupting red, the moody, textural slashes of blue. For me, it speaks, in some nonverbal and very true-feeling way, to the murky, vibrant, and wildly complex early postpartum period.

Rebecca and I worked on this book together for years, and even when it was just an inkling, our vision for it was that however we collected these voices, the object—the book itself—would have to be distinct and beautiful. Something you’d want to put on your bedside table, that you’d be drawn to pick up even when dead tired, that would offer some sensory respite from all the glop and goo of newborn life. I have very precise memories of a book I read to both my children as tiny babies—one they loved—that had this gargantuan dust jacket that was always slipping off or getting folded up or in the wrong place, one more tiny thing I had to track and take care of. One day, it got half stuck under my nursing chair and partially ripped when I tried to pull it out, bending over my infant, which made her cry—and then I was crying, because what if I’d hurt her, and also why was the fucking dust jacket never where it was supposed to be? And wasn’t that my fault somehow? Those days are tough. Notes to New Mothers will have no dust jacket. The tactility of Kristen’s painting will work so brilliantly as paper-over-board, and Sarahmay’s sensitive way of setting off the type means that no amount of baby drool or sticky fingerprints or spilt milk will obscure the title. The book can take it, just as the mother can (even if she thinks she sometimes can’t).

Sarahmay Wilkinson: It was such a pleasure to collaborate with authors Rebecca Knight and Julie Buntin in the creative process for their cover. It was important to our team to create something intimate and elevated while also lasting and durable; a gift that would live happily on a new parent’s chaotic nightstand. Kristen Diederich’s painting brought a sense of tenderness, atmosphere, and complexity that felt exactly right for the project. As a new-ish mum, I devoured this book, but really, truly, anyone who has ever been born should read this book.

Kristen Diederich: While painting, I often recall all the times I must have been held as a child, how these levels of care are linked and inseparable from the creative process, which itself is an act of mothering an idea into the world. In my case, these aspects of care are reflected in the image itself through the materiality of paint and mark making.

Growing up surrounded by creative women—a grandmother who crafted with her hands, an aunt who was a literature and theater teacher, and a mother, Tammy, who is a committed painter—gave rise to my interest in the arts.

For the past 10 years, I have been writing a single, continuous poem whose lines become titles for my paintings—among them, “Fuchsia is Slain by Observable Facts,” an abstract landscape of saturated pinks, blues, and greens, floral elements rising and dissolving through layers of glaze. I was delighted that this painting was chosen for this project because the story of my art practice is so deeply linked to my own mother.

My Skeleton Thinks It’s Better Off Alone

Posted on April 1, 2026April 2, 2026 by Preety Sidhu

Debone

You catch your reflection and think: What the fuck? Is that a new bone?

You’d liked it when you were younger—flaunted it, even—the prominent collarbone of a thinner woman. Then came your mother’s fugue summer, when amid all the worry and perplexity and frantic travel, your pulse became visible at the base of your throat.

Maybe something, the doctor said, maybe just underlying structures uncommonly close to the surface. You hadn’t thought of it that way before, but they were, weren’t they? All that visible rigging. Was it grisly? Did it make people squeamish? It struck you as unseemly, indecent, something meant to be private and internal out there for all to see. You became self-conscious. You began to amass a collection of high-necked tops. You began scrutinizing the necks and shoulders of other women during warm months, in exercise classes, in red carpet photos of actresses in strapless gowns. You were trying to understand what’s normal, where you fall in relation.

Next was the emergence of the outer tips of your clavicle and knobs that must be the heads of your humeri. You suspected bone spurs, then looked up “bone spurs” and decided, probably not. No one has been able to explain it. Perhaps it’s premature aging, or another scoliotic disfiguration, a byproduct of your terminally terrible posture, something that might have been stopped had you noticed and course corrected in time. Which is to say: your fault.

It’s hard to know when more tendons in your neck and more mystery bones in your chest and shoulders have emerged, and when you’re just looking too closely, obsessing, growing more and more paranoid. It puts you in mind of that French show where a lake drained to slowly reveal a sunken town.

You imagine being able to wrap your fingers all the way around your clavicle. You imagine rainwater collecting in the hollows, hummingbirds alighting to bathe there. Ha, startle reflex like yours, you’d like to see them try. (A jest! Dear Universe, please do not send birds.)

At night while drifting off to sleep, you begin to observe stirrings. Lying on your belly, arm folded under your chest, you feel a delicate tickle against your palm. You flick on the light, rush to the mirror, and pull aside the collar of your T, but see nothing. This occurs several times before you finally catch a glimpse: something squirming underneath, like your galloping pulse did, but freer, more erratic.

It remains dormant during the day but grows bold at night. Stand still long enough before the mirror and you’ll see tiny bulges probing your skin from inside. You imagine hundreds of feathery legs, like a millipede. You poke your collarbone and it dives away in the other direction, testing the outer limits of your body, or further within, becoming, for once, discreet.

It wants, you think, to be free. Don’t we all.

To entrap that which would be rid of you, to ensnarl, to imprison, is ethically indefensible, it is morally repugnant. So you go to the kitchen, open the drawer. Your hand hovers: carving knife, paring knife, boning knife. The last of these sounds most appropriate, but you quail before the sharp edge and settle instead for a butter knife.

What will you become without it? Compressible, you suppose. The way rats can squeeze down their ribs for any point of ingress and octopuses can ooze through any hole not smaller than their eye. This could be the start of a whole new chapter of your life, one featuring cave exploration, wreck diving, and other claustrophobic pursuits.

Before the bathroom mirror, you wedge the butter knife behind your clavicle and begin to pry. At first, it bows and writhes in distress, but you pause to pet it, humming lullabies, and it calms enough to proceed. This hurts more than anticipated. The shaking hands and sobs aren’t helping. Nor is the blood, obscuring everything, making it slick and difficult to gain purchase. No longer able to make out much in the mirror, you might as well stumble into the bathtub, finish this curled up against cool porcelain.

Twang twang twang snap the tendons. Through the carnage slices something thin, pliable, and coated in gore. A wing! Of course, why didn’t you see it before: it wants to fly. You drop the knife, try to relax, just be open and unresisting. Your part here is done; like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, this struggle may be crucial to its becoming.

It surges, twists. You wonder how much will go, whether just the clavicle or a larger mess of tendon and bone is about to claw free of you. It is so close now.

You try to skip ahead to when the horror will be over, the pain. Not so far in the future, it’s scaling the wall, smearing the white with blood and gristle. You’re tempting it down with a bowl of milk, or sugar water, or raw liver, gently dislodging it from the crown molding with a broom. Assuming you still have control over your arms. Assuming you come out of this as more than abandoned meat, a lonely shell, hollowed and bereft. Be generous, you tell yourself. Be easy and selfless and kind. But when it looses a victorious, breastbone-rattling screech, recognition: this is more than you are willing to give away.

So you clamp your hands over it and cry, “Don’t leave me, don’t go!” You feel it fighting, as desperate to get away as you are to crush it to yourself. It’s a fierce struggle that carries on for several terrifying, heartbreaking minutes. At last, over your pants of “please, please, please,” you feel it subside, go still once more, and surrender under your bloody, trembling hands.

7 Hybrid Memoirs That Merge Art and Family

Posted on April 1, 2026April 1, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

Coming of age is a lifelong creative act. So, too, is the act of making a family—biological, found, or some amalgam of the two. For writers who grow up with artistic parents or parent-figures—immersed in the worlds of literature or theater, photography, or sculpture from a young age—family is often tethered to an impulse to create. Subsequently, engagement with, or appreciation of, the media that informs our identities and family narratives can lend itself to experimentation: with collage essays and associative thinking, borrowed forms, fragmentation or compression.

While writing my second book, Woman House, a memoir in essays and flash interludes I call “assemblages,” I repeatedly turned to visual art, literature, and cinema to help understand my relationship with my mother, and to catch a glimpse of the woman and artist she was in her younger life, before I was born. She raised me on classic movies and trips to the museum, to appreciate fine art and messy, amateur experimentation alike. Art was something we shared—and yet, as I matured into an adult who sought out expressionistic or surreal work for its bodily frankness (Louise Bourgeois’ femme maisons, for example), my mother often reviled my taste. Where she favored classical, conventionally “tasteful” work demonstrating technical skill, I found myself drawn to images that moved more freely upon the canvas than I felt safe to in my body. In Woman House, form and content alike reflect the act of making—a body, a work of art—to channel control; the act of seeing as a release and opening to feeling.

The following reading list includes experiments in nonfiction, essay, and memoir that engage with art and coming-of-age narratives simultaneously. These books unpack the ways in which family, media, and story shape and change us. Each author bends form in a manner reflective not only of their influences and inheritance, but of their own artistic evolution, uniquely capturing a glimpse into their ongoing, ever-changing creative and personal lives.

The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit is perhaps most well known for her fiery, insightful activism and place-based environmental writings. But in this 2013 experimental memoir of mothers and daughters, illness and memory, travel and story, Solnit weaves a remarkable tale of identity through narrative and association, mapping her life via objects and symbols—apricots, mirrors, ice, breath—alongside the literature that shaped her approach to writing and living alike. At once a travelogue, a reflection on Frankenstein and the fairy tales of her youth, a reckoning with her mother’s memory loss and the vicissitudes of the body, The Faraway Nearby is a storyteller’s memoir that defies chronology in favor of a kind of nesting doll structure, or perhaps that of a tapestry woven and unraveled with masterful precision.

The Fluency of Light by Aisha Sabatini Sloan

“Coming of age in a theater of black and white,” the subtitle to Sloan’s debut essay collection, perfectly encapsulates the author’s pseudo-frauenroman as a mixed-race woman growing up against a backdrop of cinema, photography, literature, music, and art in late 20^th century Los Angeles. These essays employ fragmentation, numbered sections, and associative leaps to explore the artistic influences that defined her young life, from Thelonius Monk and her father’s photographs to Italian neorealism and the New York art gallery scene. Meanwhile, each essay honors and explores her parents’ interracial love story (set in Detroit, a second home that Sloan returns to repeatedly in her writing), and its aftermath. Throughout, Sloan reflects on racism, bigotry, Blackness, history, and family, always seeking great depths of understanding and evolution in her relationship to art and to the world.

Book of Mutter by Kate Zambreno

A meditation, a list, a scrapbook, a sculpture. All of these and more might describe Zambreno’s Book of Mutter, a work of memory, testament, art, and grief making sense of her mother’s life and legacy. Written over thirteen years, the book borrows form from artist Louise Bourgeois’ Cells series of sculptures, and blends critical reflections on the works of Bourgeois and other artists and writers (including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Henry Darger, Anne Carson, and Roland Barthes) with the narrative of her mother’s illness and passing, investigating the difficult work of loving and losing a mother with whom one shares both intimacy and animosity. At once spare and sprawling, making frequent use of white space and yet spilling over into Zambreno’s companion text, Appendix Project, the materials and forms that make up Book of Mutter constitute a singular approach to the mother/daughter narrative.

Brown Neon by Raquel Gutiérrez

Brown Neon is a revolutionary experiment in place-based writing. Operating as a memoir of queer family-making and cultural influence up and down California and across the Southwest, the book also explores the evolution of the author’s critical, racial, community, and class consciousness. The result is a travelogue as stunning in its depictions of landscape as it is articulate in challenging the colonial status quo. Throughout these essays, Gutiérrez blends critical perspectives on art, immigration, and performance with moving, richly detailed family dynamics of all kinds: from the love and sartorial tutelage of her mentor and “father”—butch activist Jeanne Córdova (or Big Poppa, as she is known to Gutiérrez)—to stories of her biological parents, youth, and found family of fellow punk rock fans and artists in 1990s San Diego. Described by Myriam Gurba as a work of “Latinx mysticism,” Brown Neon is singular in its perspective on intergenerational memory, identity, and ecology.

The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial by Maggie Nelson

In 1969, Maggie Nelson’s aunt Jane was horrifically murdered. Her killer remained a mystery, and her violent death haunted Nelson’s family. In Nelson’s hands, the story of Jane’s death became the subject of a beautiful, genre-blurring work shapeshifting from page to page: now lyric, now historical record, now speculative reimaging—titled simply Jane: A Murder. But just before Jane was published, new DNA evidence pointed to a new possible suspect. Thirty-five years after Jane’s death, Maggie Nelson and her mother find themselves witnessing the suspect’s trial—and with it, the excavation of family ghosts. The Red Parts is one of Nelson’s more narrative prose works, though one wouldn’t go so far as to call it “conventional memoir” (or, as far as Nelson is concerned, “memoir” at all). Anchored by the true-crime story of the trial, and the family stories evinced by its drama, Nelson’s book also investigates media and society’s fixation on murder—especially the murders of young white women—as well as her own.

Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art by Erica N. Cardwell

Wrong is Not My Name opens with a kitchen table, a tragic loss, and an inherited diary. “Was my mother an artist?” Cardwell asks, recollecting the kitchen in her childhood home and her mother’s many ways of making and creating within that space. From here, the book—a memoir, a work of art criticism, an activist’s record of Black, queer, and feminist identities recalling the works of bell hooks—unfurls into streams of memory and making. In grieving her mother, Cardwell crafts a singular work of hybrid art writing.

The White Dress by Nathalie Léger, translated by Natasha Lehrer

Léger’s trio of prose works exploring her mother’s story alongside those of three well-known women—artists at once operating as subject and object, active maker and passive muse—concludes with The White Dress, a haunting examination of the female body and mind striving for creative agency. Léger shifts back and forth between childhood memories, scenes of conversation with her mother, and researched details unpacking the art and death of Pippa Bacca, a wedding-dress-clad performance artist who was killed during her attempt to travel on foot across Italy and the Middle East. As Léger’s research into Bacca’s motivations unfurls, so too does her understanding of her lineage—as a woman, as a daughter. “Whatever it is that you’re touching with your fingertips is filled with history,” she writes, “ordered, as ancient and familiar as our origins.”

Louise Erdrich Sees Criticism as a Friend

Posted on March 31, 2026March 31, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

I always seem to find one of Louise Erdrich’s books exactly when I need them most, thanks to some combination of a trusted recommender and fate. A dear friend texted me in the middle of reading Love Medicine, Erdrich’s first novel, to tell me that I absolutely had to go pick it up. I discovered Future Home of a Living God after an old boss could not stop gushing over it. The Sentence came into my possession during a “book fishing” event run by my local independent bookstore, Brookline Booksmith: You describe your literary taste, and an astute bookseller—hidden behind a large sheet of paper made to look like water—attaches a title they think you would like to a faux fishing rod for you to “catch.” I can’t recall now how I explained what I love most in a book (there are a great many things), but I’m not at all surprised that a Louise Erdrich title was what I reeled in.

Erdrich is an absolute master of fiction. Her characters come alive on the page, each of their voices as distinct and consuming as the last. Her work is infused with an incredible depth of humanity—both piercingly clear-eyed and deeply empathetic—that is, to me, the very best of what fiction can do.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author is back this spring with a collection of short stories, Python’s Kiss. I couldn’t be more thrilled that she took the time ahead of the book’s publication to answer Electric Lit’s 23 Questions.

– Katie Henken Robinson
Senior Editor

1. Describe the process of writing Python’s Kiss in a six-word story.

Louise Erdrich: Duck, Duck, Duck, Duck, Goose. Run!

2. What book should everyone read growing up?

LE: Charlotte’s Web. Tension, death, kindness, hope, and regeneration somehow squeeze effortlessly into this book. When a young child learns about death it is a betrayal. This book is consoling.

3. Write alone or in community?

LE: Alone, for as long as possible.

4. How do you start from scratch?

LE: I rummage around in the notebooks I keep for random ideas and follow the most interesting thread.

5. Three presses you’ll read anything from:

LE: I’m not taking this literally, as I can’t read everything, but Coffee House, Milkweed, and Graywolf are local presses that publish thought provoking books that go around the world.

6. Hardcover, paperback, or e-reader?

LE: Hardcover, ideally, for favorite books. If I can’t get a hardcover, then a well made trade paperback. And I do love a book with French flaps.

7. Describe your ideal writing day.

LE: It is a day in summer by Lake Superior and I am completely engaged with my narrative. Every so often I leave my desk and jump into the water, which is very cold and pure. I sit in the sun until I am warm. Then start writing again.

8. Typing or longhand?

LE: Longhand.

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

LE: From a book reviewer reading a book of mine set in a small town—Louise Erdrich should go back to the reservation.

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

LE: If you try to defend your writing to someone by saying what you meant, you failed to get what you meant across. You might as well stop talking, go back, and try again.

11. Realism or surrealism?

LE: Quite often there is no difference.

12. How did you meet your agent?

LE: Through a friend who was looking out for me.

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

LE: Do some tangential research around your subject and eat some ice cream.

14. What’s your relationship to being edited?

LE: When I started writing I decided that criticism would be my friend. I appreciate any response to my suffering manuscript. I pay attention to every suggestion although I might not ultimately make a change. Trent Duffy, my longtime copyeditor/editor, is a sort of guardian angel. Terry Karten has been a staunch friend and guide. Jonathan Burnham is brilliant, fearless, exacting. Deborah Triesman is a passionate expert. I have been lucky.

15. Write every day or write when inspired?

LE: Joseph Albers gave the best advice: Leave the door open. So every day.

16. What other art forms and literary genres inspire you?

LE: Art Heist books—fiction or non-fiction.

17. Book club or writing group?

LE: Family.

18. The writer who made you want to write.

LE: George Orwell.

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

LE: A sensation of inevitability.

20. Writing with music or in silence?

LE: A gently snoring dog.

21. What’s the last indie bookstore you went to.

LE: Birchbark Books—I like sitting in the office with anyone on our peerless staff (my daughter Pallas is a manager) and working out problems. I also like browsing through the latest as chosen by our buyer, Nate Pederson, who does a tremendous job and has been there nearly as long I have. This is our 25th year.

22. Activity when you need to take a writing break:

LE: Walking around outside, or, with a sense of aggrieved resignation, cleaning the house.

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

LE: Discarding my pretensions.

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Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art by Erica N. Cardwell

The White Dress by Nathalie Léger, translated by Natasha Lehrer

Louise Erdrich Sees Criticism as a Friend

An excerpt from Surrender by Jennifer Acker

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Erasure by Percival Everett

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

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Goodbye, Mermaids by Christie Chapman

The Princess and the Frog

Villainy

Quest

Realms

Instruction Manual

Consumer Facts

“I Want” Songs

Red Rover

Thumbs-Up

Deaf Like Me

The Ballad of Land and Sea

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The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

The Fluency of Light by Aisha Sabatini Sloan

Book of Mutter by Kate Zambreno

Brown Neon by Raquel Gutiérrez

The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial by Maggie Nelson

Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art by Erica N. Cardwell

The White Dress by Nathalie Léger, translated by Natasha Lehrer

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