We inherit far more from our families than a surname. Our progenitors leave their mark on us in ways we often can’t understand until we pay our own rent. Some of these qualities, of course, are admirable or anodyne—a sense of justice, a fondness for a particular cuisine, our sparkling wit—and others less admirable—a poor reputation, gambling addiction, a penchant for shouting.
Our families shape our beliefs about the world and our place in it, so I’ve always loved stories that explore how our first relationships—those with our family—end up affecting all of the ones that come later.
My own novel, Pearce Oysters, tells the story of a family in the wake of a father’s death. The mother is bereft but also undergoing her own identity crisis. Two brothers, at odds since childhood, fight over the family business, the Pearce Oyster Company, which they’ve inherited as partners. The novel follows this family over the course of the 2010 BP Oil Spill. As oil approaches the Gulf Coast, and the family’s oyster reefs, the family is under one roof for the first time in years.
The books in this list explore the emotional legacy of family life.
The Five Wounds opens with a father, Amadeo Padilla, preparing to play the part of Jesus in a Good Friday procession, and in a turn that sets our plot in motion, he takes the part too seriously. It’s a fine opening for a novel, and in many ways the novel takes as its subject the repercussions of the father’s decisions—not just his ceremonial crucifixion but also mistakes that came much earlier. Amadeo’s daughter, Angel, is fifteen and newly pregnant. Her teen pregnancy signals family history repeating itself. This gorgeous novel explores the complex reasons that history does repeat itself and how families evolve over generations.
On the heels of a breakup, Kathleen Cheng leaves her psychology PhD program, moves back in with her mom, and takes a job as a professional cuddler. When Kathleen returns home, though, she finds her mother has emerged from a decades-long holding pattern of her own. Her mother transformed her life and is engaged to Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur. After years of grief, longing to return to China, and alcoholism, Kathleen’s mother is now sober, social climbing, and sporting athleisure wear. Kathleen’s cuddling gig begins as an ironic curiosity, but it has an apt emotional resonance in her life. Snuggling safely with strangers seems a natural tendency after a childhood spent caretaking for her mother. This novel delights with humor and heart as it parses the mother-daughter relationship in the run-up to the mother’s wedding day.
Alice McDermott’s most recent novel is, like all her work, unparalleled in its emotional nuance and observation. It’s also the most difficult to summarize of the books on this list, weaving in epistolary form through the decades. The major events of the novel take place in 1963, Saigon. Two American women—the young idealistic Patricia and the worldly “dynamo” Charlene—are brought to Vietnam by their husbands’ work during the war. Together, the women concoct their own unofficial charity to raise money for a Vietnamese hospital. Now, sixty years later, Patricia begins writing Charlene’s grown daughter to revisit the past. They weigh the women’s well-meaning attempts at “inconsequential good.” And though the novel takes up far more than a mother-daughter relationship as its subject, the letters paint a vivid picture of Charlene as a mother. I read this novel in a gallop, mesmerized.
I would be remiss if I didn’t include Home, my favorite of Marylinne Robinson’s novels. An errant prodigal son returns to his rural Iowan home after two decades away. And we wonder if he’ll earn his pastor father’s forgiveness, or harder still, we wonder if he’ll forgive himself. The novel probes the long suffering of the town’s one-time hellion through the eyes of his endlessly loving sister, who is newly heartbroken and back in their childhood home to mind their aging father. It’s a capacious portrait of the Boughton family.
This novel braids the point of views of a famous Irish poet grandfather, the daughter he abandoned as a child, and his floundering twenty-something granddaughter. Does the granddaughter’s bent for violent, coercive men have its roots in the relationship of her grandparents? I’ll leave that for you to unpack. This novel is such a singular work—the point of views so delightfully varied, true, and compelling. On every page, a gem of a sentence sings out and delivers psychological insights that I recognize but never found words for.
The only story collection on this list but every bit as deserving. I hear Tessa Hadley often compared to Alice Munro, and this is apt when one considers Hadley’s skill for clean, unaffected prose simmering with implications. The characters are so particular and varied and lived-in. She plumbs relationships romantic and familial with equal precision, but my favorite story in this collection, “Funny little snake,” is the story of a plain, emotionally stunted stepdaughter—a chess piece in her parents’ acrimonious divorce. The story takes place over the week in which the girl’s disinterested young stepmother must entertain her. The stepmother comes to understand the dire roots of the young girl’s temperament that week. The story had me at turns had me giggling and gasping.
William Maxwell was fiction editor at The New Yorker for forty years, and he was so renowned for his career-making influence that it risks overshadowing his magnificent writing. This slim novel, on its surface, unpacks a murder that took place in the early 1920s in rural Illinois. Our narrator is friends with the murderer’s son, so we learn early on in the novel. (This isn’t a spoiler.) But as much as this is this story of that murder—it’s about the narrator’s relationship to his widowed father. It also happens to be a perfect little novel. Written in elegantly spare prose, it’s the kind of book I’d recommend to a friend taking off for a long weekend. Read it in a few sittings and marvel.
There’s no question that turning the pages of a great book is a wonderful feeling—but is it more wonderful in a hardcover or a paperback? Aside from considering quality, durability, portability, size, price, or release date, many readers simply choose the cover with the more appealing design. At times, it’s a hard decision: One cover could be more eye-catching, while the other could appear more fitting for the book. Other times, a cover might stand out as remarkable (or remarkably disappointing), making comparison a no-brainer. Whether choosing the superior design is difficult or easy, it’s always fun. Continuing our Book Cover Contest series, we compared the hardcovers and paperbacks of 20 recently released books, asked our community on Instagram and X to vote for their favorite cover for each book, and compiled the results below. (Paperback images are featured on the left side; hardcovers are on the right.) See if your favorite covers won, and find new reads along the way!
Rukeyser’s sensual, darkly funny novel follows a young woman fascinated with “sleaze” as she travels to the Kodiak Archipelago seeking new experiences. While the paperback design features two plump raspberries, indicative of the narrator’s overfull desire and erotic passion, the hardcover design displays the story’s strange wilderness setting. Our readers voted for the hardcover, as the remote Alaskan environment facilitates the narrative’s eccentric characters, unexpected plot twists, and eco-tourism commentary, while also nodding toward the wilderness of desire.
The narrator of Open Throat is a ravenous but lovable queer mountain lion who protects a homeless encampment, fascinated by human life. Lonely and vulnerable, they reflect on their memories and search for their identity. The lion appears vicious on the paperback, their open jaw exposing sharp teeth. On the hardcover, an ink-blot illustration suggests the novel’s psychological depth, and the lion’s fiery eyes hint at their menacing nature and mental turmoil. Our readers preferred the hardcover, more interested in the lion’s interiority than their monstrosity.
College sophomore Sav thinks she’s ready for her life to begin, but she can’t anticipate the crises that are to come. In the coming-of-age novel, Sav navigates queer love, heartbreak, growth, and friendship. The hardcover proves vague, but on the paperback, a bright red cocktail represents transitioning into adulthood, with all its fun, difficulties, and messiness. The font, which appears hastily hand-painted, appropriately suits the chaos and spontaneity of growing up. Its lack of perfection makes it perfect, which our readers appreciated: The paperback cover stood victorious.
Nolan’s gripping, provocative novelfollows the narrator’s spiral into obsessive longing after the abrupt end of an enthralling romance. While probing love, power, and submission, the novel questions what we want, how we want it, and why we want it. The hardcover keeps the novel’s secrets, but the paperback displays the narrator’s vulnerability and of course, her “desperation,” whether lying on the bed in sexual submission or post-romance dejection. Unsurprisingly, our readers favored the paperback design.
Emily yearns for a fulfilling and balanced life—and when she faces an unplanned pregnancy, she is forced to make choices that will shift her old life into a new one. The hardcover embodies feeling pulled in different directions and striving for something that seems out of reach, and the paperback emphasizes tough decision-making. Despite the hardcover’s clever visual, the paperback’s sharp photo, urgent color scheme, and italicized text are even more enticing. They clearly enticed our readers, since they chose the paperback over the hardcover.
In modern Nigeria, an ambitious boy supports his family during their financial struggles, and an overworked, young doctor is the “perfect child” in her wealthy family. Their lives collide during a political crisis, and a captivating tale of class inequity, gender inequity, violence, love, and humanity unfolds. Neither the hardcover nor the paperback reveal too much about the narrative, but the paperback’s beautiful design is unquestionably alluring. In our polls, the paperback triumphed.
Isen’s sharp, shrewd, and sometimes uneasy essays boldly critique present-day racial justice initiatives. They confront sensitive topics, from arts and entertainment to law and politics, interrogating the discrepancies between values, intentions, words, actions, and impact. While the hardcover is pretty, the paperback gets to the point: We say a lot, but we do a little. Featuring text-message bubbles, the potent subtitle, a fingers-crossed emoji, and a lot of blank space, the design fits Isen’s criticism. Accordingly, the paperback appealed to our readers more than the hardcover.
Flor can predict the exact day a person will die—and she isn’t the only person in her family with secrets. In an emotional epic, Family Lore traces the lives of Flor’s sisters, cousins, aunts, and nieces across generations, past and present, Santo Domingo and New York City, leading up to the day of Flor’s living wake. The hardcover and paperback are both colorful and beautiful, simple but intriguing. Ultimately, our readers voted for the hardcover: Its remarkable elegance is difficult to surpass.
In a beautiful, spellbinding novel, Cursed Bread tells a haunting tale of small-town life, set in a 1951 postwar French village during a real-life unsolved mass poisoning, as madness, hysteria, and desire consume the town. While the paperback suggests that something might be a little off in the rural French village, the hardcover immediately grips readers with Cursed Bread’s unsettling eeriness and dark elegance. The hardcover draws readers into the book’s mystery, and our readers agreed, selecting the hardcover as the better design.
As two young men pursue a career of illegal scam artistry, their relationship, crimes, and greed become increasingly complicated. Frumkin’s novel presents a scathing take on capitalism, deception, and the American Dream with satirical absurdity and hilarious wit. The paperback keeps the most astute elements from the hardcover—the emphasis on “con,” money visual, and excluded head—and offers more cash, a more contemporary feel, and the leading duo in a more confident stance. According to our polls, the paperback won our readers’ favor.
At an archeological site in Greece, four starkly different women encounter an unusual artifact—one that shouldn’t exist—and the head professor realizes that something went wrong. He tries to bury history, while the women work together to dig up the truth. The hardcover echoes the novel’s feminist angle, and the paperback highlights the setting, featuring a Greek-inspired font, hot summertime colors, and excavation site images. Our readers found the paperback more fitting. The playful cover mirrors the humor and wit that make Excavations such a fun read.
In the 18th century, a teenage woodcarver agrees to build a mechanical tiger for Tipu Sultan’s sons, leading to an epic adventure amidst colonialism, war, and displacement across India, Britain, and France. The hardcover’s vibrant colors are striking—but the paperback, featuring a building reminiscent of St. Paul’s Cathedral, a topsy-turvy tiger, and an 18th-century floral design, won our polls. The upside-down illustration reflects the impact of colonialism, which severely upended the world, and the woodcarver’s quest, which flipped his life out of its status quo.
The story of a romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s, Kairos meditates on memory, change, and the passage of time to offer a powerful examination of history. Individual, collective, and national histories parallel and intersect in surprising ways. Both cover designs are artful and abstract, posing more questions than they answer. The creative and confounding artwork suits Erpenbeck’s complex narrative, but the hardcover might be a bit too difficult to interpret, as our readers preferred the paperback.
When Audrey returns from her dream life in Manhattan to visit her hometown in Illinois, she confronts her complicated connection to her roots. She reexamines family dynamics, past relationships, and cultural identity—urging her to reconsider her future. The paperback edition depicts Audrey, literally torn between big-city plans and small-town history with a ripped-paper-like division. This design feels too on-the-nose. Our readers voted for the hardcover, appreciating the gorgeous artwork and the partial transparency, which could represent looking inside the self.
When a teacher adapts her feminist, eco-warrior, bestselling novel into a screenplay, she is directed to convert the empowered mermaid protagonist into a stereotypical mermaid designed for the male gaze. Strange things start to happen, and the teacher and her mermaid must fight to maintain their voices. Both the hardcover and paperback are intriguing, but our readers chose the hardcover as the winner. The fun and fantastical design reflects Langbien’s amusing, imaginative, spectacular storytelling.
After alien spaceships briefly visit Earth, Blaine, Heather, and Oliver grapple with certainty, uncertainty, life, and doom. Through a hilariously absurd narrative, Jane’s exuberant debut novel tells a heartfelt, poignant story about what it means to be human in the contemporary universe. The hardcover is appropriately colorful and energetic, but the paperback turns it up a notch with brighter colors, a more energetic, tightly-packed layout, and a strange cat. The paperback cover—victorious in our polls—is loud and bizarre, just like Jane’s novel.
In McKenzie’s quirky comedy, Penny—dealing with a number of life challenges—goes on a road trip in an odd-looking, barely-working van, embarking on an unpredictable journey that proves to be a charming, hopeful story. Both the hardcover and the paperback feature the teal van and adorable dog, but their designs are drastically different. The paperback grabs attention, but the hardcover better captures the eccentric, endearing, uplifting experience of following Penny on her quest. Our readers preferred the unique design on the hardcover.
A couple of ’90s college sweethearts grow distant as they struggle with present-day marriage. New anxieties have emerged with the passage of time, from social media to potential polyamory, making their relationship a challenge to maintain. On the paperback, the formerly-young lovers face each other, separated and surrounded by a busy design, indicative of their busy world. On the hardcover, they stand together in the center of a triangle. The simple design and unified couple won over our readers, leading the hardcover to victory.
Bucky has one goal—play college football—until he is deported to his birth country of South Korea, a place entirely foreign to him. A series of unpredictable mishaps test Bucky’s physical strength and inner character while he searches for his home and self. Between two contrasting cover designs, our readers favored the hardcover. They might have liked the serious feel, the focus on Bucky, or the aesthetic appeal—or they might have disliked the paperback’s middle finger. Regardless, the hardcover prevailed.
A celebrated journalist navigates truth and trust after her fiancé is called out in a viral social media post. When online toxicity permeates offline life, it makes a mess—and Adegoke’s novel dives into the quagmire. The paperback’s goofy emoji minimizes the gravity of the book’s timely, complex issues. On the hardcover, a menacing storm of chat bubbles threaten growing terror, and the bright, fragmented text feels alarming—and intriguing. Our readers voted for the hardcover, which brilliantly frames The List’s riveting suspense, scary realities, and thrilling plot.
Recently, I was slung across the couch with my young daughter, both of us blissfully full from dinner, limbs intertwined as we read before her bedtime. Her face was hidden behind a beloved Phoebe Wahl picture book, and perched on my soft belly was Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Housemates, a road trip story about two friends in pursuit of art and purpose. While a small bony knee dug into my armpit, I braced myself as the author began describing her characters’ bodies. It’s a make-or-break moment for me as a plus-size reader, when a riveting plot or beloved character may spoil, tarnished by the slip of an author’s anti-fat bias.
Eisenberg doesn’t shy away from highlighting protagonist Leah’s size, rather she revels in it often: “She was big. Big breasts atop big stomach atop thighs in men’s khaki pants, big long legs that terminated in round-toed soccer sneakers.” At first this put me on high alert, waiting for this character’s size to become a flaw, a conflict, a source of tension. But I exhaled in relief when it quickly became apparent that Leah’s body would be presented neutrally, a stark departure from the literary representation I’ve grown accustomed to. Being barraged by anti-fat bias in an otherwise admirable novel is an experience that both Virgie Tovar and Eisenberg herself have written about in their respective Substacks, so while I needn’t have worried, this habit has developed out of necessity. Books have been letting me down with their representations of fatness since I started turning to them.
I developed early as a kid: period at ten, tall enough to be mistaken for a teacher by fourth grade, boobs big enough to make the comparison realistic. With the concurrent influx of hormones, I was a hot, horny mess. I scavenged my mom’s bookshelves for romance novels, legal dramas, presidential biographies—anything that might include even a whiff of sex. The jackpot was Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone, chockful with nipple tweaks, dick pics, and “lovemaking.” Entranced, I hid it at the bottom of my backpack and brought it to my seventh grade history class to share the bounty. I pointed out passages I’d earmarked to my friends as they crowded around, nearly all of them thinner than me. Already, I was excruciatingly aware of my extra curves, and Lamb’s novel taught me to fear them.
She’s Come Undone offers a cautionary tale, a “story of craving,” following Dolores as she reaches 257lb, a number that’s branded on my brain. In its nearly 500 pages, the novel details Dolores’ countless hardships: an abusive father, a rapist neighbor, the death of her mother, merciless teasing about her body—and on and on. Her body is presented as monstrous as it scares small children and horrifies doctors. I re-read the book recently and cackled at the near-slapstick presentation of it all: at one point Dolores can’t fit in a car, at another, she faints and shatters through a staircase. But I also felt bereft for my young, impressionable self who inhaled this book and hung on its every word, whose own weight gain was blighted by this book’s legacy. I’d found the book in a youthful search for smut, an attempt to connect with my changing body. But I came away untethered, frightened by my own flesh.
I developed early as a kid: period at ten, tall enough to be mistaken for a teacher by fourth grade.
The beauty of fiction is that it gives authors space to explore and experiment and imagine and create. It’s the ultimate freedom. And yet, freedom still carries responsibilities. There has been a concerted recent effort to eradicate racism, ableism, ageism, classism, tokenism, anti-semitism, xenophobia, transphobia, and homophobia from literature, and yet anti-fat bias can still be found with abundance. It’s no surprise that literature of yore is rife with the issue—DonQuixote’s Sancho Panza, Piggy (RIP) in Lord of the Flies, and Stephen King seems to think that being fat is the scariest thing a woman can be—but the problem is just as rampant today.
Modern heavy-hitters like Otessa Moshfegh, Haruki Murakami, and Tess Gunty incorporate casual fatphobic descriptions in which a person’s larger size is meant to signal their unsavory personality. As highlighted in a recent installation of Delia Cai’s Hate Read, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus—a blockbuster bestseller—peddles gratuitously in this brand of anti-fat representation. But as a fat reader myself, my least favorite and most oft-encountered examples are the ones that are a little more insidious. A story without a single fat character can sometimes expose the author and their biases most of all. Per Carmen Maria Machado, “It’s like writers can’t imagine fat women having sex or agency or complex lives. They’re just bodies for thin people to bounce off of; funny and unserious as a whoopee cushion or unconsidered as a chair. If they’re even there at all.”
When multiple characters share the same discriminatory leanings, my hackles shoot up. This prevalence is found in She’s Come Undone. Dolores is “locked in fat and self-hatred,” but she isn’t the only person who despises bigger bodies: her college roommate would rather die than end up fat like her, she is ostracized widely by strangers, characters are celebrated for thin waists, and perhaps most telling, her mother “[grows] herself a big rear end,” as a warning signal for an impending mental health crisis. In Eisenberg’s excellent newsletter, she points out the anti-fat bias among several characters in Lauren Groff’s Fate and Furies, arguing that the fatphobia is, “endemic to the author rather than salient to any particular character’s development.” As a plus-sized reader—as so many of us are—my experience is spoiled when hostility toward big bodies is on the page, and especially if it becomes clear the author harbors these feelings themself.
A story without a single fat character can sometimes expose the author and their biases most of all.
Two of my favorite books in recent years are exquisite and tender and important except regarding one detail: they center characters harboring anti-fat bias. In one, the main character’s fatphobia prevents her from sexually pursuing the person that becomes her best friend. When she, herself, gains weight by the end, it’s up to the already-fat friend to comfort her. In the other book, one of the protagonists is plus-size as a teenager and observes an even fatter classmate bullied mercilessly for his size. When the characters become adults, they bond over making fun of a peer who’s joined their ranks by gaining weight. Both books are queer, nominated for prestigious awards, and deeply beloved—including by myself—and yet left me feeling uneasy. Anti-fat bias is, of course, accurate to both history and our present, but unless characters are allowed to realize their small-mindedness, then at best, many readers are alienated, and at worst, those with similar worldviews are affirmed. Research shows that while American attitudes have either improved or plateaued toward sexual orientation, skin tone, age, and disability, sentiments of anti-fat bias have worsened.
And yet, nearly half of Americans qualify as fat. These people realize goals, salvation, and great loves, all while being fat, all the time. Why don’t we see this in books?
In Housemates, Leah doesn’t live in a bubble; they still encounter fatphobia. But what Eisenberg conveys so deftly is that the discrimination Leah faces doesn’t define them. Eisenberg allows the reader to witness some of the negativity Leah experiences, particularly through their parents and an incident with a malfunctioning diner chair. But these biases reflect much more on those putting it forth. Their father is stagnant and boring in his steadfast hatred of bigger bodies. The inadequate seating is the catalyst for Leah’s relationship with friend Bernie to progress into something deeper. The two enjoy a sex scene that includes self-consciousness on Leah’s part, but no more than any other person might harbor about their own corporeal hang-up.
Housemates should be studied by every contemporary author as the finest departure from the fatphobic hellscape of fiction that exists yet. There are others out there (The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow, The Manor House Governess by C. A. Castle) that succeed in portraying fat bodies as neutral, but with secondary characters. Eisenberg gives a fat body the lead and allows nuance, heartache, foibles, and growth. This isn’t by accident. At one point, Eisenberg writes in the novel, “A shocking number of the books lefties loved revealed a plain hatred of fatness.” The books being published today are at such high caliber, but they can still do better on this point, with Eisenberg as their example. Authors can write exquisite prose and gripping narratives without alienating half of their readers. It is boring to tether a character, an arc, a life, to the irrelevance of size. It is lazy to look at a fat body and assume you already know the whole story.
The freedom of fiction allows authors to opt out of participating in fatphobia, which doesn’t mean they can’t write fat characters—please, if anything, write more! An easy way to tell if the depiction is problematic is to look at the way a body is being presented: if it’s happenstance, that’s fine. A fat person can be a great villain. But if it’s a defining characteristic, if it’s what’s used to convey negativity, that author needs to do better. A fat person isn’t a villain because they’re fat. In Lindy West’s review of the somehow Oscar-winning film The Whale, she writes that, “Fat people are already trapped, suffocating, inside the stories the rest of you tell yourselves about us. We have plenty of your stories. What we don’t have is the space to forge untainted relationships with food and our bodies, to speak honestly about our lives without being abused, to explore our full potential…” When stories are written in which fat people are confined and limited, there are consequences.
When stories are written in which fat people are confined and limited, there are consequences.
Wally Lamb’s depiction of Dolores affected my self esteem for decades. In my twenties, I watched the scale creep past the dreaded number of 257 and steeled myself for impending devastation depicted by Lamb—but it never came, and if anything, my life has only improved. It wasn’t until I started reading expansive work by authors like Eisenberg, West, Machado, and others, that I began to remedy literature’s legacy of damage on my psyche.
I weigh more now than Dolores ever did, and spoiler alert, my life is great. I’m surrounded by people who love me, fulfilled by my work, and enjoy a marriage teeming with both joy and sex! I’ve never broken a chair, but if I did, I wouldn’t internalize it as personal failing, I’d understand it as neglect by an establishment to be inclusive in their seating. My weight is irrelevant to my worth. My body has always and will always be big; weight loss is not an element of my redemption.
This past summer, I went whale watching, just as Dolores does at the end of She’s Come Undone. All I saw from the pitching boat was a quick slice of dorsal fin, just enough to convey something majestic and potent and big underneath. I remembered in that moment, as Eisenberg so clearly already knows: to be big is to be powerful. To be big is to be worthy of whole, nuanced representation.
There are rules for everything in life: how to speak corporate lingo, how to pray, how to dress at a wedding, and even how to blow the candles out at your own birthday (did you make a wish?). Storytelling is not exempt from its own ordinances. Writers in any genre face a myriad of craft to-do and not-to-do’s. As a writer, knowing the rules is important, especially if you’re going to break them.
I was tempted to stray from the norm when writing this reading list: maybe cut the intro or make the list like a game of hide and seek. But, I asked myself, would the experimental form serve the content here? Would it say something to the reader that can’t be said through a standard reading list? The answer was no.
As an experimental writer, you don’t break, bend, or bite into the rules just for the sake of doing it. You toy with them in service to that which cannot be conveyed through the ordinary. When words, plot and ordinary narrative fail, we use the experimental to speak.
The nine literary works I’ve gathered below show how talented writers break narrative norms in service to something greater. These works have inspired me tremendously, and they have also paved the way for my own novel to be digestible. From here on out, I’m going to refer to these works as “books” since most of them defy categorization.
A non-daunting book that gives you room to breathe around the anguish of loss, while simultaneously not taking its hands off your neck.
Words are containers, but what happens when traditional narrative cannot properly hold the amount of grief one feels? In this novel, an unnamed narrator famous for saying something ridiculous on “the portal,” a placeholder for any social media platform you want to imagine, narrates her day-to-day influencer life. Half-way through the book, her sister gives birth to a daughter with Proteus syndrome. The narrator spends time with the baby who cannot see or hear and who will, they all know, die soon.
This story knocks you off your feet by placing a mirror up to our society, juxtaposing our most shallow aspects with the deepest grief one can imagine, watching someone completely innocent be dealt the worst hand in the game. But Patricia Lockwood does this without lecturing us on how “bad” we are. Lockwood leaves ample white space on the page which allows for real-time reflection and processing: of grief, of unspeakable pain, and of our own shame.
Nonfiction that acts as a manifesto for creativity and living alike.
Why write new sentences when we can repurpose the words of other writers who once said it better than we ever could? Made almost entirely from quotes said or written by someone else, this quotation-less book is at once a manifesto, a cultural snapshot, a critique of society, and a guidebook for future creatives. Split into chapters labeled from A-Z, which also have titles like, “trials by google,” “doubt,” and “let me tell you what your book is about,” David Shields’ work is one of brilliant montage that leaves a reader underlining almost every single sentence.
This is a must-read for any writer. I see it as the Bible for the metamodernist movement.
Poetry that captures what is lost to history, and moreover what hatred is grown from history, when history is recounted by someone other.
Part of the experimental is about reframing what already exists to add layers of meaning to your work. Robin Coste Lewis’ poetry collection is titled after her long poem, “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” which sits at the center of the book, bookended by a series of her autobiographical poems. The long-form poem stands out as a phenomenal piece of research and experimental body of work crafted exclusively from titles of art made about the black female figure: sculptures, paintings, drawings, and more, dating back to prehistoric ages. From the titles, which are mostly disturbing, sometimes poetic or just straight up odd, Lewis montages the history of black female portrayal.
With this poetry collection, Lewis asks questions about race, history and who gets to tell our stories. It is a smart, biting poetry collection.
A book that uses the experimental to take you on a journey inward.
To explore a certain topic, sometimes a writer has to forgo all notions of what a novel’s structure has to be. In Invisible Cities, an italicized conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, in which Polo is reporting to the grand emperor about his commissioned explorations, anchors the book. Most of the novel, however, is Polo’s accounts of cities he’s traveled to in Khan’s empire. Gorgeously written accounts. Each city takes up its own mini chapter, and each section has its own eerie header: Cities & Signs, Cities & The Dead, Cities & Eyes.
Recently, I’ve heard people are scared to pick this book up: as if it’s so highly regarded and therefore beyond their reach. I’m tempted to say don’t believe the hype, yet the hype is legitimate. This book is a masterpiece. My advice, however, is to let yourself experiencethis book. What it means for you. What it mirrors in your own mind. What it says about our world today. Take what you need from this book and let the critics rave, in their own corner, about what they think it means. This book has saved my life many times.
Matters of the heart are not easy to convey through words. Narratives often fall short of capturing the complex alchemy of pleasure and pain, the weightlessness and simultaneous dense gravity, embedded in the act of loving. But in Bluets, Maggie Nelson explores love, longing and heartbreak through miniature meditations on the color blue. The prose combines facts, science, and anthropological research about blueness with the narrator’s phenomenological feelings about blue and their lover. It is a brilliant way to explore love through the written word, and Nelson, like always, pulls it off.
You’ll never look at the color blue, or any color for that matter, in the same way.
Non-fiction that explores the current sites and effects of racism in the United States of America.
Breaking narrative norms sometimes means collaging different mediums and forms to create a holistic body of work that operates as one. The cover of Citizen boldly displays a sweatshirt hood that is impossible to look at without thinking of Trayvon Martin, the Black teenage boy walking home when he was murdered by George Zimmerman. And that’s the point. Through essays, vignettes, photographs of art, and whatever other mediums necessary, Claudia Rankine peels back, page after page, the realities of living as a Black person and Black woman in the United States of America, a place that too many demand is a post-race society.
The microagressions and pervasive injustice that Rankine narrates can be felt like daggers through the books shiny pages and large font.
A book that uses the experimental to disorient you in the same way trauma does.
This novel is probably the most daunting on this list. The content is difficult, to say the least, and the form is even more off-putting. Trust me though: five pages in and you’ll forget that none of the words are spelled correctly. You learn to read this novel and, in turn, this novel rewards you with the aching experience of what it means to be fragmented, beginning from in utero when one is taken from the pool of their mother. Yes, it rewards you with pain.
Eimear McBride is a genius who uses the experimental to ward off the lazy reader and, then, slice into the throat of trauma.
A light read about love and the power of storytelling.
If you’re an experimental newcomer, this is a good gateway read. It’s digestible. It’s tender. It has a plot and everything is spelled correctly. Nicole Krauss grounds the novel in three story arcs: a young girl watching her lonely mother translate a book; an old man reminiscing about the woman who inspired him to write a novel; and Zvi Litvinoff, an author. Weaved into the pages of Krauss’s novel is, of course, the novel which the characters perceive as either a remedy for loneliness, proof of love and/or their demise.
The History of Love unravels itself page by page, moving characters closer and farther apart as if in an interpretive dance.
Fiction that highlights the tension between author, narrator, and character.
Like Invisible Cities, you may be scared to dive into this classic, especially since it’s a long one, but I see Don Quixote as a critical forefather to the canon of experimental literature. Don Quixote is split into two parts. Part One follows a man who has read too many tales of knights, and he’s trying, much to the reader’s humor, to play the part alongside Sancho Panza. He calls himself Don Quixote de La Mancha. Part Two gets even more interesting when characters in the novel have read Part One of the story. They see the wanna-be knight as famous, and each character messes with the plot, hoping to become part of the novel, which infuriates and frustrates the wanna-be knight.
But Miguel de Cervantes adds another layer of experimentation: there’s a character in the novel named Cide Hamete, the Arab historian responsible for writing the original biography of Don Quixote. There’s also another author, the narrator of this book, which is, one guesses, Cervantes. The two authors have different ways of telling the knight’s story, and the second author often comments on the first’s improper narration of events. But I remind you: they’re just characters! I know, it gets confusing, but it’s so good.
If you start reading, just promise me you’ll stick it out until Part Two which is where I think the magic of this book is most palpable.
To regard Francine Prose’s award-winning title list—she has written 23 works of fiction and nine nonfiction books—is to understand that some people really do know more, work longer, and write harder. Yet her first memoir, 1974: A Personal History, is imbued with an utter lack of self-importance.
In 1974, the self is a lens through which the light of the world can pour, as well as its darkness. Prose pairs her merciless scrutiny of that era’s misogyny, moral compromise and sexual liberation with a keen inquiry into her own motivations for dating the whistleblower Tony Russo, an anti-war activist both celebrated and vilified for helping to leak the Pentagon Papers, whose publication proved that the federal government had lied about the length, scope and reasoning for American involvement in the Vietnam War.
Reflecting on the young woman that she had been, Prose wrote, “I tell myself that not everyone is born with a conscience, that our moral sense can develop at any age.” In an epoch characterized by both apathy and outrage, we need the reminders that her and Russo’s example provide: “Even if you couldn’t do much, even if the chances were that most of what you did would eventually be undone, you still had to try.”
KMY: In 1974, you wrote that Tony followed Kennedy’s famous call to action. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Then as now, there are divergent, heated and contradictory notions of what it means to be a patriot. How do you think Tony’s example influences our current notions of what it means to be a patriot?
FP: Our current notions are wrong because they’re so malleable and distorted. If one would have asked Tony, he would have said, “The Constitution. Read the Constitution. Read the Bill of Rights. What is in there are the principles on which our country is founded.” But of course, there were a lot of horrible mistakes made. It was still a slave-holding society, and there were the massacres of Indigenous peoples. But nonetheless, the very existence of a Bill of Rights—which is a rare thing—is not in every country. He believed in the best of American democracy. And that’s what’s being lost.
KMY: It’s certainly a challenging time. I did not expect to see women’s rights to reproductive health care rolled back, though it was only 50 years ago that women needed to have a man countersign for a checking account. Did you time 1974 for its 50 year-anniversary? I wondered, what have you seen in those 50 years? Are you surprised by what you’re seeing happening to the rights of women?
FP: I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. Misogyny has always been there, the oppression of women has always been there. But when things get better, you tend to think that they won’t get worse again. After Roe v. Wade, I thought, Well, that’s settled. In the book, I do talk about having to lie to the doctor to get birth control pills because it was illegal in Massachusetts to get birth control pills unless you were married. Now, shockingly, they’re trying to make it illegal in some states to get birth control pills. There were many things you had to pretend and lie and accept your subservience, which I thought was over. I really thought it was over.
KMY: In 1974, you portray the constant stream of belittlement that you received as a woman, even from those who decided to uplift your work, like the publisher of your debut novel. You also highlight a certain disregard that you had for the psychological and emotional needs of the men in your life, whether your ex-husband or Tony. Do you think it was misogyny that conditioned you to consider these men as beyond need of your care, or was there something else at play?
FP: A big part of it was about just being young. So much of the book is about the time I was living in, and yes, it’s about Tony and the whole political situation, but just by virtue of being young, you don’t consider other people. It’s such a hard job deciding who you are and who you’re going to become, and what life you’re going to live, that you almost don’t have—what we would never say then—the bandwidth to really take other people’s feelings into account. The young are selfish—not all of them, of course—but I think it goes with the territory, along with a kind of determination and stubbornness.
Of the belittlement that you were talking about…at the time, it was so normalized that a publisher would say to me, “You didn’t write this whole book all by yourself, did you?” It was awful, but it didn’t even seem that weird. It was the kind of stuff that men got away with saying. There was a certain amount of anger involved at being patronized, at being condescended to, and it tended to work itself out in sometimes unhelpful ways. It would not have been helpful to say, “What do you mean, you idiot? I wrote this entire book all by myself.” He was my publisher. But it would get displaced. The nearest available male got to suffer for what I had to deal with then.
KMY: One of the things I found really interesting in your narration of your conversations with Tony was how many questions you seem to have for him and how few questions he seemed to have for you.
FP: I couldn’t help noticing how quickly the subject changed from me to him, and of course, that still happens. I’m a big fan of reality TV shows. The reason I watch them, or claim to watch them, is because they seem closer to a picture of reality than a lot of other things that I’m seeing, and the way that women are treated, and the way they’re disregarded, and the way that they’re patronized seems again not to have changed that much but just…buried beneath the surface.
KMY: I put out an open call on social media for readers to send in questions for you, and this one comes from the poet Suzanne Bottelli: I’m curious about how you came to write the various ways women can be aware of our intellectual and physical power, even when we are materially and socially ignored, marginalized, and devalued. What comprises that power? Is it intimacy or cold observation? Where and when did this mysterious paradox first begin to interest you?
FP: That’s a good question. My mother was a doctor—there were two women in her medical school class—but I got to see this complete double standard at home. Because if my dad said it was raining outside, and it was sunny, she would say it was raining outside. I was exposed to it very early, but it still happens.
In 2000, I wrote a piece for Harper’s called “Scent of a Woman’s Ink.” I asked one of the heroic Harper’s interns to do the stats of how many literary wars were reviewed in literary circles, which were worse than I thought. The title came from this quote from Norman Mailer, where he said [something like], “I could always feel the ink of the womb,” and “it’s quaint and domestic,” the usual string of insults. I thought, stupidly, that people were going to thank me, that they were going to say, “Oh, my God. You know, I hadn’t noticed.” Which a few people did. But then I was denounced, and people said, “You just completely torpedoed your career.”
KMY: For my memoir, I’ve been studying this pagan mother goddess Cybele throughout the Roman Empire. I read your mythography/biography of Cleopatra and was so interested by the ways that her power has been siphoned from her story and sexualized in a way that ignores the extraordinary diplomacy of her navigation of those treacherous times. I really appreciate your correction of the record.
Writing the book was a revelation to me, coming to grips with who I was and who I am.
FP: Thank you. She ran a very diverse, complicated, large, powerful country. And what’s she remembered for? She was the lover of Mark Antony and Julius Caesar. Or she was Elizabeth Taylor having a big fight with Richard Burton on screen. Well, the gap between those two things is so obvious.
KMY: Perhaps because of that, I admired your self-indicting candor and—I say this in the happiest of ways—the shameless freshness of your recognition that the presence of sex was haunting your conversations with Tony and haunting your motivations for being in relation with this tormented man.
FP: A tormented man with whom I was having bad sex. It’s hard to write about sex because of intimacy and embarrassment, but also the fact that the language has been co-opted by porn. There’s a passage that, even though I wrote it, I actually like. Every sentence begins, “I wish I could say it was the kind of sex that…” Because I’m saying, it’s not that. It was one of those great days where I did the paragraph, and I was done for the day. Like, I was on my way to the refrigerator.
But it was very much in the air. Sexual liberation was different. I think with Hinge culture and Tinder culture, for women in particular, there’sa strange mixture of a kind of freedom and bravado and saying, “I can do what I want. I can meet a guy online and have a one-night stand.” But then a residue of puritanical guilt keeps creeping up. We didn’t have the guilt. Our mothers had the guilt. The ’50s were like, you cheat on your husband, and oh my God, the world falls apart. By the ’60s, it was not such a big deal, although that was a lie. It certainly was. A lot of people got hurt very badly. Some of them by me.
KMY: The freedom to be callous, right? That has long been the purview of men, but to take it on as a woman is not to subvert the patriarchy—it’s to reify its values.
FP: Absolutely. I keep coming back to this—the whole idea of youth. The stuff I did in that book, I would never do now. It wasn’t just riding around with some crazy, charismatic guy in the middle of night in San Francisco. At the end, he was my friend, and the fact that I walked out at a very critical moment, not in a gazillion years would I do that now. I wouldn’t. In fact, if one of my children or grandchildren did that, I would think, Did someone raise him wrong?
There was something about being young, being fragile, being aware of my tenuous grip on my own sanity, identity, stability. The shock of finding this envelope full of letters from guys I ghosted! The trouble of writing about yourself is that you find out stuff you didn’t know, or particularly like. I’d always thought of myself as a nice person. It turned out there had been times when I wasn’t.
Writing the book was a revelation to me, coming to grips with who I was and who I am. My husband’s my first reader, and he said to me, “You’re going to have to like that girl more.” And I went, Whoa. I went back, and I had much more sympathy for my own choices, my own areas of blindness, or my own limitations, or…the difficulty of being a woman in her twenties.
KMY: It’s ongoing. As women, we expect more from women, and so it doesn’t surprise me that you would have shown more sympathy for this selfish, chaotic, and negligent man than you did for yourself.
FP: How you are at a certain age is not necessarily how you’ll be—I mean, talk about things that I wish I’d known! You can ride around in the car with this guy, but in four years, you’re going to have a kid, and your life is going to settle into this—I’m knocking on wood—basically stable, basically pleasant routine. After all that chaos. I wish I’d known. I don’t know what I would have done differently, but it would have been nice to know.
KMY: Quoting Tony, you wrote, “There was no way they could undo the Pentagon Papers.” Later, he said, “The reason I felt such joy was that I was being true to myself. I remember thinking that people who work solely for their paycheck or for personal power would never know that feeling,”
You wrote, “In those days, people often talked about being true to themselves. But by 1974, what they meant by truth was beginning to shift from the collective to the individual, from political action to personal fulfillment. My truth, they began to say.” What did these rambling, hallucinatory, nocturnal car rides with Tony teach you about being true to yourself?
It’s hard to write about sex because of intimacy and embarrassment, but also [because] the language has been co-opted by porn.
FP: He really gave everything. He went to jail. He’d had this big career as an aeronautical space engineer and then a data analyst and an economist. He was hired by RAND, which was a big deal, and they sent him to Vietnam, and he saw that it was a nightmare. He saw what we were doing, and his conscience wouldn’t let him not do something about it. When Ellsberg came along and said, “Well, I have these papers that prove the government’s been lying,” Tony was willing to do whatever it took, which was a huge personal sacrifice. He could have gone on in that trajectory, and he’d be running NASA. But he was so profoundly shaken by what he saw in Vietnam, and so determined to do what he had to do. Without question. That was partly what was so interesting and attractive about being around him. He wasn’t calculating. He wasn’t looking to be successful or famous or anything. He just wanted to stop this war, which was what we all wanted.
KMY: Were you being true to yourself in his presence or only after?
FP: What I was doing was listening. Not for one second did I think, “This guy’s the love of my life.” That was never it. I had been very involved in antiwar stuff, and here was this guy who not only had been very close to the heart of it in many ways—the fact that he’d been to Vietnam, the fact that he was involved in the Pentagon Papers—but could talk about it, and would talk about it, in a way that it was something that I’d known from a certain remove. I’d gone to demonstrations and made posters—but he’d gone to Vietnam, and he’d gone to jail, and he really put himself on the line. And also, it was the truth. It was not his truth. It was the actual truth. He’d met these actual prisoners. He’d seen these actual bombings. It was not like he was discovering something within himself. This is what he’d seen.
KMY: In novels, much of the sleuthing that occurs through the narrative is a way of showing how the future is conditioned by the past. There’s this constant need to go back and map, like if we can only find the source, then all will become clear. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become distrustful of this constant impulse that we have as novelists. I’m not sure it’s true.
FP: It’s ridiculous. Just Freudian. It’s like, Oh, you found the trauma in your past that explains everything—No! No. I’m writing a novel now, and one of the only things I like about it at this point is that it seems to be about people’s essential unknowability. You just don’t know people. It’s not that easy—that now I’ve got the reason why everything happened to you. In some cases, it’s obviously true. People who suffer severe trauma will be acting it out forever, or trying not to. But I don’t think even that explains everything.
People are very, very complicated. In some way, I’ve always been writing about that. It’s certainly true in 1974. I mean, who was this guy?
An excerpt from You Are the Snake by Juliet Escoria
There was this weird hippie guy who hung around the Palms. He owned a van and a llama and not much else. We called him Van Man. I didn’t know the name of the llama. The two of them slept in the van every night at the far end of the parking lot, Van Man in the driver’s seat, llama in the back. He’d cut out panels in the van so the llama could stick its head out. It didn’t seem like a very comfortable living arrangement, but what did I know?
One day I was working the cash register at the bookstore when Van Man came into the store with the llama. He walked right over to the magazines, the lead for the llama wrapped loosely around his fingers like he was holding a balloon. It was dead silent for a second, a thick communal shock, everyone staring at the man and his llama. The moment passed, and everyone began talking over one another at once. A fucking llama. In a fucking bookstore.
I really liked my manager, this nice guy with a trendy beard who’d gotten me into Bret Easton Ellis, but when he told Van Man to get out of the bookstore, he seemed like nothing more than a spineless little bitch. “Come on,” my manager said. “Let’s be cool. Take the llama out of the store.”
“There’s not a sign,” Van Man said. And it was true. There wasn’t. There was a sign that said no dogs but it mentioned nothing about cats or rabbits or llamas. But there wasn’t a sign about how you weren’t allowed to bomb the store or light the books on fire or jerk off in the erotica section (which had happened before) either.
My manager left to call security. Everyone was just standing around, staring, as Van Man paged through the new issue of Maxim. A few minutes later, the security guard showed up. He was a pathetic man, pink and doughy. My friends and I all worked in the shopping center—the bagel store, the Meineke, the sandwich shop—and when we got off work, we met up at the tables in front of the movie theater to talk and smoke, waste time until there was something better to do, somebody’s parents out of town, a bonfire at the beach. We knew all the security guards. We called this one Tweety because of his car, a yellow RAV4 with a Tweety Bird sticker on the window and a Tweety Bird tire cover and a personalized TWTYBRD license plate. It was impossible to take him seriously ever—not when he yelled at us for drinking or smoking or making too much noise. The worst he could do was order us off the property. When that happened, we walked across the drop-off area to do the same things we did at the tables but in front of the stop sign instead.
“You gotta go,” he told Van Man.
“Whatever, man,” Van Man said, like some stoned guy in some stoner movie. “I’m just reading a magazeeeeeeeen.”
“You gotta get the llama out of here,” Tweety told him, and pulled on his arm, the one that wasn’t holding the llama lead.
That pissed Van Man off. He started flailing his arms, which yanked on the llama lead, which made the llama let out a long weird snort like a horse. But finally he relented, petted the llama on the nose to settle it down, allowed himself to be escorted out of the store. They were at the door when Tweety told him, “And don’t you come back,” trying too hard to play a role.
Van Man laughed, like he had the exact same thought as me. “Hope this makes you feel real big, mister badgey-badgey five-dollars-an-hour man,” he said. “Mister badgey five-dollar fake pig.”
I couldn’t help it. I started laughing. I tried to stop, ring up the customer, a middle-aged woman buying a Dean Koontz novel. She seemed shook-up, clutching the shitty book. I couldn’t. “Sorry,” I told her, beeping the book under the scanner. I was still laughing when I gave her the change.
When I got off work, I went right up to the circle, sat down in one of the metal chairs, told the guys who were sitting there all about it. Mister badgey-badgey five-dollars-an-hour man. And from then on, that’s what we said to Tweety whenever he told us to be quiet or settle down or put away that beer.
The security guards all came and went, working at the Palms for a couple months or a year before disappearing, nearly indistinguishable from one another. Useless doughy guys with buzz cuts, weak rejects from the actual police, who rode around the shopping center in a golf cart because they were too fat and lazy to walk. Tweety had only stood out because of his car.
But one day, there was a new security guard at the Palms, different than all the rest. He was giant, nearly seven feet tall, and gorgeous in a scary way, cheekbones and angles, a shaved head that was almost sculptural. The first time I saw him I felt scared in a way I couldn’t explain. I’d just gotten off work when he walked around the corner. The security guards had these sticklike things they held up to various receivers around the shopping center until they beeped, I guess to ensure they were doing their rounds. He came around the corner, big and muscular and scowling, beeping his wand. His hair was so short you could see the perfect shape of his skull.
I still felt as though the security guard had something to do with it, had been one of the final straws that damned Van Man to his death.
Later that day, Colin, who was always around, Chandra, my best friend, and I were smoking a joint in the corridor behind the movie theater when we heard someone yelling. I stood up, looking over the low stucco wall we were crouching behind. I saw Van Man getting yelled at by the new security guard. “You get the fuck off this property,” the security guard was saying. Van Man was standing outside his van, next to the llama’s head peeking out. I waited for him to say something but he didn’t. Instead, Van Man walked around the van, opened the door, got in the driver’s seat. I heard the van turn on, put-put-put. I watched him drive out of the parking lot, around the hill, until he drove out of sight. The new security guard continued his rounds, walking. I never once saw him in the golf cart.
The new security guard ignored us for a long time, didn’t say a word as we sat at the circle and smoked. One day, though, it was the release of the latest installment of a movie franchise, and the space in front of the theater, our space, was packed. Someone had a big bottle of store-brand vodka, and we were passing it around, pouring it into soda cups. We were about to head out to one of the dirt lots that had appeared by the side of the new freeway, waiting to be turned into another subdivision, one of our go-tos when there was nowhere else to party.
We didn’t notice him at first. One minute nobody was there, and the next minute there he was, standing behind Colin, confusing because of his size. Colin was holding the bottle, pouring it into his can of Pepsi. The new security guard put his hands on Colin’s chair, one on each side of his neck. Colin was an asshole, didn’t care about respecting anybody, but he froze. The security guard’s eyes were blue and sharp like crystals. His face was completely expressionless. I couldn’t tell if he actually cared or if he was just doing his job. “Put the bottle away,” he said, quiet and calm, but there was something buried underneath his words that chilled me.
I wondered what Colin would do. Normally he’d make fun of the security guard, give him shit. But he just put the cap on the bottle, handed it to somebody, who put it in their backpack.
The security guard took his hands off the chair. As he walked away, I noticed something peeking up over his blue uniform collar. Fine black lines, uneven in color. I didn’t know a whole lot but it looked like a prison tattoo, the tip of an Iron Cross.
I was sitting at the chairs, waiting for Chandra to arrive. There was an old paper sitting on one of the far tables and I didn’t have anything better to do, so I walked over and picked it up, paged through it. A headline caught my eye, buried toward the back of the paper.
Ocean Beach Victim Was Colorful Local Known as the “Llama Man”
The article was about Van Man. The Llama Man was Van Man. He was dead, had been found drowned twenty miles south in OB, weights on his ankles and rocks in his pockets. A suicide note had been left in the sand. He was bipolar, the article said. He’d given away the llama a few days earlier to a guy in the neighboring county with a farm. This was a week ago, shortly after the new security guard told Van Man to leave. I didn’t think he’d been murdered or anything as conspiratorial as that, but I still felt as though the security guard had something to do with it, had been one of the final straws that damned Van Man to his death.
A couple weeks later, it was a Friday but there wasn’t anything to do. It was the weekend after Thanksgiving, and a lot of people were busy or out of town so there was a smaller group than usual, maybe fifteen of us, trying to figure out where we could go. Finally we decided on the beach. There were few enough of us that the cops probably wouldn’t come. None of us were old enough to buy alcohol except for Colin. We pooled together money, and there was only enough for a case of beer and a pint of cheap vodka but that was fine. We handed the money to Colin. “I lost my ID,” he said.
“What?” I said.
“Yeah, I lost it.”
“Shit.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. Then he disappeared with the money. Maybe he was going to steal it. Maybe he knew someone working at the gas station. But he came back empty-handed.
“What the fuck?”
“Be patient,” Colin said. He had a little smile on his face, the way he did when he’d come up with a good scam. When nobody was looking a few minutes later, he waved at me to follow him. We walked behind the theater to his car, a beat-up maroon IROC-Z with broken windows that wouldn’t roll down. It reeked in that car, from Colin always hotboxing it with cigarettes due to the broken windows. We got in the car and drove around the corner to the alley. I was just about to ask Colin what we were doing when the new security guard walked up. He was carrying a case of Miller Lite and a paper bag. He handed it to Colin, who got out of the car to put it in the trunk. I watched them bump fists in the rearview. “Thanks, Derrick,” Colin said, the first time I heard his name. The security guard, Derrick, said nothing to me, simply looked back at me with a face full of hatred, like he knew I possessed some despicable secret.
This happened a few more times—Derrick buying us beer—until eventually he started partying with us. It was another lame night, nowhere to go, so we just went across the street to Beer Woo, this vacant lot that was supposed to turn into another shopping center but was empty for years instead, due to some boring fight with the city council. It was higher than the shopping center and nobody ever seemed to notice us, which felt a little magical, hiding in the camouflage of plain sight. Derrick had two cases of beer, Miller Lite again, and also a bottle of Jameson. We walked across the street and he didn’t say anything, and I was starting to think he was just straight-up mean. But when we got to Beer Woo, he asked me for a cigarette and I gave him one and then he handed me the bottle of Jameson. I opened it, but I didn’t have anything to drink out of, and I was afraid he’d yell at me if I put my mouth on the bottle. He seemed to notice, some animallike intuition. “Go on,” he said. “Take a sip.”
I took a pull from the bottle. It burned. I handed it back to him, and he took a sip too, his mouth touching the same part of the bottle as mine. I knew there was logically no meaning in that but I still felt violated, knowing a part of myself was now a part of him too, a weird thrill.
He asked me for a light so I pulled out my lighter. He tried to do the thing that creepy guys always do, making you light their cigarette, or the reverse, so there was no choice but to be close to their body. I pretended not to notice, placed the lighter in his hand. “You can keep it,” I said, even though it was the only one I had. I walked away, pretended to just notice Chandra, hugged her like I hadn’t last seen her a few minutes ago.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“He creeps me out,” I said.
“Who? Derrick?”
“Shhh,” I said. “I don’t want him to hear.”
Chandra looked at me, confused. She seemed to think Derrick was fine, no different than the rest of us.
Derrick came out with us a lot after that. I learned that he lived in El Cajon, thirty minutes away and one of the shittiest places to live in San Diego County. In San Diego, everyone said that anywhere that wasn’t the coast was filled with white supremacists—El Cajon, Santee/Klan-tee, Spring Valley, Lakeside. Racists. El Cajon was the shittiest of them all. At least Santee looked like a generic Southern California suburb, with tree-lined streets and the big Costco. El Cajon, on the other hand, was hot, poor, and ugly.
It didn’t matter, though, because Derrick was an actual racist. A skinhead. He listened to horrible music, racist punk and racist death metal. The lines I’d seen on his neck were indeed a prison tattoo, or at least that’s what he said, eighteen months in San Quentin. Of course it was San Quentin. There was another tattoo on his chest, which I saw when he took off his uniform, two lightning bolts like a regular fucking Nazi.
For some unfathomable reason, Chandra didn’t believe me, as though the tattoos and music and shaved head were random aberrations.
I didn’t know if I believed him. He never gave details about what his crimes entailed, wouldn’t tell us why he was sent to prison. But mostly I didn’t believe him because I couldn’t imagine a security guard firm in Santa Bonita hiring a felon.
Nobody seemed to care except me, including Chandra, who was half Mexican. Derrick didn’t seem to notice her eyes or her skin or her last name, Martinez. Chandra didn’t seem to notice either, the bad music or the bad tattoos. The two of them even made out one time. When we talked about it later, she didn’t even care. “What?” she said. “He’s hot.”
“He’s a fucking skinhead,” I said, but for some unfathomable reason, Chandra didn’t believe me, as though the tattoos and music and shaved head were random aberrations.
We were running this scam at Home Depot. One of us would go in, buy a spindle of wire that cost twenty bucks. The scam was that we’d steal one of the barcodes from the fiber optics cables that looked the same but cost five times as much. We’d peel off the original barcode, replace it with the stolen one. Then we’d drive to another Home Depot, return it, and pocket the difference. Home Depot gave you cash on returns, didn’t even want to see an ID. With the money, we bought beer and a room at the Motel 6 off the freeway. Eventually we got greedy, started to return two spindles instead of one, buy cocaine and kegs instead of just beer. The parties at the Motel 6 got so wild that we had to get a new person to rent the room each time because we left them so trashed.
It was late, maybe 4:00 a.m. We’d been doing lines of coke all night at the Motel 6. It brought that weird thing in the air, tense and thick. We ran out of drugs and Derrick didn’t know we were low and he got mad. All of a sudden he was yelling, indecipherable. His eyes were bloodshot and red. I guess a lot of the coke money had been his and he was mad it was gone.
“Dude,” Colin said. “You got to quiet down.”
Usually Colin was the one Derrick liked best, but that just pissed him off. I watched him get up, walk over to the shitty desk, and pick up an empty beer bottle. He stood there for a moment, frozen, before breaking the bottle on the edge of the desk. “You stole it,” he said, walking over to me, the broken bottle over his head.
I sat up from the bed. I had no idea why he was blaming me. I didn’t feel scared, for some reason. He looked so stupid, a big dumb boy, with big-dumb-boy tattoos. The look in his eyes was dull and blank and I was tiny and didn’t know how to fight, but still I felt like I could take him, somehow. I wanted to laugh at him, to tell him he was a stupid boy, but that didn’t exactly seem like the best move. So I just sat there, staring at him, his stupid cold blue eyes, and it felt like everything was both pulsing and frozen.
“Dude,” Colin said. “Everything is chill.”
Derrick turned to him, as though he had forgotten what he was doing. He dropped the broken bottle on the floor. I thought for a second that he’d calmed down. He walked over to the TV. He picked it up. He tried throwing it but it was still plugged into the wall. It yanked out when he threw it, but instead of launching in the air, it tumbled right down onto his feet. The TV broke with a pop. He screamed, high-pitched, like a little girl.
None of us knew what to do. When it came down to it, we were just nice suburban teens. We didn’t break TVs. Something seemed to shake loose from Derrick in that moment, all of us standing there, silent and horrified. He started laughing. “Shit,” he said. “I went a little crazy.”
Chandra and I left the hotel room after that. I wasn’t sober enough to drive but I had to get out of there. We took the coast home, thinking I’d be less likely to get pulled over that way.
We were up on the hill, right before the stoplight closest to my neighborhood, when I saw something in the middle of the road. I noticed it just in time. It was a boulder, a big chunk of sandstone from the cliffs above. We got out of the car. The night was dead silent and there was a bit of fog rolling in from the coast, everything washed out in the yellow of the streetlight.
Chandra and I were able to move it, just barely, out into the other lane. The sandstone got all over my hands, stained my jeans.
After the TV incident, we tried to stay away from Derrick, no longer invited him out, but sometimes he went up to the circle when he got off work anyway, came out with us uninvited. I did my best to ignore him, stay out of his way. I think he noticed. He was always staring at me, like everything was all my fault.
It was morning, way too bright, but I was sitting at the Palms anyway. It had been a long night and I was still too jacked up to go home. My mom was always threatening to drug test me, and if I failed the drug test, she’d kick me out, so I was staying away from home more and more. After checkout time at Motel 6, I had Colin drop me off here, until I could sober up and walk home.
I’d been sitting there for a few minutes, elbows on my lap, head hanging down, trying to get my bearings though it was hard in the hot sun, when I heard someone yelling. It sounded like a mess of nonsense except for two distinct words: fucking bitch.
I looked up, feeling dazed. The light was splotchy. I saw Derrick, maybe fifty feet away, walking toward me. He had a cup from Subway in his hand, was dressed in jeans, his security guard shirt on but unbuttoned. He started screaming at me. I had no idea why. I’d done nothing to him. He was calling me a bitch and a cunt, a stupid bitch, a dumb fucking cunt. He stayed across the pavilion though, away from me, which was confusing, like he was afraid of me. I didn’t say anything to him because it seemed so insane. I was just sitting there, hungover and tired.
Me not saying anything seemed to piss him off more. He started saying he was going to kill me. “I’ll murder you, bitch. I’ll bury your body in a shallow grave. You’ll rot, bitch.” He threw the soda cup at me but missed. I watched the ice splatter on the cement.
I didn’t know what to do. It all seemed so wildly illogical. I couldn’t help but imagine my decaying body, bugs eating my eyeballs.
I grabbed my purse without looking at him. I walked down to the bookstore, went into the break room, used the phone. I asked my mom to pick me up, waiting for her in the safety of the bookstore, looking out the window the whole time, just in case. When I got in the car, she said nothing about the way I smelled or the way I was acting.
We never saw Derrick again. All I know is he got fired. I don’t know why. I didn’t tell on him. That wasn’t how my friends treated it, though. They acted like I did it, like I’d conquered him, like I’d done something, anything, like I’d won.
First, let me explain my title: I like using “folklores” in the plural, since there isn’t such a thing as a single, monolithic Slavic folklore. There are many different Slavic folklores, all drawing on different influences and borrowing from various neighbours, creating a rich tapestry stretching across Eastern Europe.
At the same time, despite all our differences, there are certain things that are common in Slavic stories. Some of it likely has to do with the fact that many Slavic countries found themselves stuck behind the Iron Curtain in recent history, leading to many shared experiences. The strict censorship during that period has left a lasting impact on our literary traditions.
And some of it probably has to do with some ancient influence, something borrowed from the old fairy tales. For example, have you noticed how often the heroines of Slavic fantasy books are practical women, echoing the stories we all grew up with, of brave maidens rescuing themselves from zmeys, and witches who boil cocky heroes in their cauldrons? We also seem to have a true love for truly creepy monsters—upirs, rusalkas, and zmeys, who pop up in stories again and again.
These are the Slavic influences you can find in my debut duology, The Witch’s Compendium of Monsters, starting with Foul Days. Practical women, Slavic monsters—and the shadow of the Iron Curtain, depicted in my book as a magical, impenetrable barrier, trapping our witch protagonist in a city full of horrors.
Here are seven other books I love which borrow from various Slavic folklores.
Set in a world inspired by the Eastern Adriatic where vengeful Slavic gods trap lost travelers in crumbling, haunted castles hidden in snowy forests, this novel is atmospheric, creepy, both fast paced and intricately built. It is told from the viewpoints of three distinct narrators: a reluctant hero ex-assassin, a naïve noble whose dreams of courtly romance land her in deep trouble, and a con artist with a secret heart of gold. The con artist, in particular, is such a fascinating female character—flawed, interesting, and cunning, dripping voice from every page.
Do you like sapphic monstrous girls? If so, this is the book for you. The Midnight Girls stars two young women who, as part of a malicious plot by their witch masters, compete against each other for the heart of a prince during the glittering balls of Karnawał season—but end up falling for each other instead. The main characters, Marynka and Zosia, are two of the novel’s many strengths: they are driven, ambitious, and willing to do anything to reach their goal. Another strength is the atmosphere, which is vivid, tangible, and so distinctly Polish, from the food and the clothes to the obvious 18th century inspiration.
The Second Bell is another story inspired by Polish folklore, following a young striga—a girl born with two hearts, one normal and one ‘dark’, who is considered a demon and banished away from her human village, to live with other strigas deep in the forest. There, she is taught she has to control her dark heart, or else risk becoming a monster. Except, our protagonist soon finds herself in a life-and-death situation only her dark heart can save her from. This is an intensely personal, atmospheric story about prejudices and learning to embrace yourself, dark heart and all.
A re-imagining of Baba Yaga’s life as a young woman in the court of Tsar Ivan the Terrible in Moscow, The Witch and the Tsar contains so many of my favourite things: historical inspiration, folk magic, and of course, Baba Yaga herself. Our protagonist quickly finds herself stuck between a tsar who becomes more paranoid and volatile every day and a queen who is likely being poisoned—and she has to navigate not only politics but ancient magic and young love. This story features so many fun little details that anyone familiar with the time period and the myth of Baba Yaga would recognise, which only adds to how atmospheric the Medieval Russian setting feels.
When a village girl who has grown up believing that magic is evil develops a magical gift, she makes a deal with a Leszy—a forest spirit from Polish folklore—who offers her a bargain: a year of servitude in his crumbling manor, in exchange for a wish. Rich, complex, and beautifully written, this book is a must-read for anyone who likes mysteries, gothic settings, and a well-developed romance between characters you can’t help but root for. It reminded me of Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, but with a dash of Howl’s Moving Castle, which is undoubtedly a winning combination.
Unlike the previous titles on the list, this is a contemporary fantasy set in New Orleans, exploring immigration and life in the diaspora, which makes it particularly dear to my immigrant heart. Once more, we’re following in Baba Yaga’s steps—or, in this case, in the steps of her chicken-legged house. After a pair of siblings inherit it, they plan to use it to take their family theatre on the road—except, it quickly transpires they need to outrun a truly nightmarish figure from ‘the old country’ to preserve it, as well as their family legacy, their newly found peace, and their lives. Thistlefoot expertly weaves a narrative influenced by Jewish and Slavic myth, mixing the magical and the mundane.
We’re in the U.S. again, this time in New York. This Romeo and Juliet retelling is about two rival witch families, tangled in a complicated mess of love and betrayal. The book revolves around the youngest brother and sister from each family, who meet each other by accident and fall in love; as well as their older siblings, whose relationship ended badly several years prior. The heads of the two families, Baba Yaga and Koschei the Deathless, borrow their monikers from Russian fairy tales, and there are all sorts of little Easter eggs sprinkled through the story that lovers of Slavic folklore would appreciate. Gruesome magic, tragic love, and complicated women—this book has it all.
My debut novel, Freakslaw, opens with an epigraph from The Craft: “We are the weirdos, mister.” It’s what one of the teen girl witches says to the bus driver, when he tries to warn them to be careful of any peculiar types that lurking in the woods. That line has always stuck with me. In a world that’s terrified of outsiders and encourages normalcy at every turn, what does it mean to align yourself with the freaks from the outset?
Freakslaw tells the story of a traveling funfair whose inhabitants are all misfits of one kind or another, and take great joy in being so. Whenever the world rankles at their existence, they refuse to make themselves smaller.
When I wrote this book, I wanted to talk about the ways in which difference is not something to be overcome—smoothed out and shaped into a more palatable form—but itself a source of triumph and thriving. As the narrator of freakdom bible Geek Love makes clear:
“You must have wished a million times to be normal.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I’ve wished I had two heads. Or that I was invisible. I’ve wished for a fish’s tail instead of legs. I’ve wished to be more special.”
It’s November 2008 when the monster dogs arrive in Manhattan by helicopter. Biomechanically engineered by a mad Prussian surgeon, these dogs walk upright, dine with silver cutlery balanced in their prosthetic hands, and talk intelligently through mechanical voice boxes. They are deeplyuncanny, but New York has always been a city that embraces oddballs, and so the monster dogs quickly become reluctant celebrities, appearing on chat shows and hosting lavish balls. The story is told through various forms: newspaper articles, diary entries, even an opera libretto. I didn’t know I needed to read an opera written by a dog until I got my hands on this bizarre and brilliant novel, but I did, and so do you. It is perfect in every way.
The Cabinetby Un-Su Kim, translated by Sean Lin Halbert
A lizard grows like a weed in a girl’s mouth, eventually replacing her tongue. A father of five survives on a diet of glass and only glass (his favorite kind is crystal). Then there are the doppelgängers, who show up in their counterparts’ lives, causing all kinds of mayhem. Records of these peculiar humans—known as “symptomers”—are filed in a seemingly-ordinary office block in Seoul, in Cabinet 13. We learn their stories through the eyes of harried office worker Kong Deok-geun, who believes they may represent the emergence of a new species. Though Kong approaches his work with a kind of exasperated disdain, the ultimate feeling you come away with is one of utter delight at all the possibilities for strangeness in the world.
When Santiago dies at eleven years old, his mother is “not done with her son, not yet ready to hand him away.” So, acting upon the instruction of a Mexican folk tale, she cuts out a piece of his lung and nurses it until it gains sentience. Thus Monstrilio is brought to life: a furred, carnivorous lump, dragging himself around by the arm-tail, as he gradually grows into the man Santiago will never become. Despite Monstrilio’s bitey tendencies, his family—both biological and chosen—continue to accept him no matter what. This book is queer, gory, and packed with unconditional love.
Theo—a horny surfer-bro merman who loves hanging out on the rocks at Venice Beach—appears in Lucy’s life at the point where she’s almost hit rock bottom. Her boyfriend has dumped her, her dissertation is going nowhere, and the only distraction she can find is from dreadful Tinder dates proposing anal in hotel lobby bathrooms. In this weird, grubby, fantastical novel, it’s Theo’s inhumanness that sets him apart from other men and in so doing offers Lucy an opportunity to escape the anxieties of modern life. Things go increasingly off the rails, of course, but in the meantime Broder makes fucking a merman sound like so much fun.
There’s a myth about a tiger spirit called Hu Gu Po, who lives in a woman’s body and hungers to eat children’s toes. Soon after being told this story, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail of her own. In coming to terms with her new form, she has to excavate her family history, and the violence and secrets that lie therein. K-Ming Chang is also a poet and her sentences are the kind of thing you want to tattoo on your heart. A combination of Taiwanese folklore, grotesque bodily functions and queer redemption, Bestiary is like nothing else I’ve ever read.
The mother at the center of Nightbitch has given up her art career and much of her identity for the past two years to stay home and care for her child. But things are beginning to change. Her canines are growing and sharpening, and there’s a thick new patch of hair on the back of her neck—signs of the essentially feral and freakish self she’s tried to repress. Everything becomes more interesting as she increasingly gives space to her gleeful dog impulses, casting off the woman the patriarchy says she should be, and making room for her alter ego Nightbitch instead. This book is a celebration of living unapologetically—a deranged manual for subverting the pressures and expectations of motherhood, and coming back to yourself.
The quintessential freak show novel, Geek Love is the story of a traveling carnival family who go to the ultimate lengths to rescue their failing business. During her pregnancies, Crystal Lil Binewski imbibes all manner of drugs and exposes herself to radiation in an attempt to alter her children’s genes. Her resulting offspring are Arturo the Aquaboy, with his flippers for limbs; the dreamy conjoined pair, Iphy and Elly; hunchbacked albino narrator, Oly; and telekenetic Chick. Dunn’s fierce affection for her complex, multifaceted characters oozes from every page and what could, in other hands, feel exploitative and prurient becomes a love letter to uniqueness. Read it and you’ll never want to be ordinary again.
Nina St. Pierre’s debut memoir, Love Is a Burning Thing, began with a question: “Who starts two fires?”
Before St. Pierre was even born, her mother and a friend lit themselves on fire in a dual suicide attempt. Years later, St. Pierre’s mother started another fire that shook the foundation of their lives. St. Pierre grew up in California: in the tenderloin of San Francisco, in sunny San Diego, and most prominently, in rural Weed, up north where her unconventional family unit stood out in the conservative small town where everyone knew each other’s business. Throughout her childhood, St. Pierre’s mother continually chased after various forms of spiritual practice and enlightenment, as St. Pierre longed for a sense of stability that they never had. After her mother’s passing, St. Pierre began to uncover the hidden details of her past and soon realized that undiagnosed mental illness could have been the root of her mother’s struggle—that her mother’s reality was not the reality St. Pierre herself was living in.
Love Is a Burning Thing delves into issues of mental health, spirituality, self-immolation, poverty and class struggles, and more. As St. Pierre digs into her childhood, her upbringing, and her family history, this story shows how mental illness, when unchecked and unsupported, can sear through the lives of so many, not unlike a fire.
Deena ElGenaidi: My first question is very broad, but I think it’ll be a good jumping off point. So much of this book is about the relationship between mental health and spirituality. Can you talk a little bit about how the two are related?
Nina St. Pierre: Well, in this story in particular, my mom was into all these different new age, spiritual modalities. She was into Transcendental Meditation, the I AM, Christian Science, and all these sort of fringe modalities. In my experience, and in the communities that I lived in, those beliefs were taken as truths. And then at some point, probably around ages 11, 12, I started to feel like this reality I was being told about was not matching the reality that my friends and I were living in. But it wasn’t until after my mom’s death that I was really able to look back at that time through a mental health lens.
The more I learned, the more I saw that both mental illness—particularly mental illnesses that have states of psychosis or delusion—and New Age spirituality are alternate states. They’re fringe states. In my mom’s case, and in the communities that I was a part of, often New Age language and concepts functioned to fail at addressing mental health issues because they’re trying to explain something that’s outside of consensus reality. They’re trying to explain an unreal state.
DE: Were there moments during your childhood when you had an inkling that your mom was suffering from some kind of mental illness?
NSP: The first time that I really sensed a schism between the way that she perceived reality and what I was experiencing was when I was 12 years old living in the Alpenrose Motel, and she told me that she was a “walk-in.” The way she described that to me was that before she was born, her soul had made a contract with another soul that when her initial soul had learned all the lessons it was supposed to learn, this new soul would come in and use the body to learn its lessons. That was kind of a psychedelic thing to hear at 12 years old.
DE: You were young at that time, so you probably didn’t have the language or forewithal to realize that something was not right, or to put your finger on it.
NSP: Yeah, but at that moment—and I think for a long time, I didn’t realize this—my body was telling me something was wrong. Even some of the anxiety that I carried as an adult I can trace back to moments where I felt, physically in my body, like something is off—you know, when your hair stands on end, or you just feel uneasy. That was happening. But because I had been brought up in a world where things like reincarnation or astral travel, or all these metaphysical concepts and terms were taken as truth, then what my mother was telling me didn’t ring as impossible. It was like, well, I’ve heard weirder shit. This is just reality, as it’s been explained to me. But at that moment, I had a distinct physical reaction. There was something almost eerie, but it would take me 20 years from that point to realize it.
DE: Even the way you wrote that scene was very eerie. And what you’re describing in your body feels the way it felt reading the scene. But these different belief systems and spiritualities are so prevalent in so many different ways, whether it’s religion, astrology, wellness culture, and even things like Q Anon—which is not typically what you would describe as spirituality, but it is a sort of belief system. Do you feel like the normalization of those belief systems could also work to mask signs of mental illness for some people? And in what ways?
NSP: That’s interesting, because the sort of slippery slope between believing in angels and believing there’s a super ring of pedophiles seems like, wait, how did we get from A to Z? But the unifying factor is this belief that something larger than us is controlling us. And that’s a broad umbrella. You know, religion, spirituality, even things like government—it’s this idea that there’s some bigger, even paternalistic force out there that has an agenda, whether that agenda is benign or sinister.
In my experience, these beliefs can be a way of abdicating responsibility for the systems that we, as human beings, have created here. It’s almost impossible to talk about this stuff without talking about political systems—race, class, gender. So to answer your question, yes. I think that anything that’s taken to an extreme like wellness culture, Q Anon, and all these New Age beliefs can be used to mask symptoms of mental illness. If you’re experiencing especially extreme states of mental illness, which are limited to delusional thinking, or say psychotic states, which is more what I’m focused on in this book, then you’re experiencing a state that does not align with what everyone else is taking as reality, or with what other people are experiencing—consensus reality.
Anything that’s taken to an extreme like wellness culture, Q Anon, and all these New Age beliefs can be used to mask symptoms of mental illness.
If we had more of an open discussion around mental illness, or ways to track those symptoms, or places to go and say, “Hey, you’re feeling XYZ, you can reach out and there’s no stigma behind it, there’s no danger behind that,” then maybe there would be a clearer channel to this magical thinking. Maybe there would be more of a systemic checks and balance around it. But because it’s a free for all, I think people are looking for belief systems or justifications for what they’re experiencing, basically.
DE: I also want to talk a little bit about the idea of social class in your book. Obviously, spirituality, wellness culture, etc., exist across all social classes. In your book, both of your parents are very spiritual, and they both get into Transcendental Meditation. But your parents also exist in very different worlds. Your dad and his family are more stable, have more traditional values, and they have money—more money than your mom at least. What do you see as the relationship between wellness and spirituality and social class? And do you think those belief systems manifest differently based on how much money or stability that you have?
NSP: Yeah, there’s so much struggle involved in daily life for those living below the poverty line. So I think there’s an even greater drive towards believing that this is all for a reason, believing that your suffering matters, that there’s some greater force orchestrating it, and there’s things you just can’t know. Taken to the extreme, that can manifest in a sort of martyrdom, in a literal sense. The daily slog of being poor can wear you down, so if we can believe there’s a reason for the suffering that’s not just capitalism, we can find relief or some sense of bliss in communing with these spiritual ideas or figures, which makes life manageable, if not beautiful.
With my dad, his parents were the ones who really had money, but the place I would go visit him in Texas was middle to upper middle class. It was not ostentatious. It was very simple, but it was comfortable. And in some ways I see that while my mom’s belief system gave her reason and relief, I almost think that my dad’s belief system offered protection from having to engage with the world.
It’s so interesting because there’s a way in which both these belief systems in my particular story—in the poor and more wealthy versions—were ways of avoiding addressing social problems head on. For my father, even though he was concerned with the human condition and the state of the world, he maintained a very protected, structured life in which he did his practices, and that was that. He felt and believed this is his contribution to world peace. And not only in larger systems, but even in our direct family unit. I felt like there was a way in which his spiritual practices and beliefs created a barrier between us. It made it harder for him to see and confront concrete problems because he thought, “Well, there’s a larger meaning, and don’t get into the muck of life.” And I live in the muck.
DE: I think a lot of religious people might be like that too, where if you have a problem, their answer might be, “Everything happens for a reason. God is testing you, God knows what’s best.”
NSP: Yeah, if you just meditate, if you just pray. I guess the commonality between people with more and less money in my story is that their belief system offers them a certain remove from the problems of life because everything is in the hands of a greater being.
So I would say what my parents shared was an immaterial orientation. They were oriented towards the divine. They didn’t talk about heaven so much, it was more just that we need to be oriented toward enlightenment, or this other more divine place. So it made it hard for me in different ways. Life with my dad was more comfortable and more ordered. The basics were taken care of. Life with my mom—sometimes we were very broke—life was more chaotic. But in both settings, it was hard for me to put problems on the table. It was hard for me to say in a concrete way, this is a problem.
DE: You mentioned chaos and order just now, and those ideas come up a lot in the book. You describe growing up in a very chaotic environment. And as a result, you tried your best to maintain order, even in small ways where you just tried to keep things neat and organized. And then you have the fires in your life that are happening in the background, which are just pure chaos. You can’t control fire, but you managed to somehow contain it in this book. What was it like writing this and trying to compress the fire and chaos into a cohesive story?
NSP: I think that’s an interesting word to use, compression. I feel the final form of this book was a years-long act of expansion and compression. It had to happen over and over again. It almost felt like there were certain portals in the story I had to open and go down, like a rabbit hole. I had to go through the chaos of the story in the creation of the book. The whole thing was very meta.
If this was a fire, here we go—bringing oxygen to this story started to grow it.
At some point, when I’d been writing the book for so long, the book started to become about the impossibility of writing the book. It was a really intense process, and to compress all that, I think I had to focus less on exactly what happened or connecting all the dots in my mind and get to a place in which I was presenting an emotional imprint of what happened. Initially, the book didn’t even have chapters. It was just all these chaotic sections. And then working with my editor, I put it into chapters. And we started thinking about how to bring the fire to life more than just talking about it. I wanted the smoke itself to be representational in some way. And we had this idea about marking it in four parts—the four parts of a fire’s lifecycle. Structurally, it helps to think about the book as a fire.
DE: We spoke recently, and you mentioned that writing this story is what made you a writer. If you didn’t feel like you needed to tell this and tell it well, you might have had a completely different life. So first, why was it so important to tell this story and share it with the world? You could have just uncovered it for yourself, but you wanted to write it in a book. And then at what moment, in the process of telling this story, did you realize, oh, I’m a writer, and now I’m going to build my life around writing?
NSP: Initially, I was writing this story to understand what had happened. It really began with a question: Who starts two fires? Like, who literally does that? And then as I began to do some very cursory research into schizophrenia, I began to think my mom was experiencing schizo affective disorder, or states of schizophrenic psychosis. So once I determined there was some mental illness going on, I started asking myself, how did I not know? Initially, I was writing to make sense of everything for myself.
I wrote for one year, and it just came out of me. And then when I read it, I realized how dissociated I had been from the whole experience, because it was like reading a novel. It was like reading someone else’s story. It was kind of shocking to read. I just thought, “Whoa, where was I in all of this?” At first, yes, I just wrote it all for myself to understand, but then the further removed from me the story got, the more important it seemed for people beyond just me.
I started to share little pieces with a writing group that I had at the time in Portland, Oregon, and they were very affected by certain things. But it wasn’t an ego thing. I wanted to tell this story because it felt really powerful and startling. And then I started taking some writing courses. I took a class with Cheryl Strayed very early on, and I submitted a scene and told her, I’m taking this class because I need to understand whether this is a story. Is this a journal entry, and I just need to go to therapy? Or is this a story that needs to be in the world? She said, “Probably both.” So I went to therapy, and I kept writing.
The more that I wrote, the more momentum the book got, until at some point, I felt like it took over. The feelings that I got from reading some of this stuff back, even to myself, and then showing it to other people and having them acknowledge and see what had been so secret for so long brought oxygen to the story. If this was a fire, here we go—bringing oxygen to this story started to grow it.
As it grew, I felt the power of it more and more. Having people acknowledge and witness what had happened was so life affirming for me that I thought, “Oh, what if other people need this?” This is a very specific story, so it’s hard to imagine someone has this exact story, but there must be so many other people that are carrying deeply confusing family experiences that they’re ashamed of, or protective of, or, in particular, people that are that are sitting at the convergence of some unreality in which mental illness and mysticism are coming together in confusing ways. Maybe their whole lives, they’ve been asking what’s true? What’s not true? If this is life affirming for me, maybe there are other people that need this.
It’s so cliche, but people always say write the book that you need to read. If I would have read a book like this when I was still very confused, I might not have been driving drunk down mountain roads for years. There was a way in which at my most destructive, I was trying to say, “look at this, see this,” but I didn’t have the language. It was so deep and buried. So yeah, I think bringing it to light really helped me so much, and if there are other people for whom this story might resonate, then this is so much bigger than me. And honestly, if this was just about me telling my story, or even becoming a writer, or having a career, it wouldn’t have sustained me this long. I would have done something else. Because I’ve made no money. It’s been a grind and a grind and a grind, and I’m grateful to be here, but it’s not the glory days. There were many points in which I felt despair, and I wanted to give up, and I was so fucking sick of thinking and talking about this, that if it wasn’t for some larger purpose, if it was just for me, I would have clocked out long ago.
Due to lack of furniture, my mother’s bedroom is the center of operations. The TV is always on unless I turn it off. The fire alarm beeps for new batteries every few minutes, but we’ve gotten good at ignoring it for the most part. The blankets are psychedelic shades of pink with a gold, glittering crust flowing down like lava lamp wax. Electric candles and pink champagne overlay decorate the dresser— my mother’s interior design for Valentine’s Day. The remote control is buried somewhere in the sheets. Around the TV are receipts, prescriptions, and old mail. The Blu-ray player has been broken for two years, but mom hasn’t gotten around to replacing it. A dusty calendar lays behind the dresser with a quote from Monty Williams. “Everything you want is on the other side of hard.”
Shoes and boxes are crammed under the bed. The hamper leans to the side with clothes that can either be clean or dirty. Remnants of burnt incense seep through each vent around the house. The house is cluttered, but never filthy. Filth is what attracts vermin. My mother taught me that early in life. Sometimes when mom finds extra energy floating around, she cleans the living room, bathroom, and her bedroom.
At least once or twice a week the place smells like weed from the downstairs neighbors after they come in from work. Pitbulls from the house next door bark throughout the day from their backyard, though rarely does anyone answer them. It’s the same house where there was a driveby shooting last summer. When the sun is out, grandmas and aunties gather for gossip while kids play on the lawn and sidewalk. A few cars blast music so loud the bass vibrates through the streets up to our windows. Men in hoodies and baggy jeans hang around the corner store up the street. Early in the morning, a crackhead shows up to beg for money in front of Delta Sonic’s car wash. There’s a drug den behind my mother’s house right next to the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church’s parking lot. It’s safe in mom’s apartment, it’s clean in her bed, where no one usually sees me besides her. I sleep in her room, often ignorant of what’s happening in the street until after I’m gone. I visit only once or twice a year due to being short on time and money.
But then my grandmother, Nana, sends a message in the family group text asking us to keep my mother in prayer because she’s in the ER. She lists parts of my mom’s body that are under attack, places that dissect themselves before me as I read the message. Liver, thyroid, brain. Typically, my mother and I correspond every other day, usually sending goofy memes. When there are cracks I don’t know how to mend, I break down and tell her how I really am. Sometimes she speaks through the therapy she’s in, suggesting I forgive or learn from the breakup, isolation, my writing. Other times she speaks from a distance as if forgetting the toll a woman’s twenties takes on the body and mind. There is judgment when I come too close to making the same mistakes she once did, a mirror too ugly to look back into. In absence of kinder words, or the community I can’t seem to build, she texts me the solitary line: Finish your book. I ask every few weeks how she is doing. Her health, work, diet, friends. Her men. Her response never changes. Fine. Same old, same old.
When there are cracks I don’t know how to mend, I break down and tell her how I really am.
After Nana messages our family, I go about my day. Exercise, church, request for my social circle to keep my mother in prayer. I sporadically reread the family texts, waiting for updates. Since I can’t force her body to be okay, I push my own to do what it can. If I don’t force myself to move in a normal way, I’ll do what comes naturally: wait in the dark, let the nightmare of ‘what ifs’ skin me alive.
In October 2020, my mother attempts suicide. The pandemic further infects her twenty-year old wounds. Depression, isolation, pushing people away, poverty. She’s never been good with money, or paying bills on time. She spends thousands on a car that keeps breaking down over the last year. She loses 75 lbs going to the gym for group fitness classes and training for a marathon, but once the shutdown happens, her support is limited. The pandemic takes away the applause, hugs, and smiles that keep her going and make her think her life’s brightening. She’s left at home with her demons, the biggest being depression. Amongst all of this, it also takes her two years to find stable housing.
She tells me I saved her without knowing it that summer. In August, I unknowingly talked to her for two hours on the first day that she decided to end her life. “I planned it all out, but you just wouldn’t let me go.” She tells me this after she wakes up from a coma in October. She OD’s on pills and is discovered by her landlord who called an ambulance.
“It’s a miracle she’s alive with the amount of medication she took,” the overnight nurse tells Nana.
She drives three hours from Albany to Rochester, searching for my mother, who has no ID and is admitted to the general hospital as a Jane Doe. When Nana locates her daughter, it’s discovered that she has no health insurance. Not because she can’t afford it, but because she never got around to getting it. Both my grandmother and mother are nurses. It never occurred to me that someone working in healthcare wouldn’t have such protections. Nana stays with my mother for eight months while she recovers and figures out what her new normal is.
I think about moments when my mother dies a little in front of me. When mom finds out she has to leave her home of the last decade, or when we sit on the bus after she’s been sued for a car accident the other driver caused. I suggest outlets at her old church and at the YMCA where she can search for housing, and encourage her to use the police report written in her favor in court for the car insurance company. She’s overwhelmed and I don’t hear any future in her voice. I feel bad that all I have to offer are words, and yet as I watch her spiral in despair, too dizzy for answers, I realize my words are the most she has. In moments like this, my mother is unpredictable, wounded and bleeding on me. Sometimes I see the weapons formed against her; other times I only see the carnage. So many of her wounds are mine, and yet so much of her mind is still a stranger. But this time, eighteen months after that October, it is her body that’s the traitor, not her mind.
In moments like this, my mother is unpredictable, wounded and bleeding on me.
Within a few days of Nana’s message, I apply for emergency funding for a plane ticket to return home. My mom stabilizes within that time and only answers a few of my questions. When did this start? What’s causing it? Why didn’t you tell me? What can I do? Her answers are fragmented and incomplete, as they always are. Whether information gets lost through text or avoidance, I don’t know. What I do know is that I have to see her in order to get clear, tangible answers.
A week later in May, mom picks me up from the airport. After her suicide attempt, she cares more about touch and closeness. Side hugs are no longer enough, though that has been most of our relationship. If I touched her outside of hello and goodbye, she’d become suspicious. Now, if my chest doesn’t press into hers, she doesn’t consider it a real hug, and I have to embrace her until I get it right.
When I sit down in the car and cross my legs, mom gasps at the sight of my calves. “When’s the last time you shaved?”
“I don’t know. A few weeks or months ago.”
She runs her hand along my calf as if inspecting for dust on a coffee table. “It’s giving Wolverine vibes. Have you gone on strike or something?”
I laugh. “I haven’t had time to perform for the patriarchy in a while. I have writing deadlines. Bathing is productive enough.”
In dealing with my own depression, basic hygiene tasks—bathing, brushing my teeth, doing the dishes—are a struggle to keep up with. So many mornings I am already heavy when I wake up. There are phases of trying to jump start my day and mindset with exercise, forcing myself to go outside after sitting on the couch all day watching cooking videos. Being in the presence of others usually compels me to clean myself and my house. That and experiences with skin and vaginal issues force me to deal with hygiene. It doesn’t matter that shame is often my motivation if it gets the job done.
Mom gives me her updates—appointments, meds, the duration, etc. “I only found out about my health issues shortly before you did. I went into the ER because I was getting terrible migraines. I couldn’t sleep at all that day because it felt like there was a vice grip around my head.”
For years I suggested putting a timer on the TV or using a soundscape machine when she sleeps. And to avoid looking at her phone when going in and out of consciousness. Sometimes melatonin and other meds work, other times they don’t. The doctor says one of her antidepressants is attacking her liver and that she needs to lose weight.
For every answer, I have another question, about the causes and time frame, another area of her body that’s known pain.
When I get to her teeth, she stops me. “I don’t want to talk about all the ways I’m falling apart. Can we just spend time together?”
She’ll be fine if the subject dissolves here and now, but I’ll be as broken up as her if I don’t know everything I need to know in order to put her back together. Mom has a habit of staying away from truths that threaten her peace, even if she has to pay for it later. But haven’t we put things off too long as it is?
She puts in a Chipotle order for us and we run into the grocery store to get a few snacks for the week. I notice how rushed she is while we’re in the store.
“You struggle to bathe. I struggle to go grocery shopping,” she says.
Though we both deal with depression, baths are a therapeutic ritual for women in my family. Christmas is just an exchange of candles, bath bombs, essential oils, and Epsom salts for the year. Cooking is my therapeutic ritual.
Though we both deal with depression, baths are a therapeutic ritual for women in my family.
Mom has never been domestic. My childhood consisted mainly of TV dinners or whatever could be thrown together from the fridge or cupboards. The only consistent cleaning that happened was the bathtub.
When we arrive at her apartment, it’s cluttered with clothes on unused furniture and shoeboxes under her bed. When I go to the guest bedroom, I can’t close the door because of the sneakers flooding the floor. In an effort not to get overwhelmed, I focus on creating a clear path to walk through.
“Have you thought of retiring your worn shoes and donating the salvageable ones?” I ask.
“I just need to get a few more totes to organize them,” mom reasons, “I already got rid of stuff before I moved here.”
“It looks like you’ve bought back what you gave away.”
“Now why would you come here of all places saying things that make sense?” she jokes.
“I didn’t realize I was speaking to Alice in Wonderland.”
I’ve gained weight over the last month from lack of activity and eating out. There are several writing deadlines coming up that I’ve avoided until the last two weeks. The first several days of my visit, I’m glued to the dining room seat trying to outline and write, massaging language in some areas and trying to just get the story down in others. I go to 2-3 gym classes a week with mom, but other than that I don’t move, except to places I think my focus will sharpen such as the library, a park, places without wifi so I can stay off social media.
Mom brings home fast food for breakfast and dinner, usually sandwiches and some form of potato. My stomach expands and sits in my lap. I’m constipated; I forget to drink water. I ask my mom once daily when we’ll go grocery shopping. She answers, then it never happens. But I notice she makes pit stops to the store after getting off work to pick up an item or two, lemons and limes, chips, trail mix. Periodically I see her lying in bed staring up at the wall, phone in hand, the NBA playoffs on the TV.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
She looks down at her toes. “I’m just disappointed in myself for regaining this weight.”
So am I, I think of my own body. I’m not obese and can still hide my gut under my clothes, but I see the way this has played out over time for most of my family. The gradual weight gain over the years, food treated like a lover in their loneliest moments, then the struggle to go upstairs or take a fifteen-minute walk, and the joint pain, more than just the aches of aging. Many of them sleep with CPAP machines. The choices they want to make get further away. By the weekend, I have asked my mom five times about going to the store.
“After the playoffs,” she says, rolling her eyes.
“What time is that?” I ask.
“Six.”
When it’s time, she reluctantly rolls out of bed. After twenty minutes in the store, she asks if I’m almost done. She leans on the cart lethargically, her eyes vacant. It’s my first time seeing her like this. We aren’t wandering aimlessly and I am the one gathering food. If she can go to the gym, why is the store so overbearing? I ask if it’s the people and she shrugs. “All I know is I’m ready to go.”
The clutter of the apartment is heavy and so are the mice it hides. One night as I watch TV in her room, I hear squeaking coming from her closet. At first, I think it’s just the creaks of an old house or my mind playing tricks, but then a brown lump skitters out the door. Laying on mom’s bed I shift over to peek in her closet. There are a few droppings and shreds of her shoeboxes I haven’t seen before. I write to her on Facebook messenger.
The clutter of the apartment is heavy and so are the mice it hides.
Mom: Oh yea I forgot to tell you about them.
Me: Why don’t you tell your landlord so he can get an exterminator?
Mom: Because I already know he’s gonna tell me to clean the house.
Me: Can we at least get some traps tomorrow?
Mom: Sure. But there are already some around the house. Just sleep in my bed.
I look around the apartment and see a trap under the kitchen sink and one shoved in the crevice of the door. I put it outside her room and make sure all the zippers on my suitcase are closed. Later that morning I wake up to my mother using a snow shovel to scoop a trapped mouse into a trash bag. For the next several days I remind her of the traps, to no avail.
Mom: Just throw something at the wall. That usually scares them away.
Me: Aren’t mice your biggest fear?
Mom: No, it’s rats.
Me: I just need you to know this isn’t normal.
Mom: You don’t think other people get mice?
Since I’m already stressed about my writing deadlines and weight gain, I try to accept the things I can’t change around her apartment. The essay I’m working on has gone up to ten thousand words and still isn’t finished. I also start a short story and finish the first scene, but as I look online, I see breaking news. A mass shooting has taken place at a Tops grocery store in Buffalo, where most of my family lives. My phone keeps lighting up from the family chat with questions of who checked in with who, who has confirmed their safety, and who has yet to. Eventually the perpetrator’s picture is released along with his motives. He targeted black people. Eighteen years old and already so filled with hate.
It happens on Jefferson Avenue, a street that I and many of my family members have traveled down. It scares me to see violence closer than I ever have before, in a place where people I love reside. To be in suspense about who is safe. How the very errands I beg my mother to run outside the house have become dangerous. The next time we go to Wegmans, my gut clenches as white men pass us by. What parts of their minds are hidden by their faces? Which are rejoicing or waiting for the next chance to hunt us? I feel ridiculous and ignorant for my fear, but can’t make it go away. All I can think about is which exits are closest, if mom and I will be close enough to grab each other and run. Are we enough to protect each other?
I try so hard to lose myself in my writing, the one thing I think I have control over, but find even that can’t consume me. I keep losing track of words and ideas between racing thoughts of the violence that happened, wondering if the stories I’m trying to tell matter if my safety doesn’t. I no longer find the words, I’ve run out of them, and don’t know how to make them pretty in the face of so much ugliness. Eventually I admit defeat, missing three deadlines in a row. There’s no guilt, just fatigue and relief, relief that I am okay with failing, with a break, with being defined by other parts of myself outside of writing. It’s okay to just exist for a while.
For the next few days I am a vegetable, drowning out thoughts with Disney movies. I get back to exercise, books, and walks. Lose a few pounds. My skin clears a bit. I avoid conversations that are the equivalent of doom scrolling. Yes, I hear updates on the shooting, but I can’t allow myself to remain close to the subject for too long, otherwise, I lose the will to get up, engage in conversation, or go anywhere at all. Since the goal of my trip is to see my mother and to enjoy as much of it as I can, I go back to planning things for us to do. It’s been years since we went to the Strong Museum of Play and the butterfly exhibit.
I hear updates on the shooting, but I can’t allow myself to remain close to the subject for too long.
After walking for fifteen minutes to the museum my mom is already fatigued. We sit in different sections of the museum, watching kids run around, observing new sections they’ve added over the years, The Berenstain Bears, Mystery Alley, the sci-fi/fantasy room, and superheroes’ corner. “I’ll need to eat soon,” she tells me. When we first visited the butterflies over a decade ago, I was jittery, jumping at the flash of any wing or color that brushed past. So I go in to prove that I’ve mellowed out over the years and can handle an insect landing on my shoulder.
We watch the quail nest near the stone bridge, try to find the chameleon crawling in its tree, and the toucan resting in its perch. It’s nice to have a moment of color and peace as mom and I identify the different butterflies by their patterns. She’s comforted, and gradually begins to chat, sharing news about my older brother and her health.
When we leave the museum, she tells me her doctor called. “He said there’s inflammation of my liver.”
We’re silent as we pass a happy, young family on their way into the museum before she tells me it’s not due to alcoholism. I believe her and yet I remember the vodka that her landlord found by her body along with empty pill bottles, how Nana got rid of the alcohol around the apartment when she arrived back in October 2020. Mom still has vodka in her closet. I’m grateful it’s full and collecting dust, but I also wonder why it’s there in the first place. I think about the meds mom had abused over the years. Justover the counterones, she rationalizes. Her nickname was Pharmacy Queen, which was funny until she overdosed. Pills were like background noise that I never really paid attention to.
On several occasions mom speaks jokingly of her death. “Don’t go through any trouble for me. When I’m ready to go, we’ll have a goodbye barbeque, then I’ll load up on my meds and once it’s over, you can bury me in the backyard.” Though it is dark and unfair of her to say, it’s funny she thinks there’ll be a backyard to bury her in since she’s never owned a house. But now that she’s tried to put some of her plan into action, I wonder if her body is making her pay for it. If the meds that were meant to free her, are slowly doing what she’d hoped would be quick—killing her.
I ask if her current medication is the problem, but she doesn’t know and neither does her doctor. What is the point of expertise when there is never enough information? The wait is never over and there is no sure way to save a loved one. Both the answers and questions fail me when I need them most. Mom seems less interested in the results and I don’t have the willpower to ask why.
Once upon a time, I thought being a nurse meant being nurturing, responsible, and patient. As a child, I think these traits come naturally to women, that they can see as much into the dying as they can the living because they sense need all the same. Essentially, I thought that nurses made better mothers. But my mom shows me that warmth isn’t necessary for efficiency, and many days the latter isn’t even sustainable. Being a nurse isn’t synonymous with eliminating threats or creating safe domains. Sometimes it’s just the job that presents itself, vast enough to fall into and get lost in. Like motherhood. They are people who can add to pain as much as they can take it away. Maybe there are dreams of witnessing and caring for life, but it is never enough to build a new mind and body for my mother.
I thought that nurses made better mothers. But my mom shows me that warmth isn’t necessary for efficiency.
I sleep in her bed the rest of my visit, usually waking to see her on the other side of me, lightly snoring, a documentary on baby animals playing in the background. Every time I watch her sleep, I see myself in her: The years we spend apart as much as our years together, a part of me that I don’t want to lose hope in. We both still have futures with many directions to turn. I try to convince myself that fear is a choice, that our bodies are safe outside of our bed, our home, our dreams. There’s no point in letting white terrorists, the neighborhood, or health scares control me when I have no control over them. Still, it’s hard to get up and go about my day, for reasons that are as heavy in me as they are in the world. Isn’t that how depression works?
Each morning I pray for her to be the nurse or mother she’s never been to herself, or to me. That she’ll tell me everything so we can prepare for life, because death is unacceptable. I tell God what he already knows. I don’t have the community or energy to help fill the void that her loss would bring. Death would leave me somewhere between want and need, stuck and incomplete. Left with bits of her shrapnel in me. The responsible thing for her to do is wait, to grant more moments for me to be mad at her and heal, for me to become an adult with a steady income, married, and finish the book she says she won’t read, even though I know she will. She needs to wait until I have a life that will hold me when she’s gone.
I go back to sleep to the sound of her breathing. The mice are quiet in the morning. Daylight is the only thing that subdues them. I wonder if they sense she needs rest. Other mornings I get up and try to clean somewhere around the house, waiting to feel safe enough for words and sentences and stories to return to my head. The last day of my trip, mom tells me to wake her to say goodbye before I go to the airport. The playoffs are still going on in the background. I watch the game from the doorway, waiting longer than I should to wake her, wondering if she ever dreams of memories for us to make, like I do, ones where we’re soft and protected at the same time.
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