I heard Garrard Conley read from the research note for his first novel, All the World Beside, at an AWP reading earlier this year and was thoroughly riveted. In voicey, animated prose—he notably calls French philosopher Michel Foucault “Daddy Foucault”—he discussed the work of finding queer spaces within 18th century, Puritan New England, a task inherently complicated by the essential coding and concealment that kept queer identities (safely) out of the records.
Garrard Conley made a name for himself with his memoir, Boy Erased, which recounted his experience growing up in a religious household and going through conversion therapy. In his first novel, Conley brings his finely trained eye for dissecting human connection, spirituality, and emotion to the 1700s, Massachusetts, a religious community called Cana to which the Elect have been called. In lush, lyrical prose with reverence for the natural world and the complex lives of others, Conley tells the story of two men, the preacher Nathaniel Whitfield and doctor Arthur Lyman, who are bound by their forbidden love. All the World Beside enters the traditions of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Romance and period pieces that imagine the shapes that queer love might have formed across history. Conley takes great care to balance the pressures of Puritan society with the freedom these two men uncover in each other. The book is a daring, compassionate, and humane portrait of a religious community that is seeking a way to organize the world for themselves, at once aware of the human impulses behind this work and the destructive forces that result from colonialism, manifest destiny, and religious fundamentalism.
We spoke about the novel, the society’s twin condemnation of and reverence for beauty, and how he found his way deep inside this world.
Michael Colbert: All the World Beside is deeply interested in beauty and the natural world. How did you find your way into writing about the landscape of colonial New England?
Garrard Conley: I’ve always been fascinated with how my family ended up falling for something that is so obviously insane: how did we end up in that 1984 bubble that was conversion therapy where we had hundreds of rules, had to ignore what our bodies were saying, and believe what our minds knew wasn’t true. It was anti-rational, anti-emotional, anti-everything really. Everything that it is to be human, it was anti. I was interested in how we get to a place where we ignore the basic facts of existence, and what our bodies are saying, in favor of a kind of fascist thinking, and how do we prevent ourselves from doing that again.
All the World Beside is full of that. Everyone is somehow not listening. I wanted to describe that moment when you realize, ‘Oh no, recognizing the truth, there’s going to be a great cost to me, and I’m going to do it anyway.’ There’s a good kind of pride, which says, ‘You know what, I’m not going to be a coward anymore. I’m going to live out this truth, and the consequences that come with it will feel like nothing. I know what it feels like to shut that off. I know what it feels like to live not like a human being but like an automaton, and so I will do it anyway.’ I think that there’s something really beautiful and triumphant in that choice because it paves the way for so many other people.
MC: Without giving too much away, this reminds me of Nathaniel’s worry about being an abomination if he lets himself be with Arthur, and when they get together, it doesn’t feel that way.
GC: That was a really difficult part of the book to convey, because I didn’t want to be unrealistic where these two men don’t have any problems when they’re finally together. The problems are still waiting outside the cabin. But really, I wanted to show that when they do get together and think and talk about God as this proto-gay couple, they’re actually closer to God than ever before. That was a big challenge for writing the whole book: How do I portray both that things are still terrible when you walk out that door, but in this private place, real freedom can exist? That acceptance can lead to a greater sense of the soul and beauty. It was true for me and probably true for almost anyone that realized that they weren’t alone and felt happy at that recognition and scared but still do it.
MC: You mentioned beauty. How were you interested in exploring the perils of beauty as the people of Cana understood it?
I wanted to show that when they do get together and think and talk about God as this proto-gay couple, they’re actually closer to God than ever before
GC: I have a symbol at the center of my book that I think operates as a way to talk about beauty. They have this beautiful ormolu clock that Catherine, the minister’s wife, has inherited, and it’s the one thing that is permitted within the house that’s beautiful in an obviously not productive way. The way that the characters respond to that beauty is really telling of where they are in their journey. Anything that went against that buttoned down, collared world of the Puritans was seen as suspect. That was something I dealt with in my childhood and wrote about in Boy Erased. Does that sound familiar today? It does to me. We can’t talk about the atrocities that are happening in the world, or what’s happening in Palestine without someone saying you must be anti-Semitic, you must be X, Y, or Z, let’s label you however it is that we need to label you to dismiss you. That is what Puritans do. It’s what fundamentalists do. It can happen in any religion, in any place, at any time. It doesn’t even have to be religious. I know it inside and out, and I can feel it the minute that it is being put on me. That’s where my arrow’s really aimed: the fundamentalists who say there is no room for discussion, nuance, or political or heartfelt opinion that goes against the orthodoxy. I think literature opens us up to thinking differently about that. There are a lot of kaleidoscopic feelings that make up the texture of a time like ours today. That texture is where the real truth is, that texture of everyone feeling differently. You find that web, that’s where we start to get at truth.
MC: I thought a lot about the gaps in how someone perceives others, or how they understand somebody else’s opinion or behavior, yet with access to that other character’s interiority, our sense of the world becomes so much richer. Through the novel’s point of view, the story is so much more humane.
GC: Yeah, we dismiss so many people with labels or whatever convenient ideological terms we have today. I think literature is a place where we don’t do that. It’s like the better version of ourselves. Maybe the characters are acting poorly, but the authorial voice, if it’s doing good work, shows us a bigger picture. It’s always saying, ‘Look at the margins. There’s something else there. You think you’ve got a hold on it? You don’t.’ Of course, that can be a frustrating reading experience, but I think what excites me as a reader is the discovery that someone has made that effort to see beyond their narrow, prescriptive view of the world. It’s the reason I read. I don’t read because I need my biases reaffirmed. I don’t read because I need comfort. I read because I want to see other people trying to reckon with the really complex and often terrifying world that we live in, in a way that feels humane and beautiful.
MC: In the research note at the end of the novel, you write, “The great thing about fiction is that when you start to fill in the gaps of history the imagination grows bolder.” Could you speak about this imperative?
GC: It was a little bit of a dance. I think I’m still understanding it. First of all, I set out to write not a novel but a Romance—the way that Hawthorne wrote Romance. I wanted people to understand this within a tradition in which the characters come alive by a sort of atmospheric effect, one that does not exactly adhere to every rule of reality but is still in conversation with reality. I wanted things to be a bit dramatic, maybe even melodramatic at times, and to lean into some of those genre feelings that people wouldn’t necessarily associate with literary fiction. If including a fact ruins the atmospheric effect, I won’t necessarily put it in there, but I won’t ever make up a fact that could ruin the historical accuracy.
I wanted things to be a bit dramatic, maybe even melodramatic at times, and to lean into some of those genre feelings
I did a ton of research on multiple areas of the 18th century. I would go to Historic Williamsburg and Historic Richmond Town on Staten Island, to understand how the walls felt and what kind of furniture would have been in these houses at the time. I read a lot of books; I’d say I probably compiled about 500 sources on everything from material culture to sexuality in the 18th century to maps of towns that could be like Cana. I felt it was necessary because I wanted this really ambitious combination of things. I needed to have a theory of sexuality that made sense to me, one that went beyond, as I call him, Daddy Foucault’s estimation that homosexuality was born in the 19th century. Of course, he was being a little funny, but I wanted to be careful not to map our contemporary identity politics onto the past because it wouldn’t work. In order to enter the past, I wanted to make sure that I got all the names for things that could be associated with queerness in the past.
MC: In many ways this book is about being ushered into new worlds, and there’s play between the new worlds of religion, colonialism, and the new world that opens with queer people. How do you see these forces intersecting?
GC: One character in my book says something like a movement is dangerous because it gathers everything in its wake. You don’t know what’s going to happen with the movement, it could go one way or the other. That’s something I’ve learned with doing a lot of advocacy work around ending conversion therapy. I’ve seen this movement change a lot in the last eight years, and I’ve seen this anti-trans backlash in 2024 that is really horrible. It’s been very frustrating to see this movement that many of us created hijacked by a gender-critical crowd, who is now attaching conversion therapy to this idea of turning gay people trans. It’s frustrating because it ignores a fundamental fact of conversion therapy, which is that trans kids were more likely to go to conversion therapy, that there’s no conversion therapy that’s turning gay people trans. It’s conversion therapy that’s trying to turn gay people straight and trans people cis.
That was a concern of mine when I went into All the World Beside. A different world is not always a better world. Movement is not always better movement; it doesn’t always turn out the way that you want it to. There is a kind of cynical realism at the heart of the book. To me, the world that is presented at the end of the book resembles a possibility that could be much more like our world today. We know the “New World” was never new, and it’s a very dark term. It doesn’t mean that the new world doesn’t have all of the same baggage. It does. That’s one of the messages that I want to get across in All the World Beside: Yeah, we’re in a much better place. There’s no denying that there is progress, but it always comes at a cost, and there’s always something that we’re ignoring or some ugly beast that’s going to rear its head again.
I think there are moments of joy and beauty between characters when they let their guard down. That, I hope, is a kind of acknowledgement of the queer joy that we can all exist together even in dark times. Our resiliency is what I want you to walk away with. We’ve been through a lot of shit. We’re going to be going through a lot more shit, but there’s always some new keyhole to look inside and see what’s going on. I won’t give away what that is, but it might involve one man pissing on another man in a way that you’ve never imagined in the 18th century. And maybe today, we’ll see new vistas of complete debauchery and beauty that we could have never imagined before.
Each afternoon at five minutes to four, Gigi emerged, descended from the mezzanine, and filled three glasses with ice, Tanqueray, and a pimento olive. A freezer beneath the wet bar produced small, gem-like cubes of unusual translucence and the sound they made, ringing into lowballs, was more powerful and prompt than any salvo.
I brushed my hair and set it, then donned a bra with actual underwire. In solidarity, my mother had left curlers, and my sister and aunt Ellen had abandoned appropriate lipsticks behind the triple-pane mirror. The four of us agreed on very little, but we shared a porous, frizz-prone hair texture and freckly complexion with cool undertones.
It was time. The mirror revealed a winking corridor in each periphery, flanked by peach hand towels that had hung in the guest bath for as long as I could remember. As a child, I used to peer into the mirror, trying to see around myself and into the future, but today there was only my obsequious hair in endless replica.
“Why Nina,” my grandmother cooed from below. “How nice you look.” It was hard not to make an entrance on the spiral stair. A nightmare, my sister had called it, after visiting with her newly mobile twins. Alison took after our mother and Aunt Ellen, girlish women who needed husbands and things. Gigi and I were different.
“Your shoes are sparkling,” I observed.
“I stole them from Maeve,” she said, glancing down.
“Dead Maeve?” For the last quarter-century, Buck and his wife Maeve had traversed The Sorrento each day at four o’clock, from their pool-side one-bedroom to Gigi’s coveted two-story unit with Gulf views. Maeve died of a stroke three months ago, and Buck moved in with Gigi shortly after.
“Let’s not call her that.” Gigi returned to the drinks. “What’s going on with work?” Her gaze met mine in the mirrored bar.
“I’m taking a break.” I didn’t wish to speak about my job or private life. There wasn’t much to say. At thirty-five, this left me in an awkward position. Failure in career could be blamed on love. Failure in love could be blamed on career. Failure in both suggested some personal shortcoming. But I was here to save Gigi, and at that, I would not fail.
I tried to tell if she looked older. Ninety-four now, but with two new hips and a cooler shade of gray. She’d accepted my compliment factually: “I was so attached to the champagne blonde, but silver suits me. I admit it.” The shoes clicked and glittered through the condo. Maeve had dressed like a card shark but Gigi kept herself classic. Linen and a splurgy handbag. Pink lipstick. Her secret to a youthful complexion was not to get too thin. “You’ve got to hit it just right though—type 2 is no picnic.”
“I want to hear about you.” We settled in the lounge. “You’re the one suddenly getting married.”
“Would you like to be a bridesmaid?”
Gigi and Buck had announced their engagement a week ago, leaving us little time for shock. They were holding a simple ceremony in the chapel of St. Ann’s on the first of the month.
I wasn’t going to let her flirt her way out of this. “You’ve known Buck forever,” I said. “Why marry him?”
Her gaze flicked to the clock. A minute to four. “If he’s late, maybe I won’t.” She shrugged like a glamorous starlet, evasive and smooth.
“Have you been lonely?”
The door crashed open. In the time it took Buck to enter and close it behind him, the condo was invaded by the violent white noise of The Sorrento’s atrium waterfall.
“May,” Buck nodded at Gigi.
I didn’t like that my grandmother’s first name was so similar to his recently deceased wife’s.
“Nina.” His greeting was a guttural grunt. Did she expect us to believe she was in love with him? My mother said dementia could manifest through unusual attachments.
For eighty-one, Buck was not unattractive. Dapper, still erect, and with hair that held a wave. Ellen speculated about a long-standing affair, but Gigi was neither a hypocrite nor a tragic figure. If she had wanted Buck before, she’d have had him, free and clear.
I knew Buck would ask about the pool and his cabana key. It was all he could ever think to ask about. I invented an excuse about work.
“For whom?” asked Gigi. “I thought you were taking a break.”
“I am,” I said. “I’m here!”
Gigi’s look conveyed concern and a little pity. “Do you want me to call Bernard?”
“No,” I said, perhaps too quickly. Gigi’s old friend in the DNC had procured me half the campaign jobs I’d ever had. I didn’t want another one.
“Your mother says you’re in a funk.”
“She always says that after we lose.”
“You do look run down.”
“Only because I’m not tan.” I dearly hoped my mother had not mentioned the breakup. “Floridians forget what it’s like up there.”
Gigi sighed. “I suppose it’s all become a little sordid and pointless, hasn’t it?” I usually found comfort in Gigi plucking out my feelings and speaking them aloud. Today her insight hurt. My face must have betrayed me. She turned to Buck. “Nina’s going to be my maid of honor!” she announced.
“Good get.” Buck nodded. “No easy task in matron-city.”
I felt disoriented. “What about Shireen?” Gigi’s withdrawal from her social circles was another item of recent alarm. As a hostess and booster for the scattered liberals of the southern Gulf, Gigi was integral to the state machine. Shireen, a major bundler, was her oldest friend.
“Shireen has become somewhat unbearable in her old age,” said Gigi.
“She says you’ve entirely disappeared.”
“All anyone talks about is who died and what’s happening with the estate. I’m tired of it.”
Buck grunted approvingly.
“Are you sure I can’t call Bernard? I don’t like to think of you idle and wallowing over some man.”
So my mother had mentioned him. “No thanks,” I said. Surely she had excluded his marital status, given Gigi’s strong moral opinions. “There’s no rush.” I knew better than to joke about how I didn’t need the money.
“So, your guy lost?” Buck interjected.
“I generally work with women.”
He rolled his eyes. “So your gal lost?”
“A win was only one of several acceptable outcomes.”
Buck shrugged. “Winners win.”
I maintained my bright, informative tone. “She still managed to pull the incumbent left.”
“Left.” He made it sound like a slur.
“Yes,” I couldn’t help responding. “Toward sanity.”
“Women,” Buck gurgled, “talking about sanity.”
“I beg your pardon?” It was my standard response to hostile men, but I knew I sounded shrill.
“Nina,” Gigi said sharply. I looked down at Buck’s puckered pectorals to deescalate. At his high white socks and Keds. Practically a child again. “I need to ask a favor while you’re here.” Gigi’s hostess’ instincts finally rose to the trick of redirection. “I’ve been having a problem with intruders—” The grunt sounded. “Buck—let me finish. I know what I saw, and what I saw were knees.”
“Knees?”
“Men’s knees. Up there.” Gigi pointed towards the mezzanine. Her condo had an exit on the second floor, though it was rarely used. From my seat, I could see a sliver of the landing through the floating staircase. “Twice I was sitting here and saw knees on the mezzanine.”
“Was it Al? Handymen?”
“This isn’t a hotel. I screamed! I completely screamed, both times, and the knees fled.” Gigi was indignant. “Does that sound like a handyman?”
“So they’re using the door up there.”
“I keep that door locked.”
Buck had spent his endurance for silence. “Seeing things,” he spouted.
“Was it you?” I accused.
“I’m worried,” Gigi insisted. “I may have a stalker.”
“She’s told me about her sister.” Buck said.
“Sister-in-law,” corrected Gigi. “Poor Elyse. She called the police nearly every day.”
“Why?” I’d heard of a batty great aunt, but never met her.
Gigi sighed. “She swore men from the CIA broke into her house at night to paint the ceilings.”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“You need to help me catch him.”
“The man with the knees,” I said gravely. I refused to align with Buck by not taking her suspicions seriously. “I’ll look into it,” I pledged.
After dinner I checked my phone, forgetting about The Sorrento’s dead zone. I’d been told the lobby was newly wired, but my feed only refreshed inside the elevator, of all places. No news, but plenty of updates. Nothing from Mateo, the man for whom I would not wallow. The campaign was over. I wouldn’t even see him at work now.
I hadn’t told my friends about him, so they weren’t calling. In my twenties I would have, before anyone had husbands or children. Now, I knew their allegiances would be torn between me and his poor imagined wife, their three young sons. My mother only knew because I’d run into her at a fundraiser after too many champagnes.
The doors opened on the lobby, where the din of the waterfall was worst. Welcome to Niagara Falls, was how Gigi greeted guests now. The remodel had failed to account for the acoustics of all that marble. I missed the jungle-print rug and player piano. The basin for the cascade gaped wide and shallow, chlorinated teal. No Wading, a sign read. No Coins.
I explored the spaces for holding meetings and getting fit. In a tiny powder room, I found a spot they’d missed. The jungle-print rug survived! Acid-trip ruffles of pink and green fronds that now felt like treading on a Keith Haring. I looked at myself in the vanity. Was this the face of a woman who had lost her way? Introspection became tedious quickly.
In the office, I found Al reading Tiger in the Smoke. He read with such intensity that interrupting him felt like a small violence. “Nina!” he called. “What can I do for you?”
I broached the subject of the knees. No evidence, he swore, had appeared on the lobby footage of any intruder. “No one’s reported similar issues?”
“No,” fretted Al, “though I’ve insisted she call immediately if anything seems amiss.”
This was charming but not very useful. Al was a professional in the register of chivalric doorman, but his heart was in a cozy mystery. When I asked who had access to master keys, he stiffened. Al’s brother Cecco worked mornings, and Facilities consisted of Al’s two nephews. The whole clan came from “the original Naples.”
I backtracked. “Think she’s losing it?” It seemed wiser to besmirch my own family’s honor than risk any slight to his, but I only perturbed Al further.
“Your grandmother is sharp as a tack,” he repeated. “A tack.”
Six days until the wedding.
Five.
Gigi’s schedule felt mysterious and fixed, and did not include me, or even Buck, except at cocktail hour. Mostly, she stayed in her bedroom with the news at high volume. I sat in the kitchen and checked the extension, but on the occasions it rang, Gigi seemed only to be eliciting grim medical updates from one small and taffyish voice. Every few hours, I pressed my ear to her door, but didn’t knock.
As a teen, I’d felt no such reservations. I barged in at all hours to lie on her bed and argue with the television. Confide or confess as needed. In college, frustrated that no one wanted to talk about Cheney or Iraq or stagflation, I’d call Gigi, who could be relied upon to be appalled and entirely up to date. Gigi, I’d say, can you believe it? and she’d say: I cannot. Or: This is just insane. Then she’d call back after talking to Bernard to explain what was really going on.
I called less now. Perhaps much less, lately. Didn’t everyone? I wondered if Gigi was punishing me.
At noon, Buck left for golf, and she emerged. As a child, I’d dreaded Gigi’s lunches, each mayonnaise mélange she called salad a fresh horror. Now I loved them. Together we ate tuna, noodles, grapes off little saucers. I’d shimmied us into a conversation about cooking for one, and finally on to Buck. “A catch” she kept calling him. “Most of the men are dead.”
“Why not live with women?” I asked her. “We’re all much pleasanter and know how to do things.”
“What can I say,” she said. “It’s nice to have a man around. I know it’s not new-fangled.”
“You used to say you’d never trade your freedom after getting it back.” It sounded like an accusation, but when I was in high school, it had made a profound impression.
“I’m sure I did,” said Gigi.
“So what are you doing with Buck?”
“Whatever I want!” She ignored me, tidying.
“What about your freedom?”
“You try growing old alone.”
I am, I wanted to say, but knew it would not be well received. I followed her out of the kitchen and towards the stairs. I invited her to the pool. “You can’t stop exercising,” I scolded her departing back. “It’s important for longevity.”
“I’m ninety-four,” she called over her shoulder. “I’ve won.”
The pool was thick with women bobbing in unison. I sat in the sun with one of Mateo’s novels. We had pillaged one another’s pantheons as a form of foreplay, but now five pages felt like holding my breath underwater. All around me people sunbathed with intensity, or strolled between the cabanas and ice machine. All were equipped with a Tervis tumbler, clinking and redolent. I had an epiphany about the cabanas. They were full of booze.
The sun moved, and I retreated to the elevator. Nothing from Mateo, nor anyone looking to hire me in the shuffle of post-midterm turnover.
Messages from my mother.
Ellen had a good forensic accountant from her last divorce, she texted. SHOULD WE SIC HIM ON BUCK?
I couldn’t help but feel Buck was not worthy of our full adversarial response.
I couldn’t help but feel Buck was not worthy of our full adversarial response.
WHAT THEN? read the texts.
I’M WORKING ON IT.
I had succumbed to sitting on the floor to type and scroll when the doors reopened on a pair of knees. “Is this the seated car?” a boy—man?—asked, grinning down. The boy’s skin said he was five to ten years younger than me.
“The lobby wifi’s awful.”
“Good to know.” He twirled his racket with a flick of the wrist. “You play?”
“Not really.”
His chin tilted in a light scold. “I’ll see you by the pool, then.”
He had that god’s gift energy I hated, but I smiled.
“Al says you’ve been spending time in the elevator,” Gigi said at cocktail hour.
“It’s the only place I can work.”
Buck: “There’s a business center.”
“The internet is best in the elevator.”
Gigi hummed and sipped. “I’m sure it’s fine if you aren’t bothering anyone.”
“I like it,” I replied lamely. “It hasn’t been remodeled.”
Gigi rolled her eyes. “They tried.”
“We got our very own Jewish cabal on the twelfth floor,” barked Buck.
“I beg your pardon?”
He became animated. “They wanted their special elevator.”
“A Shabbat elevator,” Gigi clarified. “It was hardly a calamity.”
“Why’d they buy on the twelfth floor if they can’t use the elevator?”
Gigi addressed me calmly, as though I was the one complaining. “It was one elevator, one day a week. But no one could agree.”
“I see,” I said. My most diplomatic line.
Gigi visited the bar. “Is your mother still having those Holocaust dreams?”
I didn’t wish to speak about my mother’s strange, private dreamlife in front of Buck. Mercifully, he’d become disinterested. “She’s into lucid dreaming now.”
“She was always hiding in haystacks,” Gigi mused. My mother never recounted the dreams to me in detail. “She and the children she was rescuing. She’d hold her breath as Nazis speared the hay. I’d barge into her bedroom, worried she was choking, but she’d be dead asleep.”
“Did they spear the children?” I asked.
Gigi shrugged. “I always said it was all those Leon Uris books they assigned in school.”
Buck nodded off, whinnying faintly.
“I guess that explains the lucid dreaming.”
She squinted. “What’s that?”
I described how my mother envisioned what she wished to dream, then trained her subconscious to follow the plot. “Like a sitcom.”
“That works?”
“She’s developed a whole storyline involving Jude Law.”
Gigi raised her drink. “Better than haystacks.”
We watched Buck shift in his chair, still making animal sounds.
“Your grandfather could’ve used that trick.” Gigi exhaled as Buck settled. “He had them too,” she said. “Not quite nightmares . . . They started after that kerfuffle with 60 Minutes.” I had heard of no kerfuffle. Gigi sighed. “They brought him on to discuss Chlorofluorocarbons and Industry.” All I knew about my grandfather’s company was that they’d jarred peanut butter and filled aerosol cans with hairspray. “He tried to explain that they changed their process as soon as the science was clear—but when it aired, they only showed him talking about the car wax nozzle and how the EPA made them a superfund site.” Gigi rose for another drink. “That’s when the dreams started,” Gigi called, waking Buck. “Ozone guilt. He never trusted the media after that.”
“Smart man,” said Buck.
I’d been screening my mother’s calls but accepted the conference with Ellen as a compromise.
“Where have you been?” my mother demanded.
“Service is horrible here.”
“Are they still engaged?”
“For now,” I growled. “Did you know about the knees?”
“Knees?”
“She’s been seeing knees.”
“Oh, the stalker,” said Ellen. “I assumed it was Buck.”
“I taped a piece of my hair across the second-floor door. So far, no one’s come in or out.”
“Paranoia’s on the rise in the elderly,” said Ellen.
“This is what I’m talking about.” There was an eager sheen in my mother’s voice, like oil on water. “Paranoid behavior could be useful.”
“I’d hardly call it paranoid,” I said.
My mother: “Has she gone out at all?”
Ellen: “In August, it was just cable news and gin.”
My mother: “And Buck.”
Ellen: “Shireen says he convinced her to stop contributing.”
I felt the familiar fatigue of being right about all my worst suspicions. “And now I’m here. We look party sponsored.”
My mother scolded me. “Don’t be nasty. Shireen is one her oldest friends.”
Ellen: “She can’t believe Gigi’s marrying him either.”
My mother pounced. “Do you think she’d be willing to file a complaint?”
I made an incredulous sound.
“The lawyers say that in the event of a worst-case scenario, Florida’s deathbed marriage statues could help us invalidate his claims after the fact. But our case would be stronger if there were reports already on file that suggested fear of fraud or elder abuse.”
“Shireen’s the one who will look guilty of fraud if she files that complaint,” I said.
“You should file one with Adult Protective Services while you’re there,” my mother continued. “As insurance for her own protection.”
“You’re serious,” I said. “Gigi is saner than you are.”
“It isn’t about sanity,” said my mother. “It’s about influence and manipulation. Frankly, I’m concerned you don’t see the logic here.”
“Nina, it’s a failsafe!” I could almost see Ellen waving her bangled wrists around. “She would never even know about it!”
“I would know,” I said.
“Don’t be naïve,” my mother hissed. She’d never been able to manage me, but she knew how to deploy my least favorite accusations. I felt a powerful and refreshing lividness. Why? Because it was Gigi? I suppose if anything was sacred, it was her.
“She claims she’s seen an intruder twice,” I said, returning to the facts.
“A stalker?” Ellen scoffed. “In TheSorrento?”
“Al is hardly a paragon of vigilance.”
“Open your eyes,” my mother snapped. “This is your inheritance, too. At the rate you’re going, you’ll need it more than any of us.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Though I knew perfectly well. Each of them with their stately husbands.
“Stop it,” said Ellen. “Can we not all agree that Buck must go?”
I kept silent.
“Good,” said Ellen.
My mother: “You’ll file the report?”
The elevator opened to admit a woman I recognized as Buck’s daughter. She had two first names I could never recall and seemed impossibly pleasant.
I hung up and greeted her. Had she heard about the stalker? It took only a moment to match her voice to the sticky-sweet tone from the landline. “An intruder?” She frowned over the news, contemplative with true concern. Teens had been breaking and entering for opioids downtown, but nothing this far up the boulevard. “I doubt they’d pick a building with security!” I was struck by her credulous expression and bad skin. Her air of exhausted good nature. She had the perfect face for a campaign ad.
During cocktail hour, I told Gigi I was installing a chain-lock on the mezzanine. Since scotch-taping my hair there, I’d found no empirical evidence of any intruder.
Gigi frowned. “It will look like a motel.” Then she stood, alarmed by a sudden thought. “Did you see him?”
“See who?”
“My stalker!”
“No.”
“Oh.” She sat back down. “They were very hairy,” she mused.
We’d returned to the knees. “What color?”
“White.”
I glanced at Buck with renewed suspicion. “He must be older.”
“White skin,” Gigi corrected. “Fair hair.”
At The Sorrento, this hardly narrowed things. “Do you have any valuables here?” I asked her.
“I keep everything important in the building safe.”
Buck joined us. “Smart woman.”
“Not much there,” Gigi went on. “But you should know where to check if I die.”
“Gigi.”
“Papers, mostly. I donated the jewelry.” Gigi drank deeply. “Don’t tell Ellen. She’s sentimental about that sort of thing.”
“What was the cause?” I asked innocently.
“One of Shireen’s auctions. Those pieces were the belle of the ball.”
After my grandfather died, Gigi went from quietly neutralizing his vote at the polls to donating large chunks of his estate to his age-old enemy, the Democratic party. There had been a fair measure of glee in it for her, but she couldn’t seem to beckon it now.
Buck grunted his disapproval. “You want to end up on a fixed income?”
I wondered if Buck was attempting a joke. Gigi waved him off. “The auction was years ago.”
I persisted. “I’ve always admired your purge, Gigi. I tell that story to women all the time, and it really moves them. You’ve inspired a lot of giving.”
Buck grew irritable. “Fools.” He gripped his armrests as though experiencing turbulence. Gigi looked irked by my antics, wise to what I was doing. He muttered louder. “A man works his whole life for his family, and how is he thanked?”
“Fix me a drink, Buck.” Gigi held her glass in the air. “My hips ache.” He twitched some more but did as she asked. Gigi turned to me. “Mind your manners.”
“Buck seems awfully concerned about the state of the family coffers,” I said.
“Then you have that in common!”
“I’m concerned about you,” I hissed.
“And I’m concerned about Buck.”
“Why?”
“He’s right you know,” she snapped. “A fixed income is no picnic.”
Buck returned with her drink.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, looking between us. It seemed he was not entirely oblivious.
“Nina was bullying me,” Gigi said, with a mean look. “She thinks I should wear white to the wedding.”
I excused myself from dinner. The beach was pretty but too calm. I walked until a canal of mangroves bisected the sand and I had to turn back. I sensed it was a character flaw that beaches made me nervous. Too much openness. Sky. Water. Reflect! the beach entreated. People always said I took after her, even if they never meant it entirely as a compliment. The comparison pleased me. Gigi was sharp. I did not understand her withdrawal and disinterest. Her snappish defense of Buck, of all people.
Back in the elevator, I searched the address and phone number for Adult Protective Services. I couldn’t bring myself to call, but I sent an email.
Outside the elevator, the waterfall crashed and echoed. In the condo, I listened at Gigi’s door. The television roared. Her rest had always been fitful, and the sound of the television bore no relation to whether she watched or slept. Buck was in there now. How could he stand it? I lifted a box of Cocoa Puffs from the pantry and ate them in defiance on the tasseled cream sofa. I had four days. I was her favorite. That was plenty.
At lunch, over a salad of minced ham on English muffins, Gigi encouraged me to get out more.
“Gigi,” I said, placing my muffin on the corner of the sink. “I’m here for you.”
“Honey,” she said, with a trace of her old tone, “you’re here because your mother thinks you can change my mind about the wedding. You can’t, so you may as well take it easy. Go to the Beach Club.”
I decided to admit nothing. “Will you go with me?”
“Sure,” said Gigi. “That sounds nice.”
“Today?”
She frowned. “Buck will be back by four.”
“Tell him we’re having a girl’s night.”
Gigi was firm. “If I don’t feed him, he just drinks and eats a can of bar nuts.”
“He’s a grown man.”
Gigi looked at me blankly.
“What about his daughter?”
“Darryl Ann has enough on her plate.” Gigi sealed the tub of ham and ran the water.
I flailed for a strategy. “I miss when it was just us.”
Gigi cocked her head. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-five.”
“And isn’t that old enough to think about other people?”
“You are my other person.”
“Nina,” she set her dish in the sink. “You’ve been here a few days—”
“Nearly a week—”
“—and it’s been lovely.” She looked at me pointedly. “But you’ll be off again before you know it.”
I knew the punch line. She didn’t have to say it. I grabbed for the dishrag, but Gigi boxed me from the sink. I hovered beside her, pathetically empty-handed. “We’re just worried about you,” I said, retreating into the cowardly “we.”
She set down the rag. “How do I look?” She faced me, almost posing. She held out her arms and swiveled her hips. “Well?” she demanded. “How do I look?”
“You look great,” I said, defeated. She did. Plump, tan, bare-footed, hair bobbed, fresh hips to steer her whole torso. Attempting to wield power over Gigi was a farce. She was the source.
“Good enough,” she said, turning back to the sink.
“Too good for Buck,” I mumbled. I couldn’t help it. “Will you at least be protecting yourself?”
“You make it sound like I need body armor.” She was taunting me.
“Confirm or deny.”
She paused. “I haven’t decided.” She held out a soapy hand to prevent my retort. “Do not for one more minute try to pretend this is for my own good.” The dish clattered lightly onto the porcelain. “I’ve asked for help with one thing.” She was shaking her head into the basin. “For someone to catch my stalker.”
“Alleged stalker,” I snapped. My comment managed to actually deflate her.
“I’m surprised at you,” she murmured, and left. Gigi, in retreat! Talking with her had become like walking through a familiar room in the dark, after someone has rearranged the furniture. I finished the dishes, went upstairs. Her door was shut. Downstairs, I paced around, but was sick of seeing myself in every surface. I grabbed my suit and the cabana key.
The cabana smelled of mildew and Coppertone. Beside a rack of faded beach chairs, a storage shelf held a handle of Svedka, a case of Tropicana, and a selection of insulated tumblers bearing the logos of golf invitationals. The tepid overhead fixture flickered then snuffed itself, but the sun through the slats was enough to see by.
The cup of vodka and juice tasted hot and disgusting until I recalled the ice machine. The pulp barnacled the cubes and the whole thing looked radioactive. I drank it quickly and felt better.
The clamor by the pool was too much, so I opted for a lounger set apart by fan palms and a low concave wall painted silver. I knew this wall had a function, but I liked it mainly for the privacy it afforded. I lay there, letting the sun bake my thoughts into little crisps, and fell asleep.
“Sorry to disturb,” said the boy from the elevator. “But I think you’re burning.”
I looked down, feeling the truth of his statement in the tight, hot skin on the tops of my thighs, arms, and chest. “Shit,” I said, sitting up.
“The reflectors’ll get you.”
“What’s your name again?”
“Drew,” he smiled, offering his shirt. “Want to share my umbrella?”
In truth, I wanted to keep his shirt and dispense with his company, but flirting with a ruddy-cheeked catalogue specimen was the least I could do while Mateo was out there, still married and not calling.
In truth, I wanted to keep his shirt and dispense with his company, but flirting with a ruddy-cheeked catalogue specimen was the least I could do while Mateo was out there, still married and not calling.
I followed Drew to the shaded loungers as he spoke of his own grandmother’s struggle with retirement. “I’m the cheer package.”
“Lucky her,” I played along.
“And you?” Drew asked.
“I’m here to break up my grandmother’s wedding.”
“No shit.” He grinned. “For real?”
My skin, beneath his shirt, began to pulse. “Younger man,” I added. “Republican.”
Drew’s enthusiasm dimmed, but after another of his full-body surveys, I saw he wasn’t going to let my politics bother him.
I adjusted to stay in the shade. “I wish there were more umbrellas.”
“My Gran loves complaining about the condo fees.”
I snorted. “The waterfall?”
“They truck in the beach sand, too.” He stretched his shoulders showily. “She’s thinking of suing. She doesn’t believe sand could possibly cost what the Condo Association says it does.” Drew had muscles that could be identified in tidy, hairless groups and I found this sweet and obnoxious.
“We should hang out,” Drew said when I stood.
“Hang out,” I repeated.
“Yeah.” He found nothing overfamiliar about jabbing two fingers into my waist. “Hang out.”
Was he leering? Or simply squinting into high sun?
Cocktail hour was quiet. I didn’t bother with my hair and could tell it was an effort for Gigi to withhold comment. By five, my skin began to emit a thrumming heat. Gigi gave me two aspirin and a gin and tonic, her version of babying. Her look said I’d done this to myself.
I went to bed early but woke from a fever dream in which I was falling. I landed with a thud on the Resolute Desk. Mateo and Drew had merged as President, and when they stood, they were wearing Keds. It was an obscene time to be awake, but when I stumbled into the kitchen, I found Gigi there with a bowl of cereal. She was reading the paper.
“Are those Cocoa Puffs?”
Gigi squinted. “So?”
“I thought they were for the twins.”
“You think Alison bought these?” It was true, my sister was not a laissez-faire parent. “What can I say,” Gigi went on. “I just—love them.” She threw up her hands as though she spoke about physical attraction or where we go after death. “You look awful.”
“I fell asleep by the reflector wall.”
Gigi nodded. “Stay inside today.” She looked down at her paper. “Have you read this?” She tilted the page. Seeing the headline in print made the news itself seem quaint.
“Obscene.”
Gigi shook her head. “They’re not even trying to hide it.”
I considered insinuating all the obvious similarities between the men in question and her very own fiancée, but I was too tired to summon my rutted schtick. My skin felt like a tomato’s in a pan. I shook my head. “It never ends.” I ate my own bowl of Cocoa Puffs in silence, cherishing it, afraid to disburse the density of this old, familiar atmosphere.
By midday, I had accrued several messages. UPDATES PLEASE NINA, read my mother’s latest. From my sister: I THOUGHT YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE A STRATEGIC OPERATIONS SPECIALIST. The wedding was in two days.
Darryl Ann boarded the elevator on Gigi’s floor. “Your grandmother is such a blessing,” she gushed as we descended. “My dad was so depressed before. Now look at him.”
I found myself incapable of assessing her sincerity. How did she truly feel about her father moving on so quickly? “I imagine it was a real shock to lose a partner of fifty years,” I said instead.
“My mother, their home—it would be too much for me, that’s for sure.”
“Their home?” I inquired politely.
“The Sorrento was always a bit rich for their pension,” Darryl Ann confided. “But lately? With all the fees? No way. We’ve been trying to convert our garage, but it’s impossible to get a contractor between hurricanes. When he moved in with May, it was a lifesaver, let me tell you.”
She chatted on, but I was ill-equipped to do anything but nod. I suppose I had stopped expecting an explanation, but here it was. My dismay surprised me. Was Gigi on a guilt trip? Or had she been fully conned?
Daryll Ann squeezed my hand before bustling into the lobby. “Love is a beautiful thing!”
I wore a red dress for cocktail hour. Unflattering, but it was the garment that touched my skin in the fewest possible places.
I was at the bar when Gigi started screaming. “It’s him! Hey you—it’s him! Hey, I see you. Hey you!” Buck twisted in his chair but did not rise. Gigi was pointing at the mezzanine, yelling and spilling her drink. I darted around but saw nothing. I listened for the door, but was distracted by the scream of my skin where Gigi had grabbed me. I would comfort her. I would go after him. I couldn’t organize my thoughts. “It’s him!” she kept repeating.
“Should I make chase?” The phrase came straight from a cozy mystery.
“White shorts!” she called, as I jogged up the stairs and out the second-floor door, realizing too late I’d ruined my own trap. White shorts. White knees. There was no one in the hall. I scanned the empty atrium from above. The waterfall obliterated all sound. The stairwell was silent. I ducked into the office, but Al had seen nothing.
At the pool, the usual scene. A hand on my waist made me jump.
“Hey,” said Drew. “You okay?” His breath smelled of rum and Coke. I headed for the beach and Drew followed. “How’s the burn?” he asked. “I’ve got aloe in my bag.”
“Did you see a man in white shorts come through here?”
“What sort of man?”
In this case, I couldn’t blame Drew for being useless. From the boardwalk, I surveyed the sand. “Can you see?”
“See what?”
“Help me! Is there a man in white shorts running in either direction?”
Drew peered around dutifully but shook his head. “Want to tell me what this is about?”
“Someone’s been breaking into my grandmother’s condo,” I said, leaning back against the railing, disappointed beyond all logic.
“Can I fix you a drink?” Drew touched my waist again. “Looks like you could use one.”
I brandished my key to Buck’s cabana.
“I’ve always wanted one of these,” Drew said, looking around the dank closet. “It’s like a hideout.” He shut the slatted door to make his point.
“For an alcoholic.” I grasped for a tumbler in the dim.
“Or other things.” Drew was suddenly close, pressing my body into the shelving unit. His mouth latched onto my neck and his pelvis ground my hip bones into the rough edge of plywood. I grunted with pain and knocked over the vodka.
“Whoa.” I righted the bottle, which had already glugged over my dress and onto the floor. This was not my first groping, but it had been years since I’d encountered this brand of it, suffused in the smell of sunscreen, vodka and orange juice. “Stop,” I said. “Stop now.” He slid his hands from my waist to my arms. My burned skin seared as he squeezed and I screamed. The sound sent him backwards, though he looked disgruntled more than guilty. I fled the cabana to poolside looks, and marched back into the building.
In the forgotten powder room, the rug soothed me. I blotted the dress. My skin was so angry, so red and tender and betrayed. It throbbed, and my heart hammered, a strange racket that would not slow. I didn’t know why I felt so upset. I had endured worse.
The man with the knees could have hidden in the trash room or ducked inside a condo. Hardly anyone locked their doors here. Did Gigi know Buck had nowhere else to go? Did she accept his proposal under duress? The vodka fumes thickened but I refused to wretch. The roar of the lobby smacked me.
In the office, Gigi and Buck were speaking to Al. When she spotted me through the glass, Gigi rushed out. “Did you find him?”
“Of course she didn’t find him,” Buck bellowed, wheezing behind her. “There’s nothing to find!”
I shook my head at Gigi, who looked defeated or, perhaps, frightened. Of the man? Or the chance that there had never been a man at all?
Buck cackled in her face.
“Go away,” I told Buck.
He drew himself up. “I live here.”
My skin throbbed. My heart continued to beat with unusual fervor.
“Nina—” Gigi’s voice was sharp again. I looked at her, in her linen shift and sparkling shoes. All I remembered of Maeve was that she had terrible posture and smoked over the pool. “He’s taking advantage of you,” I said.
“May,” Buck barked with his schoolboy’s bluster, “I’ve had about enough of this.”
“May. Maeve. You barely had to change a syllable!” I sneered. “Though you certainly upgraded otherwise.”
I suppose I was the one to approach Buck, to bring myself in range of him. There was a choreography to baiting someone that came naturally. He looked down at me with offense and hatred, his powdery gingivitis smell all at once too pungent and everywhere. With no warning, he reared back and spit.
The gob sprayed my neck and cheek. I felt powerfully that I must keep the spit from entering my body through my eyes or mouth. My breathing quickened, had never slowed, and I could no longer hear Gigi, who was using a tone of voice I had always dreaded. I’d never had a panic attack, but my short, fast breaths suggested some onrushing rupture. I climbed into the basin and stepped under the waterfall.
The force was pummeling and I struggled to breathe, but in a new way. I’d once watched my sister look down at her thrashing newborns after trying every trick she had to soothe them. She wailed right into their faces. Stunned and befuddled, they quieted.
Then, abruptly, the water was gone. Its source, two stories up, had been cut. I looked out at Buck and Gigi, fuming beside the basin. Inside the office, Al was on the telephone.
“Get out of there,” Gigi snapped at me. “Buck?” He turned to her. “You should go.”
“I live here,” he said again, though this time with less certainty.
“You spit on my granddaughter,” Gigi stated.
Buck whirled toward the basin and back, as though conflicted over where to direct his ire. His body jerked with age and discombobulation.
“The wedding’s off,” Gigi informed him. Her voice had become soft and rueful. “Al will call Darryl Ann.”
Even Buck knew not to argue. He looked stunned. When his gaze swiveled back to me, his nostrils flared, but he said nothing.
Gigi turned and walked carefully toward the elevators.
I began to shiver. Was this triumph?
Inside her bedroom, I could hear the television. When Gigi didn’t answer, I entered anyway.
She was slumped against the pillows. “I wanted to help him,” Gigi announced, glaring stubbornly at the screen.
“He was using you,” I said. I didn’t like seeing her neck that way.
“You think I didn’t know?” Gigi made a sad, tired sound. “He’s lived down the hall for twenty-five years. Daryll Ann has three kids and a sick husband. What’s the harm in having Buck in the guest room if it helps them?”
“He was sleeping in here!”
Gigi straightened and it was a relief to see her neck correct itself. “He was sleeping in here because you arrived and took the guest room! It was very inconvenient.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. So she pitied him. Fine. “But why marriage?”
Gigi closed her eyes. “Buck is a proud man.”
I couldn’t bear how forlorn she looked. Weary and, with every moment, less angry and more defeated. “So take him back,” I said. A flail.
“He spit on you,” said Gigi. “I can’t forgive that.” Her tone had turned hard and aloof.
My dress had become a cold wet skin. “It’s my fault, really. I baited him.”
“Your judgement,” Gigi stated. “I’m worried about it.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated.
Gigi closed her eyes. “I’m tired now.”
I hesitated. “What about Buck?”
Gigi opened her eyes but wouldn’t look at me. “He’ll have to find another way.”
I couldn’t help it. I continued. “Would you really have left them everything?”
Gigi looked at her hands. “I was considering it.”
“Why?”
“It’s done none of you any favors.”
“Even me?”
She frowned at the hem of my unflattering dress. “You’re dripping on the rug.”
In the guest bath, I stripped and swallowed some aspirin, but as I drank from the faucet, the old trick of the triple mirror took hold. The worlds opened up on either side. Me, again, forever until death. Red, lonely, compromised. It took three tries to free myself. The water gushed. I had to close my eyes to lean in again to shut it off.
The robe was cool against my skin as I crept back beneath the cover of the television. Gigi did not stir. Her eyes were closed, her neck lolled back.
I sat, hoping she’d wake like she used to, at any true noise or movement. Immune to the raving television yet attuned to the living world. But my presence didn’t register, even when I reclined on the far side of the bed and felt the dip of it, her divot so much deeper in the soft mattress. “I’ve had twenty more years to dig it,” was her line.
“It’s good you’re spending time with her,” Al had said when I arrived. “Though if anyone could live forever, it’s your grandmother.”
The man on the television was yelling. The woman on the television was yelling. I shut off the television, which expired in its old-fashioned way, with an audible hiss. Beside me, Gigi stirred. She groped for the remote. I grasped her hand and held it.
For the last thirteen years, wherever I’ve taught, I’ve always been one of the only teachers of color. Having taught college, high school, and middle school, I’ve navigated each space as “other.” I often feel like an outsider with the very people I work with, in part because so few of them understand what it’s like to regularly be a minority, often the minority.
Every day I walk through crowded hallways: teachers, students, and staff. I rarely, if ever, see a face that looks like mine. A lot of folks experience this, but it’s the bigger picture that matters: American schools continue to be as segregated as they were before the 1954 Supreme Court decision to desegregate them. There are Black communities and white communities, and there continues to be unequal distribution of resources among their education systems. This is nothing new because the racist history of the American education system is bound to the history of racism in America, but it’s important for people to remember that it remains the status quo.
These days, however, the racism is subtle, hidden in microaggressions. Discrimination is coded in policies and politically-correct language: “failing schools” (Black schools), “those students” (Black students), “remedial classes” (Black classes), “low-income communities” (Black communities). These are buzzwords—dog whistles, if you will—and they’re used every single day to describe Black students, the measures employed to discipline them, and the lessons used to teach them, particularly those who attend white schools. And the crux of this, as a Black educator in a school system staffed by primarily white teachers, is that I feel responsible to defend these marginalized students—even though I am also in the margins myself.
If I’m honest, I’m not always thinking about my race when I stand in front of my students. I am their English teacher—only their English teacher. They don’t look at me and see the only Black teacher in the building. And yet my experiences as a person of color are fully tied to who I am as an educator. I used to ask myself if I could teach a book like To Kill a Mockingbird without teaching as a Black man. I wondered how I might react when a student highlighted the n-word, saying, “Mr. Loeb, look, it’s your favorite word!”
I feel responsible to defend these marginalized students—even though I am also in the margins myself
For everything I’ve written about my experience in high school, I currently teach at the high school I attended. Even though that was twenty years ago, not much has changed. In many ways, I move through this building the same way I did back then then, my past curriculum on loop. I dole out old copies of classics: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Crucible, Romeo and Juliet, Catcher in the Rye, twenty years of dates and lists of kids’ names crossed out. Even the same teachers are here, grayed and wrinkled, still lecturing the same lectures: Christopher Columbus, a renowned explorer. Andrew Jackson, a war hero. Thomas Jefferson, a visionary. Still these versions of a tainted America. And still diversity is lacking. Black and brown kids remain on the margins, peppered in one or two seats in the classroom. Sometimes, I look at those kids, and it’s like they see through me. Without saying anything, we know we don’t belong here.
As much as our society has changed since I was a boy, this place has stayed the same. It is a throwback to an American culture that, for many people, is in demand today; it is the perfect picture of “Make America Great Again,” or more simply: it’s just white.
This small non-diverse town in New Jersey is where I’m from, and for many reasons, too many parts of America are still very similar. As a boy of Black and Jewish descent, I clearly did not fit in with my classmates with my black, curly hair, brown skin, and thick lips. I was a thorough mix of Judeo-African heritage. Going through old class pictures, the kids lined up by height, the teacher on the end of the cast of students, I was always the only brown face, teacher and students included, meaning that the only people of color I saw with any regularity were family members, and the few other non-white kids in school. This was especially obvious in middle and high school, when children and teenagers began to understand how and why they all looked alike.
I questioned why my parents moved here, but for the twenty-plus years that we lived in this town, they argued one point: good schools. Today I wonder how a good school can also be the place where kid after kid asks their only Black classmate why Black people do whatever it is they think Black people do? How can a good school also be a place where that kid’s white teachers ask him why Black people can say the n-word in rap songs and they can’t? I’ll never forget that time during my sophomore year when we watched Roots in U.S. History, and my classmates stared at me as if I was an oddity, a spectacle, as Kunta Kinte was lashed. Or those Friday nights when I attended football games and my peers drove pick-up trucks adorned with fifteen-foot Confederate flags to the mounts, those flags waving in the breeze of an autumn night as Lynyrd Skynyrd blasted from a radio..
These things happened to me then, and they’re still happening to Black kids in white schools today. I used to fantasize that had been lucky enough to have had a Black teacher at my school, they would have understood what I was going through. This could have made a tremendous impact on my education. Having a Black teacher matters because even the most sympathetic white teacher in an entire school doesn’t understand what it’s like being Black in America. That’s something only Black people can appreciate.
Even the most sympathetic white teacher in an entire school doesn’t understand what it’s like being Black in America
I returned to this community to be the teacher I never had. I returned to find that boy I was, a teenager who sometimes felt afraid in this hostile place and also angry to be the other. I came back home, even though it did not always feel like home because I wanted to make a change. I believe a school like mine in a community like this needs teachers like me. And as much as my Black students need representation, they need to identify with the teacher in front of them, my white students need Black teachers too.
New Jersey teachers of color make up 16% of the state’s teacher workforce, and because the Black population in my town was almost nonexistent, this number was even smaller. In comparison, other communities where minority students are the majority are still educated by people who, for the most part, don’t look like them. Representation matters, especially in education. New Jersey, the most densely populated state in America, has a real shortage of Black teachers, but even across the nation, Black teachers still remain among the most underrepresented demographics in teaching compared to their percentage of the general population — and the student population.
I think the reason is a self-fulling prophecy – Black kids don’t have Black teachers, so they don’t consider it a viable career path. From kindergarten through high school, I never had any Black teachers. As a student who struggled academically and behaviorally, I know this was partly due to the racism and microaggressions I experienced. I was ostracized by my peers for being different, and my challenges were not recognized by teachers, administrators, and guidance counselors. But what if there had been even one teacher who understood how I felt? How would have that changed my educational trajectory? To be seen, to be valued—these things matter. I became a teacher in spite of what happened to me, almost spitefully, to say I will be the minority teacher for the minorities. But I’ve also spent the majority of my career in white schools, in white spaces. They are all I know. I am a product of a good American education, I teach at “good schools,” and am also very much a cog in this gear of a broken education system.
Growing up, I remember watching countless renditions of teacher-centered film and television: Boy Meets World, Dead Poets Society, Dawson’s Creek, Mr. Holland’s Opus, among many others, and the white teachers of those shows and movies seemed to be the idealization of what education looked like. It didn’t look like me, and I never saw myself. On the contrary, Black education has often been portrayed by struggle: Lean on Me, Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers. The problem is that if you continue to only show Black people in education as one thing, that is what people believe.
But what if America could see all that Black teachers can do? What if, instead of portraying the same stereotypes of Black education and Black students in film and television, you showed Blackness as central to the success of these students? What if these shows celebrated race without being defined by it? Through film and television, I knew some great Black teachers: Mr. Hightower (TheSteve Harvey Show), Mr. Cooper (Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper) and Sister Mary Clarence (Sister Act).
Their race is part of the narrative but it’s never the driving force
That shift is happening now, specifically, the depiction of Black schools and Black educators in the award-winning series, Abbott Elementary. These characters, Janine Teagues (Quinta Brunson), Gregeory Eddie (Tyler James Williams), Barbara Howard (Sheryl Lee Ralph), and Ava Coleman (Janelle James) are Black educators who are not defined by their Blackness. Their race is part of the narrative but it’s never the driving force. And this is what Black kids need; I’d argue this is what all of us need. We need to see Black educators in schools, positively portrayed in schools. We need to see that Black schools, like the fictional Abbott Elementary in Philadelphia, can be great schools.
Abbott Elementary proves that schools serving majority Black and brown student populations not only deserve the best teachers, but also that those teachers have an important story to tell. Quinta Brunson, a product of the public school system in Philadelphia, defies the genre of American comedy by avoiding the racial and socio-economic stereotypes. Brunson recognizes place: Abbott Elementary is loudly and proudly Philadelphian, as is Brunson herself; She honors its people, like Philly-proud Melissa Schemmenti (Lisa Ann Walter), and she renders the very real experiences of being a teacher with humor and authenticity: parent-teacher conferences, field trips, the PTO, classroom management, the board of education—and never does she ever exploit stereotypes for a laugh. On the contrary; she leans in, doubling down on storytelling that is both Black but is also universal. She grounds her characters in their humanity. I believe her nuanced writing will create more teachers, much like Glee did.
I see the ghost of myself sitting in a chair in the back of the classroom
I’ve been in a classroom for most of my life. As both a teacher and a student, I have felt both invisible and hyper visible because of the color of my skin. I have been challenged and have battled with my race since I was a boy and still as a man. Even though I have been teaching for over a decade, I am still looking for representation in education. I do not have a Black colleague in my school, but I do have Gregory Eddie in Abbott Elementary, which helps me feel seen, especially as a Black male teacher. Gregory Eddie is epitome of what a teacher should be, what kind of teacher I want to be, one that is just driven by a love for simply teaching kids. All of which has nothing to do with Mr. Eddie’s Blackness, and yet, seeing a Black man in this role, fiction or nonfiction, will be paramount in some boys’ sense of self.
Sometimes when I’m in front of my students, I see the ghost of myself sitting in a chair in the back of the classroom. I see that kid I was, a teenager with a head of zig-zagging cornrows, a pair of baggy jeans, a FUBU jersey, Timberland boots. I see a kid who stood out because he was different but how he tried to hide but couldn’t. I see him sitting there and how he pretends to listen but isn’t, how he avoids my stare when I ask for a volunteer to answer a question. I see this boy, and I can tell he’s angry and wants to tell someone something, but he doesn’t. His eyes connect with mine, but then he looks away because he knows saying it isn’t worth it; he knows that no one will listen. I want to stop my lesson—lecturing on Of Mice and Men, on how Crooks was really the hero—and tell him that everything will be okay, that I’ll listen. I’ll care, even if other teachers don’t. I’ll tell him that despite the guidance counselor who told him not to apply to college, that despite the bodies that he bruised, and that bruised him when those kids called him the n-word; despite the classes he failed and all the times he was called down to the vice principal’s office, even though he barely is going to graduate high school, he will return to this place to be the teacher he never had.
In a place where your very existence is threatened and your survival uncertain, every form of art should revolt and proclaim, “look, I am here and I will live.” In Africa, queer people are at risk of being lynched by mobs or killed. These acts are not just individually motivated but endorsed by the government, either overtly or covertly. An evidence of this is the recent anti-gay laws in Zambia and Uganda. This prohibition of queerness is not limited to the above African countries but it’s prevalent throughout most of the continent.
With this, queer people are forced to live in fear and in secret. Queer writers are silenced and censored, afraid of expressing themselves and their sexuality in their writings. However, amidst all this darkness are writers who have works, in Ellen Bass’ words “spacious enough to hold all the contradictions: the violence waged against gay people and the body’s insistence on love, the tenderness of flesh and the carnage of war, remembering and forgetting, silence and song.”
These writers write about queerness with so much vulnerability and nuance. In their books, they sing the song of liberation, of survival. They interrogate the nature of God and love in relation to restrictions placed on them. These writers are not afraid to speak their truth, their fear and their hopes. I invite you to come into their light.
Sacrament of Bodies is a poetry collection interrogating what it means to be queer and Nigerian. With great musicality, Oriogun weaves poems that sing of a people yearning for freedom. One cannot help but notice the vulnerability in this book, the urgency with which each word carries. Oriogun splays the body on an autopsy table, dissects it and within it recognizes the desire to find love in “whatever body that gives them home”. An elegy revealing the ordeals of being queer, Oriogun manages to dance, with such boldness and courage, in the face of death. Even with all the killings surrounding them, dancing to Oriogun, it is a way of escaping the cruelness of their country. In their words “I danced as if I knew every song had a door.”
Logan February is a Nigerian poet whose verse is imbued with a solemn and rhythmic energy. They contemplate the burden of possessing a desire that is taboo and the ache of tiptoeing the night, searching for someone to share that yearning with. In their words: “Lord, do you know how hard it is to find good dick?” The beauty of this collection is not just in the questioning or navigation of the forbidden, but in the way Logan juxtaposes the spiritual with the sensual. They do not question God’s position, but rather they report their maltreatment, their hidden desires, their adventures to a higher power. This is a book that gives a different perspective of queerness and spirituality.
In The Death of Vivek Oji, Nigerian writer Akwaeke Emezi shines a light on the treatment of nonbinary and trans people in Nigeria. The main character Vivek is genderqueer and unable to live an authentic life, their femininity leads to family members insisting that they’ve been possessed by demons. Set mostly in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the novel opens with the dead body of Vivek deposited on his mother’s doorstep and the story unfolds in a series of flashbacks. The book explores the complexity of being genderqueer in a place where your very existence is seen as an abomination, the constant pursuit for identity that feels true to who you are, and the need to belong by whatever means possible.
This YA novel follows Abu and Karl, teenagers in London who are best friends. It’s 2011 and the shooting of a Black British man by the police leads to riots engulfing the city. Fleeing the city, Karl travels to Port Harcourt in Nigeria to find his father who he has never met. Karl’s reunion doesn’t turn out the way he imagined, but he forges a connection with his cousin and befriends an activist protesting the Niger Delta environmental disaster. Overlooking these series of events is Esu, the Yoruba trickster god. A heartfelt exploration of transgender identity, race, and friendship by a talented Nigerian German writer.
God’s Children Are Little Broken Things is a paean to the depth of love and the ability to sustain it despite societal pressure and the threat of harm. The main story in this short story collection is about Lotanna and Kamsi, college students in Kano, northern Nigeria, who have to keep their attraction to each other hidden from the public. “The Dreamer’s Litany” is an insightful excavation of power dynamics, told through the lens of a series of transactional sexual encounters between a struggling business owner and a wealthy benefactor. Ifeakandu’s characters come alive through their choices and the complexities of their lives.
Originally written in French, Cameroonian writer Frieda Ekotto’s Don’t Whisper Too Much is a sapphic love story, the first African work of fiction to depict lesbian relationships with tenderness, instead of condemnation. The book follows Ada as she comes of age in the outskirts of a village and falls in with Siliki, an older disabled woman. In an interview, Ekotto says this book is about confinement and “the impossibility of feeling free, of being able to participate in the world without feeling constrained by one’s race, one’s gender, one’s sexual orientation etc. In a sense you’re never free to do what you want because of all the outside forces that control you and control everything else. Confinement also has to do more with language, has to do with my position in the world as an African woman.”
Nigerian writer Buki Papillon merges the literal and the figurative, the concrete and the abstract with the introduction of an intersex character in this searingly honest and questioning book. In An Ordinary Wonder, Otolorin is not just seen going through the psychological uncertainty of identity, but also a physical reckoning as they are born with both male and female organs. Papillonexplores the insistence of heterosexuality, especially in cases of boys, as a product of the hegemonic, patriarchal preference of a male child. When Oto chooses womanhood, , her parents reprimand her and society responds with cruelty and mockery, insisting that she is only allowed to be a boy. At boarding school, away from her family, she thrives, even as she is forced to hide her true self. Oto hopes that through hardship and sheer willpower, she’ll be able to win a scholarship to the U.S. and finally live a life of her own choosing. But a tragedy forces her to reckon with an uncertain future.
When I created Weird Sister, a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of feminism, literature, and pop culture, in 2014, I was craving a space where feminist poets and other writers could comment on the literary and pop culture that excited us, made us mad, and everything in between—and where these conversations could grow and build upon one another. This past February, Feminist Press published an anthology of writing from Weird Sister, The Weird Sister Collection, taking writing from the blog and moving it into print for posterity, where it will rest on a shelf IRL for future readers to engage with in new ways. “Feminist anthologies make it possible to ensure knowledge is not lost,” as Becca Klaver, a feminist literature scholar and Weird Sister contributor puts it. “It gives us something to pass along that the next generation can hold in their hands.”
As Klaver points to, anthologies are the books we so often turn to to familiarize ourselves with schools of thought, canons, catalogs of work; in short to learn our literary and political history. Anthologies do the vital work of centering marginalized perspectives left out of the mainstream; they document a moment in time and also move the conversation forward. For example, the now canonical collection This Bridge Called My Back began with a call for submissions that focused on critiquing white women’s racism within feminist movements in the late 1970s and early ’80s, but developed into a more profound project focused on radical women of color’s perspectives and voices—an urgent intervention, the results of which are still felt in social movements today.
Anthologies turn what would otherwise be a disparate array of texts—scannable online or in the hard drives or notebooks or books or inside the brains of various writers—and pull them all together in one cohesive, easily digestible bite. While I was putting together The Weird Sister Collection, I kept returning to a trusty stack of feminist anthologies from my own library for guidance—on what, and how, and why, to assemble this next anthology. They remind me of all the many feminist literary legacies that have paved the way for writers today, and those that are yet to come. Here’s my love letter to those books.
No More Masks: An Anthology of Poems by Women, edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass
During the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, feminist anthologies proliferated as part of the Women in Print movement. The first anthology to focus exclusively on poetry by women, this collection of writing spanning 75 years addresses themes particular to women’s lives, tapping into the second wave ethos of the personal as political. No More Masks includes work by 87 poets such as Gertrude Stein, Gwendolyn Brooks, June Jordan, and Judy Grahn.
This hallmark anthology moved the margin to the center, interjecting the voices and priorities of women of color into a feminist movement that all too often focused on middle class, straight, white women’s experiences. Bringing an intersectional feminist lens to topics spanning history, class, homophobia, spirituality, and language, This Bridge gathers personal essays, criticism, interviews, poetry and more from iconic feminist writers including Pat Parker, The Combahee River Collective, Audre Lorde, Cheryl Clarke, Norma Alarcón, and many others.
Coining the term “third wave feminism” in a 1992 piece for Ms. that responded to Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas, Rebecca Walker famously wrote, “I am not a postfeminism feminist. I am the Third Wave.” To Be Real expands on this notion of a new wave of feminist activism in the 1990s, engaging with the issues that mattered most to young people in this era. The book gathers essays on topics like sexuality, marriage, motherhood, work, and pop culture from writers including bell hooks and Veronica Webb, all sandwiched between a foreword from Gloria Steinem and an afterword by Audre Lorde—feminist pioneers handing the reins over to the next generation.
“Like many other women of color,” the editors write in the introduction to Colonize This!, “the two of us first learned the language of feminism in college through a white, middle-class perspective, one form of colonization.” This critical third wave feminist text explores crucial topics like sexual harassment, mental illness, the AIDS crisis, and Islamophobia in post-9/11 America through a lens that centers family and community, redefining women-of-color feminisms for a new era.
In the introduction to their 2000 book Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards describe an iteration of third wave feminism that they called “Girlie:” “If feminism aims to create a world where our standard of measurement doesn’t start with a white-male heterosexual nucleus, then believing that feminine things are weak means that we’re believing our own bad press.” Gurlesque taps into this ethos, collecting poetry by women and femme writers including Cathy Park Hong, Ariana Reines, Dorothea Lasky, and Weird Sister contributor Geraldine Kim that embrace femininity and the grotesque in all their complexity. Keep an eye out for the second expanded edition, Electric Gurlesque, coming later this year from Saturnalia.
The first anthology of its kind, Troubling the Line brings together the work of 55 trans and genderqueer poets spanning styles and subject matter. Trace Peterson writes in the book’s introduction, “we are interested in helping make more widely available in poetry different kinds of inbetweenness in relation to gender identification.” Troubling the Line does the vital work of documenting a trans poetic lineage, collecting poems by Dawn Lundy Martin, Eileen Myles, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodrán, Stephanie Burt, Weird Sister contributor Zoe Tuck, and many others, along with a poetics statement from each contributor. (Check out Peterson’s incredible “pre-narrative” exploration of kari edwards, her mentor and one of the poets featured in Troubling the Line, in The Weird Sister Collection.)
Cooper, Morris, and Boylorn started the Crunk Feminist Collective blog in 2010 because “their academic day jobs were lacking in conversations they actually wanted to have—relevant, real conversations about how race and gender politics intersect with pop culture and current events.” Throughout the heyday of the feminist blogosphere, Crunk’s members were trailblazers in pushing journalism, academia, and the world at large to bring a thoughtful, intersectional, hip hop-feminism influenced lens to topics ranging from music, TV, and books, to state-sanctioned violence, reproductive justice, and beyond. This anthology archives some of the blog’s most crucial work into one essential volume.
Collecting the work of Syreeta McFadden, Angel Nafis, Aja Monet, Noname, Weird Sister contributors Morgan Parker and Naomi Extra, and many others, this anthology is a powerful exploration of the worlds and words of Black women. As Patricia Smith writers in her foreword, “It’s page upon page upon page of stanza as incantation—crafted not to make black girls’ lives less impenetrable and lyrically palatable for the curious, but to revel in the chilling power of our weaponry.”
This anthology of radical trans poetics demands “nothing other than a world in which everything belongs to everyone.” A weighty, hot-pink tome featuring genre-pushing, urgent writing, We Want It All includes emerging voices alongside historically important figures like Leslie Feinberg and Sylvia Rivera, collecting poems that connect aesthetic experimentation, political activism and the material realities of contemporary trans life.
The Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion is a deep consideration of land, ownership, and civil society tracking the histories of an author and area in upstate New York. Jennifer Kabat studies time in a continuous present, watching the past bleed onto now. That blood is from the wounds of land theft and the confusing heartbreaks of our democracy. Her reckonings find echoes between financial crises of the late 1830s and the early 2000s; between the Anti-Rent Wars of the 1840s and the anti-government rebels of 2021; and between generations of her family, sharing a deep commitment to cooperatives.
The book revolves around narrations of one of America’s first populist uprisings, the Anti-Rent Wars, where tenant farmers rose up against feudal landlords. The region still had a Dutch property system, unchanged by British control, the American revolution, nor the founding of New York State. During a drought and a long, punishing recession, gangs wore leather masks and calico dresses and fought authorities who claimed payment on behalf of the ruling families.
Late in April, I drove over small roads through thinly populated places, eager to walk the paths and forests that hold Jennifer Kabat’s imagination. The sky was full of portentous clouds, and the fields that quilt the soft, worn-down mountains were muddy, unplanted. I was thick with her book and wondering how to seed its central idea in the general population. Shouldn’t we all be digging for clues of how to be responsible toward each other in contemporary times?
Amy Halloran: You wrote that you’ve always had problems with tenses, and time slides through you, and you through it in the book. Talk to me about time and chronology, and how you use them.
Jennifer Kabat: I remember being in my MFA program and someone saying, you can write in the first person, but you can never write in the first person present, as a kind of dictum. I found that really strange even if sometimes it’s true.
If you’re writing in the past tense, the reader knows how to place themselves around the action because the teller has come out of that action and has a different point of view, so there’s a reason to tell that story. So, readers feel a sense of security with the first-person past tense because they feel like they understand what’s happening. We were told not to ever do first-person present because it’s going to make your reader feel uncomfortable. I remember wondering, why should somebody be comfortable in a text?
The idea of somebody feeling safe is part of the idea that plot leads us to a new and better place, where plot and progress are kind of interchangeable. A lot of Western literature, the novel, or the memoir or whatever, has that as a structure or a fantasy of the world. I was like, well, what if we make the reader uncomfortable? What if we present them with facts?
And then if you do deep research, you kind of feel like that person or history is alive with you all the time. The way they kind of vibrate into your presence or the present tense starts to feel permeable. We live on this land in the Western Catskills and there’s this old stone foundation up there and at some point—I mean like, I’m a Pisces so I’m pretty porous and can feel kind of translucent with the world around me. Living with this foundation I feel like I live here with the people who had been there? How can you reflect that experience in writing other than if the past could be in the present tense? If the past can be in the present tense, it’s also like saying the idea of plot getting us to a new and better place is also a fantasy.
AH: How did you come to handling time in this book?
We were told not to ever do first-person present because it’s going to make your reader feel uncomfortable. I remember wondering, why should somebody be comfortable in a text?
JK: Well, I was writing a lot in the past tense, and it felt so uncomfortable. I was trying to write this stuff where it was all joined together and there were segues between the action. “Then a week passed. And this happened,” you know what I mean? Where time was continuous versus discontinuous.
I was writing a kind of memoir about my parents and modernism and all these things that I’m really interested in, but it was way too linear, and so it was kind of stifled. I was glad this book didn’t sell, and I realized I should write a book against the expectations of what the market wanted.
AH: I’m curious about how you lace together multiple experiences, people around here from Indigenous times through the Rent War’s time through contemporary rebels. How did those come together, and how did it feel as you were trying to make them meet?
JK: Partly, I started researching this piece of land that we couldn’t afford to build this house on, where we could only have a tent. I was writing these essays that were kind of grounded in place, that started with a project in Bristol in the U.K., for this contemporary art museum, Arnolfini. I became really interested in the ghosts of a place. And for me, those ghosts could be a piece of gum on the pavement, all the things that we overlook. Bristol was one of the capitals of the slave trade in the UK. The streets were basically paved with enslavement, and so I was interested in what are the values held in a place.
Here, there are ruins on this land, and I couldn’t figure out anything about them. I wanted to understand who had lived here and what the conditions of their life had been. Research led me to realize a tenant farmer dies in absolute poverty (in these ruins) at the moment the uprising is starting to happen—well where’s that going to take me?
AH: Can you talk about the book as a way of dealing with being a white person, a person of privilege on native ground?
JK: Yes, I’m on Indigenous land, but also, I’m thinking about being a white person of privilege in a place in which a large portion of the population might earn at or just above the poverty level. All artwork is created in a context, and I’m socialist, and I’m kind of a Marxist in that the material conditions of our world create what is allowed to exist in that world. If I’m writing a book about living here, it seems like the material conditions under which I get to live here are part of the question. And if you believe all time to be alive, that includes what does it mean to live on Indigenous land, what are those histories and how do all those histories exist?
AH: Do you feel like you got a sense of peace by acknowledging all of these layers?
We’re on a precipice and I want people to question the current state of American capitalism.
JK: I don’t know if that’s possible. This book is part of a diptych. So, there’s a second book. This first book has my mom as a subtheme and the second book is kind of my dad. And in a way they are both reckoning with the Indigenous histories here and not seeing them as over, but continuous in this moment. Both books think about this, the first about the Munsee, and the second the Mohawks. I stumble over this. They are both reckoning with the Indigenous histories here. Like the first one really thinks about the Muncie and the second one really thinks about the Mohawks.
The people who were taking native lands, their socialist fervor did not extend to seeing who was on the land. This is a tradition I come from. I really identify in a very agrarian, socialist way. But that tradition is not without harms. I don’t know what to do with that and so and in the second book, those harms feel much more visceral to me. And I don’t actually think there is a fix. Having something to grapple with, not having answers—not having answers to me that feels necessary.
AH: Do you think a reader could take your self-scrutiny and apply it to their own life and place?
JK: Maybe. I mean, I hope so. And the second book, which is twinned with the first, is left even more unfinished. And the unfinished is really my intention. There is some closure that I have, but it is not closure that I want to extend because I think it’s actually more profound to live in a place of rupture with some of this stuff. I’m aware that I’m talking about something very abstract.
I don’t think there’s anything remarkable in this book. I think that everybody could look at their place in a way with the same kind of questions and the same intensity. But I didn’t set out with an agenda to show a way for people to be with themselves. It was more like this is how I live in this place.
AH: An itch to understand yourself and your place.
JK: Yes, and my family and its place in this place.
AH: Do you feel like you’ve wrestled with these questions of belonging and rebellion sufficiently for the moment?
JK: I don’t know. Our country is going through a huge period of uprising. And I don’t feel like it’s finished.
I feel like people need to think about the larger context of U.S. democracy. There are things that are not fully functional in U.S. democracy, like the Electoral College, but it really supports rural America. The Anti-Rent moment looks really like the January 6th moment. This is not to say I think people should be attacking the capital, but if we could look at those moments with equal generosity, the motivations behind both of those things are similar. There were tenant farmers who were living in perpetual peonage to a landlord, but many people today in America, particularly in rural places, are living in stagnating economies. And those rural economies also don’t exist without federal funding and subsidies. There’s a real disconnect happening now in any discussion of what that white rage means or looks like, and the thing that happened in the 1840s was that these poor white farmers really linked their plight to everybody else’s. They thought about abolition. They thought about the immigrant crisis, like it was a moment where there was a lot of immigration from Northern Europe. And the Irish and the Germans were castigated in the ways that we might castigate somebody with Black or Brown skin trying to come to this country now. And yet they tied their plights to them. People were working jobs in dire conditions, and they felt like what they were doing here connected to all these people to the enslaved people in the South. And that is a really radical position.
However, they did not see Indigeneity. They had huge blind spots. But the thing I find fascinating is you know, here we have this white uprising today but nobody is tying their needs to anybody else’s. The conditions under which people are being screwed over by dead end jobs in this country or wealthy people getting wealthier, or health care which is exorbitantly expensive and has some really bad outcomes, and the fact that life expectancy is now going down in this country. All that stuff is true across the urban, rural divide and few people linking that up and making a case for that.
AH: Are you excited about the book allowing you to have more conversations about the disconnects?
JK: I guess I’m also terrified. I live in this community, and I write really intimately about it. And I’m scared of how people will see it. Can I write about marriage, which I think is a tool of capitalism? What are my dear neighbors who are very full of faith going to think? Are they going to be like, what’s wrong with you?
I come from a pretty leftist, capitalist questioning background. And by laying those material conditions out there on the page, it’s also a point where people might question me.
I’m really interested in what the dream of the U.S. represents. You know, I grew up in a family that was really patriotic. And I don’t think being patriotic and questioning should be at odds. So, if we’re not going to have those conversations now, when?
AH: Right. We’re on a precipice.
JK: We’re on a precipice and I want people to question the current state of American capitalism. I think it is making the country way more undemocratic. You get uprisings in moments of massive inequality. And the tax structure is not serving everybody. I would love this book to be a way to ask those questions, to get people to be like, why aren’t we organizing?
The book is kind of an experimental book, but I want it to matter here as much as elsewhere. I want the book to exist within this community as its own complete thing.
You may recall my post from three days ago, when I received news that made me “humbled.” You may recall this because ever since, I’ve been posting nonstop, including earlier today, moments ago, and just now. And just when you thought I’d said all there was to say on the matter, I’ve returned to announce, once again, how I’m feeling.
Don’t get me wrong. Everything I said before is true.I’m still humbled. In fact, I’m “incredibly” humbled. I’m “unspeakably” humbled. To be honest, I’m a little frightened of how humbled I am. Which is why I must share my news several times a day, and with all 12.9K of you: to show that, even in the wake of success, one can achieve an improbable amount of humility.
But humility can only take me so far. I must shout my news from the social-media rooftops. I must feel differently about the same thing. So I’m here to announce that I’m not just “humbled” anymore. I am now over the moon.
Friends, I didn’t get here overnight. When I first learned of my news, I was screaming. Then I was crying. Then, for some reason, I was vacuuming. You’re familiar with these early phases because each got its own post, plus photo.
I’ve been posting nonstop, including earlier today, moments ago, and just now.
After that came the realization that I was thrilled. Remember my “thrilled” phase? First I was “utterly” thrilled. Then I was “beyond” thrilled. Then I was just “thrilled.”
And let’s not forget the time I was speechless. During my speechless phase, I was like,
“. . .”
and then,
“(!)”
Of course, who can forget the time I posted a photo of me peeking out from behind my book? Wasn’t that fun? Talk about humility. If you don’t think I’m humble, let me ask you one thing. Was I in the foreground of that photo? No. I was in the background. Text: MY BOOK! Subtext: (me). It was like, Guys, I’m not even here. And then it was like, Oh, yeah—there I am.
Now you’re wondering: Is there simply no end to my humility? Were you baffled, for example, when I said I “did a thing”? I bet you were like, Wait, that’s so much more than a “thing”! Correct. What about when I asked how “little old me” could achieve something so extraordinary? You were like, Come on—you’ve always been extraordinary! Ha—I love that. Then there was the time I was like, “So this happened . . .” and you were like, Don’t be so modest! Good point.
You’re familiar with these early phases because each got its own post, plus photo.
Which brings us around to my current phase. Is it really “news” that my mood has shifted? No. Am I going to post it anyway? You bet. Why? Because news for this writer is so few and far between that I must continue to go full-bore with my posts, even if they’re old news. And so here I am, hurtling over the moon.
You might say it’s a pretty big deal to have journeyed this far. Not all writers vault the moon, you know. I had one unfortunate author-friend (let’s call her Sandra) who would post her news merely once or twice, and with a simple thank-you to whoever was involved. At one point she was even “humbled.” But, sadly, she never made it over the moon. You can imagine where Sandra is today. (Dead, probably. I don’t know. She isn’t posting, which is the same as being dead.)
You see, what Sandra didn’t understand is that posting these minute changes in emotional experience is a lifeblood for us writers. Because despite your “likes,” your emojis, and your rallying comments, you’ll probably never read my work (the subject of my news) or meet me in person. These posts likely comprise our entire life together. So let’s make it a good life, full of clichés, forced enthusiasm, and an even exchange of hyperbole.
Because, friends—I hate to spring this on you—but I actually have news. Does anybody else feel that slight shift in my emotional state? I am no longer “over the moon.”
San Francisco, winter 1974. There was less traffic then. At ten on a weekday night, Tony could take his ten-year- old putty-colored Buick up to fifty-five and slam-bounce up and down the hills along Taylor Street.
Maybe Tony thought that someone was following him. He certainly thought so later. Maybe he was right all along. He kept checking his rearview mirror. He’d make sharp U-turns and veer into alleys. He had every reason to suspect that he was under surveillance, and he drove like someone trying to elude whoever was pursuing him.
He said that we were right to be afraid. He said that he was living proof of what could happen if you pissed off the wrong people. Actually, the right people: the government and the military, the criminals and the liars. He said they’d been working against us for years and that it would take courage and determination to defeat them. He said that if we told the truth, if we tried to talk about what happened, they called us paranoid.
He said that he was living proof of what could happen if you pissed off the wrong people.
That was more or less what I thought, and I liked hearing him say it.
I was always looking for things we had in common, maybe because on the surface we must have seemed so different. He was Southern. I’d grown up in New York. He was an aerospace engineer turned radical activist. I’d published a novel and was about to publish another. I was in my twenties. He was ten years older. I had long dark hair. He was bald with a shoulder-length fringe. I was at the beginning of my career as a writer, and he was beginning to think that his career was over.
We both cared about politics. We both liked stories. We both liked to laugh. We were both less easygoing than we tried to appear.
We often talked about books. It turned out that Gravity’s Rainbow was one of our favorite novels. It spoke to our belief that history and the forces that shaped it were in every way more sinister than the most evil scenarios we could imagine.
Tony said we were right to worry. The impulse to destroy is as deep as the desire to create. When he was a kid in Virginia, he had a rogue history teacher who told his class that the reason humans are the only species that kills its own kind was because of some evil Egyptian poison in the apple that Eve gave Adam. Word got out, and the teacher was fired. Tony’s science teacher told his students that wasn’t true. He wasn’t going to touch Adam and Eve, but he said that many animals are as bad or worse than humans when it comes to brutalizing their own kind. Lions, bears. Primates. Kangaroos. Meerkats.
I said, “Probably we’re the only species that makes money from killing one another.”
“Exactly,” said Tony. “Precisely. That’s our meerkat nature. So it will happen again. Stronger countries invading weaker countries, larger countries swallowing smaller ones, as long as there’s a profit to be made, as long as it inflates some psycho dictator’s ego. But we shouldn’t be afraid. Because we are going to win. The war in Vietnam will end. Things are going to change.”
“For the better,” I said.
“For the better,” said Tony.
It was a chilly, rainy winter, maybe no colder or wetter than any San Francisco winter, but it seemed that way to me. I had thought that California was warm year-round. The weather felt like a personal insult. I’d moved out West wearing flip-flops, and I refused to admit my mistake and buy a pair of shoes. My feet were always freezing. The heater in Tony’s car barely functioned, and dampness seeped up through a hole in the floor.
We rode with the windows shut. The car smelled like cigarette smoke, like the wet dog that neither of us had, like woolen coats in a grade school cloakroom. As we headed west through Outer Sunset and circling back along the avenues of Outer Richmond, bright streaks of neon signage dripped down the windshield onto the glistening streets.
I had no idea where we were going or where we would end up. I liked not knowing, not caring, not having to decide.
I was twenty-six. I liked feeling free, alive and on edge, even a little afraid. So what if my feet were cold? They wouldn’t be cold forever.
I wanted to feel like an outlaw. So did everyone I knew. Bonnie and Clyde were our Romeo and Juliet. I still have a photograph of the leaders of the Barrow gang, the Depression-era bank-robber lovebirds. In heels and a long dark dress with a knitted top, Bonnie pokes a rifle and one finger into Clyde’s chest, his immaculate white shirt. Slightly slumped, his hat pushed back, Clyde is looking at her, half amused, half besotted.
Played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in the 1967 film, the couple couldn’t have been more beautiful or languidly stylish. They were our outlaw-lover superstars, hotter than Seberg and Belmondo. That Clyde was apparently impotent made their love all the more tragic, chaste and operatic. I can still see their mustard-colored 1934 Ford sedan death car bucking and jumping as the hail of bullets pierced it or bounced off.
I didn’t want that, obviously. But I wanted the rush. I had just recovered from two bouts of what the early desert saints called the pain of the distance from God. The fogginess, the loneliness, the lack of direction or purpose. They called it spiritual aridity: the inability to be touched or consoled by prayer. Though I didn’t believe in God, I understood what they meant. I was better now, or mostly. I wanted to stay that way.
I wanted to feel the thrill of not knowing or caring where I was going or what I was supposed to be doing. The dreamlike unreality of those high-speed drives was nerve-racking but weirdly relaxing. Nothing was expected of me. I didn’t have to think. I hardly had to speak. All I had to do was listen.
From 1972 until 1975, I lived, for months at a time, in San Francisco. There was no reason for me to be in California, except that I liked it there, and because it was across a continent from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I had left my husband and dropped out of school and never wanted to return. In those years, I often chose a place to live because it was as far as possible from the place I was escaping.
I lived in the Inner Sunset district, not far from Buena Vista Park, in a sunny apartment with two roommates, a couple I’ll call Henry and Grace.
California might have felt like a long vacation in limbo if I hadn’t begun to think of myself as a writer. One perk of being a writer was that I could tell myself that I was working even when I wasn’t. I liked thinking that my job description was to watch and try to understand who people were, to intuit what they’d been through, what they revealed or tried to hide, what they said versus what they meant. The challenge was to find the right sentences, the right words, the right punctuation to get it down on the page.
Meanwhile I was at that stage when time and the body are signaling the unconscious: If you are going to make stupid mistakes, you should probably make them now. Everything seemed like a matter of life and death and simultaneously inconsequential. Everything broken could be fixed. Everything that was incomplete could be finished, or anyway, so I hoped.
I knew that my life and the world around me were changing, that something was ending and something else beginning, but I was too close—too inside of it—to have any idea what it was.
In December 1971, two years before I met Tony, he and Daniel Ellsberg were indicted, under the Espionage Act, for leaking information—a secret seven-thousand- page report known as the Pentagon Papers—that, according to the authorities, could jeopardize national security and endanger our soldiers in Southeast Asia. The two had met at the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, a think tank with close ties to the US military. Locating their headquarters out West, the company hoped to preserve some independence from Washington, though how much autonomy could they expect when they were funded by the government? The “Orwellian” (Tony’s word) organization of analysts, strategists, and economists helped orchestrate the war in Vietnam.
Daniel Ellsberg and Tony Russo photocopied the documents that Ellsberg smuggled, in sections, from the RAND files. Commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the study proved that the executive branch of our government had been lying for decades to Congress and to the American people about our involvement in Vietnam.
In 1974, Tony was still known, at least among activists, as an anti–Vietnam War whistleblower and free speech hero. By then, he had spent forty-seven days in jail for refusing to testify against Ellsberg or to appear before the grand jury unless the session was open to the public so he could use it to talk about why we were in Asia. His hope was that the publicity generated by the trial might reach people who were still unaware of what the Pentagon Papers had shown. Despite the growing evidence that the release of the Pentagon Papers wouldn’t significantly alter the political landscape, Tony still believed, or tried to believe, that the truths they revealed and the lies they exposed would blow the country apart.
That was the winter when Patty Hearst was kidnapped from the Berkeley apartment where she lived with her graduate student boyfriend, the former math teacher at her high school. That was the winter when she was held captive by the Symbionese Liberation Army, which demanded, in exchange for her release, two million dollars’ worth of free food be distributed to the poor. That was the winter when the food giveaway in West Oakland degenerated into a riot. That was the winter when the SLA decided to hold onto their captive princess until they figured out what to do next.
The April 15 bank robbery that turned Patty Hearst into a gun-slinging, fuzzed-out poster girl happened at the Hibernia Bank branch very near our apartment. The house where she would be arrested was also nearby. My roommates and I knew about the robbery but not yet about the safe house.
The story about the kidnapped heiress and the cult led by a formerly incarcerated Black man—Donald DeFreeze, now code-named Field Marshal Cinque—was media gold. A white-girl disappearance (always newsworthy) was spun as a conclusive I-told- you- so about the hippies, radicals, and Black activists who had tried to make America feel guilty about racism, inequality, and the war.
Grace and Henry advised me not to mention Patty Hearst to their friend Tony Russo, who was coming over to play poker. I appreciated the warning. The abduction was very much in the news. Strangers chatted about it in line at the supermarket. Apparently Henry had made an offhand remark about the kidnapping, and Tony said, with real venom, “I don’t want to hear another word of that bullshit.” It was puzzling because normally, Grace said, Tony was so good-natured and polite. It turned out that Tony believed that our neighborhood was crawling with FBI agents searching for Patty Hearst. When they found her or quit looking for her, they would go back to following and harassing him, if they’d ever stopped.
Grace and Henry told me that Tony was having a hard time. As far as they knew, he was unemployed. He’d been doing community outreach and civil rights organizing in Los Angeles, where he’d worked for the Los Angeles County Probation Department. But he’d lost his job there after he’d gone to prison. No one understood why he’d moved to San Francisco, nor how he paid the rent. Henry said the Black Panthers had raised money for Tony’s legal team, and that his young, pretty, radical ex-wife sold sandwiches in the courthouse lobby, during the trial, to dramatize his need for help paying his lawyers.
I recognized Tony immediately. I had seen him in newspaper photos and on TV, surrounded by journalists. He always stood just behind Daniel Ellsberg’s shoulder, waiting his turn at the mike. I’d noticed him partly because, in his butcher boy cap, shaggy sideburns, rumpled jacket and tie, he looked so unlike Ellsberg in his elegant suit and good haircut. I’d noticed Tony partly because he always seemed so calm and contained, even a little amused, while the frenetic reporters shouted questions and thrust their microphones in his face.
When Henry introduced us, Tony looked at me a beat too long, maintaining a thin but acceptable margin between friendliness and appraisal. By 1974, most of the men I knew had learned better than to look at women that way.
I wanted him to notice me. He was a famous antiwar hero. He’d done what we all should have done. He’d lived the way we all should have lived, suffered as we might have suffered if things had gone as badly for us as they had for him. I wanted to think that I would have had the courage to do what he did, to help leak a secret report about Vietnam that my work-friend happened to be lugging around in his briefcase. To go to jail, if necessary.
I wanted him to notice me. He was a famous antiwar hero. He’d done what we all should have done.
Tony said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
He had a Southern accent and a low musical voice. His voice and his delivery were among his most attractive qualities. He wasn’t conventionally handsome, but he was interesting-looking. He had the slightly pudgy, appealing face of a good-tempered hypermasculine baby. He chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes and didn’t look entirely healthy, yet there was something radiant about him: the inner light of a zealot. His metal-framed eyeglasses glittered. He was soft-spoken, quick-witted, and extremely smart.
Tony was very funny, though when you say that about a person, you can’t think of one funny thing they said, just as you can describe someone as charming without being able to begin to explain what charm is, exactly.
The poker games at Henry and Grace’s were penny-ante, in no way serious, and the games got less and less serious as the players smoked more and more weed. No one cared about winning or losing. The whole point, for Henry and Grace, was using the stylish vintage wooden wheel that spun on casters and held slotted stacks of Bakelite poker chips. They’d bought it at a yard sale.
I watched Tony as I shuffled and dealt, put down and picked up the cards. I looked at him until he looked back. I could tell that he noticed, that the famous antiwar hero was watching me too, and that his focus wasn’t that of a player trying to psych out an opponent’s hand.
Tony mentioned, in passing, that he and his coworkers in Saigon had played a lot of poker. After that he was silent for a long time. At one point he said that there were two different types of experience, two different kinds of knowledge. Both had to do with time. The first kind of knowledge comes back, even after a long lapse, like riding a bicycle. The second kind was use it or lose it. Forget and you never remember. He said that poker was an experience of the second kind. By then, we’d smoked quite a lot of weed. It didn’t matter that no one understood what he meant.
When he spoke, he was speaking to me. Henry and Grace noticed too. At some point it became clear, without anything having been said, that I would be going home with Tony when he left.
Tony wasn’t a great poker player, or so it seemed. I wondered if he was losing to me on purpose, which was flattering in one way and not in another.
Henry and Grace must have told him that my first book had done well—well, that is, for a literary debut novel published in 1973, which meant that it got good reviews and was perceived as a success. My second novel was coming out, and I was (supposedly) working on a third.
During a break from the game, Tony congratulated me on my book, and on the forthcoming one. He told me that he thought my being a novelist was amazing. Maybe that was true, or partly true. But it was also the kind of thing that men had recently learned to say if they wanted to get laid.
Also, in an amazing coincidence, he too was writing a book. He’d come to San Francisco to work on it, because it was less distracting here than in LA, where the postal deliverers and the trash collectors were still losing his letters and strewing his garbage around the alley behind his house. It was disturbing, not just because it made life harder, but because he’d imagined that those guys would be on his side. They and their sons were the ones being sent off to fight in the war that Tony had tried to end.
All that time he’d studied engineering and government, he said, he’d dreamed of becoming a writer. He said, “I wrote all the time in jail, when I could, until the guards took my journal away, and then beat me up for objecting. After that I wrote in my head. Maybe you could take a look at some of the stuff I’m writing. Just a couple of pages. It’s not really . . . literary. I’m not aiming to write a masterpiece. I’m just trying to get it down, what happened in Vietnam, what I saw there . . .”
I didn’t know what to say. It occurred to me that we’d started off talking about me and ended by talking about Tony. I was just starting out as a writer. I had no idea what I was doing, no more or less than I ever had, no more or less than I do now. I had no advice to give, but already people were asking me to read their novels. I tried to find excuses that wouldn’t hurt anyone’s feelings.
And yet I was flattered that Tony wanted me to read his book. That a hero was asking for my help meant there was something I could do, that there was a way I could contribute to the work for which Tony had sacrificed so much. I could show him how to line-edit if he thought it might be useful. I wondered if the invitation to look at his writing was code-speak for sex, but I couldn’t tell with Tony, and for the moment it didn’t matter.
High, I played a tighter and more focused game, even as my friends’ attention drifted. I wasn’t a great poker player, but neither did I need the order of the hands written out for me or the rules of the specialty games explained. I depended more on luck than players who knew what they were doing. That night I drew some unpromising hands, but I thought ahead and watched and won. I took it as a sign that I was doing something right—and that it was a good idea to leave with Tony when the evening ended. As far as I knew, neither of us had romantic commitments that would complicate things.
We settled our debts. Tony had lost thirty dollars, twenty of them to me. For some reason this seemed funny and like a secret between us. How could that have been secret? Our friends were right there, stacking the poker chips. Nor was it a secret that Tony and I were leaving together.
When Tony’s back was turned, Grace shook her head at me and mouthed Don’t!, a twitch of warning that only I saw and that I pretended not to notice.
Tony and I got our coats. We both wore black leather jackets, another thing that seemed funny. Tony helped me into mine. My arms missed the sleeves, which caused a bit of awkward flailing around. We laughed and tried again.
“Button up,” Tony said. “Or is it zip up?”
He looked at my jacket. “I was right the first time.”
I said, “San Francisco is always colder than I expected.” “Tell me about it,” said Tony. “I can’t get used to it.” That was how we established that neither of us was from there, nor did we plan to stay.
He asked if I minded riding around in the car for a while.
I said I liked it, which was true. Riding around a city, any city, has always been one of my favorite things to do. I loved seeing San Francisco through the window of a moving car. I had never stopped being thrilled by how you could turn a corner and a slice of the blue Pacific might flash up like a dolphin. I loved the wooden housefronts faded salmon gray by the weather. I loved how the city’s residents took civic pride in the days when fog enveloped the neighborhoods like a giant furry cocoon.
All during the card game Tony had been wry, low-key, and amused, but now, with just the two of us in the car, he seemed tense and preoccupied. As he sped off toward Judah Street, his glance kept tracking toward the rearview mirror.
After a while he turned on the radio to the same station Henry and Grace listened to in their cars. The Chi-Lites, the Delfonics, the O’Jays, the Stylistics, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. I was pleased and relieved. Music meant a lot—maybe too much—to me. In college, I’d been lonely because none of the people I met during my first weeks had ever heard of James Brown. I’d slept with guys just because they liked the same songs I did.
I liked it that the station Tony had on played the so-called Philadelphia sound. If loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right? Didn’t I blow your mind this time? You, you make me feel brand-new. Me and Mrs. Jones, we got a thing goin’ on. So many of the songs were about hopeless, passionate, adulterous sex, about the love you could die for, die from, the love that keeps reminding you that you will never understand it. It’s the kind of music that makes you wish you were in love, the kind that makes you long to fall in love.
I told myself, Don’t. Seriously, don’t. Don’t let the music touch you. I’d read somewhere that love comes in through the eyes, so I tried not to look too directly at Tony. It was easy, sitting side by side in the car. The Buick had no console between us, so we could have sat very close. We could have touched. But we didn’t.
“If you don’t know me by now, you will never, never, never know me,” Tony sang along. Prophetically, as it turned out.
He hit all the falsetto notes.
“You can sing,” I said.
“Once a choir boy, always a choir boy,” he said.
Eventually Tony turned off the radio, and then it was just silence and the protests of an old car being pushed too hard. He hit the gas and drove the avenues fast, without speaking, out through the Sunset, then across the park and back through the Outer Richmond, without speaking, then around and out Parnassus, without speaking, past Henry and Grace’s apartment. When we passed their house for the third time, my roommates’ bedroom light was out, and only then did I realize how late it was.
He said, “I know it’s not a great idea to just drive for the hell of it. I know about the gas crisis. I know that the so-called crisis is the usual bullshit designed to make more money for OPEC. The gas isn’t going to run out. It’s just going to get more expensive. In case you’re wondering, I have two license plates, one with an odd number, one with an even, so I can fill up wherever I want. I just have to remember not to go to the same gas station two days in a row.”
“How did you get two license plates?” I asked.
“That’s classified information.” Tony waited a beat, then laughed.
I’d assumed that we would be going to Tony’s apartment. But it was becoming clear that we weren’t, at least not yet. I didn’t care. Whatever happened was fine. It wasn’t as if I was in the grip of crazy lust or as if I imagined that Tony was going to be the love of my life.
I suppose I already had the kind of crush on him that can begin when you want to be the focus of someone’s attention, and then you are. Especially when you are young and that person is important or famous. Not only was Tony a hero, an antiwar celebrity, but he had said all the right things that night, hit the right marks about my being a writer. I still believed that you could decide to let love happen or not.
I still believed that you could decide to let love happen or not.
I had just escaped a marriage that had been a mistake. The last thing I wanted was a “relationship.” I couldn’t think of the word without imagining it between ironic quotes. I couldn’t picture myself settling down and having children, though that was precisely what I would do four years later.
I didn’t want a serious love, certainly not with Tony. From the beginning I sensed that something about him was . . . the word I decided on was troubled. Everyone has troubles. Certainly I had. An aura of unease surrounded him, the faint distressing buzz of an electrical panel with a burnt fuse and some wires pulled loose. I didn’t want to adopt his demons or share his resentments and regrets. What did Nelson Algren say? Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never play cards with a guy named Doc. Never sleep with someone (he said “a woman”) who has more problems than you do.
Of course life is never as simple as Algren’s wise-guy rules of avoidance. Tony was charismatic. He was brave. He’d been to Vietnam. He’d interviewed prisoners, peasants, scooter drivers. He’d seen the horrors of war. He’d help steal the Pentagon Papers. He’d gone to jail. And now he wanted me to listen, to hear what he had been through. He seemed to think I could help. He’d come to San Francisco to write a book, and I was a writer.
Neon signs flashed past. A Russian restaurant, a laundromat, a motel, a massage parlor. Brightly colored letters wobbled in the mist. I was still pretty high. I liked everything I saw. I liked it that Tony didn’t care about anything scenic or touristic: views of the Golden Gate Bridge, Chinatown, Lombard Street. Nothing like that. All that mattered was speed and minimal traffic, hitting the waves of green lights and running the red ones. If Tony stopped, it was only to open a new pack of cigarettes.
I wasn’t required to admire anything. I didn’t have to say, How beautiful! I didn’t have to speak. What I wanted to say was, Watch out! You’re going to kill someone! But I didn’t say that either.
I was too busy paying attention, trying to focus on what Tony was telling me. To remember it word for word. Not to write about it. Not then. But because it seemed important.
I held onto the edge of my seat as the car hit a pothole, levitated, and slammed down on the blacktop. Neither of us spoke, but I felt as if we were chattering wordlessly into the silence.
It had begun to drizzle. The light from the streetlamps striped the windshield. I imagined the light bar on the Xerox machine on which Tony and Ellsberg copied the Pentagon papers, the glowing tube swinging back and forth, back and forth. The work must have been tedious, but that’s how copies were made then. Page by page. Slap the paper down on the glass, lower the flap, wait for the light to make its double turn, lift the flap, remove the page, repeat twenty-one thousand times. Forty-seven thick bound volumes. The equivalent of Moby-Dick single-spaced on typing paper and stacked up fourteen times over.
I said, “Copying all those pages must have been like a fairy tale, like something Rumpelstiltskin makes you do so he won’t steal your baby. How much time did it take, how much paper, how many ink cartridges did you go through, how many machines broke down? Copy machines are temperamental. They break all the time. They—”
I made myself stop. I sounded like a girl I knew in college whose social anxiety made her go on and on about her uncle’s dachshund’s hip dysplasia. What could be more boring than talking about copy machines?
Tony turned toward me and smiled a slow Cheshire Cat grin. He’d smiled like that at the poker game, when I’d bluffed and won. But he hadn’t smiled since we’d been in the car.
He said, “If it’s okay with you, I am really really really tired of talking about Xerox machines.” The smile was to reassure me that he didn’t mean to hurt my feelings.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Please don’t be sorry,” he said. “Asking about the Xeroxing is the first thing everyone does.”
I didn’t want him to see me as the kind of person who did the first thing that everyone does, but I’d already done it. He drove in silence until he pulled up to a curb and stopped. I’d lost track of where we were. It was too dark to see.
We got out. I heard the ocean. The air was soggy, and the rain had sharpened into cold spiky needles. I chafed my arms. It occurred to me that Tony hadn’t touched me all evening, not once, not even brushing my fingers by accident as we’d dealt and picked up our cards.
We stood on the edge of a drop-off. There was just enough moonlight filtering through the clouds to see the dark stone pools below us, the cracked basins full of muck. Beyond the ruins were the beach and fog and the black waves rolling in.
The clouds broke, and the moon floated in one of the stone pools like a huge soggy Communion wafer.
“Do you know where we are?” he said.
“The Sutro Baths,” I said.
“Good one,” Tony said.
Everyone knows that when you’re attracted to someone, the discovery of a shared passion can seem like proof that you’re meant to be together. You like the full moon? Amazing! I like the full moon too! You like beer? Me too! Friendships can take a similar leap. Maybe we just love the voice—the whisper—telling us that we’re not alone.
I loved the Sutro Baths: their beauty, their desolation, their mystery. So did Tony, it seemed.
We stood on a rise above the pools, watching shafts of moonlight sweep across the crumbling walls as clouds drifted across the night sky. The baths were how I imagined Pompeii or Hadrian’s Villa.
Tony said, “It’s like every ruin. Somebody’s empire didn’t work out. Or it did until it didn’t.” We fell silent. The only sound was the slap of the waves. There was no one else around. We stood there—close but not touching— on the edge of a cliff, in the dead of night.
Looking back, I’m a little frightened for that girl hanging out with a semi-famous, possibly unbalanced friend of a friend, looking down into a stone pool into which a person could be thrown and no one would ever find them.
But I wasn’t scared then. Tony was one of the good guys. I knew he’d had a rough few years. Anyone would be rattled. It seemed interesting to be driven out there to hover above an abyss.
Maybe I was a little afraid. My family and friends were very far away. Were they even thinking of me? Henry and Grace knew who I’d left the house with, but not where we’d gone.
Tony wasn’t going to hurt me.
A year ago I’d sat on a ledge, halfway up a Mayan pyramid, in Palenque. I didn’t want to think about that now. I didn’t want to wish I was there.
Tony said, “There were these magnificent fourth-century Hindu temples in central Vietnam that we will never see because we bombed them into baby powder on some bullshit tip-off that the so-called Viet Cong were sheltering there. You know what a US Army colonel told me? He said, ‘The problem with those temples is that Ho Chi Minh is stewing his fucking disgusting chicken feet in the inner sanctum.’ ”
I laughed the isn’t-that- horrible laugh that isn’t a real laugh. It was strange that he’d mentioned Hindu temples because I’d been thinking not just about Pompeii but also about how the Sutro Baths reminded me of the ruins at Sarnath, where the Buddha preached his first sermon. I had been there a few years before, in what seemed like another life.
What was Tony saying? For an instant I’d thought of Sarnath and forgotten him and lost track.
He said, “Have you ever seen Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy?”
There was just enough moonlight for him to see me shake my head no.
“The best bad-marriage film ever. Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders spend the movie ripping each other apart. He’s a stuffy Brit ice cube, and she’s whiny and bitchy, but pretty, there’s that. Here’s why I mention it. The ruins.
“He finally tells her, That’s it. They’re getting a divorce. But just then their Italian archeologist friend shows up to take them to Pompeii. They meet up with an excavation team, and bingo, the archeologists unearth a perfectly preserved man and a woman. Maybe the couple died together. Maybe they were husband and wife.
“Ingrid Bergman is practically in tears, but Sanders is still his chilly-old- bastard self. Soon they’re walking down Main Street Pompeii, fighting about some marital bullshit. Look around, you upper-middle- class white Continental shitheads! You’re stumbling through a ruined world, the apocalypse is over, the planet has been destroyed, and you’re squabbling about your marriage?”
I hadn’t said that the Sutro Baths were how I imagined Pompeii. How did Tony know? Perhaps it didn’t require a giant leap of the imagination. Another sign of attraction: thinking the person can read your mind.
Tony picked up a stone and threw it down the hill. It bounced off the walls of the pool and dropped into the water. Plink, plink, plop. The soundtrack of a horror film just before the scream.
He said, “Look at you. You’re shivering.”
Only now did I notice how cold I was: My feet had never been so numb.
We got back in the car. Tony turned up the heater, which blew some cold air around, then quit.
He said, “Is it okay with you if we park here for a while?”
“Sure. What happens to them?” Self-consciousness made my voice crack.
“What happens to whom?”
“The couple in the film.”
“Oh, right. They get stuck in a religious procession in Naples or somewhere. The mob comes barreling down the street. It’s too packed for them to move the car, so they ditch it. They leave it there! She runs off and gets swept away by the crowd until he wades into the stampede and saves her. Long clinch. Passionate embrace. The crowd divides around them. They decide to stay together.”
“Good luck to them,” I said.
“Exactly. Marriage is the stupidest way the state has come up with for controlling our lives.”
“You were married, right?”
“For about five minutes.” He laughed. “It was her idea. She was pretty and young and smart, and she seemed to be up for everything, but I was misled. She’s very radical, supposedly, but really she wanted to party with liberal Hollywood stars. She’s since become a follower of the thirteen-year- old guru. Sometimes I wonder if she was an undercover FBI plant. In which case she should get a medal for distinguished service above and beyond the call of duty. You know why I thought she might be an agent? Her first and last names were the first and last names of a woman in a Hemingway novel. Some Yale English graduate FBI asshole’s idea of a joke.”
“Did you really think she was working for the FBI?”
“Everybody might be.” He shrugged.
I said, “I was married too. Also for about five minutes.” Why had I said that? My marriage had lasted three years, from my final semester at college through two years of graduate school and a year of travel. “Nothing about it was that dramatic. I’m pretty sure my husband wasn’t working for the FBI.”
“You don’t know,” Tony said. “You never know who has a secret life and who doesn’t.”
Tony pulled out of the parking spot and headed toward the Embarcadero. I was expecting another long silence when he said, “In the garden of one of those temples there was a six-foot stone dick sticking straight up out of the ground. We’ll never see it now. It’s gone. Bombed out of existence.”
He laughed, and then he was crying. It was the first time I’d seen him cry. He wept silently, staring ahead. I didn’t look at him, but I felt the air move, the way tears can change the atmosphere. When he turned toward me, his face was wet. He shrugged and smiled.
He said, “I don’t want you thinking I’m the kind of guy who weeps over a six-foot granite hard-on. It’s just that it’s all so sad.”
The pathetic fallacy: The sky was crying too. Within moments the rain intensified until it was almost car wash heavy.
“You need to turn on the window wipers,” I said. “Really, Tony. You need to do it now.”
“So I do,” said Tony. “Thank you, ma’am. Everyone needs a copilot.” He switched on the wipers.
I didn’t like how much it pleased me when he’d called me his copilot. The last of the weed was wearing off, and my blood sugar was dropping.
“Are you hungry?” He got points for sensing it. Points for knowing I was there. For asking.
Korean mythology brims with everything from philosophy and political intrigue to glorious creatures. Fox shapeshifters with a penchant for male livers. Club-wielding goblins with an excess of mischief. Winged maidens who spend their days in the sun-warmed mortal forests, and their nights in the star-dotted heavens. The traditional stories of Korea are vibrant, and more than ripe for the retellings.
This love of the retelling is where I draw the majority of my inspiration. My novel Last of the Talonsfollows Lina, a teenage assassin, as she becomes entangled in a treacherous game of cat-and-mouse with a cruel and captivating dokkaebi emperor. Armed with her swift, precise blade against his enchanted flute, Lina is given fourteen days to either kill him…or be killed in turn. The sequel to Last of the Talons, Wrath of the Taloncontinues the adventures of Lina as she embarks on her bloodthirsty quest to reclaim her kingdom from a vicious crime lord. Drawing deadly power from the mysterious, serpentine Imugi, Lina has transformed into living vengeance, an assassin deadlier than a blade itself. Yet there is a mysterious side to her growing abilities, a dark voice that lurks inside of her mind and seeks to push her closer and closer toward ruin.
In my new novel The God and the Gumiho, I give the notorious Korean trickster god (Seokga) a detective twist, transforming him into a coffee-addicted investigator shunned from the Heavenly Realm for his, ah, transgressions. When a demon of darkness escapes the underworld, and an infamous murderer known as the Scarlet Fox briefly reappears before vanishing once more, Seokga must pair up with a coffee-slinging gumiho to save the mortal realm.
Mythology, monsters, mystery, and magic.
That’s the catchphrase I often use to describe my novels, and it’s my catchphrase for a reason. As of this point in time, the entirety of my published work draws from the rich folklore of Korea, where all of these alliterative words abound.
Below are some other extraordinary novels that also incorporate Korean mythology into their enrapturing pages.
The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea is a gorgeous reimagining of a traditional Korean tale, “The Tale of Shim Cheong.” Swept away to the whimsical Spirit Realm after sacrificing herself to the sea on behalf of her brother’s beloved, protagonist Mina is thrown into an adventure reminiscent of the most beautiful Ghibli films. Determined to end her village’s cycle of sacrifices, she seeks out the Sea God, only to find that he is stuck in an enchanted sleep. Along with a motley crew of new friends and a mysterious (and alluring) deity named Shin, Mina embarks on a quest to wake the Sea God and save the girls in her village.
Wicked Fox is the tale of Miyoung, a ravenous gumiho who crosses paths with a mortal boy named Jihoon, and saves him from a dokkaebi at the cost of her treasured fox-bead. Cho takes the reader through a whirlwind, romantic adventure in modern-day Seoul as Miyoung and Jihoon are pursued by murderous forces and as their burgeoning friendship blossoms into something more.
Prophecy by Ellen Oh follows a fierce warrior through an immersive fantasy world in which danger abounds. When her kingdom, Hansong, falls under threat from a demon invasion, royal bodyguard Kira is forced to flee with the prince she’s sworn to protect. As the Demon Lord’s forces continue to wreak havoc, Kira embarks on a dangerous quest to locate a prophesied hero, whom myth claims will unite the Seven Kingdoms and defeat the demonic armies. As the stakes grow deadlier, Kira will soon discover that there is more to the war . . . and to herself . . . that meets the eye.
In the sequel to Wicked Fox, Miyoung’s lost fox-bead has ripped a hole through the veil separating the world of the dead and the world of the living. As ghosts terrorize Seoul’s streets, Somin and Junu—two lovable characters from the duology’s first installment—must try to repair the boundaries between life and death before it’s too late for Seoul . . . And for the world.
Bride of the Water God by Mi-Kyung Yun, translated by Julia Kwon Gombos
Bride of the Water God is another retelling of “The Tale of Shim Cheong.” When Soah is sacrificed to the sea by her starving village in an attempt to appease Habaek, the water god, she embarks on an adventure that’s most unexpected. Rescued by Habaek himself, Soah explores her exciting new life in the underwater realm, and can’t help but to fall in love with the god who’s not at all the monster she expected.
Folklorn is the story of particle-physicist Elsa Park, but it’s also the story of ancestral myths and the deep connection between folklore and family. When Elsa is called back to her childhood home after time spent stationed in the Antarctic, she unravels haunting familial secrets. Desire, magic, and fury are all passed down through the women of her line as they live cyclical lives narrated by the mythology of their heritage. The stories of Folklorn closely intertwine with each other, and the novel’s exploration of generational trauma reaches deep.
Princess Bari by Hwang Sok-young, translated Sora Kim-Russell
One of the most classic Korean folktales is of Bari, who journeys to the underworld disguised as a man to retrieve medicine (magical flowers and a potion called Yangyusu) for her ailing parents. While in the underworld, Bari heroically saves tormented souls and encounters a god, whom she falls in love with. Princess Bari is a retelling of this traditional myth in the modern world. Hwang Sok-young takes the reader on a riveting adventure as Bari’s modern reincarnant escapes North Korea and flees to London, with a few other stops along the way.
Drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup with chewed rim. Choosing hotel rooms based on which has the fewest number of 2 A.M. fights in the parking lot. Calling your guy in Pittsburgh from a payphone in Dayton to ask about the Tampa connection who might be dead.
This is the America of Carroll’s fifth book and his first journey into the road novel. In place of the poetic flights of Kerouac, where random joy rescues the protagonist from despair, Carroll levels his finger to a landscape that burns to the touch.
Farrier is the novel’s protagonist. He’s the sketchy but nondescript guy who’s constantly being mistaken for a musician. It’s an association he has come to expect, as both a conversation-starter and mask for his true purposes. The reader is never quite informed what these purposes are, but they are given enough evidence to conclude they could get Farrier killed at any time. The novel’s tension arises from such percarity. Farrier is the low-life guide, waking late in the day and driving at odd hours from one gas station mini-mart to another. The people he meets come into focus or blur depending on how deep into the night Farrier is and whether the substances he’s consumed are cycling through or cycling out of his metabolism. Redemption is never mentioned but nudges a Farrier at odd moments when he has settled into his favorite room in his preferred sleazy motel and tries to tell himself he is safe.
I talked to Carroll about the movies, books and music that influenced In the Sight, along with how he was able to fictionalize an abstract, post-everything system that seems to have poisoned the land we are standing on.
William Lessard: The opening reminds me of that famous Kerouac quote, “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me.” What is it about the road novel that is so attractive?
Tobias Carroll: There’s a similar Adrian Tomine quote to that one that I read during my formative years and took to heart. (Which isn’t to say that I didn’t also read some Kerouac during my formative years, because I absolutely did.) I think some of it is inherent to that quote: that sense of possibility, of openness; even of mystery.
In some ways, I think it’s a way to make the picaresque form more modern — which isn’t to say that a picaresque narrative can’t also be modern. (See also: several selections from the bibliography of André Alexis.) And I think there’s also something—at least in the U.S.—that’s relatively shared about being behind the wheel of a car or truck. It’s something of a great equalizer. Someone reading In the Sight has probably not dabbled in brain modification, but they do know what it’s like to drive down a highway late at night.
Being behind the wheel of a car or truck, it’s something of a great equalizer.
In the Sight was written pre-pandemic, and I’m wondering now if there isn’t space for a very different kind of road novel. I started driving a lot more during 2020, in part because it felt like one of the only ways to explore safely. (I was also in wretched physical shape at that point and was a lot less mobile than I’d have liked to have been.) More recently, I see a lot more pent-up hostility on the roads — more honking, more shouting, more cursing. My deeply scientific take on it is that it’s a result of repressed emotions coming out of the pandemic, and I think there’s probably a good story to be told against that backdrop — but I don’t have one to tell quite yet.
WL: I have been trying to come up with a clever, one-line description of the book. Best I could manage was “Glengarry, Glen Ross” goes coast-to-coast. How’s that?
TC: I don’t think I’d ever thought of this book as having Mamet-esque vibes to it — though now that you mention it, I’m wondering if there isn’t a little bit of The Water Engine to it. (Ages ago, I saw a production of it paired with the one-act Mr. Happiness, which was performed by the great Bob Balaban; bits and pieces of both have been in my head ever since.)
My elevator pitch, such as it is, has been something in the vein of: “One man’s business rewiring people’s brains comes back to haunt him.” Though I’m also not sure how effective an elevator pitch that is, nor have I ever actually pitched someone in an elevator.
WL: I like your characters. But I don’t think I could hang with them.
TC: That’s wholly understandable. The bulk of my central characters up to this point have been, I think, relatively sympathetic — with (spoilers) the arc of Virgil Carey’s life in Ex-Members being one big exception. Farrier was definitely born out of wanting to write someone who was a little more of an overt anti-hero — someone who’s made a series of bad decisions and now has to live with the consequences.
I did an event in Chicago with Juan Martinez, and he observed (accurately) that Farrier is, essentially, a drug dealer in all but name. Farrier is definitely doing things that are not ethically okay; he has, 100%, not thought through all of the things that he’s opted to base his life around. I do think that some of his friends and acquaintances are more hang-out-with-able — but then, they have the good sense to not be at the center of this book.
WL: There is a precariousness about the story, although it is never made clear what your main character Farrier is doing. The unease reminds me of Severance or an episode of Black Mirror.
TC: I am very grateful to you for those two points of comparison! Yeah, I was a lot less interested in the mechanics of how Farrier’s brain alteration system works and more with what it would do if it was out in the world. My first point of training in storytelling came from film, which means that I can ramble on for hours and hours about the concept of the MacGuffin.
I also knew that I wanted to write something that was a little less realistic than its predecessor, even though Ex-Members ended up having a few more surreal moments in it than I had initially planned. I think Jonathan Lethem’s Amnesia Moon and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods were both subtle influences on this one — both American road novels that aren’t set squarely in our own reality. (And, what the hell: regenerations in Doctor Who, too.)
WL: The America in this novel is the America of the shitty gas station sandwich. Having written political essays in the past, you seem attuned to this reality.
TC: Yes indeed. It’s funny — to bring things back around to the Juan Martinez conversation, one of the things that came up was that this book ended up being fairly Philip K. Dick-esque (or phildickian, as they day) without me consciously thinking of Dick’s work at all. And I think there’s a version of this that’s more self-consciously phildickian and more self-consciously political.
A lot of the book was informed by a DIY book tour duncan b. barlow and I embarked upon in 2017, which took us from Santa Fe to Chicago. I’m a lifelong Northeasterner, so I’m genuinely not used to the practice of driving for eight hours in a given direction and not seeing much of anything — I think you’d have to try very hard to do that in the New York metropolitan area. And recently, I did a bunch of Rust Belt and Midwestern events that involved similarly long drives. I will say that I largely avoided gas station sandwiches out of fear of intestinal distress. Though I did spend a month in 2019 at a residency in Iceland, and found myself borderline-obsessed with the premade grocery store sandwiches there.
That said, I did dine at a Sheetz on my last night of this most recent tour. I’m not sure that counts as a gas station meal or not, but: it was far better than I was expecting. Though it was also not a sandwich.
WL: The aristocrat is my favorite character in this book. He is a person I’d like to punch in the face, but wouldn’t mind having a drink with. Am I a weirdo to feel this way?
There’s a lot that I like about realism in literature, but there’s also something fun about creating a heightened version of reality.
TC: You are not! Those scenes were some of the most fun for me to write in the novel. In part, I think the Vinstaden sequence was where the book really clicked into place for me — that it was as much about the idea of what could be on the road as it was about what was actually on the road. When I was a kid, I remember not quite understanding how things like “zoning” or “retail” worked and imagining some kind of shop of miracles being located right around the corner, even though I know now that that would be impossible.
So, part of In the Sight is about embracing the impossible or unlikely and putting things in the landscape that might not be there in real life. Weird bird sanctuaries. All-night coffee shops, far from anything else. There’s a lot that I like about realism in literature, but there’s also something fun about creating a heightened version of reality.
WL: Washburn is the closest Farrier gets to family. Is the road what he has instead of family or are such binaries not relevant?
TC: I don’t see the open road being Farrier’s family, but I do see him in a kind of self-imposed exile from his own family, for sure. I think that aspect of In the Sight might just come from its position as the book I wrote after Ex-Members, which had a lot of familial relationships in it. This book, and the book I’m working on now, are much more about protagonists who are on their own by choice. I’m not entirely sure why that is — it might just be that I’m thinking about my own solitude more and more. I’ve never been married; I have no children. I’m an only child as well. And I think Farrier also exists as a kind of cautionary tale for me — that this is what could happen (metaphorically speaking) if I went too far down a certain path.
On one hand, Farrier’s enviable: he works for himself! He’s a genius! He’s an innovator! He travels the country! On the other hand, he has no safety net, what he does is illegal, and his physical safety is no longer guaranteed. The postpunk band Beauty Pill has an album called The Unsustainable Lifestyle, and that phrase seeps into my consciousness and haunts me at regular intervals.
WL: Farrier reaches the end of his journey as someone who will either decide to kill themselves in the next hour or see what tending bar feels like for a little while longer.
TC: I don’t think he’s going to end his life, but there is a question of whether he’ll undergo his own process and remake himself. There’s something about leaving a character like that in a kind of purgatory; I don’t know. I was a little surprised at how the ending turned out. I basically backed Farrier into a corner….and then Farrier decided to set up shop in the corner. And I think that’s fine. He may have found something of a moral compass, he may not. But I do feel like he’s changed sufficiently from the person the reader meets on the first page. I’m glad to know that the ending has resonated with people as well.
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