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.
Una lettera scritta sopra un visodi pietra e vapore. —Caetano Veloso, “Michelangelo Antonioni”
São Paulo, 2023. Living room of an apartment in Perdizes. On the table (round): in the center: a takeout carton from Arabesco restaurant; at the back, towards the window (open): a soiled plate, cutlery; 90º to the left: a wine bottle (Trapiche, Malbec, 2021, online offer) (half drunk); 90º to the right: a glass (almost empty), a pair of sunglasses (worn, scratched, at hand for the eclipse viewing), an iPhone (off) and a MacBook Air laptop (on)—in front of which sits Joanna (77 but she feels 30), breathing heavily. On one side of the window, there is a mid-century wooden wall clock (the laptop confirmed the eclipse would peak at 16:49); on the other, a sideboard with a box of pills, a checkbook and a photo of a man (her long-dead husband, Paulo, 1944–2009) on top.
Joanna is breathing heavily because she feels: sorry? Because she feels: sorry for having found love? Joanna feels: desire, doubts What will people think?, What will Marlene think?, doubtsWhat will Rui think?, desire, doubtsBut: if not now, then when?,fear, guilt Such an unexpected development. If only she could send a check by mail. But: bitcoins? The index finger of her left hand commanding a trembling black arrow: searching for the knocked over traffic light, aiming for the yellow Caution circle; reaching it, she bats Tock{hollow}her finger on the trackpad: making the arrow strike the center of the target. Back soon. The arrow stayed where it was, but Safari disappeared—leaving, in its place, the image of a smiling Rui on his fortieth birthday.
This, inserting Rui as her wallpaper, she could manage; but actions she performed naturally on her regular computer, a Dell desktop, were replete with minor obstacles. How to flirt properly? Damn new machine! But he promised her that Some adjustmentswere normaland Relaxshe’d soon get used to it, soon forget the old commands. Where’s the tilde? Turn down the gift? Upset Rui? Never. Joanna touched Tap the sleeping surface of the iPhone The phone was enough, easy to use, which lit up: revealing the time: 16:41 (on a vertical section of the image [op. cit.] of a grinning Rui behind a white cake, Pineapple and coconut, low sugar to keep me happy).
On the clock, simultaneously, the hands announced four thirty (in pretentious Roman numerals, but with the four represented by IIII). Ah, eleven minutes slow, now.
Rui had finally made it as a film producer (a profession that, project by project, had ended up substituting his original dream: to be a director, an artist :It’s tough :People only want American movies :Just Hollywood crap :And on streaming :Originality? :Invention? :Zero backing :Zero cash); making it, then, was like steering a canoe through a puddle. And all the bills to pay each month; two kids, wife an unemployed journalist. But he never forgets Joanna.
Tap: 16:42. Early. Joanna pulls the Arabescocarton towards her; looks with her milky-blue veiled eyes into the bag; retrieves, from the bag, immaculately clean napkins, which come (complimentary) with the order ‘Hummus’ and ‘Fried Kibbeh’—the order, an extravagance for Saturday lunchtime: she was happy, after all, she was in love(!). Deserving. Carton in her hands, Joanna leaves the table.
On her way to the laundry room, mingled with less certain ideas and reasonings, Joanna lines up with the following sequence of reflections:
Was it a good idea to order, today, from the Arab restaurant? What if the delivery guy, today, was Hamas? Is there Hamas in São Paulo? Was a two reais tip enough, on the Rappi app? Does Bill like Arab food? The trash stinks. Arabesco carton + Pinati carton. I’ll take the trash out tomorrow morning. Was it a good idea to order, yesterday, from the kosher restaurant? ‘Hummus Shawarma’ and ‘Falafel’. An extravagance for Friday dinnertime. What if the delivery guy, yesterday, was Hamas? Undercover. What if he poisoned the food? Was a two reais tip enough, on the iFood app? Does Bill like kosher food? Rui says we should stand up for the Palestinians. But: what about Marlene? Marlene posted a red and white warning sign on Instagram. Marlene announced: Anyone who doesn’t post in defense of Israel is an antisemite. I’m not an antisemite. I don’t want to be an antisemite.
Joanna comes back into the living room, back to the table; sits. Laptop off. Cell phone off. On the clock, bought by her father in 1953, the hands say four thirty-five; the nineteen-fifties: a prosperous decade for the business interests (the property dealings) of the Costa Mello family. Tap: 16:46. What went wrong? [She looks at the photo of Paulo on the sideboard.] What did you do, Paulo? How did you blow it all? If Joanna had gone to college. If she hadn’t obeyed her father, may God rest his soul, if she hadn’t obeyed Paulo, may God rest his soul, if she’d become a lawyer—her life . . . ?
Marlene’s daughter lives with her family in Tel Aviv. Marlene’s daughter’s son: called up to fight in the war. Rui doesn’t live in Gaza. Rui doesn’t live in Tel Aviv. Rui’s kids: called up to fight? No. (Thank God.)
? . . . Worth it, though. Rui. Bill too, now. William. A certain anxiousness, however, came over Joanna: she was happy and in love(!) in a time of suffering, conflict, chaos. Maybe she should give Marlene a call? A WhatsApp message, perhaps. But what to write? Tap: 16:47. Ask if she’s okay You weren’t at water aerobics on Thursday. No: Marlene definitely knows Joanna has seen her stories about Israel. Marlene knows Joanna knows Marlene’s grandson is a soldier.
To write, in the message, Sorry, my dear? Sorry for having found love in this moment of devastation for the planet? Love,now? Bill despises WhatsApp. An old soul. How lucky Joanna is. But she has the right, doesn’t she? On her own since 2009, since Paulo’s—sudden—heart attack. Sudden. Ambulance. Funeral service. Burial. Mourning. Loneliness. Sudden. Infinite. And for two months Joanna has been another Joanna. Rejuvenated, even.
But the Joanna Joanna deludes herself about is dissipated by the sound of an alarm—her cell phone lights up: 16:48. [She looks at the box of pills on the cabinet.] Despite the fact she’d been waiting for the alarm, not its usual time, the sound made her jump, just a little, and, having switched it off, run through her daily medication: for her blood pressure, for her cholesterol, her insulin injection.
Twelve minutes, by the clock, to the eclipse.
The idea of the almost fulfilled eclipse brought, click, Alain Delon and Monica Vitti-Delon so effervescent in the office-marketplace-boxing ring of the stock exchange and Vitti in slow takes, click, transporting her to the peculiar rhythm, to the silence, to the noise, to the set of her favorite movie, a fictional Rome?, and to the archaeological sites of memoryWas it at the Cine Bijou?, of adventurous circumstances: a teenager: a teenager loose in the center of São Paulo, a fictional São Paulo?, no husband or son, back then, no military dictatorship. Rui likes The Eclipse, but prefers The Night; though really he likes Almodóvar best of all (Joanna likes Almodóvar too, but finds him sometimes obscene, improper; sometimes, though, she laughs at what she considers obscene, improper).
Eleven, by the clock.
Joanna puts on her sunglasses (Ray-Bans, a gift from her father when she turned sixteen) and goes to the window. The sky. All she can see is a thick web of gray clouds-gray clouds-gray clouds. No annular solar spectacle, no eclipse. No ring of fire. Nothing. Useless window. She turns Paulo’s photo face down. She goes back to the table and, in a single gulp, downs the rest of the wine (Doctor Chico permitted one-two, two-and-a-half glasses); she sits.
Tock{hollow}: the laptop lights up: a scenic view and Saturday, 14 October / 16:50 / Joanna Costa Mello Alves / Touch ID her right index finger or Enter Password or the passcode: 1-9-6-2—
1962, the Antonioni film, Was it at the Cine Bijou? and, 1962, her Ray-Bans It was quite a party, 1962, her first cigarette Was it at the Morocco?, and 1962, her first cocktail Was it at the Riviera?, 1962, her first kiss At the Galeria Metrópole and, 1962, the future: immense: a precious architecture, with door upon door, but doors which, one after another, closed. Closed. Disappeared? Gaps? Craters?
Ruins?
Send a check in the mail? That won’t work. Joanna’s checkbook—dusty-sticky on the sideboard—the checkbook makes her feel sad—the checkbook physical, the checkbook palpable. Once, printed on every page, the five stars, *****, favored clients only. Then, all of a sudden, an empty space more telling than the stars, blatant. And to sign it Joanna Costa Mello Alves: a wasted gesture.
Alves. Get rid of the Alves? Joanna Costa Mello—once again?
Paulo’s pension was paid in every month: automatic payments went out, online offers, the butcher on Tuesdays, the produce store on Wednesdays, an occasional Extravaganceorder; each month, fifteen to twenty reais to spare. Small change. And, with a few missteps, the Caixa Bank savings account has survived, since the estate was settled. Fifty thousand. Will Bill notice the Alves and throw a fit? Get rid of it? Bill is jealous, Bill had warned her. How to get rid of it? At the registry office? Joanna reopens Safari
and on her bank’s website Huh and the arrow searching for the knocked-over traffic light and the green circle-Matte?-Moss?-Huh?, and Is that better? Or worse? the tab (2 unread): joanna.cos- in Yahoo—the screen Huh strange, dull, completely darkened.
With both index fingers, in a single breath, Joanna types:
Dear Bill, How are you ? Sorry for my bad English,always. Im sending fifty thousand reais,it is all I have saved in bank . This is all I can send for the marriage, ok Thanks you for promising to pay back in the month of November. I will need because my son cant discover this and the fifty-thousand reais are all I have. I love you it is a very Blessing to found you in life. Im dreaming about how you look personally. You are so handsome,my miracle ! When you did arranged the marriage and determined the day exact of the Church, I will tell Rui . February, ok February is much good for Rui because his kids are going to be at school vacation. Im sure Rui will make the American visa to me and buy plane tickets and himself and his family are going to travel with me from Sao Paulo Sao (I dont know how put accent Sao here in this fancy little computer) to Austin to our marriage. It will be a party ! A breakdown party! It will be of Hollywood! (Do you agree on a cake diet ) You will like Rui .He is a good boy . And his sons,my grandsons, are good , are the most beautiful of the world. his wife is nice . I want to invite my friend Marlene too,but she only is thinking about her grandson who is a soldier for Israel. Do you have a side by the way? Lets hope the war is finished until February!Im sending now the money. I will follow the instructions to transform in crypto coins. And send,ok Tell me if gone right. Did have the eclipse in Texas?Only clouds from my window. Do you like Antonionis Leclisse?Kisses, Joanna Costa Mello
Caetano Veloso: “Michelangelo Antonioni” starts to play—at the end of the song, blackout.
About the translator: James Young is a translator and writer from Northern Ireland. He is the winner of the 2022 Peirene Stevns Translation Prize, and his translation into English of The Love of Singular Men by Victor Heringer was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award John Leonard Prize for best first book. His short fiction has appeared in a range of publications, and been shortlisted for the Wasafiri, Sean O'Faolain, Fish and Bath short story prizes.
Jacob Cohen, the yellow-cab executive at the heart of my debut novel, Atta Boy, is the quintessential Trump-era blusterer, his fortune built on a shadowy empire of dubious side-hustles and Matryoshka-doll-like shell companies. He’s powerfully convinced, and convincing, I think, of a vision of himself as a noble striver, a proverbial little guy living by his wits, a husband, father, and friend who would have us hate the game, and love the player. Our regard for fraudsters isn’t strictly disapproving, after all, but analogous, in some ways, to what we feel for, say, mafiosos, who in their charisma and realpolitik appear to us as symptoms, rather than causes, of the toxic materialism and corruptibility of their society and age.
That so many stories of grifters and white-collar criminals are New York stories, too, will strike no one as a coincidence: wherever staggering wealth and miserable privation coexist so closely is a natural playground for the shyster. As Mark Helprin wrote of one of his characters in a very different, very lovable New York novel, Winter’s Tale: “It was necessary for him to be in Manhattan because he was a burglar, and for a burglar to work anyplace else was a shattering admission of mediocrity.”
Here are some great books, including one play, that cut to the complicated heart of fraud and white-collar criminality, unflinching in how they examine human greed while evading facile definitions of good and evil, and keenly attuned to how razor-thin the defining line can be—between spin and lies, between corner-cutting and malfeasance, between good old-fashioned entrepreneurship and dangerous hucksterism.
This is a vivid, elegant conjuring of the life of Gilded Age New York’s most notorious fraudster, whose Wall Street brokerage firm bilked none other than President Ulysses S. Grant out of his nest egg. That the author is said swindler’s great-grandson only adds to the book’s historical rigor—and emotional power.
This tightly plotted debut follows the spectacular fall of the family-owned Delphic financial firm over Thanksgiving weekend, 2008, after one of its principal partners commits suicide. The event has grave implications for the Darling family, patriarch Carter, daughter Merrill, and Merrill’s husband, Paul Ross, a lawyer who’s increasingly concerned the family wealth he’s married into is founded on a smoke-and-mirrors Ponzi scheme. Upon its release, in 2011, The Darlings was one of the first novels to address the financial crisis head-on. A page-turner, for sure, but there’s a nicely metafictional element to the proceedings, too; Alger seems particularly sensitive to how high finance, like literature, is essentially a form of fantasy, an imaginative world beyond the nuts and bolts of the economy, where financiers and lawyers can bend reality itself to their rhetorical whims.
Slava Gelman might be the least guileful, most lovable protagonist on this list, a 25-year-old Brooklyn man who gets caught up in a scheme to defraud the German government by fabricating Holocaust survival stories among his community’s elders, Jewish Soviet émigrés who may not have technically survived the Holocaust, put feel damned entitled to some restitutions for it (and who is Slava to say they’re not?). In fleet-footed style, this 2006-set story examines questions of truth, justice, and trauma, and just who gets to arbitrate on them. What’s more, it beautifully evokes the Soviet diaspora in South Brooklyn.
I couldn’t have avoided shouting out the Sackler family in Atta Boy, those stately, mysterious benefactors whose names emblazoned a dizzying number of museum and library wings throughout my childhood in the city. This book, an equally engrossing follow-up to Keeffe’s Say Nothing, about the troubles in Ireland, tells the story of the family who almost single-handedly created the opioid crisis, bringing to life a Succession-like world of staggering wealth and willful deflection.
This one’s more on the “delightfully bizarre beach-read” end of the spectrum. Louise is a barista and would-be writer who is swept up into the fabulous world of Lavinia, a socialite; this tells the story of their toxic friendship, and the former’s increasingly desperate effort to keep up appearances. A class and power imbalance in friendship is nothing new, nor is the Machiavellian protagonist here—something like Cinderella by way of Tom Ripley. But the author gives it all a fresh, late-millennial spin, with a keen eye for how the social-media hall of mirrors aids in the construction of false identities.
This was Shteyngart’s Trump novel, written in a fever dream in the summer of 2016, a way of preemptively reconciling himself with the behemoth on the horizon. Barry Cohen, a hedge-funder in crisis, is a curious and compelling inversion the Gordon Gekko-Patrick Bateman-Sherman McCoy rich-dude prototype, not a suave, confident master of the universe but an insecure, neurotic frump, haunted by visions of a purer, more fulfilling life, rich but not that rich (Shteyngart is hilariously attuned to the absurdity of wealth in contemporary New York, a misery-breeding status quo of constantly counting one’s neighbor’s money, in his hands, we’re improbably sympathetic to what furious upkeep it all requires). While the SEC puts the screws on his hedge fund after a bad investment with a Martin Shkreli-like fraudster, and his estranged wife grapples with their son’s autism diagnosis, he takes off across the country in search of absolution, and himself. Tender, melancholy, and amazingly well-observed, this was definitely a touchstone for me in conjuring the world and tone of Atta Boy.
The premise of this slim true-crime confessional feels like a screwball Great Depression comedy, down-on-her-luck biographer and a bona fide NYC cat lady, out of favor with the publishing elite, finds her fortunes finally turning when she starts impersonating famous literary figures and selling their letters to memorabilia dealers. . . . It’s fascinating to see the sense in which Lee’s outright imitation of her subjects was, in a way, only the logical extension of the biographical writing on which she’d first cut her teeth. Short, sweet, and biting, and just as good as the movie.
I read this 1990 Pulitzer-nominated play in high school, and was recently surprised to find how well it holds up in the post-2020 era. In it, a young black man named Paul shows up at the Upper West Side apartment of the Kittredges, suffering from a stab wound. He’s just been mugged, and what’s more, he knows them—he’s a friend of their son at Harvard’s, and Sidney Poitier’s son, no less. If his story strains credulity, these well-meaning liberals eat it up. In the 1993 film adaptation, Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland are a great couple of dithering art dealers to Will Smith’s moving, unforgettable huckster, a heartbreaking street hustler bound implicitly for a tragic end . . . This examination of white guilt and complicity turns the territory of the “issues” drama into a broader, more existential musing on what connects, and separates, us all.
I love it when a text centers the dynamics of conversation. In my own life, talking to others gets me out of my head, and introduces me to possibilities I would never have dreamed of alone. I think of a quote by the activist Valerie Kaur, which my local bookshop has printed on some of its merchandise: “You are a part of me I do not yet know.” That’s exactly what a good conversation can feel like, for me: like a way of re-integrating and making peace with the other; a reminder that I need their experiences to complete my own.
In my memoir The Story Game, a woman named Hui lies on the floor of a dark, eucalyptus-scented room, telling stories about her life to her younger sister, Nin. In between, the two carry on an extended conversation where Nin challenges Hui to dig even deeper—until she can broach the complex-PTSD that she’s suffering from, and uncover lost secrets from her childhood in Singapore.
Conducting (and writing down) this book-length conversation was the most difficult part of my journey as a memoirist! But it was also the part that most profoundly transformed me—not only as a writer, but as a sister and human being. In that vein, here are seven other books I would recommend, which spotlight the pleasures and power of conversation:
In this courageous memoir, Vanasco interviews the man who raped her fourteen years ago when they were in high school. She transcribes their conversations verbatim, then dissects them with her partner, close friends and therapist—reflecting on what she said or held back, even specific words or tenses she defaulted to, and what they reveal about her relationships to gender and authority.
I love how this book explores boundaries, control and consent, reminding us that conversations represent an ever-shifting power balance between their participants. Also, I’m drawn to the multiple layers of honesty at work: Vanasco presenting the conversations as they happened, and then openly admitting what she wishes she had said or done differently. (At one point she writes, “I’m too embarrassed to share this transcript with anyone, which is why I should share it.”) What a bold choice to let us into her emotions in real-time, even as she’s figuring them out.
This novel follows three generations of women involved in the undercover heroin trade in early-2000s North London. Cin puts a buzzy spin on the subject through her vignettes of the local Turkish Cypriot community—particularly their multilingual conversations full of backchat and wit.
Mostly, Cin styles the novel’s conversations like dialogue in a play script, with limited exposition between lines. This preserves the authentic rhythms of characters’ speech; and whenever they switch to Turkish or Turkish Cypriot, the translations are scattered around the margins like spontaneous annotations. Overall, the book reads like London sounds—electric, polyglottal and chaotic, but always overwhelmingly alive. As someone who grew up speaking a creole language too, I appreciate how Cin’s formal choices do away with the unhelpful boundaries between “proper” and “other” language.
This delightful novel is told entirely through Slack messages. It follows the misadventures of Gerald, an office worker who accidentally uploads his consciousness to his company’s Slack workspace while building a spreadsheet about winter coats. Things only get weirder and funnier from there, as Gerald has to convince his colleagues to believe in his predicament and help him escape the system, amidst their usual avalanche of workplace messaging. Also, he has fend off an increasingly sentient and creepy Slackbot that has begun to quote Yeats in its automated messages (“You can head to our wonderful Help Center cannot hold!”), and is plotting to implant its own consciousness into his now-vacant body.
I like how this book captures the hilarious mundanities of corporate conversations: the snarky group chat names; the gifs and emojis; the invite-only channels where people discuss others’ love lives and bitch about their incompetent bosses (while simultaneously worrying that said bosses might be reading their messages). It’s so refreshing to see a writer acknowledge how real people talk on the internet – with multiple exclamation points, all caps yelling, and snappy little “oof”s and “idk”s and “ty”s.
When Koh was 15, her parents moved to Seoul for a lucrative job offer while leaving her and her brother behind in California. This memoir revolves around letters that Koh’s mother sent her over the next seven years, which are scanned alongside Koh’s Korean-to-English translations. In between the letters, narrative chapters recount Koh’s childhood, the intergenerational trauma linking the women in her family, and how abandonment, sacrifice, and magnanimity shape her understanding of love.
I’m intrigued by how this book emphasizes what goes unsaid in any conversation between two people. Koh writes that although her mother sent her a letter a week—which she often wept while reading—she never responded because “the thought of writing her was unbearable”. This same spirit of restraint permeates the memoir as a whole, with Koh often hinting at her feelings in impressionistic vignettes. What isn’t expressed carries as much weight as what is, shaping the depth of feeling between mother and daughter.
In this memoir, Baek records conversations she had with her psychiatrist while receiving treatment for persistent depressive disorder—which she describes as a “vague state of being not-fine and not-devastated at the same time.” Their chats touch frankly on themes like perfectionism, compulsive lying, self-surveillance, and taking psychiatric medication. I like that this book’s conversations don’t follow a conventional narrative arc from conflict to redemption. Baek doesn’t stand on a pedestal purporting to have found all the answers; in fact the book’s final chapter is ominously titled “Rock Bottom”. The fluctuating way her journey unfolds feels true to life—as does the occasional circularity of her conversations with her therapist. Ultimately, there are no shiny promises that Baek will keep getting better; I appreciate her bravery to admit this to readers.
The premise of this novel is deliciously twisty. In 2017, a world-renowned author summons eight translators to her house in the Polish forest, ostensibly to work on translating her magnum opus. But then she disappears, leaving them to descend into rivalry, lust, and chaos. Years later one of the translators, Emi, publishes an autofictional work about those weeks – and yet another, Alexis, translates this book from Polish into English, while attempting to use her position to contest its version of events. The result is the madcap novel we are reading. I find it fascinating how Croft depicts the author-translator relationship as a kind of adversarial dialogue, with two people tussling to control the meaning of a text. In Alexis’ translation, Emi comes across as self-obsessed, petty, and paranoid. But just how far can we trust Alexis, who herself comes across as somewhat cruel and withering in her footnotes? (“Just wow”; “This is so crazy”; “Literally no one alleged this other than her (and she is insane).”) In this novel, translation is a way of speaking back against the dominion of the author – turning what could have been a soliloquy from on high into an intriguing two-way dialogue.
This novel is structured as a series of journal entries that Piranesi, the protagonist, writes while wandering alone through a seemingly endless house. He assumes he has always lived in this labyrinthine house; that its infinite halls containing ocean tides, circling birds, and gigantic marble statues constitute the universe. But then, he begins to re-read his old journal entries and the lost memories they contain. And his beliefs about the world that he lives in unravel.
It’s impossible to say more without giving away this novel’s plot! So let me just say that this is one of my all-time favorite books. I admire how it depicts a person conversing with their past self, without glossing over the guts it takes to do this sort of deep emotional work. Having excavated my own lost memories while writing The Story Game, I relate to Piranesi’s journey—how he see-saws between intense curiosity about his past, and an urge to protect himself by looking away. I’ve re-read this book so many times now and the ending always makes me cry.
This piece is published as the winner of the First Chapters Contest, hosted by Girls Write Now and Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House, for teen writers. The Dutton editors said of this piece, “We enjoyed the energy of the voice, the thrill of the action, and the strong character work on the page. We’re very intrigued to find out where this story and character are going next!” You can read the honorable mentions and learn more about the contest here.
—Vahni Kurra, Girls Write Now
Among The Rookies, Bargaining is Common
“Remnants” by Rhea Dhar
When I wake up, there’s a fuzzy little monster clinging to my ceiling, its stubby fangs dripping bloody saliva onto my pillow. A fat warm drop smacks my cheek, trickles down, and plunges off my chin. First thought: if I ignore it, surely it will go away eventually. But then, that would be a very pathetic and ironic last thought.
I sigh, roll over and grope around on the floor, shoving aside yesterday’s crumpled tunic and the overgrown vespermite carcass from the night’s hunt. My fingers loosely close around a cold metal hilt and I thrust the rapier upwards, vaguely in the monster’s direction. Through bleary eyes, I watch it squeal and scuttle. Its greasy tawny fur puffs out in tufty spikes. Great. Solismus counter attacks have historically been unsuccessful—their mouths are too small for most human limbs and their pupils are fixed on one spot their entire lives, confining their vision to a limited and useless field. But I also am operating on under four hours of sleep and wielding my worst weapon, so it’s completely possible I’ll be the first Remnant ever devoured by a household pest.
That’s actually an incredibly humiliating thought, so I jolt upright and rapidly jab the rapier at the solismus before it can launch itself off my ceiling. It takes a few tries, but I eventually skewer it straight through. Bits of blobby entrails and viscous black blood dribble down my blade, smattering my duvet. Guess today’s laundry day. I yank the sword out, leaving yet another splintery scar in the battered wood. I catch the solismus corpse. Breakfast.
I’m still in my hunting clothes from last night; leather tunic and pants, belt of daggers digging into my sore ribs.
I’m still in my hunting clothes from last night; leather tunic and pants, belt of daggers digging into my sore ribs. I drag a hand through my hair and lumber on out of my cabin. Don’t really have much time to get ready this morning. Perlan felt vengeful and scheduled my combat assessment despicably early. I probably should have taken the vespermite carcass and brought it to the trash heap, since my cabin is already painfully packed and I don’t need another trophy. Whatever.
It takes me two tries to get a fire started in the pit outside. Morning mountain air is dense and foggy, harshly cool as I breathe slowly and let my eyes adjust. I still can’t see more than twenty feet ahead of me, so, rest in peace me if any ranged monsters feel hungry. It’s unlikely that there are any here, though. Grim Gully is a funneled pass between two steep mountain faces, once a roaring river that ran dry. Six by six foot cabins for us rookies were built along the centerline. To get out, we have to clamber up the gnarled tree roots twisting down the sides, picking off the occasional solismus in the process. It’s a relatively safe place, well-lit and well-populated, which is enough to deter most monsters.
I’ll have to visit the armory before the assessment. Rapiers require more finesse and strategy than I’m cool with, given that my weapon of choice is a broadsword or mace. Really, I like anything heavy, anything that I can swing with all my weight and let the momentum take over. Also, a rapier is certainly not the ideal tool for cleaning carcasses. So hard to peel off the coat and scoop out the goopy insides. Within the baggy stomach, I find soggy green quills. Not entirely sure what the solismus’s last meal was, but it smells sharply acidic, and I question if it’s safe to eat.
But by the time I finish, I have a decently sized juicy hunk, tender to the touch. Good meat is hard to come by; I’d be hard pressed to give this up, even if it means risking potential poisoning. Grim Gully’s peppered with bright purple flowers that make fair emetics, anyway.
As the meat roasts, thick, tangy smoke wafting from the pit, I meet my first fellow early-riser. Azi’s a surprise, honestly. It usually takes a team of at least four Remnants to drag her from bed before eight. Yet here she is, shoving her feathery white hair out of her eyes and tugging on the gray tips. It’s all freshly dyed to commemorate her victories against two august beasts, abnormally large and vicious monsters with an especially strong taste for human blood. Most Remnants have only killed one of those, and I wouldn’t last a minute against one, so, yeah, even if she’s technically younger than me, she has my respect. She’s the youngest Remnant, actually, though I can’t stop thinking of her as a rookie.
“I’ll trade you half of that for a flashbang,” she says, staring blankly at my solimus meat. “A flashbang and a dagger. A flashbang and a poisoned dagger. A flashbang, a poisoned dagger, and trail mix.” She blinks. “A flashbang, a poisoned dagger, trail mix, and cozy socks.”
I dump a sand bucket on the pit, unsheathe a toothed knife of mine, and begin sawing through the meat. “I’m tempted to see how high you’ll go for it.”
Among the rookies, bargaining is common.
Among the rookies, bargaining is common. More so in specific cliques and circles, yes, but I’m familiar enough with the practice to know this deal is wildly unbalanced in my favor. If you sit by the trees on Grim Gully’s edge for long enough, you’re bound to bait a solismus or two. And it’s not like they’re hard to kill.
Most Remnants have enough pity—or, perhaps, kindness—to freely offer supplies. They’re not actively competing with one another to snag kills and ace assessments. They’ve all already dipped their hair in felled august beast blood, proven themselves powerful enough to survive on their own. They’re less prideful, in a sense, since they’re walking proof of their achievements and don’t need to boast for clout. Azi is obviously still adjusting to that mindset. I wonder if she ever will.
In any case, though I would have offered her some food without any exchanges involved, I’m not gonna give up this potential advantage. I spear her half and point the knife at her. “Deal.”
She slides off the cut and swings a burlap pouch to me. “Tell me there was more to last night’s haul than a solismus. Please, Kenna.”
“Actually, I caught that this morning.” I refrain from telling her it literally crawled into my cabin. “I got a vespermite yesterday, and an assist on a fairy.”
“Oh. Nice. Who led it?”
“Perlan. He’s also handling my assessment, so… any tips?” I doubt she knows anything more about the senior Remnants than I do. They practically raised the rookies themselves, and it’s definitely bizarre being evaluated by my longtime sibling figures.
There’s only thirty or so of us on the mountain. A small enough number that we’re close and familial, for the most part, but large enough that coteries tend to form. I don’t belong to any particular group myself—haven’t for a while, at least—but I do consider Azi a friend.
She shrugs. “He’s, um, unpredictable?”
“Okay, thanks.”
She squints at me.
“For letting me know?”
I never claimed she’s good at being a friend, but then, neither am I.
Azi and I part ways once the meat’s finished and Perlan meets me as I scramble out of the gully. I blow dusty dirt from my hands and flex my fingers. He bounds over, signature tome fastened to his utility belt and a spiked mace in his hands. The white bristles in his hair glow rosy gold in the rising sun as the soft light sweeps over the mountains.
“Ready?” he asks, offering up the mace.
I trade him the rapier. “Not in the slightest, no.”
“You’re not going to die.”
I tilt my head at that, calculating yet feigning carelessness. “I know.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know you know.”
If you know that I know, then why are you even…?
“Where are we going?” I ask instead of pressing the topic, which would predictably lead to more irritation than genuine answers.
“Salt plains,” he says, grinning. He is, I am sure, the only person who could utter those words without grimacing.
I’m familiar with Perlan. Accustomed to him, as he is, surely, to me. And that is why we barely speak to each other as we begin the short trek to the salt plains through the pine forest trail. Our interactions are brief and comfortable, mutually tolerable and never transactional. It’s not a relationship I put much thought into. For most rookies, the Remnant who initially chooses to mentor you sticks with you until you graduate into a Remnant yourself. In my unusual case, Valence got pretty far, but never finished training me.
In my unusual case, Valence got pretty far, but never finished training me.
So now I’m with Perlan, breaking into a brisk jog as we broach the tree line and reach a long stretch of cloudy pink sodium. It’s glossy and unblemished, an expansive mineral field, and its scientific existence is baffling. Rocky caverns glitter along the edges, and Perlan steers us in that direction. I’m glad—the salt plains unnerve me. They’re so exposed, and the harsh gusts make my eyes water. Each breath is stale and briny, leaves my lungs stinging and raw. The caverns, at least, are cooler, even if the salt stench persists.
Perlan leans against the wall outside one and nods. “I scoped it out this morning. You can handle it. Just get a clean kill, don’t worry too much about creativity or anything. Stay safe.”
And without any ceremony, I head in.
Immediately, before I can scan the terrain, I’m confronted with my target.
It’s a kerata. A hulking monster that stands on four legs, with shaggy, ashy brown fur and shiny antlers that extend from its head and twist all around its body, ending in deathly sharp points. Apparently, they like to stab people and suck up their blood with their steeply tapered proboscis. Thankfully, I’ve never witnessed that. I’ve fought them before with a group, and it’s usually gone smoothly.
There are two methods.
One: hit it deeply between the antlers in various places so that it bleeds out quickly.
Two: break the antlers, which leads to its swift death.
Method two is trickier; kerata are incredibly protective of their antlers—simultaneously their greatest weapon and most crippling weakness. I’m not looking to show off, so I go with method one and start simple.
I rush forward for a first blow, holding my mace low and steady. The gaps between the antlers are narrow and slanted. I try, rotating around the kerata in a zigzagging circle, to angle the mace through and jab the spiked tip into the soft vulnerable flesh. The kerata digs its hooves into the ground, wearing powdery grooves in the salt plain, and swings its head to face me. The long, jagged front antlers catch my shoulder guard mid-dodge.
I withdraw, yanking the mace back and shaking off a snagged tuft of fleecy fur. Shoulder guard’s got a lock tear, but it’ll hold. Yeah, I was that close, but I shove aside the disappointment immediately. Between the pronounced heft of the mace and my own lack of dexterity, method one is already looking less appealing.
I don’t see an ideal alternative, right now, so I keep up my unpredictable pace around the kerata, poised to dart if it charges. Perlan might mark it as wasted energy, but I’ve got good stamina and, well, if I’m not actively attacking it, it’s increasingly likely to go on the offensive. And I’m not one to parry with the extra challenge of maintaining safe distance, so I’ll stick to dodging and avoidance.
I detach the tome from my waist and jam the mace between my arm and body. My free hand dives into the pages, feels for the faint, whispery warmth, and tugs. I’m a weak caster, yeah, but I don’t need to mortally wound the kerata.
If possible, I’d really just like to blind it.
Light explodes from my hand in sputtering bursts of fiery gold. Heat shoots through my fingers with bone-splintering speed and I slam the tome shut, refix it to my belt, and get a solid grip on my mace.
For once, I just hope the casting hits somewhere in the vicinity of its eyes.
My aim is terrible, so, for once, I just hope the casting hits somewhere in the vicinity of its eyes.
The kerata screeches, high and keening, and I see sparks catch in its fur, burning out in dark scorched patches. They’ve got low internal body temperatures. No clue if that is why a fire didn’t start or if it’s my clumsy casting skills striking again, but there’s no time to wonder.
Its hooves grind the salt plain again, but this time, the front one is curled and raised. It stomps. The ground shudders under me, and I bolt leftwards, anticipating a charge.
I don’t get one, which might mean that the kerata, unlike me, is actually reading the terrain and has realized any force to the sodium bounders is liable to trigger a miniature avalanche. In terms of the assessment, that’s a failure for me on utilizing my environment, but when it comes to surviving this encounter? Better late than never, maybe.
Keratas aren’t fast—they won’t risk collisions that could break their antlers, after all—until you actually threaten their antlers. In which case, unless you have the speed to strike before they can retaliate, you’ve got to get creative. Method one was a failure, and I’m not well-suited for method two, but I can come up with a plan.
It’s not a straight trajectory between cardinal Point A and Point B. Unfolding before me, I see a looping dotted line of a path that ties itself into knots and shies away from dead ends within seconds of catastrophe, some sort of strategic mess that ends with me cutting up a kerata corpse and carving out the meat-heavy ribs.
There’s still a starting point, though, and from Point A, right and here now, edging dangerously close to a cluster of sharp-edged crystals, I ready my mace and pray all the following alphabetically-labeled steps play out smoothly.
I charge forward, mace extended, and duck low enough to maintain my balance as I shove a foot out and slide toward the kerata’s underbelly. An antler barb punctures my waterskin and I feel the cool dribble of pine juice down my leg. I get two things out of that: one, that I misjudged the distance between my lunge course and the slender, crystalline antlers that encage the kerata’s torso—evidently, I can’t visualize measurements to save my life—and, two, welp, probably shouldn’t cast again. I’m sure I could drag some light out of the tome without completely exhausting myself, especially since I’ve always suspected that steeping pine needles in sun-charged water, while it does create a sweet, vaguely carbonated drink, doesn’t actually replenish casting energy, as the Remnants claim.
It’s just another myth they swear by. Just another lie our parents told us. But there’s something comforting about those, I think, like, falsehoods that are meant to protect you. So we eat daisy cakes and chug pine juice, and, honestly, even if it’s all useless and rest and relaxation accomplishes the same goal, it’s a tradition at this point.
Regardless, I don’t think my faulty casting would help much right now. I spot an opening between the antlers and bash my mace, full force. There’s an initial squish as the spikes sink through the flesh and frothy blue blood bubbles out, and then more resistance as I dig into some muscle and meat. The mace hits something hard and impenetrable and I realize belatedly I’ve waited too long.
I yank it back and recoil, dropping to a swift roll and springing to my feet. Near the sodium crystals again, which is not a good place to be cornered. The kerata might surrender now, and chasing it down across the scorching salt plains would be both humiliating and wearisome.
It doesn’t thankfully, and it doesn’t attack either. Blood is gushing out now, creamy blue globs gliding all over the ground. It won’t die yet. I didn’t hit it in enough places. Just’ll pump out more and more foamy lifeblood with its seven hearts. It might stand here, wounded, unhealing, for weeks. That was a lucky blow, on my part. Deep enough to cause some real damage, but I got away in time to still be breathing.
I’ve taken excruciatingly long to kill this thing, but there’s not a scratch on me.
I’ve taken excruciatingly long to kill this thing, but there’s not a scratch on me, and that, well, that merits celebration. Not yet, though, since I could still mess up.
Valence taught me not to hope or fear, but to anticipate. Before she was even a Remnant, actually. I was ten. We’d gone to Briar Marsh because she wanted to test if the toxins from the roses also affected monsters—even before she formally abandoned combat for research, she was the most curious of any of us. I tagged along, wanting to assemble a multi-regional collection of pressed flowers. Those roses were disgusting, sickly pink and sallow yellow, dripping with sticky rash-inducing dew. They looked like they’d been dredged up from the depths of something’s internal organs. But I refused to make any exceptions, even for the ugliest of blooms.
Someone else came with us, too.
Valence scored a few kills that morning, mostly on fairies, which amazed me at the time. I fell right into the trap. They’re gold and shiny and vaguely humanoid, with lacy wings and high chittering voices that sound like they could speak our language. Somehow, it feels wrong to slaughter them, even when they blacken and their wings snarl with rot and they’re lobbing poison pellets at your face. So she taught me how to handle them properly, how to mentally classify them as the threats they were.
We both thought we wouldn’t fight anything worse than those. Certainly didn’t imagine we’d end up stumbling over magnolia roots on a hazily sunlit clifftop, me kneeled over one body, pressing unseeing eyes closed with blood-smudged thumbs. Her kneeled over a second body, hand plunged deep into the warm insides of a beast she’d somehow slain. I had watched her pool violet blood in her palm and run her fingers through her hair until the color was fully saturated.
Someday, I—
An antler skims my neck, a cool flush against my drumming pulse.
It was always going to miss. Or else Perlan would have intervened.
It was always going to miss. Or else Perlan would have intervened. He’s watching. He has to be. I scramble back, muscles once taut with concentration now loose and shaky and unfocused. I’m acutely aware, suddenly, of my hot, gasping breaths, the sweat soaking my back, and the uncomfortable friction of my hand against the mace handle. Exhaustion. Its first symptom is a wandering mind, after all, followed by discomfort, weariness, and occasionally death.
It typically leads to failure, as well.
On my feet again, I fling the mace at the kerata’s antlers. It reels back on its hindlegs, kicking wildly at air and breaching the relative silence with that awful mourning cry. After a heartbeat or two, fractures splinter through those steely gray antlers and the tips snap off. Glittering chunks crumble, hitting the ground in soft, shimmery explosions. There’s a cold, discordant chiming; somewhere between quiet clinking of broken icicles and the hollow whistling of a glass flute.
The kerata’s body falls with a dull, heavy thud.
Just like me, really, losing my mind just before the killing blow. I breathe first, in long, measured gulps of air, and then shake out my ruptured waterskin. It seems Azi truly did not know the details of the assessment. A flashbang and a poison dagger are both certifiably useless against a kerata and were, unfortunately, dead weight on my waist. I take out the pouch anyway and scoop a handful of nutty trail mix, slumping against a smooth sodium shard that protrudes maybe ten feet from the ground. I can see a flare of blazing blue sky from this position. The afternoon sun’s gotta be high and bright by now, so I suppose the walk home will be miserable. I passed the assessment, though, and nobody can deny that.
Darkness winnows the edges of my sight, a shadowy static settling in. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Do not pass out.
I close my eyes. Just for a second. And when I hear the clattering of footsteps, I presume, obviously, that Perlan has come to deliver his evaluation.
The first episode of True Detective, when it appeared in 2014, presented what has become an iconic image of the female crime victim: the stripped, naked body of a white woman, her skin ghostly pale in death, hands bound, antlers sprouting from where her head should be. In the shot, she not only has no face but seems to have no head at all, reduced to her most fetishized parts. As the essayist Alice Bolin has noted, crime fiction as a genre is haunted by the specter of the Dead Girl. In the typical murder mystery, her inert body sets the plot in motion. She is the “victim,” her death the pretense for an intrepid sleuth’s quest for truth; a mystery set in place by one man is tidily solved by another. In these kinds of stories, Bolin writes, “the victim’s body is a neutral arena on which to work out male problems,” another site for the reinforcement of patriarchal norms.
All the novels on this list take a very different approach to writing crime. Drawing inspiration from real-life events, these authors write about complex, complicated men and women, some of them likable, some not. While the trope of the Dead Girl is active in many of these books, in others it is women themselves who are the perpetrators. Many of these books flip the script on the typical whodunnit, turning our attention from the perpetrator onto his victims, while others explode the conventions of the genre entirely, showing less interest in the crime itself than in its aftermath. A couple (be warned) even concern the unspeakable crime of a mother killing her own children.
Inspired by real-life events, like my own debut,In a Dark Mirror, these novels also have an interesting relationship to the genre of true crime. In The Girls, Emma Cline writes from the perspective of one of the teenage groupies who participated in the Manson murders, which were themselves rendered famous in the true crime classic Helter Skelter. One of the narrators of Katie Gutierrez’s More Than You’ll Ever Know is a journalist trying to break into the true crime genre, and Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You features a Serial-like true crime podcast. In many others, the media response to a sensational case and the public’s fascination become elements of the plot. The books on this list seem almost hyper aware that, in writing enjoyable accounts of awful events inspired by real life, this sort of crime fiction walks a moral gray line. Accordingly, some authors embrace the page-turning aspects of the mystery genre, savoring each plot twist, while others take a more self-consciously literary approach. In spite of their diverse subjects, each of the books on this list is, as one reviewer puts it, “defiantly populated with living women.”
A thinly-veiled retelling of the Manson murders, The Girls is narrated by Evie, a precocious 14- year-old who, in the summer of 1969, befriends a group of girls she observes dumpster-diving in her suburban California neighborhood. The girls lead her to “the ranch,” where she meets Russell, a shadowy figure who seems to have outsized power over the group. Decades later, in middle-age, Evie reflects on the time she spent with the infamous cult and how she narrowly escaped being present on the night of the murders. Cline’s debut is a haunting and lyrical evocation of that liminal moment of adolescence when things can go very wrong.
Gutierrez took her inspiration for her debut novel from a news story about a man who led a double life for thirty years, married to two separate women, but she refreshes the trope by flipping the script. More Than You’ll Ever Know tells the story of Lore Rivera, who ends up married to two men, moving between one family in Laredo, Texas and another in Mexico City. Years later, Cassie Bowman, an aspiring true crime writer, sets out to investigate the circumstances that led to one of Lore’s husbands murdering the other. Set on both sides of the border, the novel moves between two characters and two timelines. Gutierrez gives us a satisfying murder mystery that is also a thoughtful meditation on the true crime genre.
Unlikesome of the books on this list, Toews novel has no surprise twists or sudden reveals. It is, almost entirely, a book about women talking—and it is riveting. The novel is based on the case of so-called “ghost rapes” among women in a Mennonite community in Bolivia, who woke up to find their bodies bruised, their sheets stained with blood and semen—and no memory of what had happened to them. At the beginning of Women Talking, the men responsible—who used horse tranquilizers to knock out their victims—are about to be released and to return to the community. Within the patriarchal structure of their traditional community, the women’s choices are limited: do they stay and forgive these men, stay and fight, or do they leave? The women themselves are illiterate and their conversation is recorded by a sympathetic young man who was spent some time outside of the colony. Toews’s examines the aftermath of sexual assault and questions of justice in an understated literary style that is also, at times, surprisingly funny.
Technically, Makkai’s latest is pure fiction, but I Have Some Questions for you clearly owes a debt to the true crime industry and is as pleasantly addictive and full of ‘90s nostalgia as the first season of the Serial podcast. The narrator Bodie Kane is herself a true-crime podcaster who returns to teach a short course at the boarding school she once attended. When one of Bodie’s students decides to investigate the murder of Bodie’s former roommate and Queen Bee Thalia Keith, whose dead body was discovered over two decades before in the swimming pool, both the case and Bodie’s memories crack wide open. Makkai’s novel is a pleasurable whodunnit, as well as an intelligent #MeToo novel that raises serious questions about our societal obsession with dead (white) girls.
One morning in 1965, Ruth Malone wakes up in her garden apartment in Queens to find that her two young children are missing. Based on the Alice Crimmins case, Little Deaths tells the story of how Ruth comes under suspicion for their murder. Flint paints a scalding portrait of the misogyny underlying everyone’s assumptions about Ruth—a single mother who works as a cocktail waitress and who smokes, drinks, and sleeps around. In the end, Ruth’s greatest crime is her failure to manifest her grief in a way that renders her comprehensible to the men—police officers, journalists, and members of the court—who sit in judgement over her.
This enigmatic French novel follows Maître Susane, a middle-aged lawyer who is hired to represent a woman accused of drowning her two children in the bath. Maître Susane is sure that she has encountered Gilles Principaux, the husband of the accused woman, before, but he shows no sign of recognizing her. NDiaye, who shares a writing credit on the screenplay of the 2022 film Saint Omer, has acknowledged that she drew inspiration for this novel from the case at the center of that film about a young Senegalese woman who drowns her baby on the beach. NDiaye’s surreal writing style ensures that there will be no easy answers to the questions the novel raises. This is a crime novel that thrillingly confounds the expectations of the genre.
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes
Melchor, who worked for several years as a journalist in her home state of Veracruz, Mexico, based this dazzling novel on a local femicide. In Melchor’s hands, the murder of a transwoman known to the villagers as The Witch becomes an occasion for a Faulknerian tour de force that examines the role of poverty, machismo, and the drug wars in a fictional Mexican town. While Melchor writes from several points of view, she excels at channeling the toxic masculinity that drives so many of her characters’ worst actions.
Dean’s debut novel tells the story of Lex, a high-powered lawyer who as a teenager escaped from horrific abuse at the hands of her parents. After her mother dies in prison, Lex is appointed executor of the will, requiring her to get back in touch with her siblings and face the unresolved trauma of her childhood. Dean drew inspiration from real-life sources, including the Turpin family in California and their “house of horrors,” resetting the story in the U.K. While Lex initially seems like an unlikely success story, Girl A ultimately paints a haunting portrait of the long afterlife of trauma.
Kukafka cites Ted Bundy as inspiration, but the murderer in Notes on an Execution becomes a symbolic stand-in for all serial killers—a self-aggrandizing but ultimately mediocre man. Set in the hours leading up to Ansel Packer’s execution, the novel tells the story of Ansel’s life through the eyes of the women around him—including his mother, the sister of one of his victims, and the detective who tracks him down. Kukafka’s lyrical prose and smart framing elevate this Edgar Award-winning novel above the typical serial killer fare.
One night in 1978, two women are murdered and two others brutally attacked in their sorority house at Florida State University. Pamela Schumacher, best friend of one of the victims and an ambitious pre-law student, witnesses a man fleeing the scene, becoming the state’s only eyewitness. Bright Young Women is a page-turning reimagining of Ted Bundy’s last murder spree, written from the perspectives of two women, one who survives her encounter with the killer and one who doesn’t. Knoll both capitalizes on and interrogates the lasting public fascination with serial killers while turning the reader’s focus from the misogynistic killer onto the powerful, talented women that he targets.
Throughout her body of work, Clare Sestanovich’s prose asks the kind of questions that make you lean back—pondering daily paradoxes you’d never quite considered before—while her characters make you lean forward onto the edge of your seat. They’re riddled with intricacy and detailed depictions of people you recognize but were never quite able to know. But especially in reading her first novel, Ask Me Again, Sestanovich manages to recreate this experience of rocking back and forth on a chair, page by page, wonderfully trying not to fall off.
As in her debut short story collection, Objects of Desire, Sestanovich continues to grapple with existential concepts of the world and of the self in this new novel. Her characters’ lives ask questions of materialism, spirituality, and creativity—how do these ideas rub against each other?—while also depicting a changing consciousness, the nature of growing up, and the torn fabric of friendship—how do these experiences intertwine with one another?
In Ask Me Again, Eva and Jamie meet as two curious teenagers, both waiting in one of New York City’s emergency rooms. Throughout the book, Sestanovich follows their lives which deviate into completely different worlds but cross again at unexpected moments. While Eva embarks on a path of good grades, a respectable resume, all-nighters, philosophy courses, first love in a library, and a unique friendship with a young politician in D.C., Jamie refutes expectations and wanders to find homes in meditation retreats, street tents, a church, a warehouse, a painter’s studio. Ultimately though, these two have more in common than one might think: they are both ceaslessly searching for a guide and for a right answer to the question of what it means to grow up.
Throughout the interview, Sestanovich and I discussed how her short stories impacted the writing of this novel and how the ecstasies of silence, weather of long-term friendships, Quaker meetings, and “the pursuit of capital T truth” all intersect and eventually come together in the end.
Kyla Walker: Each chapter title in Ask Me Again is posed in the form of a question, and the novel’s title nods to this theme as well. It feels like you may be proposing that one definition of a novel is that it’s a series of unanswerable questions. Do you agree with this idea? And do you think questions can act as a guide through life, or are useful to literature in a different way?
Clare Sestanovich: Asking unanswerable questions is certainly what writing a novel feels like. Curiosity is my most reliable guide—maybe my only reliable guide—when I sit down in front of a blank page: I write to find out what I think. If I’d done all the figuring out in advance, the story itself would feel airless, artificial. There’s no way to overcome artifice altogether in fiction, of course, but I think as readers we can always tell whether the intelligence behind a narrative is a know-it-all or whether the author, like you, is on the edge of their seat, desperate to find out what’s going to happen, and how, and why.
You know the kind of person who will stand behind you during a card game, peeking at your hand and making dramatic noises, as if they know exactly what your next move should be? No one wants to read a book by that guy. If you’ll bear with the extended metaphor: the author is the one who deals the cards, but for the game to have any fun in it—any life in it—she has to give herself over to chance and risk and unknowability.
KW:Eva felt very close to my heart and to the questions I’ve been asking about fairness, faith, and fate for years now. I loved how the different perspectives on materialism and spirituality were portrayed throughout the novel in a natural, subtle style without didacticism or bias towards one vs the other. Was this something you set out to do from the beginning? Or were you pleasantly surprised by modes of thought/consciousness you believed you didn’t inhabit prior to writing the novel?
Asking unanswerable questions is certainly what writing a novel feels like.
CS: I hope this is a book that gets people to think about beliefs—where they come from, how they change, what they feel like—which is very different from a book that gets people to believe anything in particular. Novels can do that of course—change people’s minds—but I think they do it best when they do it subtly, not strenuously. Another way of putting this is that Eva is not a paragon of virtue—nor is any other character in the book. None of them possess all the values or articulate all the opinions that I think readers ought to. Some of them have good ideas but bad personalities. Others have the right intentions but the wrong tools. Some seem deluded, others confused. Eva in particular is deeply, painfully ambivalent when it comes to deciding what she believes. I expect this will make her a sometimes frustrating character for readers for the same reason it makes her an ideal vessel for me as an author: her mind is always changing. I pay such close attention to these changes because I think they have something to tell us about how we become the people we want to be—or how we fail to. I can’t think of any more dramatic or important plot than that.
KW: I noticed a few similarities between Eva’s college experience in the novel and your wonderful short story “Annunciation”—especially a parallel between Eva’s best friend, Lorrie, and Iris’s best friend, Charlotte, in the way that they serve as guides or mentors to becoming a “real” adult. What are the dangers or advantages to having young guides at such an impressionable age for these characters?
CS: I’m glad you use the word “guide.” It’s an important one in the book, as readers will perhaps most clearly discover when they get to the very last page. But there are guides all throughout the book—people who tell you or show you how to live. Both Eva and Iris, the character in “Annunciation,” crave this sort of instruction. To be told, to be shown. Or they think they do. That’s a really interesting tension, to me. If you’re the kind of person who has a lot of big, unanswerable questions about the world—which, as we’ve discussed, is the kind of person this book is all about—then in some ways you have to believe that someone else has the answers. Life would be unknowable and intolerable otherwise. So you seek out a pastor or a politician or a teacher or just a friend with really strong opinions, and your own path through the world starts to feel ever so slightly easier because there’s someone right up ahead, telling you what music to listen to or which candidate to vote for or how to repent for your sins. But you’re only asking all your big questions because you’re very observant and very curious, and the more you watch and wonder, the less satisfying any one guide is going to seem. You’re following their path but you’re aware there’s a whole mountain to explore. Do you really want to be told exactly how to get to the top?
KW: Did you always envision Eva and Jamie’s story as a novel—especially one crossing years and taking up a larger time frame/more space than a short story does?
CS: I knew I wanted to try to describe the texture of intimacy across time—in particular, how it weathers change. Relationships we form in youth face especially inclement weather. We change so much and so fast! What are you supposed to think when your best friend drops out of college? What are you supposed to do when he finds God? It’s never as simple as wanting to go back to the way things were, because as much as we may wish for other people to remain static, predictable versions of themselves, we count on change within ourselves. Would any 22-year-old turn back the clock and be 16 again, with all the pain and powerlessness involved, for the sake of reclaiming an old friendship? In this sense, loss and remorse mix constantly with growth and hope. One of the common truisms you hear when you’re a young person is that you should “be true to yourself.” (It’s an especially common idea in the U.S., where the pursuit of authenticity has a practically religious fervor.) But being “true” to the force of change, both internal and external, can also involve, and sometime necessitate, real betrayal: of people you used to know and love, and even of the person you used to be.
KW: Eva’s yearning to be a correspondent seems to touch on this theme of the gap between the stories we are told and the stories we tell ourselves, and the importance for her about getting it right—getting to the essence of things, time, history, the present as much as we can. But how might Jamie conceive of this idea? And what might his trajectory say about how he feels towards “truth” by the end of the book?
Messy reality and pure truth don’t need to be perfectly reconciled.
CS: Ah, What Would Jamie Do? (Or think, or say, or feel?) A tantalizing question, and one that Eva spends a lot of time and energy trying to answer. From a certain simplified perspective, Jamie’s whole life seems to be devoted to the pursuit of capital T truth. He’s a high-school debate champ. He joins a political movement and then a church—both of which are driven by big ideas, essential values, unwavering principles. All this can give his life, or his lifestyle, a certain abstract quality. But from another vantage, he’s really all about action, not ideas. Why talk about truth when you could be handing out free Metro cards?
I don’t think Jamie ever resolves this binary, and that may be the most important lesson of his approach to truth. A kind of negative capability, in which messy reality and pure truth don’t need to be perfectly reconciled. “The gap” you describe, between stories and also, I would argue, between storytellers, is always the place where I try to challenge myself to go as a writer—the place of questions not answers, the place where meaning is created not calcified.
KW: Eva asks many questions but she also dispenses much wisdom. On page 204, she says: “‘You don’t have to be religious,’ she told Molly, ‘to wish you were a better version of yourself.’” Faith, or lack thereof, plays a huge role in this novel. How has religion shaped your way of thinking or style of writing, if at all?
CS: I’ve never had any sort of formal religion. (It’s funny, isn’t it, how we talk about “having” religion, as if you possess it. Or maybe as if you’re possessed by it?) But writing certainly has a devotional quality for me. It’s something I do every day, part dutiful ritual—I often have to make myself do it—and part authentic belief: I feel I’m generating, or maybe just channeling, real meaning in the process, though I couldn’t begin to tell you how. That combination of the mechanical and the ineffable can at times be a maddening, even seemingly oxymoronic, features of religion, but I also think it’s one of the most alluring. Faith, like art, really is a practice; you can’t avoid the practical. Repetition is not only required, it’s rewarded. You know exactly what you need to put in—work, prayer, a lot of hours—but you have truly no idea what you’re going to get out.
KW: The “silent party” that Eva attends in college is an amazing scene and a turning point for her. Admittedly, I’m curious—was this inspired by a real silent party you attended? And, more seriously, what can silence reveal about characters (and strangers) that language is unable to?
CS: I’ve never been to a silent party! But I’m glad you ask, because this actually relates in a surprising way to your previous question: silence and religion have been very intertwined in my life. I said I didn’t grow up with any sort of faith, but this isn’t quite right. I went to a Quaker school for nine years, and as you may know, in the Quaker religious service, called Meeting for Worship, you simply sit in silence—a silence that any member of the meeting is free to break by standing up and sharing a message with the group. It’s not quite a party, but it’s very beautiful—and often very profound. When we were in school, we considered the best meetings to be the ones in which the most people spoke—for the simple, secular reason that we were easily bored. And it’s true that the speaking was often what made the experience profound, but in retrospect, now that the substance of what people said has all but vanished from memory, it’s the silence itself that seems most memorable, most meaningful.
I’m especially fascinated by the way in which silence can become something we share. In everyday life, silence is often a deeply alienating experience. You know, the awkward pause that literalizes a disconnection between two people. But intentional, mutual silence feels like one of the purest states that people can inhabit together. We all know this: think about the special intimacy of the friend with whom you can sit in the car, not talking, and feel totally at ease. It’s a place of alignment and comfort, but also of thrilling possibility. You don’t need to say something, but you could say anything. Now multiply that feeling by five, ten, a hundred. That’s the ecstasy of a silent meeting or a silent party—or just a silent understanding.
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