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.
I was writing this story about a man who invented elaborate lies to seduce each of his three roommates. To the first woman, he made a confession, walking on Fifth Avenue on their way back to the subway from his special gelato place, his private place he had not shared with anyone until that day, when he brought her. He told her he was a trust fund baby who rejected all the money from his coldhearted parents because it was important for him to prove to them and, most importantly, to himself that he could make it on his own. To the second roommate, he said, wiping his eyes, then hers after the two of them watched All about My Mother on Netflix, that he’d been abandoned by his drug-addicted mother, who in turn had been abandoned by her mother, in a tragic unbreakable cycle. Heartbroken since infancy, he said, irresistibly, he’d never been able to fully let himself trust anyone. To the third roommate, he whispered one evening over takeout, after the cat suddenly jumped on the piano keys, that his lineage was cursed and that the ghost of a distant relative’s lover haunted his inherited piano. Seeing her eyes widen, he put his chopsticks down and took her hand to his chest, asking her to feel his heartbeat.
My Saturday-morning writing group read a draft, but none of them saw the protagonist as a trickster. They believed his stories were true, at least within the text. When I got back to my apartment after meeting them, damp from the thin mixture of rain and snow that followed me across the Manhattan Bridge back to Brooklyn, I called my mother in Brazil:
“So I have this story I’m writing. A guy tells one of the girls he lives with that his parents are loaded.”
“Hm.”
“He tells his other roommate that he was abandoned by his mother.” I sat down on my gray Ikea couch. “And the third woman, about a ghost haunting him.”
“How many women are there?” my mother asked. “Why do they live with him?”
“Well, rent is expensive, etcetera. The usual reasons.” I balanced the phone between my shoulder and ear and removed my wet socks.
“Why live with strangers? Don’t they have families?”
“Mom.” I suddenly felt tired. “Come on.”
“OK, some guy lies to girls stupid enough to live with strange men they find on the internet. What’s new? Sharing an apartment with people you don’t know cannot end well.”
“Mom, if you met Marc, you’d love him. There’s nothing to worry about.” I held my glasses, still foggy, covered with tiny drops of water, and wiped each lens with the edge of my scarf. The world went blurry for those seconds and became clear again as I put my glasses back on. “But, yes, exactly: The stories my protagonist tells the women are made up.”
“Ué, of course, they are. I thought sharing a place was just for when you were going to college.”
The weak diffuse light entering my small living room made it look like it was late afternoon. But the alarm clock on our one exposed brick wall insisted there were two minutes to midday.
“Well, Mom. I don’t do it because I want to.”
“OK, OK. Do you have to live with this guy, though? I mean, have you seen the pictures he posts? The parties?”
“Pictures? Where?”
“I friended him, about a month ago.”
“Mom, you have to stop doing that.”
“What if he was a psycho? A Trump supporter?”
“Meu Deus. He’s not a Trump supporter! Plus, you know what the equivalent of a Trump supporter in Brazil is?”
“Oh, let’s not go there again. You left too long ago to know what it’s like: the corruption! The violence!”
I almost pointed out, again, that she was just repeating words from TV and social media clips verbatim. Or asked what she meant exactly, based on what, etc., again. But I knew it wouldn’t go anywhere, like the many other times we’d tried to talk about the situation in Brazil before. My mother, who was quiet now, must’ve felt the same way. I felt the browning edge of a leaf of my baby ficus plant on the coffee table. I drew a tiny spiral in the soil with my finger. It was dry. I walked to the sink, grabbed a half-filled glass of water, and poured it into the pot then went back to my story. “So my character, the guy sharing the apartment with the three women: People get confused thinking all his lies are true. They get tricked by him.”
“If these friends of yours visited here, they’d be like dodos, falling for any scheme that waltzed their way.” She perked up, her voice excited. “Oh, did you know someone called last week pretending to have kidnapped you?”
“Me?” I looked down at my bare feet on the worn wooden floor.
“Yes, they go, ‘We have your daughter,’ and put on some woman crying in the background: ‘Mom, Mom,’ etcetera.”
It was such a well-known cliché of a scheme, the “we have your child” call. But I found myself wanting something, some reaction from my mother. “What did you do?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
“I asked them, ‘Where did you find her, this daughter of mine? Tell her I sit here waiting for her. Every day, I wait and wait, but she never comes.’”
Birds chirped on my mother’s end of the line. Outside my apartment, the trees were dry naked twigs. I didn’t know if my mother had really said that to the scammers or just wanted to say it to me now.
“I don’t think anyone heard anything,” she continued. “It was such a ruckus, uma bagunça danada, the girl in the background with this loud fake weeping. You know the kind that is interested in declaring itself as weeping? Like you and your brother, when you were children. I told the guy, ‘Tell her to quit being so ungrateful and give her old mother a call.’”
“Mom, I call you all the time.”
“Yeah, yeah, but I thought that was what a mom type would do. I could’ve spelled it out for them: ‘You could not have kidnapped my daughter, for she has left us for America.’” She stirred a drink, the spoon hitting the edge of the cup, tiny clinks with each turn. “But then I would be asking them to kidnap one of us for real. They think you go to America and you’re loaded. Ha!” She paused for a sip.
“Weren’t you scared?” I wondered how she would have felt if the fake-kidnapping victim had been my brother, Miguel, instead of me, but I dropped the question as soon as it took form.
“Nah. Everyone was home. Your father was on the couch, your brother also, right next to Juliana. And you—well. All I had to do was count the people watching the soap opera, and I knew the guy was full of it. Anyway, I put him on speaker. Your brother was laughing. Then he got up with his phone and started recording the whole thing. The video is doing the rounds. Wanna hear it? Wait a second.” Before I could reply, she put the phone down and shouted after my brother in the background (“Ô, Miguel, help me out over here, come find the clip”), TV voices faintly accompanying hers. She came back to the line. “He’s in the shower. You can search the hashtag, something like #sequestra doretiazinha or #tiadosequestro. Oh, I don’t remember. Your brother will send it to you later. Anyway, why don’t you stop this roommate nonsense and come back to live with us?”
At least it wasn’t just me who saw through my character’s lies. But later I checked with two more of my friends. They both thought the stories the man told his roommates were true too. And my mother, the only person on my team, had not even read the story, written in English. In the end, I changed it to fit the prevalent reading. And I did that by changing nothing. No edits to the words printed on the hibiscus tea–stained manuscript. The change happened only in my mind. For a moment, I wished the change would have happened in the readers’ minds instead, but it seemed clear by now that I was only wishing for what I couldn’t have. So I decided that yes, now all the stories the guy told were true, including the ghost one, in fiction I’d initially thought was a little far-fetched but still realistic. And that was the end of the question, at least for now.
A few weeks later, my mother called me:
“You need to do something about this ghost.”
“Ghost?” I opened and closed the kitchen drawer where I usually left my keys. I was late to work.
“Yeah, ghost.”
“Mom, what are you talking about? We believe in ghosts now?”
Not on the table or the counter. Marc must have taken them by mistake, again.
“Whether you believe it or not doesn’t matter. It’s here, haunting me.”
I didn’t understand why she was suddenly talking about ghosts. Was she leading us into some sort of metaphor? I couldn’t see how to interpret it. The microwave blinked 8:13. I had a meeting. I had to get to work right away.
“What are you trying to say, Mom?” Maybe she really thought she had seen a ghost? Was that possible? “Are you feeling okay? Maybe put on Dad or Miguel?”
“I’m fine. And no, I can’t put them on. Your father is out, and your brother”—she sighed—“is traveling with Juliana again. They’re talking about having the wedding in Minas Gerais instead of here. Can you believe it? Those people of hers.” She sucked her teeth. “Well, even if he were here, you’d have to help me with this one. Not him.”
“Why?”
“Because this ghost is yours.”
“What do you mean ‘mine’? It’s not like I have a stash of ghosts to send out like postcards.” I sounded incredulous without meaning to. I didn’t know what to think. If I could only find my keys.
“I mean”—her voice wavered—“it’s you.”
I stopped looking for my keys. My mom sounded genuinely concerned. Something was truly bothering her. I worried about her more and more. Her getting older added another layer of complications to living so far away.
“But I’m here, Mom.” I tried to project something, reassurance maybe, like a parent hushing a child who had awakened from nightmares. I hoped she could really hear me. That I could make her feel better and make this scary ghost talk go away. And even without knowing the exact shape of my fear for her, I felt it, constricting my throat and stomach. I wondered what she looked like at that moment on the other side. I thought I could just hear her breathing, but I wasn’t sure. “I’m right here.”
“If I were going crazy,” she said slowly, as if trying to persuade a child of something she couldn’t quite understand, “I’d probably just see a regular ghost—say, your grandmother, or maybe a great-grandparent, or an old-fashioned count with an ill-timed real estate ambition. Something predictable like that. But it’s you. You are older, but it’s still you. I don’t have the imagination for this kind of nonsense.”
She had a point. She sounded like she was reasoning properly. Except for the whole ghost part. What was happening to her? Whatever it was, I wished it would disappear. That my mom would reveal it was all a misunderstanding or a joke. But she sounded so serious, so worried.
“But I’m alive,” I said gently, “talking to you right now.”
“You say”—she paused—“the ghost says she comes from the future.”
“The future?”
“When are you coming home, Filha?”
When I hung up the phone, I thought again about my plans to go somewhere else, anywhere, for my vacation this year. I imagined myself walking down the cobblestones in Lisbon, passing by graffitied walls in Berlin, parallel universes I would never access. I always ended up going back to Brazil. With my brother’s engagement and now my mom’s ghost thing, I let my tourist other selves disappear in a little puff of blue smoke. In the reality of my apartment, I saw my keys on the couch, glinting in the sunlight.
The plane landed in Brasília close to noon. I passed through the sliding glass doors, squinting at the blinding brightness that marked my visits. The light, permeating everything along with the dry heat, always made my first days back feel otherworldly. Far away, past the parking lots, lay the short patch of grass, the sparse savanna, the few short twisted trees of the Cerrado. The sky was everywhere, over and in between buildings, touching the red dirt on the horizon. I stood holding my hand like a visor. Arms embraced me: my mom and, when she finished with the first round, my dad.
The changes felt more dramatic with each visit, so striking to me, having missed the gradual recording of time on their faces, the invisible pace of the everyday.
When I first saw them, I was startled by my father’s sunken cheeks, his scalp almost naked, save a thin spread of bluish-gray hair. My mother’s papery skin, her softening neck. They were still in their midsixties but looked so much older than the image I carried with me in the US. The changes felt more dramatic with each visit, so striking to me, having missed the gradual recording of time on their faces, the invisible pace of the everyday. But this happened every time I came back, and I knew that within a few minutes, I would start to habituate to their present selves and not notice it anymore.
My mother also seemed shocked when she first looked at me. She kept mentioning how I looked so well, so young. That was not her style. She should have been asking me about the flight, complaining about Juliana’s parents, or frantically looking for her keys, always lost in her large handbag. I looked at my father quizzically. He replied with a small shrug.
But as we walked to the parking lot, still side hugging, she seemed to be getting back to normal, except for the occasional stare and a pause to kiss my right cheek again, as if to confirm I was really there. The car was at the very edge of the lot.
“Your brother took the other car to Minas Gerais,” my mother said, looking for her keys in her bag.
Minas Gerais was a full day’s drive away, and they were with Juliana’s family, which I knew bothered my mother. I was surprised to feel annoyed at that now. Maybe because I liked Juliana and wanted to defend her? No, not that. If were honest with myself, it was that, at least for that moment, I wanted me to be enough.
“Why didn’t he take this car? It’s only the two of them, no?”
“It’s not a problem. We don’t need it,” my father yelled from behind the car, where he was loading the luggage into the trunk.
“Careful, or he will donate it to the church,” I said.
None of us used to go to any church, but as a teenager, my brother announced out of the blue that he was joining a local evangelical youth group. He’d wanted to donate his car, an old Volkswagen Beetle, to them. Fortunately, he’d been a minor, and my parents would not let him. Now, more than a decade later, he’d graduated to convincing others to donate to the church instead. He was good at it, pleasant, relaxed, attentive. And he knew what people wanted to hear, whether it was about charity, “family values,” or the fear of the end of the world. I loved him and had always resented him a little, for being so likable. But now there was more; it wasn’t just about everyone liking him. They also believed him. I thought about my character in the story, his roommates in love with him. Did my brother really believe all he spouted?
“Don’t pick at your brother,” my mother said. “Here, hold this.” She handed me some of the contents of her bag to make the search easier: a few documents, a hairbrush, and the squashed chocolates she still carried in case my brother or I got hungry. “They are all coming for dinner in a few days—her parents too.”
That explained why my mother had called me a few weeks before the trip and asked me to bring a serving dish (instead of the usual perfume for her coworker’s cousin or electronics for the neighbor’s nephew’s girlfriend or whoever it was; I couldn’t keep track). Never mind that I grabbed her dish from the cheap seasonal items displayed by the entrance of Target. She would be proud of it and mention I brought it with me from the US. She had probably been thinking about this dinner for a while, at least since the call, and I was glad she had something to distract her from ghosts.
Across the parking lot, the airport looked small, flattened by all that sky. It had seemed tall up close, much more built up than it used to be when I first started traveling back from the US. Now the ceiling hovered far above, with enough room for three or four additional floors between it and the ground. Its recent renovation nodded to Brasília’s original architecture: a white curving concrete pillar here, a modernist sculpture there, the occasional wall covered with the colorful geometric tiles of Athos Bulcão. A natural growth of the original core of the city, futuristic for the 1960s, but fused with a more recent architectural sense of the future. More metal, more glass, more open space, more light. But to me, even this futuristic architecture was becoming a fossil of the recent past. Too ominous, large and corporate, and, paradoxically, too optimistic to have anything to do with the future.
My parents started arguing about my mother having misplaced the keys. And while they argued about that, they developed a secondary argument on what route to take back home.
I turned around and faced a gap in the chain-link fence around the parking lot, a section of three or four panels missing that had probably just rusted off, given how deteriorated the fence looked. I took a couple of steps forward, toward the horizon, then a few more until I was just past the gap. When I shifted my gaze, nothing changed in the landscape. Because there were no mountains, hills, or tall buildings, if I tried to get closer or look at things from another angle, my perspective always stayed the same. Just a flat line, just as far away. I felt again as I sometimes did when I returned home: as if I had entered a dream. I looked at my hands to remind myself of my physical form. There they were, still holding my mom’s things.
“Where are you going, menina? Come. I found the keys; now I have to look through that stuff”—she pointed to my hands—“to find the parking card.”
The last time I’d seen the house, it had been just a concrete skeleton; the structure had been there, but there had been no windows, doors, roof, or outer layers of smoothed concrete: a ruin in reverse. Now it was finally finished. And it was beautiful. I had expected it to be nice, but not this: a gorgeous modernist two-story house. It was hard to believe it was real, it was ours. Inside was a tall open square of air and light bracketed by plain bright white walls. The floor was covered by large smooth porcelain tiles, with the look of polished concrete but shinier, making them seem like water reflecting the windows. I wanted to touch its surfaces. The floor, the unadorned white walls. And the light everywhere. It came in through the windows, beams of sunlight, and it bounced, filling the house. Soft diffused light on the white sofa and our skin and hair. It was as if I were breathing it, that light. It was cool inside, no air-conditioning needed, despite the scorching afternoon. A solid concrete house. I was never comfortable in the wooden houses in the US, precarious and prone to burning. I understood then I’d been craving to live in concrete again. Within five minutes of being in my parents’ new house, I wanted it to be mine because I felt as if I belonged to it. I began fantasizing about one day saving enough to buy it from them and have them live in it. A gift for them and for me.
It was clear from her satisfaction in giving me the tour, the way her gaze followed its lines, the open space, that my mother loved it too, despite her belief that her brand-new house was haunted. My mother and I had the same taste in most things. We hated knickknacks and clutter. We liked the unapologetic angles and openness in modernist architecture and suffered from a nostalgia for its past imagination of the future.
We went to the guest room on the second floor and stepped out onto a balcony. I knew she was proud of the nice view of the lake over the other concrete houses in the neighborhood, and I praised it, which I could tell made her happy. But after a while, her face grew worried. She walked back into the room, and I followed her. Everything inside was temporarily dark as my eyes adjusted.
“This is my last house.” She fluffed the pillows on the double bed. “I am not going to let a ghost, especially a ghost of someone who’s not even dead, spoil it.”
She didn’t seem angry, but her expression was grave. It was as if she were warning me or the ghost, or both of us. I couldn’t tell, and maybe she couldn’t either. I wanted to comfort her but didn’t know what to say. As I was growing up, it had been common for my aunts and many people we knew to believe in all sorts of things—auras, crystals, past lives, and spirits. Not fanatically so, but on a just-in-case basis. My mom had always humored her sisters and her friends, but she’d never seemed truly interested herself. I wasn’t sure what was behind this ghost thing now, and I was scared for her, for where this was going. And for me. I needed her to be OK, as she had been just a few months before. I wasn’t quite ready to believe the gravity of what was happening. I was waiting to find some rational explanation for why she was talking about ghosts that didn’t involve her beginning to lose grasp of reality. Before I could say anything, she left me to go finish preparing dinner in the outside kitchen they’d built on the verandah.
At dinner, we sat out there, on that same verandah. A cricket was chirping in the dark backyard. My plate was set up for me already, the onioned beef, with tiny crunchy slivers of dried meat, yucca flour, rice, beans, and vinaigrette, pleasantly arranged. The smell, meat, butter, vinegar. It was as if a picture in a coffee table cookbook had fully come to life.
I stole a delicious bite of farofa soaked with vinaigrette, even though we were still waiting for my father, who was in the shower.
She updated me on the wedding plans. Yes, it would take place in Minas Gerais. But the date was not set, “and venues book up; things change.” She smiled. But at least they gave her the engagement party, which she would host here, in her new house. They would be discussing the wedding details when Miguel, Juliana, and her parents came for dinner in a couple of days. “I’ll make sure the dinner is good and the party is very chique. You never know. Maybe they’ll change their mind about having the wedding over there.”
I nodded, my mouth full, vinaigrette-soaked yucca still melting on my tongue.
“Can I make you anything else? You are so skinny. You look so skinny and so young.”
“Thanks?” I said, finishing my stolen bite.
“I guess I got used to looking at you older?”
“Huh? Oh, that.”
“Never mind. Maybe she’ll show up for you one day.”
“What does Dad say about all this?”
“Ask him later. He promised to be quick to shower. He got a new polo at Carrefour to wear at dinner with you. Now he’s taking forever, probably can’t help but steal some glances at the novela. Ô, velho,” she yelled out, “a menina ’tá com fome!”
We both giggled. In his old age, he had become addicted to the 9 P.M. soap operas (still referred to as the “8 P.M. novelas,” because of their original scheduling several decades ago). Though he never admitted it, saying he liked having them as a background to his naps. To be fair, at least 50 percent of the time, when I walked past him in front of the TV, he was sleeping. How I missed him, without always realizing it. And now he was so close to me for real. He would be down from his shower anytime now.
“Anyway, it’s very unfair,” my mother continued. “No parent is perfect. You will learn that, once you have your own . . .” She stopped herself and swallowed, her eyes traveling up and slightly to the right, as if she remembered something, something sad. “Anyway, we tried our best. I did everything for you two, but I wasn’t perfect. It’s the same for your father. But she only haunts me.”
Just then, there was a loud bang behind the kitchen counter. I jumped in my seat. The cricket stopped chirping.
My mother got up and ran to stand just behind the counter. “Shhhhhh, shhhhhhh, shhhhhhhh.” She waved her arms up and down. “Shhhhhhhh.”
She stopped for a second. I could hear the TV commercials (“After your novela, stay tuned for Big Brother Brasil”). The cricket had not returned yet. My dad stopped at the door, looking at my mom, waiting.
Another noise in the kitchen. This time my dad joined in, both going, “Shhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhhhhhh,” flailing their arms like birds.
That was it, I thought, both parents had gone insane.
Something dark and furry ran out of the kitchen. They relaxed.
“What’s for dinner?” My father lifted the lid of a pot on the stove.
“What was that?” I asked.
“What? Oh, that was just the neighbor’s cat. It found a way to get out again.” My dad shrugged. “She said she’d take care of it. Yet here it is again.”
The cricket was chirping again.
“Don’t worry.” My mom brought me a glass of guava juice. “She likes to come during the day.”
“What kind of ghost is that?”
She raised her eyebrows, tilted her head to the side. “She says she misses the light.”
I shivered. Was there no light where she was coming from? I tried to tell myself again that there was no ghost, to convince myself the whole thing was nonsense, as I ran my hands over the goose bumps on my arms.
After breakfast the next day, I sat at the outdoor dining table, looking through the feedback I had received from the writing group on another of my stories. They asked for more details on the father character, who was not by any means my father. But my dad was gardening right in the yard, possibly making sure everything was in order for the dinner, at my mom’s request. So now I began to write about the father gardening without gloves, red dirt covering his hands, stuck under his fingernails. Yes, the dirty red hands suited the story. My dad lifted his hat and wiped his brow. It was a legionnaire hat I’d brought him from the US last time. I knew he hated sunscreen, which I made him wear when I was around. But most of the time, I wasn’t here. I’d thought he would find the hat cool. “Like an explorer in the desert,” he’d said when I’d given it to him. But it had been suspiciously clean until now, when he took it off, leaving red finger marks in the otherwise-pristine khaki fabric. He’d worn it today just for me. He looked at me and waved—a sweet, goofy smile. In the story, I made it a red baseball cap and made the father’s appearance menacing. The writing group had also said nothing much happened in the story. Which was true.
I needed to take a break.
I got a cup of coffee in the kitchen. My dad came in holding three yucca roots. “For lunch,” he said proudly.
“So, what’s with Mom and the ghost thing?”
He put the yuccas in the sink and looked at the garden. “You know, I—I mean, we, your mother included—are not the type to be talking about witches, ghosts, and fairies. You know that. She never brought up something like this before. Now, have I seen any ghosts? Ever? No. I don’t believe in ghosts. But I believe your mother. So that’s that.” He turned on the sink to wash his hands. “At the very least, it is true to her. And I respect that.”
“Easy for you to say.” I sipped my coffee. “It’s not your ghost.”
He put his arm around my shoulder. “I know. But be patient with her. The ghost has been hard on her lately.”
“But you don’t believe in ghosts.”
“I don’t know. You have always been too sure of things, how things are, how things work. Even more so since you left.”
“Because I don’t believe that I am a ghost?”
“No, not just that. What is happening there, what is happening here . . .”
“That man is the Devil, Dad. How can anyone in their right mind vote for him?”
“Yeah, he is far from our first choice. But the Workers’ Party has been a disgrace for this country.”
“Who said anything about the Workers’ Party? What about everyone else? You’re beginning to sound like Miguel.”
“See?” He tilted his head slightly as if pointing at me.
I took a deep breath and sat back down in front of my laptop. When my brother had first joined his church, my parents had been as unhappy as I was. It was the kind of church that constantly asked for money, despite the Audis and BMWs that always carried the pastors, CEO types who had found the Lord only after getting their MBAs overseas. Miguel was not stupid. It was baffling to us that he didn’t see this. And the church required his presence too much; once he joined, he was never home anymore. Instead, he went to services between five to seven times a week. But over the years, with me living overseas and him living right here with them, me combative and him always pleasant, he began gaining ground. Now I was the weird one in the family.
But over the years, with me living overseas and him living right here with them, me combative and him always pleasant, he began gaining ground.
Although my parents never joined the church, they no longer criticized it, not even the fact its high-ranking pastors were getting too cozy with politicians or running for office themselves, with the full and blind support of their congregations. The previous year when I was back here on vacation, I found their car, the nice one that my brother liked to borrow, with a campaign sticker for one of the deputados pushed by the church. His platform included a pledge to end “gender philosophy” and return to “family values.” The conversation had begun okay. They were just humoring my brother, they had said, then: “We don’t agree with the guy on everything, but he goes to your brother’s church. I mean, Miguel knows him. And that Workers’ Party . . .” It had ended with a big ugly fight close to the end of my last day. I knew that talking further now was useless.
“What’s Miguel’s take? I mean, what does he say about the ghost?” I asked my father now.
“He listens to her.” My father finished washing the dirt off the last yucca and left it to dry on the dish rack. “Tells her he knows what it’s like to know something is true, even when others might not believe you. Talks about faith. It works. Makes her feel better about the whole thing.”
Of course, Miguel went along with her, and, of course, they loved it. I almost said that out loud but kept it in. I knew it was no use.
“I don’t know, Filha.” My father placed a glass of water on the table next to me. “The older I get, the less sure I am of anything.” He kissed the top of my head and went inside.
I stayed in the same spot at the table outside, but after staring at the screen for a while, I stopped working on the father story. A light rain began, stirring up a smell of rain and earth, the red dirt where my father had been working turning a shade darker with each drop. I opened the roommate story. It was now a ghost story, I reminded myself. I typed “Ghost Story” at the top of the page and wondered where to start. Maybe trying to inhabit the ghost, to understand it better. This ghost, who hadn’t been there in the first place, who’d snuck in there without my knowing. In the story, the ghost had been stuck in a piano. I thought of its vaporous spirit, a vaguely human-shaped blue smoke, squeezing under the lid into the wooden case, undulating between the strings, silently running its steam fingers through the hammers, circling the inner walls of the case, so similar to the walls of its coffin, and curling itself, lying on the key bed, like a sleeping cat. Until someone came in to play a song, a tribute to the ghost’s former self, jolting it awake, beating at it with the hammers, making its smoky body dissipate and sink into the fibers of the wood, the ivory keys, until it merged with them. And the player’s fingers touched the ghost as they played the song. And it was so nice to feel touch again. And it was as if the ghost were playing the music too.
It wasn’t working. I swayed on my chair, pushed it back away from the table a few inches, and tried again. I closed my eyes and imagined myself as the ghost, not seeing it from the outside this time. I imagined looking down at my fingers. There were my mother’s white-tiled verandah floors through the faint blue smoke that was me. I brought my hands to my face, silently, I had no mouth. And my body was not constant; I had to think of its shape, its limits, or it would disappear. Grasping for the human form, I thought of the statues, Os Candangos, the two figures at Praça dos Três Poderes, and I was there. I was able to keep close to a human shape, as one of them. I was made of bronze and eight meters tall. But then the two spirits who lived there already asked without saying anything, as the hole in their heads was neither eye nor mouth, what I was doing there. Before I could reply, they continued, reminding me that the sculpture had been a gift to them, named after them, in exchange for their bodies, which remained to this day trapped in concrete at the base of a lecture hall, the education auditorium, at the then-new university and, unless I was planning to bring them back, could I, kindly, remove myself from their statues. I had to leave. So I went then to the only place I knew I could go: my parents’ house. I tried to find an outline for myself again and couldn’t. I was thinning out into nothing. Until my mom went to the bathroom to wash her hands and looked at herself in the mirror. And I felt a pull toward that shape, her face in the reflection, I fit myself into it, and the fit was right. I was so happy to have found an outline that I started to laugh. I lifted my hands to touch my face, an old woman’s face, and it felt so good to feel something with my fingers again. Right then, I looked up and saw my mother, her hands on her cheeks, screaming.
“A bunch of thieves in the government. And all these criminals, these marginais, vagabundos, killing and raping. The country has never been worse,” a man was yelling on TV.
I opened my eyes and closed my laptop, not having written a word.
“Back when the military was in power, no one would dare,” he continued.
“Well, I must say, here we agree,” a woman said. “Even if I, unlike Senhor Rodrigo here, think there were troubling incidents then, I keep thinking, what’s worse? Having a curfew and watching what you say on TV, or fearing for your life every time you step out of the house?”
“When they kill your son, this bunch of marginais, when they rape your daughter, I want to see if you come to me speaking of human rights. These Workers’ Party people, these red criminals, they only care about filling their coffers.”
I felt nauseated. I covered my ears with my hands and walked toward the TV room.
“Dad, can you please turn this down?” I asked. But I found him sleeping on the sofa. I turned the TV off.
Dinner was a test run for the next day, when my brother would arrive and Juliana’s family would join us. My mother was in a bad mood, stressed about impressing them. My dad, who was accustomed to her, stood up and grabbed his plate as soon as it was ready, claiming he couldn’t wait for her delicious cooking and was going now to watch his novela. Mom and I ate the bobó in silence. Although she had cooked it for my brother, it was also my favorite dish, and tonight’s bobó was especially good, the smell and taste of dendê infused in the yucca. But I didn’t say anything. I knew my mother was probably not yet satisfied with dinner and missed Miguel. I didn’t let myself admit it often, but I missed him too. The old Miguel, but even the new one, who was not so new anymore. I thought about his face as a child, the two of us racing and playing hide-and-seek at Praça dos Três Poderes, his round little kid cheeks, his mouth always open, following me around, asking, “Where are you going?” I missed him, even though I didn’t understand who he was becoming.
My mom was stabbing at her food aggressively. I didn’t want to fight. But it was getting to me.
“What’s bugging you, Mom?”
“What’s bugging me,” she repeated flatly.
“Yes, what’s bugging you?”
“Well, you.” She huffed. “I mean, she won’t give me a break.” The poor woman and her ghosts.
“What’s she saying now?” I put an arm around her.
“Even knowing about Miguel, she can’t give me a break.” She closed her eyes, ran her hand over her forehead.
“You mean the wedding? Mom, Juliana is great, who cares if the wedding is in Minas Gerais? I bet you your party will be better than the wedding, especially if you make this bobó.”
“No, it’s not that. I forget what I tell each of you.” She sighed. “They are planning to move away.”
“Move away? To Minas Gerais?” No wonder she was unhappy. “No. To Canada.”
My poor mother. It was probably hard on her when I moved. But Miguel leaving her . . . this would nearly kill her.
“Oh, Mom. I’m so sorry.”
She let go of my hand and stepped away. Her expression wasn’t sad anymore but angry again.
“And your ghost said I prefer your brother.” She looked at my face, searching for something. “The nerve of her, so ungrateful, after all that I have done for you.” She paused as if waiting for me to say something, then continued. “After you left me.” Her lips tightened. She looked toward the grass and the darkness, where the cricket chirped. “I have always treated you the same way.”
She wanted me to contradict the ghost, to assure her I thought the ghost was lying. And I almost gave her what she wanted, but my throat closed up, and the words pushing against it made me feel sick. I couldn’t do it. I felt it’d always been obvious to everyone that my mother preferred Miguel. But my mother had a delusion that no one noticed.
“And I think all her talk about the fires and the forest and the blue smoke is just a front.”
“What fires, Mom?”
“She talks about all that stuff, but I think she’s just angry because of the will.”
“What will?”
“She must be angry because I’m leaving the house to your brother.”
“What?”
“See?”
“See what? Why?”
“He was here when we built it, and he was going to be here. And we used to talk about his and Juliana’s children ruining the paint job with crayons. Where were you?” Her voice faltered, but she gained control of it again, hardening her face further. “Also because he would never come back to haunt me over material possessions.”
The thought of my mother’s love for Miguel’s unborn children made me remember her looking at him as a child. I wanted to go back in time and hold my child self, run my fingers through her hair. Love her. But the sadness of that thought and the fear of where it would take me made my limbs go limp as if I were losing my grip on my body, and I grabbed on to my anger instead. “Who says she’s haunting you because of that?”
“Well, you appeared the night after I signed the will.”
“After? You did this before she showed up? But then you can’t have changed the will because of her.”
“Why not?”
“Because the will came first.”
“Talk to me after a ghost comes to haunt you, from the future, from after you’re dead.”
“You’re dead?”
“Well, that’s not exactly a spoiler. The ghost is old herself. It is not like I’m going to be around forever.”
This was a thing my mother liked to bring up, not too often, but often enough so that it would be remembered. How I would realize things once she was gone, and by “realize,” she meant “regret.” I usually ignored her attempts to guilt me. But my mother looked so old right now. She would be gone one day, and I would have no one to come back to. And I would have chosen to spend all my time so far away.
I held her hand. “She told you that?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. I’m so sorry, Mom.” I hugged her. “Maybe she’s just sad. Maybe she has nowhere to go. Or maybe she just misses you.”
I thought about longing for my mom in the US and feeling her real self, not a disembodied voice on the phone, her body as I hugged her now. It was so easy and so hard to be with her. I had her with me now, and now was all I could be sure about. That terrified me.
“The thing that gets to me is that she is not angry when she says these things,” she said, letting herself lean into my embrace for a moment. “She says the house doesn’t matter. She says so many things we think matter don’t. She tells me she’s glad I am gone.”
I gasped. “Mom, that’s horrible. I would never say that.”
“No, she says it kindly. She says things are not easy for those who survived and that I did a fine job as a mother. That it’s okay to have some regrets. But that those who are still around have regrets of a magnitude we can’t yet comprehend.”
I held her hand, to comfort both of us. This ghost, I reminded myself, was nothing—could be nothing—but my mother’s imagination. Her guilt, maybe. I was worried. But worried about her, I told myself. And me living far away while this, whatever it was, was happening to her. How things would change over here, how she, an old woman seeing ghosts, would manage, now and in a few years. And my fear for her here mixed with my fear for myself in the US. I told myself to focus. This was not some postapocalyptic story. This was my mother.
But still, I asked, because I had to, “Did you actually change the will before the ghost appeared?”
She got up and took our plates to the sink, her lips tight, her nose raised in disgust. She grabbed a cloth hanging on the kitchen faucet and started wiping the counter. “This is my house. I do with it what I want.”
The ghost was right. It was not the house that mattered. But something else here did.
She kept wiping, looking down at the black counter. “You didn’t want anything to do with this place. What do you want a house for? You left us”—she paused for a few seconds and began wiping again—“first.”
The counter reflected part of her arm. The rest of her disappeared into the stone’s darkness, making it look like a phantom limb following her movements under the surface, my mother and her ghost, cleaning the counter from both sides.
I was about to cry, and I didn’t want her to see me this way. I went to the bathroom and cried quietly, hearing the muffled sounds from my dad’s dubbed American movie, and, in the moments when the movie went quieter, my mother clearing the kitchen. I removed my glasses, and I wiped my eyes, washed my face and hands in cold water. Then, for a second, I thought I felt her, the ghost. It was as if she were there with me. I looked up at the mirror and saw a blurry version of my face, our face, mine, my mother’s, the ghost’s. We were all so sad. I cupped my cheek with one hand and touched the mirror with the other, our eyes, out of focus, met. I wanted to take the ghost with me, for my mother’s sake and for the ghost’s, so that she had somewhere to go, where she was welcome. But I put my glasses back on, and she was gone. I ripped a piece of paper towel and wiped my fingerprints from the mirror. I decided, when I got back home, I was going to revise that story. Make a clear decision on the ghost: one way or another.
When I started writing my first book around ten years ago, I had very few role models for the type of queer, genre-bending writing I wanted to be doing. While I now know those books existed, at the time they weren’t talked about in my literary circles, where the minimalist realism of writers like Raymond Carver was seen as the highest possible literary achievement. As a result, I wrote How It Works Out with what feels like very few roadmaps, which, as a queer person, isn’t new to me. In some ways, How It Works Out’s unique concept—a queer relationship multiverse of the Everything Everywhere All at Once variety, in which a queer couple is reinvented across timelines and in wildly different realities—came out of that very lack of roadmap. As a young person with no queer elders in her life, I entered my first relationship with a woman without any idea what to expect. How It Works Out imagines strange and surreal outcomes to a queer relationship because I had no idea how to be in love, or what happened once you were. The main character bears my name and is reinvented, over and over, because I was trying to make sense of how I fit into the world.
One of the best parts of being queer is getting to throw out old narratives to come up with ones that feel better suited to us. And though navigating the world with a vague sense of our history and little intergenerational guidance can be bewildering, it also opens us up to invention—makes it necessary, even. In the years since I started writing How It Works Out, the literary landscape has changed drastically, and queer writers are finally getting credit for the bold and innovative ways in which we are shaping—and have always shaped—literature at large. Though there is still much room for improvement—with people of color, women, and especially trans people frequently excluded from mainstream queer representation—the number of queer writers skillfully breaking every rule of genre and form, and being given a platform to do so, feels unprecedented in my lifetime. The following seven books are a thrilling gateway into the world of queer genre-bending and formally innovative literature.
I love experimental books most when their reinvention of genre and form arises naturally from emotional truth. Hazel Jane Plante’s stunningly written novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) takes the shape of an encyclopedia about a fictional television show called Little Blue. By alternating between the rollercoaster narrative of Little Blue and memories of Vivian, with whom the main character watched the show before she died, Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) tells the story of an unforgettable friendship between two trans women, the main character’s unrequited romantic love for Vivian, and a grief as devastating and beautiful as Vivian herself.
In Blackouts, Justin Torres turns a true artifact—a medical textbook called Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns—into a series of erasure poems through which readers can hear the voices, largely redacted from history itself, of the queer subjects of dehumanizing studies conducted in the early 20th century. Torres uses Sex Variants to tell the story of Juan, an elderly gay man dying in the desert, and the younger friend he calls nene, whom Juan met when nene was barely eighteen and the two were institutionalized for their homosexuality. As Juan slowly dies with nobody but nene at his side, the two revisit their lives, interweaving their stories with those of Sex Variants’ subjects and creators.
One of the most genre-defying memoirs in recent history, Machado’s In the Dream House uses the trope of the haunted house to make sense of the psychological and physical abuse she endured in her first relationship with a woman. Playing with the genres of folk tales, cultural criticism, historical nonfiction, choose-your-own-adventure books, among others, In the Dream House is an important deviation from the coming-out-as-salvation narrative, a humanizing reminder that queer relationships are just complex as straight ones, and are no less susceptible to domestic abuse. Revolutionary in form and content, In the Dream House is a must-read.
Written from the perspective of a queer, gender-fluid mountain lion, Open Throat reads like a prose poem bursting with the sort of narrative tension that can make readers rip through 160 pages in a single sitting. Slowly starving in the drought-devasted land under the Hollywood sign, Hoke’s mountain lion listens in on passersby, a collage of decontextualized dialogue that paints a telling portrait of “ellay”’s human inhabitants. When a climate catastrophe forces them into the city, Open Throat’s narrator experiences for themself the tenderness and brutalities inherent to the human world.
While volunteering in an archive, history-obsessed Mathilda discovers the photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, a lesser-known member of the queer and extravagant Bright Young Things. Her ensuing research spiral leads her to an eccentric arts residency in the European town of Dun, where Druitt once lived, and sets her on the trail of a secret society of West African, proto-communist, lotus-eating luxury worshippers. Blending documented and imagined histories, and writing their own historical book-within-a-book, von Reinhold writes a compelling historical mystery, a poignant investigation of race and gender identity, and a stunning work of aesthetic theory.
Anyone who reads Derek McCormack’s The Show that Smells won’t be surprised that it has gained a passionate cult following since it was published in 2008. Narrated by Derek McCormack, a reporter for Vampire Vogue, and set largely inside a mirror maze, The Show that Smells features Elsa Schiaparelli (a vampire designer vying for the soul of country legend Jimmie Rodgers), Coco Chanel (Schiaparelli’s rival, whose poisonous Chanel N°5 is her deadliest weapon), the Carter family (down-home singers by day, vampire killers by night), and a whole cast of country stars, monsters, and queers. An unhinged phantasmagoria of camp, The Show that Smells creates a form of its own, littering its own pages with typographical sequins, mystical mantras that cause characters to appear, and blood.
A beloved staple, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts tells the story of her relationship with Harry Dodge, a gender-fluid artist undergoing hormone therapy, as well as her own pregnancy and desire to build a family with Dodge. Blending memoir with theory, The Argonauts uses the works of Butler, Sedgwick, Barthes, Winnicott, among many others, to make sense of everything from gender, family structures, motherhood, identity politics, and anal eroticism. In addition to the central metaphor of The Argonauts—“Barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase ‘I love you’ is like ‘the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.’”—the poetic precision with which Nelson writes this intellectually rigorous investigation of love puts The Argonauts in a league of its own.
Palestinian American writer and poet Hala Alyan’s latest poetry collection is an inventive play with language and form as she writes into grief, infertility and a familial legacy fraught with the trauma of displacement and exile. Hala is warm when our call first connects and I launch into a confession: I’m intimidated by poets. She laughs and I tell her, it’s true because there’s something so powerful about maneuvering language, making the words mean, at once, what you want them to mean and what the reader would want them to mean.
In The Moon That Turns You Back, Hala offers the reader more control with such meaning-making through interactive poems. In “Key”, she tells the reader, “Fill in the blank with a suitable word from the right” and proceeds to give us a table with incomplete sentences that we get to fill with the word that resonates with us, from a list that resonated with her. In verses broken by columns and line breaks, Hala captures splintered memories of displacement from homeland, family, and body. There is rage—“I don’t have time to write about the soul. There are bodies to count”—as the poems contend with what it means to be Palestinian, what it means to be a woman, a mother, and a daughter—sometimes, all at once.
“When my mother bought a patch of land & tried
to put my name on it they wouldn’t let me
because my name is my father’s name
because he was born in Palestine and so
impossible and so I am fated to love what won’t
have me you know the way our mothers did”
Hala has published four award-winning poetry collections (including The Twenty-Ninth Year) and received accolades for her novels, Salt Houses, and The Arsonists’ City. Hala tells me her writing practice is instinct-based. It is evident from the way she expertly finds her way within frameworks, both given and self-imposed. We talked about finding liberation in the constraints of structures, steadfastness in the face of erasure, the parallel between houses, bodies, and femininity, and much more.
Bareerah Ghani: I want to start with the imagery of house that you’ve used in conjunction with themes of grief, body, and matrilineality. In the opening poem, you say, “My favorite house is my mother. The heart muffled like a speaker.” Later, you write, “A good house can carry anguish and this is how I think of bodies now too.” To me, these lines are intertwined, highlighting the sacrifice and suffering inherent to womanhood and motherhood in cultures such as ours where women have historically been treated as inferior. Can you share what you were thinking and how you envision the house as body as mother?
Hala Alyan: These poems were written during a period of time marked by a lot of infertility for me, and also marked by losing my grandmother, who was one of the core figures of my life, and always will be.
I lost a matriarch while I was simultaneously grappling with what it meant to be in a body that did not always behave the way I wanted it to behave, and that ultimately was not able to be the house that I wanted it to be. I was grappling a lot with what it meant to carry and what it meant to house something at a time when I was also feeling like the connections and the roots that I had to these places that I loved, one of them being Lebanon and Beirut, where I spent a lot of time, were slowly being severed through the deaths of elders, but also through the circumstances of these countries and what was happening there. For me, there’s something in the container, and how a thing can carry and contain you.
There’s a lot of places that I don’t have access to anymore, that my family throughout our lineage no longer has access to. And I think of how the women in my family, in particular, have kind of had to be the carriers of those places and those rituals, traditions and those memories.
BG: I can’t help but see that your poems have containers.
Real active protest begins first in the mind, on an interior level. It begins with conversations we’re having with ourselves.
HA: You’re pointing out something really interesting. This is the first collection that I play with form and structure to this extent. The other collections, they’re structurally very basic like my poems are usually just prose poems. So a block of text or couplets. This is the first time that I was like, okay, I’m gonna play with this thing. And it actually felt very liberating to have constraints, which seems contradictory but there’s something safe about being like, you know, you’re gonna play with a form like ghazal. And the ghazal tells you where you’re gonna go, or maybe it doesn’t always tell you where you’re gonna go but it always tells you where you’re gonna end. So you can have this migratory movement through a poem where you travel all over and go to all these different places but you’re always gonna land in the same place. And there’s something about knowing you’re gonna land there, something about knowing the home of that word at the end of each stanza that I was finding very comforting at the time, which makes sense, because if it’s a chaotic time, finding structure wherever you can find, is gonna feel useful.
BG: I wanted to talk a little bit about the places where you mentioned your grandmother. It’s beautiful, but also so heartbreaking. In one place, you say, “It’s beautiful to speak for her; she’s dead.” In another spot, you write, “My chest rising to steal her dialect.” This got me thinking about matrilineal linearity and writing into a legacy. Can you talk about what legacy and inheritance means for you especially as a Palestinian right now?
HA: I think particularly within the Palestinian tradition there is so much around this idea of inheriting memory, and not forgetting, and that plays on the theme of, I will not leave. I will return, I will remain steadfast—the concept of Sumud, صمود, I’ll remain steadfast in this land, which for people in the diaspora translates to, I will remain steadfast in my connection to that land, I will remain steadfast in my reaffirmation of that identity, not forgetting what my lineage has gone through. The inheritance within that tradition has a lot to do with, again, being holders of memory. So there’s the people that are on the land, that are steadfastly holding onto the land and what’s left of it or what they have left of it. And for the rest of us, what we’ve inherited are the stories we’ve been told, and, to be frank, the traumas that people have experienced and that we’re all still sort of experiencing. There’s something in the idea of remaining rooted that feels very much like a Palestinian tradition.
In general, I think of lineage in that way—how do we not forget that which needs to not be forgotten? How do we not forget that which must remain remembered? And what do we do with memory which is one of those silk-like emotional fabrics that changes every time you touch it. And so every time you tell a story, that story shifts, and every time you return to something, it shifts, and what do I make with the memories that I’ve been told, that I didn’t even live through? How can I do right by them and respect them and inhabit them, but also recognize that I’m taking liberties? And that’s a big thing in writing—how do you kind of operate in both of those spaces at the same time? It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible.
BG: How do you contend with the erasure of Palestinian culture and identity as an American, living in a country that is supporting that erasure?
HA: It’s deeply painful. It’s very hard to exist within a system that is enacting and participating in this level of violence and systemic erasure, and that has engaged in it against indigenous communities to whom the land belongs, against Black people, queer and trans people. It’s too easy to look at the contributions of violence elsewhere but they begin here. They’re not just things happening on “foreign soil”. So for me, it isn’t just about Palestine. It is about contending with what it is to sort of exist within spaces. What does it mean when elected representatives no longer represent their constituents? What do we call when a system, a government, an entity, etc, no longer serves the interest of the citizens, no longer serves the values that it espouses? And then what do we do with the possibility that it never really has—how do we make sense of those things? Those are sort of the questions I’m interested in.
Of course, on a personal level, it’s horrific. I’ve been watching people that are my kin, that share my identity, be attacked on the ground and here, in different ways. Obviously, there’s no comparison to the ways people are being slaughtered in Gaza and the West Bank but I think there’s something to be said for students who were walking around wearing Keffiyeh and talking in Arabic and got shot. A boy was stabbed many dozens of times. What’s so wild about this moment that we’re living in is that the saturation point of horror has reached such a tipping point that, quite literally, people forget stories of things that have happened, that alone should have stopped everything.
As a person, in general, I’m more interested in asking questions. I feel that way as a therapist, as a writer, and certainly feel that way when I’m trying to engage with people who have been exposed to ideas that I think they should consider letting go of. In my experience, it’s more effective to just invite people to consider certain things. Like, here are some ideas. Here are some questions, invitation for all, myself included, to engage in them. And we’ll see if that shifts anything for people.
BG: Open up dialogue?
Art is not a replacement for policy change. Liberation and equal rights must exist for everybody, everywhere.
HA: Well, I don’t need to be part of that conversation. Because that kind of goes with this heroic archetype of, I need to go around changing people’s minds. I don’t need to do that. I think my task, other writers’ tasks, other people who are engaging in different kinds of thinking or creating, our task is just to be like, here’s a question. Here’s a possibility. Here’s an invitation to an imagined future. Real active protest begins first in the mind, on an interior level. It begins with conversations we’re having with ourselves.
BG: There is a recurring theme in this collection—of being denied love, being denied motherhood, safety, and homeland. And the poems sway in how the narrator can be at times resigned, accepting of how things are, have been in their lineage, and then at other times, you see the language is maneuvered in a way that it almost feels like the writer is speaking through gritted teeth. It’s remarkable. And those are the moments where the writer is really putting up a fight. Where do you draw the line between fight and surrender?
HA: I always think of that expression, Let go or be dragged. And I think there’s been a few inflection points in my life, one of them was getting sober, where I got to be up close and personal with this concept of surrender and what it really means. Ideally, we work through our lives towards a place where we can surrender quicker and quicker, and we can recognize quicker and quicker what calls for surrender and what calls for fights. I struggle with that all the time, in life and in writing. For me, the tension point comes with getting more adept at recognizing earlier and earlier where it is worth fighting and recognizing that surrender, a lot of times, requires more courage than fighting, because it usually means that you’re radically accepting something you really don’t want to accept, or you’re accepting something about yourself—for other people or the world—that you really don’t want to be the case.
I love that you caught that in my work because that’s just in general a tension point in my personhood. I’m somebody that enjoys fight, I mean, there are certain places and certain topics and areas in my life where I really get energized by showing up for a good argument, a good debate, I find it to be very life giving. But it does mean that I often find myself in situations where I’m like, I could have saved that energy, you know? I could have put it towards something that was of more value. And I’m trying to get better, as I get older, at recognizing earlier when those moments happen.
BG: In “Half-life In Exile”, you write, “Everybody loves the poem. It’s embroidered on a pillow in Milwaukee. It’s done nothing for Palestine.” How do you keep your relationship with writing in the current reality where it feels like writing as an act of resistance is falling short?
HA: I’ve been thinking about that a lot the last six months—this idea that art is not a replacement for policy change. Liberation and equal rights must exist for everybody, everywhere. Period. There cannot be exceptions when we say that, or else we don’t actually mean those values. Art is not gonna be a replacement for the idea that those who have the power to make those changes need to make those changes. Art is still crucial. Art has saved my life multiple times. Even more than that, it has saved my imagination, my hope, multiple times. Art allows us to replenish ourselves and fortify ourselves, because pleasure and beauty, and being moved, matters—they help us rest, take a beat and return to the things that matter to us. That’s why collective care is important. Art is part of that.
I belong to a family that’s been displaced multiple times over. I find home in that family, in my community, in making art and writing…
Also, art can be a place where you can sharpen your thinking both as the creator and as the person taking in the work. Writing about everything the last few months has helped me clarify how I think about things, how I feel about it. It’s helped me put language to it. It’s helped me take a beat, organize my cognitions. In the same way, when I read, it helps me be like, oh, yes, this is why this matters. I was reading something by Audre Lorde the other day where I had read the line before and when I read it now at a different age, in a different stage of my life, I was just like, yes, now I feel it in my bones. And so I think it also helps us build community. There’s this whole thing about how being an artist is a very solitary life, and I mean, sure, to an extent. But I never feel alone when I’m writing. If I’m writing fiction, I am surrounded by the characters that I’m interacting with. If I’m writing poetry, it’s the voices, the people, the memories. So for me, it’s a very cluttered process, not a lonely one at all.
BG: Displacement and exile haunt your work, your language. You begin a poem by asking, “Can I pull the land from me like a cork?” How does one wrestle with their sense of belonging when they’ve been exiled?
HA: If I had an answer I wouldn’t have to be writing all these goddamn poetry collections. To go back to this concept of Sumud, صمود, steadfastness. I think you find things to root yourself in. And you do that for as long as those things are aligned with your value system and serve that purpose. I think you can root yourself in a relationship, you can root yourself in a new city, in a craft, in your family. Some of those things won’t be forever, they will shift. Some of them will no longer resonate, but there will always be something to take that place. That’s something that brings me a lot of comfort, this idea that we’re not as alone as we think we are. There’s something in really asking myself, what are the places where I have felt at home? I belong to a family that’s been displaced multiple times over. I find home in that family, I find home in the family that I have sort of built over the last few years. I find home in my community. I find home in making art and writing, and also in reading other people’s work, and engaging with other peoples’ photography, film, ideas and music. That’s kind of what we meant when we said, don’t forget where we come from. Take it with you where you go—that’s been the assignment. And that’s what I think we’re seeing happen beautifully all over the world, right now.
When I first started what became my novel The Witches of Bellinas, there were no witches, no witchcraft at all. I had wanted to write about a beautiful village that seemed perfect but had hidden secrets after spending a summer in a beautiful, remote area near San Francisco that I later learned had a reputation for attracting cults, among other rumored strangeness. At some point while drafting, magic became the bridge in the narrative between the awe-inspiring beauty of the landscape and the secret, ugly acts committed by people.
Being a woman alone in an eerie place made me wonder not only why women would turn to magic, but why wouldn’t they? What happens when people claim the mantle of witch, and what happens when there are different ideas of what that means? What makes a witch? What is magic and what is simply (or rather, intricately, mind-bogglingly complexly) nature at work? These are all questions I wanted to explore in The Witches of Bellinas.
There’s that slogan you see on bumper stickers and T-shirts sometimes: “We’re the granddaughters of witches they didn’t burn.” As others have pointed out, that line sort of misses the point: Most people accused of witchcraft, across all genders, were not practicing witchcraft. They had slighted neighbor; they owned some land or livestock someone wanted; they had cured a patient the village doctor failed to. The books on this list are not just about being a witch—they’re about people who have been accused of being witches—and what that happens afterward. Who is considered a witch, and why, reveals more about those accusing than the accused, and these are books I turned to when trying to construct a community that might conspire to use magic, but that could also turn its use into a crime.
This novel perfectly illustrates what a woman living alone risks when she has agency, means, and a mind to follow her own path: In 17th-century Manningtree, an English town where men are scarce following a war, a strange man dressed in black arrives calling himself the Witchfinder General. Soon, witch trials are underway, and Rebecca West, the narrator, must navigate suspicion, accusations, and worse.
A mother offers her testimony after a neighbor accuses her of trying to enchant her with a potion in Germany in 1618. What is Katharina Kepler’s real crime? Is it the success of her children, especially that of her eldest son, Johannes Kepler, the famed mathematician? A gorgeous contemplation of science and superstition, and a stark reminder that it’s not only men who serve the patriarchy.
This multi-perspective novel unfolds in narratives from Zoe, a journalist investigating the murder of a curandera—aka a healer, or a witch—named Paloma in a small town in Mexico, and Feliciana, Paloma’s cousin. Paloma was a Muxe, born a boy and living as a woman. The safety of anyone living outside of the patriarchy’s norms is ultimately at the whim of whoever’s in charge.
Told from the perspective of one of literature’s oldest and most famous witches, Circe narrates her life story as an immortal sorceress: From growing up in the house of her father, the sun god and Titan, to life as an exile on the island where she’s been confined. A celebration of the magic in nature and in life as a solitary woman, we also get cameos by heavy-hitters from Greek mythology, including Circe’s setting the record straight on what happened when Odysseus invaded her island and why his men deserved to be transformed into pigs.
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes
Dreamy, terrifying, and engrossing, Melchor, a former journalist, tells the story of a small, impoverished town in Mexico where The Witch has been murdered. Born a man, she was known for providing abortions to those in need. A brutal read that’s often compared to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 for the depiction of violence and drugs, The Witch is a victim of a system that uses up everyone in town in different, tragic ways.
This is a memoir-history-anthropology hybrid that chronicles the author’s encounters, and participation in, with various covens and with witches across the United States. She pairs this first-person spiritual search with the history of witchcraft and what it means to be a witch and to practice witchcraft in the modern world.
The witch novel of all witch novels. Condé has taken the life of a real woman, accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials, and rendered her into a compassionate, fierce, magical woman who yearns for love and is in turn only returned hardship. Tituba narrates her life in beloved Barbados, how following the wrong man led her to become enslaved by Samuel Parris and taken to the Salem colony, and what she must do to return to her homeland.
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