After its massively successful streaming release last November, Emerald Fennell’s film Saltburn dominated cinematic discourse for months. A 2006-set period piece that starts as a 21st-century Brideshead Revisited and morphs into an ironic erotic thriller, its carefully honed aesthetic, plot twists, and off-kilter sexuality divided critics and audiences. Some lambasted the film for lacking subtlety; others admired its dark humor and transgressive sexuality. The “Saltburn discourse,” though, left out some of the film’s key features: Fennell embeds a complex set of influences, and conscious riffs on genre, that frequently went overlooked. Beyond simply acknowledging the works that inspired her, British “country house” films chief among them, Fennell uses her influences as raw material to create a counterintuitively topical class drama.Through Fennell’s manipulation of her influences, Saltburn ultimately speaks to an audience living amidst sky-high wealth inequality and primed to denigrate the rich, even as the filmmaker knows we can’t always resist the pull of wealth.
Saltburn’s protagonist is Oliver Quick, a socially isolated, middle-class Oxford undergraduate who endears himself to the alluring Felix Catton by feigning an impoverished background. Felix, taking pity on Oliver, invites him to spend the summer at his family estate, Saltburn. Oliver latches onto the house and the family, yet as his attachment to Saltburn grows, the Catton family’s interest in Oliver wanes, leading him to secure his place via manipulation, seduction, and violence.
The film’s array of aesthetic and narrative references reflects Fennell’s intent to subvert the tropes of the country house genre, in which social dramas among aristocrats play out in well-appointed estates, and critics picked up on the film’s clearest predecessors. Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited and its 1981 miniseries adaptation were cited in practically every review I read: The premise and characters directly respond to Waugh’s tale of an Oxford student’s infatuation with a wealthy friend, his family, and their grand estate.
The premise and characters directly respond to Waugh’s tale of an Oxford student’s infatuation with a wealthy friend.
Waugh’s novel, set between the early 1920s and ending in the midst of World War II, gives an idealized view of the English aristocracy, tempered by melancholy at the jarring social changes that damaged their elevated status. Its attendant television adaptation, made nearly 40 years after the novel’s publication, placed the events of the story outside of living memory for many of its viewers, allowing even greater latitude for the romanticization of a bygone era.
Fennell set out to achieve the opposite effect: By setting the film less than 20 years before its release, she makes her audience look back on mid-aughts fashion and cringe. The aesthetics of the 2000s—“the least cool of all the periods,” according to Fennell—were uniformly garish, and the on-trend ugliness of the wealthy characters’ clothing undercuts their sense of superiority. Because the audience is not primed to idealize the period, it becomes easier to see Oliver’s desire for the Cattons’ lifestyle with a critical distance. They have no appealing or redeeming qualities beyond their wealth, and their taste in fashion and decoration are dominated by thoughtless conspicuous consumption. If Charles Ryder’s fixation on Brideshead and its inhabitants stems from a search for beauty, Oliver Quick’s appears to be a simple obsession with money and status.
Fennell also diverges from the stately genre in foregrounding exaggerated sexual drama and violent class envy. While sexual and class tensions are inherent to the genre, they are typically encased in an aesthetic of restraint and gauzy nostalgia. Fennell, though, intently bursts through the boundaries of taste that often relegate sexuality to subtext. Oliver’s desperation to transcend his class is so acute it manifests as sexual desire, and this guttural need forms the film’s narrative backbone and generates its most memorable scenes, which seesaw between the erotic and the ridiculous—Oliver slurping Felix’s semen from a bathtub drain, Oliver thrusting into the soil of a fresh grave, Oliver gleefully dancing nude through Saltburn’s cavernous rooms.
In an interview, Fennell laid out her aims in centering broad sexuality in a genre known for more refined pleasures: “[the viewer] is operating on the movie that it’s saying it is, which is a classic country house Merchant Ivory Gothic movie, and then the movie that it really is, which is just something about sex and desire and our very modern obsession with things … that will never love us back.” In other words, the film’s country house trappings are a mask for its actual subject matter of all-consuming class envy. She sets up a familiar bubble of idyllic nostalgia undergirded by generational wealth, then bursts it with the Cattons’ period-appropriate bad taste and Oliver’s desperate horniness for their privileged lives and elevated status. Oliver, in particular, illustrates the “modern obsession with things … that will never love us back” that Fennell notes is her subject matter: He craves the rarefied prestige that residence at Saltburn can confer, even as its residents have no regard for him, and Fennell implicitly suggests this desire is shared by those swept away by onscreen images of impossible wealth.
He craves the rarefied prestige that residence at Saltburn can confer.
Fennell invoked Brideshead Revisited and Merchant Ivory dramas only to undermine the romantic gloss they cast on wealth. Two other influences, which went comparatively unnoticed by critics and audiences, reveal even more about her aesthetic and narrative aims: Joseph Losey’s films The Servant and The Go-Between, deemed by Fennell in the same interview as “two of my favorite films of all time.”
Losey was a Hollywood director in the 1940s who decamped to England after being targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and subsequently developed a substantial body of work. The Servant (1963) and The Go-Between (1971) came from a years-long collaboration with screenwriter Harold Pinter, and presaged Saltburn in their thematic concerns: class upheaval, sexual desire and manipulation, and the moral vacuity of the English upper classes.
The Go-Between, adapted from the 1953 novel by L.P. Hartley,is a lodestar of the country house genre, yet it features a distinctively unsettling portrayal of how sex and the British class system clash. The film centers on a middle-class 12-year-old boy, Leo, who stays with an aristocratic school friend at his family’s estate in the summer of 1900. Out-of-place and eager to please, he unwittingly facilitates an affair between his friend’s older sister and a neighboring farmer by delivering letters between them. As the affair comes to light, Leo learns sex can have cataclysmic consequences, even as he has no practical understanding of the act.
It’s very human, in spite of its extreme beauty. And it’s that thing that Losey and Pinter did together so much, which is: there’s so much cruelty there.
While Fennell borrows numerous narrative and formal touches from Losey’s film, the most important quality of The Go-Between she evokes is the dichotomy between a beautiful place and an ugly situation. In fact, she amplifies it: While The Go-Between features an elegant setting and morally ambiguous characters, Saltburn showcases an ostentatiously grand setting and amoral, ignorant characters.
Fennell delights in parading this contrast. Take the scene where Felix gives Oliver a tour of the house. The camera follows Felix through each lavish room as a romantic strain of strings plays underneath, yet his descriptions of each room are crass and banal: In one room he “accidentally fingered [his] cousin,” another is plastered with portraits of “dead rellies.” Felix’s inanity is loudly announced, and set against plush, regal interiors as if to emphasize his unworthiness.
In keeping with the recent trend of “eat the rich” cinema, the luxurious Saltburn is a breeding ground for moral and intellectual dissipation. In The Go-Between,it takes time for Leo to realize he doesn’t morally approve of his hosts; in Saltburn, Oliver, though he keeps his cards close to his chest, immediately concludes the Cattons have no substance and don’t deserve the abundance in their possession. As she makes it increasingly clear that Oliver is determined to destroy each member of the family and claim Saltburn for himself, Fennell prods the audience to delight in their downfall by repeatedly highlighting their superficiality. The Go-Between invites its audience to question the repression and exploitation that the English aristocracy can perpetuate; Saltburn takes this as a given and uses this as a starting point for a thriller with the aristocracy as the targets.
Fennell prods the audience to delight in their downfall by repeatedly highlighting their superficiality.
This development in Oliver’s character arc leads straight to The Servant. While Oliver’s introduction to Saltburn as both a welcomed guest and an uncomfortable outsider echoes Leo in The Go-Between, the reveal that he is a ruthless social climber parallels the titular servant in Losey’s earlier film.
The Servant, based on Robin Maugham’s 1949 novella, depicts a rich, suggestible young man, Tony, who hires a live-in manservant, Barrett. Barrett takes advantage of Tony’s upper-crust ignorance and his childlike desire to be catered to, and proceeds to pamper him, flatter him, and alienate him from his fiancé, while covertly exercising a plan to take control of the house. By the film’s end, the master is completely dependent on the servant. In effect, The Servant is both the logical inverse of a country house film and a corollary to the genre. It is pointedly contemporary and anti-nostalgic, yet it also views a well-appointed house as the ultimate site of wealth, romantic and sexual discord, and class tension.
Oliver tears through the Catton family with the ruthlessness of several Barretts, manipulating and disposing of family members as necessary. He seduces Felix’s insecure sister Venetia and his skeptical hanger-on cousin Farleigh, and endears himself to Felix’s parents, James and Elspeth. Oliver hits a snag in his plan when Felix discovers he was raised comfortably middle-class, despite portraying himself as a poor child of addicts. Felix demands he leave the next day, so Oliver kills Felix at the party with a poisoned drink to prevent his exile. Felix’s father evicts Farleigh after Oliver suggests he brought cocaine to the party, and Venetia dies by suicide soon after (Oliver supplied a drunk Venetia with razor blades). Years later, James dies, and Elspeth invites Oliver to stay at Saltburn again. She quickly grows ill and alters her will to leave Saltburn to Oliver. At the film’s conclusion, he delivers a menacing monologue describing his master plan to an unconscious Elspeth, which he completes by ripping out her ventilator tube.
Like The Go-Between, Fennell takes inspiration from The Servant through significant escalation. Oliver’s manipulation of the Cattons echoes Barrett’s domination of Tony, and his sexual methods reflect Barrett’s implicitly eroticized tactics. Yet that Oliver kills three people and explains it in a sinister monologue shows how far Fennell took the character arc presented in The Servant: While Losey and Pinter exercise restraint, showing Barrett’s scheme through action and suggestion rather than explanation, Fennell spells out that Oliver is a socially striving psychopath who kills to get what he wants. The Servant ultimately leaves the audience to decide whether Barrett’s actions are morally justified, while Oliver’s characterization descends into comic villainy by the film’s end.
Fennell’s idiosyncratic synthesis of her influences ultimately reveals a pointed, cynical viewpoint. Her deployment of country house tropes is meant to foreground their social and sexual subtexts and to subvert the soft gaze they cast on wealth, and she takes inspiration from Losey’s films by escalating their ambiguous, unsettling explorations of sex and class into a thriller familiar to viewers of recent eat-the-rich films. But rather than allowing audiences to claim any sort of moral or political satisfaction, Fennell places them in a more compromised position: The metatextual argument that Saltburn poses is that contemporary audiences have much in common with Oliver.
The progression of Oliver from a sympathetic figure to a serial killer with a bottomless hunger for wealth and status helps to make Saltburn an effective piece of pulpy entertainment. It also suggests, in exaggerated form, a double-bind in current cultural ideas around class. Responding to extreme and unabating global wealth inequality, some of the most talked-about films of the past few years, notably The Menu, Knives Out, and Triangle of Sadness, depict working-class characters toppling the idle rich, and audience sympathies are primed to lie squarely with the resourceful proletariats. Yet the middle-class striver at the heart of Saltburn, despite the melodramatic excesses of his characterization, is indicative of a different strain of class tension: He envies his hosts even more than he resents them, and his ultimate ambition is to maintain the class system with himself at the top, rather than destroy it.
He envies his hosts even more than he resents them.
It’s telling that another of Fennell’s cited influences is Cruel Intentions (1999), the soapy, sexy update of Dangerous Liaisons that became a source of aesthetic inspiration for a generation of teenagers. Just as director Roger Kumble achieved in that film, Fennell creates a surface of enviable luxury and sustains it through the entire film, but Fennell also subverts this at every turn: the clothes are ugly, the wealthy characters are selfish and simple-minded, and Oliver’s desire to supplant them is both desperate and villainous. Yet scenes of lavish birthday parties and lazy afternoons spent sunbathing are enough to make viewers want to inhabit its world. From Fennell’s point of view, even when we know the moral void at the heart of wealth, like Oliver, we still want to dance through its gilded halls.
Class envy ultimately reaches its tendrils into every facet of Oliver’s psyche, directing each of his desires toward the need for social elevation—his sexual obsession with Felix, in particular, is a physical outgrowth of his craving for higher status. In his final monologue to Elspeth, Oliver repeats “I hated him. I loved him” about Felix, indicating the depths of both his resentment and his desire. This irresolvable tension is ultimately the core of Saltburn: The simultaneous anger and envy that wealth inequality generates means that many may both reject the wealthy on principle and doggedly dream themselves into their world.
In the Summer of 2017, I went to see the European premiere of the Braden Jacobs-Jenkins play An Octoroon. Based on the 1859 melodrama by the Irish playwright Dion Boucicault, it was staged at the Orange Tree Theatre in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. A truly bombastic production that lampooned the tropes of the “tragic mulatto” story in a way that was confrontational, incredibly inventive and tonnes of fun. Sparked up by what we had just watched, the biracial man who was my date for the night, regaled me with the tale of his adoption by white parents in the North of England over a drawn-out meal at the white and blue Italian chain restaurant, Pizza Express, immediately afterward. As two unambiguously Black Britons, one might expect our feelings on the play to be more similar than they actually were. That night the awareness and emotional nuance that the actresses Lola Evans and Bafta Nominee Vivian Oparah (of Rye Lane fame) was not as readily apparent in my date. He diminished the cultural relevance of the production to us, warning me against using American racial perspectives to analyse the realities of how we are racialised in Britain. I did not listen.
My father is Zimbabwean. My mother is Jamaican. Raised in a pan Africanist household, my understanding of blackness was quite necessarily diasporic. All Black experience is of intellectual interest to me—including the experience of those who may not be perceived as Black. They cause me to ask questions of myself. Does the ambiguity of someone’s blackness negate its validity? Does my unambiguous blackness immovably place me at the top of a hierarchy of authenticity, irrespective of my internalized anti-blackness? Does someone who comes to know themselves as Black later in life, value their identity more, or maybe just differently, to the way I do?
My debut novel The Library Thief has a British main character who passes as white. To be more specific, she is “white presenting” as she is unaware of her African ancestry at the outset of the story. I concocted her story out of the novel The Long Song by Andrea Levy imagining the tale of the daughter descendant of the kidnapped light skinned baby Emily, as detailed in my Author’s note. Black women of all shades have been bleached out of Britain’s history whenever our presence is deemed incoherent, inconvenient or irrelevant. By telling the story of a woman who would definitely be described as ‘an octoroon’ in Victorian times, I was able to explore the way someone who presents as white with African ancestry could fight for agency and survival in a country that sought her literal and figurative erasure. I wanted to explore the experience of someone expanding their sense of self by discovering their blackness and the moral implications of that. In a white supremacist world, why wouldn’t one simply deny or neglect one’s blackness given the option of clear material rewards? What is gained by claiming one’s blackness if one has the chance not to?
White passing and white presenting are mistakenly used interchangeably in modern parlance, when in fact historically there was a clear distinction. To live one’s life “passing as white” requires a clear decision to leave one’s Black life behind, potentially cutting oneself off from family and community in order to obscure one’s African ancestry. To be white presenting doesn’t necessarily require this denial—it’s more neutral, in that one is only “perceived as white” in daily life, irrespective of whether one denies any color in one’s ancestry.
The title is as concise a definition of passing as one can imagine. A chosen exile being “a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another.” The book details how those whose blackness was ambiguous enough, would use their lighter skin as an opportunity to reach for freedom and opportunities that would have been summarily denied them otherwise. There are unexpected and unconsidered stories held within too. Those who sunk into a drowning melancholy grieving for the blackness they lost. Family, community, culture, richness and love. Stories of those who used their lighter skin to free darker members of their family and bring them to freedom. Stories of those who gave up passing after a period of time because the loss was too great for them to bare and/or whatever intended goal had been achieved and was deemed enough. To have such a thorough academic work as this is essential for those seeking to know exacting stories of those who rode the edge of existing racial categories and finagled their way into lives with as much agency as they could muster.
The nail-biting story of how an enslaved couple, where the wife passing as another race and gender to escape bondage in Georgia and become campaigners for abolition as escapees from recapture in Great Britain. Their story is a thrilling account that demands a cinematic rendering with its wily near misses and enslaving villains chasing them at every turn through the Carolinas, Virginia, Philadelphia, Boston and eventually to them having to take flight across the Atlantic. A tale of endurance and political principal where even before their freedom was fully secured their life’s purpose was consistently focused on securing the freedom of those they were compelled to leave behind.
The hopes and ambitions of post-Civil War Reconstruction era were repeatedly thwarted by the realities of Jim Crow and the terrorism of lynching. Nevertheless, the Northern states have never been able to get off scot-free convincingly. Racial segregation not even being more visibly polite in spite of claims to the contrary. The institutional discrimination faced by Black people, even at a time when W.E.B. Dubois had already graduated from Harvard, meant that the first Black female student at Vassar needed to conceal her blackness if she had any hope of admission. The novel teems with charged tension as Anita Hemmings’ pursuit of a decent education is constantly under threat from her fears of being caught in her whitest of lies. The guile and charisma of her senior year roommate entwining her into potential calamity that leaves the reader’s back damp with perspiration from the stress of it all. It’s been seven years since it was announced Zendaya will produce and star in the film adaptation of the novel renamed A White Lie.
The now seminal text portraying vignettes into the life of the ridiculously reckless Clare Kendry and the endlessly anxious Irene Redfield has captivated readers for a century. A sky-scraping achievement from a writer of the Harlem Renaissance, the queer coded depiction of a woman who uses her ability to pass as white to play in the face of a racist, will continue to be argued as an act of Black feminist defiance. Snatching racial privilege out of the mouth of the lion in the age of Gatsby which lasted only as long as it could. My mind remains made up, but I’ve never recovered from the “did she or didn’t she” of the last scene. Possibly the most perfect novella ever written.
The collaboration between Heather Terrell and Victoria Christopher Murray yields an immensely personal biographical fiction of Belle da Costa Greene who curated the library of J.P. Morgan. Completely upturning the assumption that librarians in the main have a desire to live quite quiet lives, the story wields its temerity with everything taking place just above the scandal. One of America’s most brilliant archivists finally gets the light shone on her that she always deserved.
My most purchased book ever. Why? I could depend on anyone I purchased the book for, texting or calling me about it and thus the gifting of it became a request for intimacy. Bennett’s research and sensitivity sings itself into the reader’s bones, in a page turner of a book infused with all the stories that have come before it. The chicken stock of “Passing.” The herbal aromas of “Imitation of Life.” Twin sisters: one who chooses to pass for white for more than her own personal gain, and the other who chooses to remain Black in spite of the cost. The fracturing of a family bubbling up lava between the shifting tectonic plates that shake the foundations of the characters all the way through the story. A page turner of the highest order that left me reeling at the end with memories of the locations I was lucky enough to read it in. A sensational masterpiece!
Things will only get better? Will a skin lightening procedure that’s less dermatologically dangerous than our current skin bleaching practices cause more or less harm? Penning provocative satirical prose in one of the boldest debuts of recent years, Ruffin’s warning of a potential future is nowhere near as ridiculous as one wants it to be. How should one deal with discomfort, desperation and longing? Is a father’s desire to help his biracial son escape the racial reality his own bourgeois accomplishments prove is doggedly inescapable, an act of love or madness? Some readers will feel more lanced than others but unfortunately it’s a story that implicates us all.
THEY SAY NOTHING TASTES AS GOOD AS SKINNY FEELS, BUT After Kate Baer
have you tried duck-egg soaked brioche French toast, golden crisp edges doused in caramelized maple syrup? have you licked a spatula coated in vanilla bean whipped cream? have you soaked up oceanic Pinot Grigio brine with toasted baguette after polishing off a bowl of mussels? have you allowed the thick cream of drinking chocolate to coat your tongue? have you baked the strawberry rhubarb pie passed down from your great-grandmother? have you dined solo in Rome, read love poems to yourself over a plate of pasta carbonara with a glass of chianti? have you dipped buttered toast slathered with apricot preserves in black coffee? have you licked lavender honey off a lover’s thumb? have you finally renounced deprivation in the name of pleasure and celebration?
– D. Coffyn
I see this poem on Carmen Maria Machado’s Instagram story, black words set against a white square. I picture the chocolate, the lavender honey, the French toast, and try to recall what sweetness feels like on the tongue; it’s been so long since I ate for pleasure the thought seems strange, out of place, like a rat in a bowl of sugar. I read and re-read the poem over the sound of my seething stomach. I have not renounced deprivation in the name of celebration: if I eat for pleasure, if I eat until I’m full, I’m convinced I will feel atomic levels of pain.
Did you know that hungry people feel less pain? I mean this literally: hunger activates a neural pathway that inhibits the perception of and response to pain. So I don’t eat brioche or butters or creams or custards or anything that makes me flush, full, or moan. Instead, I eat leafy things, watery things, bland things. I am always hungry. I am always hungry. And I rarely feel pain.
Today I have an appointment with a blood specialist, or as my friend/former boyfriend Journey calls him, “Docula.”
My protein levels are low, a marker of malnourishment.
“How old are you?” asks Docula.
“Thirty-one.”
“Do you eat well?”
“Yes.”
Docula asks me to stick around so he can draw more blood and run a lipids panel.
I leave the office, promising to return for the test. I will never see this man again.
What did Docula say? texts Journey.
I respond with a GIF of a little black bat bursting into a vampire.
I am always hungry. And I rarely feel pain.
Memoirs and essays about eating disorders are often structured in redemptive narrative arcs: the writers describe the specific ways they starved or purged until their enamel wore down and their hearts almost stopped. Then they begin to recover, sometimes against their will, and from this place of tentative health, they write.I can’t find myself in these narratives. When I read them, I wonder whether the authors think about readers like me, us parched sponges who absorb “recovery” literature for tips and tools to starve beautifully, to starve well.
I won’t disclose my anorectic methods here, because I don’t want this essay to double as a manual/weapon. This is not an essay about redemption: it’s about resisting recovery the way someone resists drowning—so violently I might drag my rescuer underwater, too.
Carl Jung suggests that intellectualization masks the fear of direct experience, so here I go. Etymologically, “recovery” comes from the Anglo-French recoverie. In 1530, recovery was defined as: “the act or power of regaining or retaking something lost or taken away.” By 1580, the meaning evolved to include: “the restoration from a bad to a good condition.” The problem with this definition is that it implies the existence of (and return to) a prior good condition, and for me, there was none: anorexia is all I remember. Six-year-old me basked in my family’s praise the summer I only ate stone fruit. Twelve-year-old me fasted with my mother, longing for the sharp shadows her cheekbones cast along her face. Fourteen-year old me got a belly-button piercing to celebrate shrinking into the body everyone around me encouraged me to have.
When I send an early draft of this essay to my friend Julia, a memoirist and therapist, she writes eighteen comments in my Google Doc. One asks: “Could there be room to discuss the pain these younger versions of you were experiencing/avoiding/absorbing?” The incisiveness of her question makes my eyes sting; I interpret it as an invitation to excavate the roots of my anorexia. I resist. I wonder: do my particular pain-points really matter? I’m not interested in uncovering why I struggle to eat—I could come up with countless wounds and never touch clarity. I’m interested in that I struggle to eat, in the ways my pain presents itself rather than its reasons. But maybe Julia is right: maybe I have to discuss the pain in order to understand its anatomy.
I send a revised draft of this essay to my friend Charlie, a novelist. “Can you remember a time in which you ate for pleasure or joy?” they ask, over Zoom.
I drink my cold black coffee and shake my head.
Charlie readjusts their rectangular glasses and re-reads the etymology of the word “recovery.” The restoration from a bad to a good condition.
“If you can’t return to a previously good condition because that condition never existed, you may have to radically imagine what recovery could look like for you,” they say.
Imagination, as in the ability to project myself into the future, is precisely what I lack. I feel engulfed in a cloud of marine fog so thick I can’t see my own hand, let alone a future recovered self. And in order to recover, shouldn’t I want to recover? I don’t understand why I should want to recover from a condition that has helped me survive. Almost everything I rely on within myself loops back to anorexia, the way rivers eventually snake into seas. I depend on my high pain tolerance, on my obsessive thinking, on my capacity to endure discomfort; I don’t know how to live without the vigilance that runs through my body like an electric circuit. And by that I mean: I am certain I will die if I recover from this illness that could kill me.
Once, when I was twelve, I didn’t register the furious lurch in my mother’s eyes before we got in her green Volvo. You should have seen this coming, I thought, as we careened into the side of a tunnel, as my ribs cracked, as her nose spewed blood all over the airbag. You should have known she was too upset to drive. To be unalert has meant to be in danger: my survival has required constant watching, watching, watching. And to make the watching bearable I depend on disembodiment: for me anorexia was not about becoming a river of bones—I wanted to feel like steel, wood, ice, a nerveless membrane.
In another comment, Julia writes, “I must ask: do you want to feel like a nerveless membrane because your mother is a bundle of nerves without skin?”
I read this question and wonder: how much of my personality is reaction against my mother? She explodes, I implode. She attacks others, I mutilate myself. She cries thick tears, I swallow the salt. But also: we both drank; we both got sober. We both smoked blue American Spirits; we both quit. We both starved; I still starve. And who am I kidding: I also attack others, I also explode, I too am a bundle of nerves. That which you flee from finds you.
In “There once was a girl,” Katy Walmdan writes: “Anorexics are convinced that they are hideous, bad, and unlovable. At the same time, they are constantly soliloquizing about their sacrifice, their nobility, their ethereal powers.” I’m not convinced I’m hideous, bad, or unlovable, but I don’t believe I am beautiful or sweet or loved—to be loved, you have to be seen, and I don’t want to be looked at. Maybe this is why I disappear.
Glennon Doyle, a writer in recovery from anorexia, suggests that starving your body will also annihilate your intuition—the little voice that warns you against a dangerous person or situation. To me this rings false: the hungrier I am, the more vigilant I feel. Hungry me sees sunlight as it threads through the hairs of a stranger’s arm; hungry me sees a man in a green leather jacket drop a pill in a younger woman’s drink on the other side of a bar; hungry me warns the bartender; hungry me feels like Spider-Man.
“Could this be because when we are starving we are in survival mode?” asks Julia.
“Are vigilance and intuition the same thing?”asks Charlie.
Here, am I soliloquizing about my ethereal powers?
“You can eat and feel like Spider-Man, you know,” says my therapist, Anne. “Think about how much Spider-Man ate.”
I glance around Anne’s office, at the yellow walls, at the framed black and white pictures of sailboats, and try to remember the Marvel movies, the ones with Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland.
I am certain I will die if I recover from this illness that could kill me.
“Are there any scenes in which Spider-Man actually eats though?” I ask.
“Go re-watch the movies.”
I don’t re-watch the movies, but I Google “does Spider-Man eat?”
Video after video pops up: Spider-Man eating donuts, pizza, burgers.
I report this to Anne.
“And what does this mean to you?” she asks.
“It means that a fictional character eats.”
Anne’s lips stretch into the smirk that says: you’re an unending asshole.
“I honestly don’t care what Spider-Man does,” I say. “You’re not going to convince me that I’ll somehow be more vigilant if I’m full.”
She leans back into her blue armchair. “I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I just want you to consider that your experience of life could be infinitely better than the one you’re having now.”
“I doubt that.”
“That’s the anorexia speaking,” she says.
“But when is the anorexia not speaking?”
“You have another self that isn’t sick.”
Esmé Weijun Wang’s words come to mind:“when the self has been swallowed by illness, isn’t it cruel to insist on a self that is not illness?”
On Instagram I follow an account called “kids eat in color.” The person who runs it is a nutritionist who teaches parents how to help their kids build a positive relationship with food. One of the most important strategies is to serve dessert with the main meal: jelly beans along with pasta, a slice of cake next to a piece of chicken, sugar cookies with steamed broccoli. This presentation is meant to erase the arbitrary binary between “healthy” and “unhealthy” foods. The account also discourages the use of words like “good” and “bad,” as the distinction moralizes the value of one kind of food over another. Instead, parents are encouraged to explain nutrition in ways kids will understand, for example: “red food gives you a strong heart, orange food helps you see in the dark, yellow food helps your body heal cuts.”
“You can re-parent yourself, you know,” says Anne, when I tell her about this account.
“If you make me hug my inner child one more time I’m going to freak the fuck out.”
She reaches toward the table on her left, picks up a tin of Pringles, sour cream and onion, and offers it to me: an invitation, a threat.
Unhealthy, screams my brain. Bad.
I decline.
Online, I indulge—I follow creators who cook and eat things I want but do not have. On Youtube, I consume video after video of “what I eat in a day” vlogs. As I watch people devour breads, burgers, pancakes, cuts of Wagyu steak, tacos, and cake, so much cake, I wonder: how much of this is true? Are they doing this for the camera or is this really what they eat in a day? On Instagram, I follow bakers who create uncanny cakes that look like high-heeled shoes, mops, coffee-cups. I also follow “miniature cooking” pages in which people use little knives to cut minuscule chicken breasts and sauté them on palm-sized stoves. Someone anorexic had to come up with this shit, I think, as I watch huge hands fix tiny meals.
I submit a draft of this essay to my graduate writing workshop. One of my classmates wants to know: what do I feel as I watch these videos, while I digest all this food porn? Titillation? Hunger? Thirst? No, all I feel is curiosity, perhaps a little envy: do some people really eat whatever they want, whenever they want, without a second thought?
Offline, I feed everyone I love. When friends come over, I place four kinds of cheese on the corners of a cutting board—goat, gouda, jalapeño cheddar, brie. I stick special little knives with colorful handles—red, orange, yellow, turquoise—into each mound of cheese. In the center of the board I arrange a charcuterie flower, petals of pepperoni, cured ham, chorizo. Between the cheeses and meats, I place basil leaves, dark seed crackers, strawberries, blueberries, almonds, walnuts, pickles, puckered black olives, squares of chocolate. Before my guests arrive, I take a picture of my masterpiece and post it on my Instagram story and write something inane like cheeseboards are my love-language (can something you deprive yourself of really be a love-language?).
I never eat before coming to your house, my friends say. You feed me so well.
Their comments make me prickle with pride.
“Why is it so important for you to feed others?” asks Anne.
“I want people to leave my house feeling better than when they walked in.”
“But why?”
“It makes me feel happy,” I say, when what I really mean is: it makes me feel full.
“Folks with eating disorders often love to cook,” says Anne. “It’s like a decoy. If you appear to engage with food, your friends won’t notice your eating patterns.”
“They notice.”
Some friends notice gently; they slide snacks in my direction and offer to cook me dinner.
Some friends notice loudly; they ask me when I last ate, concern glued to their faces the way honey sticks to skin.
“How does that make you feel? That people notice?”
“I don’t care. You’re probably going to say that this is the anorexia talking.”
“No. People usually try to keep eating disorders hidden because they’re ashamed.”
My chest puffs up with self-righteousness. “Everyone struggles with something right? If someone judges me they can go be ashamed of their own life.”
“Setting shame aside for a minute, do you ever think about how your anorexia makes other people feel?”
My chest deflates.
Back when I lived with Journey, back when I was nineteen and he was eighteen, back when my mother moved from California to Spain, where we’re from, I started to eat again. Once there was a sea, a continent, and multiple time-zones between my mother and I, once she could no longer summon me with a text or a call or a facial gesture, I ate salt and vinegar chips smashed in turkey sandwiches, home-made donuts filled with raspberry marmalade and coated in powdered sugar that dusted my eyelashes and cheeks, chocolate oreo milkshakes so thick the cream barely passed through the straw. Once my mother moved away, I felt like I could rest.
For months, Journey and I hosted weekly brunches and parties in our tiny studio. The heat of people’s bodies warmed the periwinkle room, friends slept over on our leopard-print carpet. This was my first taste of an adulthood untethered from my mother. Everything felt fun and spacious, but as time passed, I began to experience flashbacks, night terrors, intrusive thoughts, full-body sweats. My eyes and fingers twitched as I imagined the sound of my mother’s anger and sorrow, of my phone ringing incessantly with her calls. I stopped wanting to be full; I felt too afraid to rest.
Soon, alcohol replaced food. Instead of eating, I drank vodka mixed with pulpy orange juice. At night, I watched The Real Housewives while Journey played Grand Theft Auto. Zoning out next to him felt soothing, as if we were floating on two separate rafts in a sea of screens, fingertips touching.
One night, Journey came home with three styrofoam containers brimming with Indian takeout. The scent of masala and cardamom filled the room. My eyes watered, my stomach growled. I could have thanked him for buying us dinner.
“This is like the third time you’ve had takeout this week,” I said instead.
“So?” Journey asked, as he spooned aloo gobi onto wedges of garlic naan.
“Don’t you think you should be eating more salads?”
The corners around his green eyes crinkled with confusion.
“What are you trying to say?” he asked.
I wasn’t trying to say anything. I was saying it. Eat less.
“I eat a salad like every day,” I said.
“What do you think life is?” Journey asked. “A salad-eating competition?”
I laughed, caught off guard.
He laughed too, and finished making his plate.
I don’t remember eating.
The more space my anorexia takes on the page, the hungrier I feel
Now, I wonder how many casually cruel things I said to Journey, how often I made him feel self-conscious about how much he was eating, what he was eating, that he was eating. All along, I’d wanted to believe anorexia was a problem between myself and I, not a double-edged sword that would cut anyone who tried to get close. I feel shame, sharp in my chest.
I call Journey.
“I owe you an apology,” I say.
Back to intellectualizing: Amanda Holmes writes that “shame” derives from the Goth word scham, which translates to “a covering of the face.” Shame, then, is the urge to hide, the act of hiding, of becoming invisible. Conversely, “write” derives from Old English writan: “to outline, to draw the figure of.” If shame is to cover, to write is to uncover—to expose. In her essay “Writing Shame,” Elspeth Probyn draws a connection between the act of writing and the experience of shame. She suggests that writing and shame go hand in hand because there is “a shame in being highly interested in something and unable to convey it to others.” As writers, we are required to wrestle with the question:what if no one cares about what we care to uncover? Or worse, what if people reduce and reject what we disclose?
The week I publish my first essay about anorexia, I meet up with a friend, another writer, in a coffee shop in downtown Los Angeles. The winter sun is pale, the air spiked with January’s chill.
“I read your essay,” my friend says, as he stirs brown sugar into his lavender latte. “I would never write about what you write about. I wouldn’t want my deepest and darkest wounds out in the world.”
The idea that anorexia is my deepest and darkest wound makes me chuckle.
“I’m fine with it.”
“Do you worry people will judge you?” he asks.
“For having an eating disorder?”
“For writing about it. For navel-gazing.”
I sip my coffee.
My friend’s comment reminds me of how, once, in an undergraduate writing workshop, my professor announced that he was tired of reading “navel-gazing work” when one of my classmates submitted an essay about anorexia. Thirty minutes later, this professor called a (male) writer’s description of heroin addiction an “existential reflection.” I wanted to snap and say that addiction and eating disorders are cousins, that starving and binging and purging produce emotions the body learns to depend on, that anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder. But my second-hand shame was so immense, I said nothing.
As my friend’s comment lingers in the dead air between us, part of me wants to pull my sweater over my head, cover my face, and hide. The other part of me wants to tell him to go be ashamed of his own life, that, as Melissa Febos writes, “navel-gazing isn’t for the faint of heart,” that I am doing my best to make sense of an illness that feels like a vacuum, with no discernable beginning or end.
I tilt my head toward the sun and stretch my arms downward; my collarbones crack.
“What are you working on?” I ask instead.
A few days after I submit the final draft of this essay to my graduate writing workshop, I receive an email from one of my classmates. If you show up to workshop without that goddamn epic cheeseboard we are going to have a problem. The message makes me cackle. Later, over text, my classmate tells me that my work made her hungry; I feel relief. The more I write, the more space my anorexia takes on the page, the hungrier I feel, too. I keep snacks at my fingertips as I type: sour things, sticky things, spicy things. On heavy writing days, I take twenty-minute cat naps every three hours and dream that I spit out my teeth one by one. Google says dreams of teeth loss symbolize a loss of control, of power, the death of an important relationship. If my anorexia dies, who gets to live? Maybe this is a stupid question because the answer is so obvious—I get to live—but what I really mean is: how am I supposed to trust a self I haven’t met?
My last workshop takes place in a bright classroom with a rectangular table. I am not allowed to speak while eight writers comb through my work. A clear plastic bag full of chocolate-covered espresso beans sits a few inches away from me; usually I never touch the beans, today I eat three. One person says my etymological meditations sound like bad liberal arts academic discourse. Another person says all my writing about writing is self-dramatizing. Someone else likens it to an “open corpse” style, in which the writer vivisects the essay to reveal its bones, guts, organs, tissue. The idea that a piece about anorexia is an open corpse amuses me. I take notes. At no point during the workshop do I feel shame, just heat; the skin on the back of my neck becomes red and flaky as if I am sitting beneath a fierce ocular sun. Once the workshop is over, my professor asks if I have any questions. I say no.
The day I drafted the first page of this essay, I saw the potential for an echo. My trip to Italy was already booked, so I made a decision: on my last day in Rome I would eat pasta carbonara. Not to assert recovery, not because I have successfully renounced deprivation in the name of celebration, but because I am a glutton for symmetry. The opportunity to open and close the essay with carbonara would be too good to pass up, regardless of how I felt about the actual eating.
I ate outdoors, in a restaurant that served its pasta in aluminum pans on tables with translucent plastic tablecloths. The spaghetti was thick, eggy, covered in cheese; tiny pools of bright red oil dotted the carbonara sauce. It would be disingenuous to claim that I ate with pleasure or that I enjoyed the wheat, cream, grease, pecorino. The truer truth is that I ate with fear and delight and curiosity, and that when I finished I was dizzy and disoriented and worried but sated. For a moment, I felt proud of myself: there I was, in Rome, listening to church bells toll in a plaza tinged fuschia by the setting sun, butter flecking the corners of my mouth. But I also knew this wasn’t recovery: it doesn’t really count if you eat for the story, just to say you did. But it also doesn’t not count.
“How was your trip?” asked Anne, once I returned.
I pulled out my phone and showed her a picture: my aluminum pan, half-empty, rich cream splattered on metal.
For a country that isn’t much larger than a thumbnail on most globes, Britain has an outsized cultural footprint. This is, of course, in part because the footprint used to be a big clobbering boot, kicking in the doors of other people’s countries without even wiping the blood and mud off on the mat.
When I started writing my debut novel, The Ministry of Time, I mostly wrote it as a vehicle to bring my favourite 19th-century polar explorer, Graham Gore, into the 21st century, so I could shove him into situations and make him wriggle. (When you have a crush on a dead man, there’s not much else you can do to keep the relationship spicy except write about him.) But I quickly found that bringing a Victorian into contemporary Britain was more conceptually complicated than just having him exclaim approvingly at the plumbing system. How would a Victorian react to multiculturalism, feminism, decolonization? What has changed in Britain since the Empire ruled the waves—and what hasn’t? What would the British government really be doing if it had time-travel—or any other technology that brought it power unprecedented since the days of imperial rule?
If you spend any time thinking about Britain, you have to contend with a planet-harrowing imperial project, a reluctant and storied post-colonial divestment, and Britain’s contemporary striving for identity and relevance in our current, late capitalist era. If you are writing—as I am—from the position of a marginalized identity in that society, you also have to contend with the extent to which you are British and the extent to which you are Brit…ish.
Here is a fiction reading list which grapples with the chimera that is the experienced and imagined Britain. Some are gloriously trenchant state-of-the-nation novels that draw on personal experience, ranging from satire to autofiction. Others are wicked, funny, alarming speculative novels, taking the thesis of this nation to a thrilling extreme—though, with nationalism and sea levels both on the rise, they are looking increasingly plausible…
This 1974 novel follows Adah, an Igbo woman from Nigeria, who emigrates to join her husband in 1960s London. The Swinging Sixties this is not; those are something that happened to other people, mostly white people. Adah’s London is stiff, parochial, barricaded in baffling rules. She is underappreciated and misunderstood by her husband, and must bring up their children in an alien atmosphere. Ethnic distinctions mean nothing to the British, to whom all immigrants are “second-class citizens.”
If this sounds like a purely tragic story, or if you expect Adah to be crushed into submission by her circumstances, think again. Buchi Emecheta’s unforced, graceful prose, and her no-holds-barred coruscating honesty, depict a woman striving passionately for joy and self-determination. Second Class Citizen is as much a novel about the emergence of a writer as it is about the experience of an immigrant to the U.K. Emecheta described this as one of her “documentary novels,” as Adah’s journey closely parallels Emecheta’s own.
In a country where the rain almost never stops falling, where the land is waterlogged and every valley is a lake, where the earth is sliding into the sea, where arable and burial land is frighteningly scarce, what, realistically, will people do? Well—realistically—late capitalism is late capitalism, and they still have to go to their stupid jobs every day.
Julia Armfield’s second novel follows three sisters—Isla, Irene and Agnes—who, after the death of their famed architect father, are forced to negotiate his legacy, their relationships and the climate crisis. Armfield’s vision of endtimes Britain is devastating and witty; the bloody-minded mundanity of day-to-day life is dizzyingly juxtaposed with the throat-closing horror of a climate apocalypse in full swing. Private Rites is also one of the finest novels about family ties and queerness that I’ve ever read; new love, old resentment, aching desire, and appalling loneliness thrums through its pages. I could read it a dozen times and still find some new truth about love and its succor and damages every time.
Vehicle by Jen Calleja
In a near future, the Nation (the U.K.), a conservative, xenophobic country, has cut ties with the Mainland (Europe). It is illegal to learn a foreign language or commit to unauthorized historical research. Jen Calleja’s allusive, mysterious verse novel presents a realm in the death grip of extreme nationalism, whose natural opponent is fluidity—of language, of gender, of movement.
The novel is told in overlapping strands. In 2000, a roaming archipelago known as The Islets, which vanished from the world in the twentieth century, reappears requesting aid following an ecological disaster. The Nation sends an agent, Hester Heller, a linguist and musician, under cover to the Mainland as a singer in a touring punk band, to gather information on the “Isletese Situation.” In 2050, a group of runaway researchers piece together a true account of Hester Heller’s mission, uncovering some shocking truths along the way. Vehicle somehow manages to be a formally challenging and a joyous mystery romp—a ghost hunt through the archives.
Mr. Ma and Son by Lao She, translated by William Dolby
Based on Beijinger Lao She’s own experiences teaching in London in the 1920s, this sparkling, bonkers satire of London’s Jazz Age as seen through the eyes of a pair of Chinese immigrants running an antiques shop near St. Paul’s is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Lao She doesn’t just satirize the peculiar rudeness, stiffness, drunkenness and meanness of the English; he’s very sharp and funny about ancien régime wannabe mandarins and romantic young first-generation idealists too. There are some hilarious scenes here, my favorite being the moment that Mrs. Wedderburn, Mr. Ma’s fastidious landlady, sews some “beautiful” Chinese characters onto her boorish flapper daughter’s hat – but she sews it upside down, so the characters read “big bastard.”
Alas, you can be as witty and as observant as you want, but racism is still brutish and painful, and the denouement of the novel reflects this. Lao She himself suffered a sad end. After returning to China, he experienced significant mistreatment and humiliation during the Cultural Revolution, eventually taking his own life in 1966. His reputation has since been restored, and there is now a major literary award given in his name to Beijing writers.
The three rooms of this incredibly smart, fresh novel are three different rooms that Jo Hamya’s narrator lives in, as she moves from Oxford (where she is a research assistant) to London (where she works at a society magazine). This is a novel about searching for belonging, except this hoary tagline is given a vivid, pertinent spin: how do you find “belonging” when the rents are so high and the salaries so low that you’re being priced out of the cultural and professional journeys of discovery that typify the “search for belonging”? What narrative can be unpicked from this kind of restriction and low-level fear? Hamya never forces the point, but her clarifying acts of observation—the price of chocolate, the hours worked, the suffocating lack of space and privacy in a shared flat—are trenchant and biting. This is a brilliant document of Britain as it exists now, and very funny to boot.
The 2015 film adaptation with Tom Hiddleston did not go hard enough, in my opinion. High-Rise is balls-to-the-wall bananas. It opens with Robert Laing, a recently divorced doctor, moving into a new tower block which has all the conveniences of modern (’70s—the book was written in 1975) life: grocery store, bank, hairdresser, pools, even its own school. The more affluent the tenant, the higher in the tower they live, with the building’s architect occupying the penthouse. If you think this sounds a bit obvious, I’m afraid that’s about the right level for the unsubtle British class system.
Neighborly rifts, power failures and obsessive control over the high-speed lifts soon descend into a dystopian carousel of violence, and different floors align themselves with different factions. Withdrawing from society at large, the tower block becomes a tiny, bloodthirsty ecosystem of its very own. High-Rise is a brutal and brilliant novel about class stratification and the isolating outcomes of modern social and technological landscapes taken to an orgiastic extreme.
This novel is narrated in the first person by a young woman who leaves China for the U.K. to begin a post-graduate program. She arrives in the midst of Brexit, and a social climate of suspicion and self-involvement. She meets—at a book group where no one discusses the book—a British-German man, and the two fall in love. The novel takes its name from Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, a fragmentary book about the imaginative state of love (and yearning), and the language and gestures used to define the state of love; but here, language and gesture differ between languages and cultures, and our narrator is in position of constant translation as part of the work of love. Britain is a rather cold, parched place in the novel, generating nothing more than a series of irritating chores for our narrator to live. It is imagined Britain—as a possible home for love—that the narrator must hope for.
“What will become of my work?” – Clara Schumann, after learning she’s pregnant with her fifth child
I. Her hands on the piano are birds she cannot name.
It’s April 1854 in Düsseldorf, rain and rain and flooded streets. Whenever Clara leaves the house to shop, she wades through water ankle-deep. Two months ago, her husband Robert was hospitalized following his most recent breakdown. He has stopped composing; Clara and the children are running out of money. She lifts her hands to her face, holds it—scent of onion she cut earlier.
II. She’s born in Leipzig, 1819. That year bicycles are invented, and the English are colonizing Singapore. A few hours from Leipzig, pogroms against Jews have begun. Clara’s father runs a music store. She spends her early years among cellos and oboes, doesn’t speak until age four. After her parents’ divorce, Clara remains with her father. He instructs her in the piano and supervises practice every afternoon.
III. Does she love Robert. She does, does, it begins when he’s a piano student of her father’s and she watches him in secret. After Robert’s lessons they stand outside together by the rowan. He’s softer in the eyes than her father, gentler overall. They talk; time pauses. Berries from the tree stain the walkway orange. When Clara turns 18, Robert asks her father’s permission to marry her. He says no. He has a different idea: Clara will remain his prodigy. Already she’s given performances throughout Germany and in Paris. She composes music, has published “Quatre Polonaises.” Despite her father’s heavy-handedness, Clara likes playing in public. She carries an agate in the pocket of her dress for luck.
Robert petitions the court, and eventually he and Clara are allowed to marry anyway.
IV. Her memories of her mother are hazy and anxious: jasmine perfume, singing, her parents’ arguments. She keeps a pair of her mother’s boots beneath her bed. They grow dull with dust.
V. After Clara and Robert marry, he enters the most creative period of his life. He composes more than a dozen new works. Clara gives birth to their first baby and subsequent children at one- and two-year intervals. She continues to perform, though less regularly, and mostly stops composing.
For years Robert has gone through melancholies, but the first sign of real trouble comes when he is 34 and the two of them are on a short tour. Clara gives piano concerts. Robert tries to work but can’t focus. There’s a constant buzzing in his ears, he says; he has difficulty sleeping, eating, carrying on a conversation. Back at home he takes to bed and doesn’t leave the house for a month. Clara climbs in and tries to console him with Heine and Keats—‘He found a palpitating snake, bright, and cirque-couchant in a dusky brake.’
VI. Learning she’s pregnant with their fifth child, Clara writes, “What will become of my work?”
Robert tells her he believes babies are blessings. And, true—he writes music intended for children and spends much time with his own.
His struggles continue. He sometimes hears voices, and the note of ‘A’ drones on when he tries to compose. Eventually Robert tells Clara about ethereal music that has begun playing in his head. The sound of harmonized wind instruments—Like dancing spirits, he says.
VII. A 21-year-old Johannes Brahms befriends the Schumann family. He spends a lot of time at their home, brings picnics, performs acrobatics on the banister to entertain the children. Sometimes at night the three adults talk music and drink Jägermeister by the fire.
Clara loses count of the number of her husband’s breakdowns. By 1853 the spirits who bring Robert music have turned malevolent. He worries aloud to Clara that he’s afraid he might harm her. He composes a fragmented piece for solo piano he titles Ghost Variations.
One winter dawn Robert jumps from a bridge over the Rhine. A boater dives in and pulls him out. Delivered home in a horse-drawn cart, Robert asks to be hospitalized. Clara is pregnant. A few months later she gives birth to their eighth child, a boy they name Felix. Robert remains in the hospital.
Their money situation: Clara could tour, but the children—she can’t leave the city. And even if she could convince herself to let her oldest daughter look after Felix, Clara cannot seem to make her hands move over the keys when she does sit down to play.
One evening Brahms stops by with kuchen for the children. Afterwards he tells Clara he loves her. She feels toward him as a mother to a son, she says.
VIII. Rain keeps coming, overwashes the roof and streams down the windows. The Rhine flows hard, days of rush and roar. The piano remains untouched. The river river river: the morning he nearly drowned, Robert had walked to the Rhine in his dressing gown and slippers. Paid the bridge toll by bartering a silk handkerchief. It hurts Clara to think of him alone that day.
Johannes Brahms offers help with finances, but she’s uneasy accepting his money. Reluctantly, she does. Again and again he tells her he loves her. Clara feels—
Ambition expected in a man is unseemly in a woman.
IX. Robert’s doctors convince her not to visit. It will upset him, they say. She imagines it though—silent corridors, smell of cooked meat, a solarium where Robert sits. They embrace. He asks, How are the children? Clara begins: school and lessons, friendships. So many children—it takes time. Robert looks away. Despair and guilt settle into Clara’s chest. Love. Anger. Love.
She writes him almost every day.
In a letter, Robert tells her he wants her to remarry. He does not mention Brahms. Clara tucks the letter into a drawer and tells no one about it.
After more than two years, with Robert’s health failing, she’s permitted a visit. He dies shortly after that.
X. One morning five months after his death Clara puts her hands to the piano and finds she can play. Hours pass. A finch flies to the windowsill and looks inside. Eventually she goes into the kitchen and asks her older children to make lunch for the younger ones. Danke schön, she says.
She remains friends with Brahms and wonders.
XI. A knock on her door nine months after Robert’s death, another rainy afternoon in April. “Mama?”
It’s Marie or Elisa, Julie, Ludwig or Ferdinand, Eugenie or Felix. Clara is practicing. She lifts her hands from the keys. “Come in.”
No. A knock on her door nine months after Robert’s death. “Mama?” Clara keeps playing. She’ll make kakao tonight and read aloud to them.
Early sobriety is a very unique, specific flavor of life in which you suddenly have yet to catch up with the exterior world. You’re a skinned grape rolling around among others who’ve grown safe, comfortable exoskeletons in the time you spent drinking. How did they do it? How do they do it? How do Ido this—and can I, really?These are some of the questions explored in Michael Deagler’s debut novel, Early Sobrieties, and questions that I, who also got sober in Philly, like Deagler’s narrator, and Deagler himself, acutely remember wondering.
Early Sobrieties follows 26-year-old Dennis Monk as he returns to the place of his active addiction—to the South Philly rowhomes of his old friends, ex-girlfriends, and potential new ones; the freshly bulldozed parking-lots-turned pop-up beer gardens; and the roof he was once locked out on all night (with good reason). He might be a little aimless, but has a purpose, not to make any 12-step amends—though kind of, without the AA program part. Monk wants to know whether he still belongs to this city, and to these people, and they to him. It doesn’t always look like the place he left, but he doesn’t really feel like the person who left it.
Micheal Deagler and I spoke over the phone about the difference between writing a novel about addiction and one about recovery, the importance of avoiding narrative clichés of substance abuse, and what sobriety can do for a storyteller, and his protagonist.
NV: Early Sobrieties has a lot to do with relationships, while active addiction is mostly about isolation. Was this a comparison you sought out, or did it come naturally to Monk’s story?
Michael Deagler: I think, from a craft perspective, having other people around makes the story more interesting. It’s a big driver of plot development and tension.
Before I wrote this book, I wrote a lot of stories that were more about active alcoholism and addiction. I was especially interested in the kind of dynamics of male friendships and how they can be kind of codependent or have a negative influence, especially when it comes to violence, substance abuse, and stuff like that. So, in a lot of ways, this project was meant to be an evolution. If this character is sober now, how do these relationships change? To what extent do they still function as relationships that can continue into the future?
Some of the chapters deal with him encountering these people who he knew in that capacity before, but others push into new areas—like having conversations with your family that you maybe haven’t been having, or reconnecting with people who you haven’t seen in a long time. The experience of sobriety is that you’re at a reset with everyone. Certain people disappear from your life, but others may reappear, even temporarily.
NV: It feels as if he never thinks he deserves the people in his life, even the shittier friends. I’m thinking of Dogman in “New Poets,” who makes a newly sober Monk drive him around while he’s wasted and looking for drugs. Monk gives everyone in his past a lot of grace. Does he leave any for himself?
I was interested in the dynamics of male friendships and how they can be codependent or have a negative influence, especially when it comes to violence and substance abuse.
MD: I think he definitely struggles. There’s a certain amount of self-loathing, either as an underlying cause of addiction or as a result of it, since you keep doing things you wish you weren’t doing, and that doesn’t really go away immediately. It’s sort of cliché, but so much of the recovery process is learning to forgive yourself. For a lot of the book, Monk hasn’t forgiven himself yet, so he has this very bifurcated relationship with everyone where on one level, he’s extremely grateful to have anybody still in his life, but at the same time, he’s easily annoyed by people because he doesn’t quite jive with them for various reasons.
NV: Right. It’s like the first time you hang out with drunk friends when you’re newly sober, and you’re like, oh, so these are my friends.
MD: Yeah, it’s tough because you need people but haven’t learned to be around them yet. That’s another thing, the most dangerous person to be with is yourself. When I got sober, I would be so happy to just sit at a table with anyone and hear them talk about anything just because it was much easier than sitting alone in a room, trying not to drink.
NV: In what ways would you say the Monk that we have access to is different from the active alcoholic he was before the book began, aside from the removal of the substance?
MD: He has a deeper self-awareness. He’s forced to sit with himself. When writing about addiction from a plot level, it’s very easy to write a character who’s never forced to confront the deeper things because the drama of addiction is at the surface level. And that’s how addiction is: you’re burying or masking whatever you don’t want to deal with under it.
Once you go to the dark place and come back, you’re a different person. Everything is lived in the aftermath of active addiction.
Active addiction is very dramatic and sort of sensational, but sobriety is boring. It’s not loud and colorful and violent and sexy, the way addiction narratives can be. So as a writer, you’re challenging yourself to find the drama in this activity which is so internal and based on the absence of something.
I wanted to write a book where the threat of relapse does not hang over him. In an earlier draft, there were no flashbacks. We knew very little about his active addiction or what he did at that time because I wanted everything to be in the present, not just a book about him reflecting on past things. I wanted there to be action because I think good fiction operates that way. Eventually, I had to include a little bit of a window into his previous activities to give the reader more context, but I wanted this book to be about the experience of sobriety rather than a long appendix to an addiction story.
NV: There are many addiction narratives that serve to shock a reader without doing the work of producing real sentiment, and/or that follow an expected pipeline of rock bottom to recovery. You avoid these clichés. Do you think about them as much as I do?
MD: It’s interesting because I quit drinking, but I’m not in AA and never have been. So a lot of that cliché stuff, to me, is rehab, 12-step programs, sponsors, and meetings, which is not actually part of my experience. I know so much about it or feel like I know about it, because of how often it is depicted in the culture, film, and television especially. But your job as a storyteller is to break out of the expected stuff and give the reader something new. I think for a lot of people it’s far less interesting. There’s sort of a glamor to addiction and a romance to it that I think is bad for people, especially young people.
Before I got sober, I was reading a lot of addiction narratives because they were obviously interesting to me. And then after I got sober, I noticed it did seem like there was a dearth of sobriety fiction, at least that treated sobriety as an active, interesting, complex process, and not just the resolution of something.
The interesting thing to me about sobriety—which I now understand is like part of pink clouding and stuff, is that you’re like, really happy a lot of the time. Everything seems incredibly beautiful, and you’re very emotional, but you also have these moments of depression and confusion and so much regret. And the need to explain yourself, but also the inability to explain yourself. Sobriety is the interesting part, not the active addiction. It all seems much more rich and psychological.
NV: In “Old Cities,” Monk experiences an emotional turning point when he returns to a place and a memory that might’ve otherwise remained forever lost. This shameful past event confirms his desire for sobriety, and we see it from the perspective of a newly sober Monk. Can you talk about how you approached this flashback, one of very few in the book?
MD: Originally, that was a story I could never really get to work. It used to end when they were climbing the stairs to go into Georgina’s apartment. It just ended there, and none of the stuff about being locked on the roof was in the original story. It wasn’t a good story, but it was because, in that first draft of the book, I was very adamant about not having any flashbacks.
Like I said, I wasn’t in AA, I was just kind of living my life for a long time, like okay, I’m sober now—I’m writing stories about it, but not engaging with it so much. And then I got good health insurance and went to see a therapist for the first time in my life. One of the things that my therapist helped me realize was that I never wanted to talk about actual incidents from when I was drinking. She was like, you can’t just not engage with this stuff. Even if you think the specifics don’t matter, the fact that you’re never allowing yourself to look at any of it is getting in the way of moving beyond it. And of course, because I care about being a writer more than about my mental health, I was immediately like, oh shit, I can’t write a book about sobriety and just completely ignore active alcoholism.
The worst aspect of drinking was waking up the next morning and being like, I don’t know what happened, what I did, but feeling the negativity of it.
This is a moment where this can come up for Monk because that stuff happens, you walk to a place, and it’s like, oh, I was like shit-faced here one time, and sometimes you like, don’t remember it until you’re there, and then you get these weird sense memories. That was the worst aspect of drinking—waking up the next morning and being like, I don’t know what happened. Everybody’s pissed at me. That feeling of not knowing what you did, but feeling like the negativity of it. In fiction, you need to write toward those moments of high emotion and toward the things that are difficult to write about both emotionally and because you almost don’t know enough about them to write about them.
NV: I dog-eared and underlined these lines: “… blackout drunk, which isn’t sleeping and isn’t awake, but a third state, the one I must have preferred on some subconscious level, though what I liked about it, what I did while I was there, was always a mystery to me the next day.”
They encapsulate active alcohol addiction so well. It’s not just that mysterious escape hatch from life, it’s also shameful, boring, and repetitive. Like, that wasn’t the only night Monk felt that way. It feels deeply true.
MD: I’m happy to hear you say that.
NV: By the end of the book, do you think Monk has found a new third space between sleep and awake—not through the escape hatch but in his transitory state, the acceptance that one more day is all you get—or do you think he’s wide awake now, whatever that means?
Active addiction is very dramatic and sort of sensational, but sobriety is boring.
MD: That’s a good question. I never made that connection before. I think it’s a third state because once you go to the dark place and come back, you’re a different person. Monk can never be pre-addiction or never-addicted. Everything is lived in the aftermath of active addiction. He’s aware of what the stakes are and committed to continuing on. It’s easy to slip into the lingo where he’s like, you know, committed to doing the work. But he wants to be sober, and he’s starting to realize how to get out of his own way.
NV: It’s like Monk says, “Three months earlier, I’d given up meat. Two months earlier, I’d given up cigarettes, I might start again with either of them. It was impossible to know. I’d just turned twenty-seven.”
Sobriety is shaky; nothing is for certain, and anyway, you don’t just quit drinking and instantly get better. This story does not have a perfect bow at the end, which is what makes it feel real. It avoids the biggest cliché: the full recovery.
MD: Yeah, it’s like even if he’s sober forever, you can be sober and still not be happy. It just puts you at the same level as everybody else, you know? You still have to do everything that everybody does to have the life you want. You’ve climbed back to baseline. Anything more than that is still work.
My mother tells me stories of a woman on the moon. When she first heard the story, she was a little girl in China, sleeping at her aunt’s house beside the river, banana trees thrashing with night storms. When I first heard the story, I was in my parents’ bedroom in the American midwest, the quiet night punctuated by the neighbor’s howling dog. Separated by time, by culture, by distance, by language, my mother’s stories are handed to me fragmented, and I am tasked to put them back together.
As a second-generation daughter of immigrants, I am often saddened by the stories that will be forever lost between my mother and I. Yet, as I grow as a reader and writer, I see the potential between the cracks: a chance to insert myself into my culture’s history. It is inevitable that myth will mutate with time. The right author will make the best of it.
Below are eight works of fiction based on Asian folklore.
One sister plays housewife to a conservative Singaporean politician. The other survives New York City as a sugar baby. Little unites sisters Su and Emerald other than the fact that, thousands of years earlier, they were a pair of snakes in Tang Dynasty China. Now, in present day, their secret is threatened when free spirit Emerald joins Su in Singapore, a city stiff with conformity. A reimagining of the Chinese folktale “The Legend of the White Snake,” Amanda Lee Koe’s Sister Snake tackles family, sisterhood, and queerness with dark glee.
Silicone sex dolls come to life. A shapeshifter finds herself hunted. A fox spirit seeks vengeance through seduction. Though the shapeshifting nine-tailed fox of Chinese fables has often been labeled as a trickster, Sally Wen Mao’s short story collection, Ninetails (which, yes, has nine tales) recontextualizes the fox through the eyes of women and immigrants. At last, the fox spirit is written as perhaps what it was always meant to be—a protector of the lost and unwanted.
Malaysian fairy tales and speculative fiction collide to form Zen Cho’s short story collection Spirits Abroad. Aptly split into three sections: Here, There, and Elsewhere, Cho’s stories explore everything from invisible forest dwellers in rural Borneo to fairies in the U.K. In “The Fish Bowl,” a girl preparing for her entrance exams bargains with a wish-granting koi with a ravenous appetite. “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again” explores the love lives of sapphic dragons. “The Four Generations of Chang E” rewrites the famous moon goddess Chang E into an extraterrestrial. There’s everything you need, and everything you never knew you needed.
It’s Manchuria, 1908, and a woman is found dead and frozen in the snow. An aging detective named Bao is assigned to identify the woman, and as the case progresses, he finds himself circling back to the fox gods that intrigued him throughout his childhood. Elsewhere, a woman named Snow searches for the man she believes to be responsible for her daughter’s death. When their respective searches narrow in on one photographer, Bao and Snow’s paths inevitably collide, and the mystery of the fox spirit comes to light. Quiet and enigmatic, The Fox Wife explores grief and vengeance amidst magic and myth.
Nghi Vo’s novella The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a classic story within a story, opening with an elderly woman named Rabbit recalling her time serving the exiled Empress In-Yo. According to Rabbit, In-Yo was originally sentenced South for a political marriage after losing her family and kingdom. Alone amongst strangers, In-Yo forms a friendship with Rabbit, soon confiding in her her dark desires for vengeance. Rich with history and myth, The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a novella examining patriarchy, as well as the angry women left in its wake.
Inspired by the Chinese fable of Chang’e, Sue Lynn Tan’s Daughter of the Moon Goddess follows Xingyin, the secret daughter of Chang’e, who must flee her home on the moon when her existence is discovered. Alone in the Celestial Kingdom, hiding amongst the very people who imprisoned her mother, Xingyin plots to save her mother, all while falling in love with the Emperor’s son, Prince Liwei. A revitalized myth filled with action and sweeping romance.
16-year-old Szu’s mother was once a beautiful actress, famous for staring in the cult horror trilogy Ponti. Now, she’s a medium and a hack, persuading people to turn over their life’s savings for a seance. With little comfort from her mother and no father figure in her life, Szu finds herself lonely in 2003, Singapore, until she befriends transfer student Circe. Flash forward 17 years, a soon-to-be divorced Circe is reminded of her past with Szu and Szu’s mother when a remake of Ponti comes up at work. Inspired by the Nusantara lore of the pontianak, a vampiric female ghost, Ponti is an exploration of friendship and memory.
The God and the Gumiho follows Seokga, an exiled trickster god who is offered redemption, so long as he can capture a recently escaped demon and the infamous Scarlet Fox. While capturing the demon may be possible, more so with the help of his local barista, Hani, capturing the Scarlet Fox may be a bit more challenging, especially considering Hani is the Scarlet Fox. As Seokga and Hani continue their journey, their relationship only grows more complicated as friendly bickering turns to something more.
Football (or soccer) has always been a significant part of Ellen van Neerven’s life; they grew up playing the game, advanced to become an amateur player, and has always been what they call an “armchair enthusiast” of the sport. But EvN, the author of Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity, who presently lives in Brisbane, Australia, has not experienced only joy in their participation in sport. Instead, their love for the game was—and is—complicated.
As someone who identifies as queer, non-binary, and is of Mununjali Yugambeh and Dutch heritage, EvN, throughout their formative years, began to grapple with what it means to play within a system that is rampant with racism, homophobia, sexism, and so often reduces complicated facets of identity and being into binaries, like gender or the concept of winning vs. losing. In the “Pregame” to their book, EvN asks: “What does it mean to play sport on First Nations land?…Do we need to know the truth of land before we can play on it? Indeed, should we do anything on Country without knowing the truth?” These questions are as much a driving force for EvN in this collection as they are an invitation to the reader to consider intersections between sport, colonization, gender, race, environmental crises, and trans inclusion.
Stunningly kaleidoscopic in form, subject matter, and voice, the pieces in Personal Score range from deeply researched passages to lyric ruminations to sports writing to poems to narrative personal essays. In a book that is so much about how harmful binaries in sport, life, and thinking can be, the breadth of forms allows EvN to trace the way that historical violences, and present day refusals to acknowledge this violence, perpetuate deeply harmful systems that do not allow for full expressions of identity and humanity. I had the opportunity to speak with EvN via email about the power of language, the importance of eradicating harmful binaries, and what their relationship to sport has looked like at different points in their life.
Jacqueline Alnes: Football (soccer) becomes a way for you to examine the ills of colonization, LGBTIQSB+ inclusivity in sport, racial equity, the effects of climate change, and what it means to play sport on First Nations land. One of many beauties in the book was the way this signified to me how interconnected all of these issues are. Was all of this always in your mind as you stepped on a soccer pitch or did one thread lead to another and then to another?
Ellen van Neerven: Playing soccer (from a young age til recently) deeply informed the writing—I was determined to capture movement and connection on the page. I learnt a lot growing up participating in sport and traveling to play games. I became curious about what had happened and what was happening in the places I was on. I had the support of my family, Elders and broader communities when I was growing up. My learnings are on the pages and are by no means complete. The book contains many threads—all woven together.
JA: It’s clear that while sport has afforded you an opportunity, at times, to feel fully alive within and connected to your body, the gendered systems, microagressions, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia have also made the sport feel like a place where you and others don’t feel like they truly belong. In what ways has sport helped you better understand yourself, and in what ways, at least in the ways most teams and sport itself are usually structured, around binaries and with a goal of winning, has it taken you away from yourself?
Gendered systems, racial slurs, homophobia and transphobia deeply complicated my love for sport.
EvN: A recent thing I have learnt about myself is that I feel most me when playing sport. I feel affirmed in my queer trans Indigenous body running around a pitch and being involved in a game I love. However, competitive sporting environments were also places where I felt most policed, discomforted, and hurt. These are experiences I unpack in the book. Gendered systems, racial slurs, homophobia and transphobia deeply complicated my love for sport, and I know it had the same effect on many of my readers, who share their stories with me. Some queer and trans people, for example, are returning to sport at an older age, having been excluded or turned off sport when growing up. I was lucky to find supportive team environments when I was in my late twenties and found joy in sport beyond competition. On the sporting pitch I understood my capacity for compassion and loyalty towards others, I understood my limits of exertion and I learnt skills that extend off the pitch.
JA: When we see people who represent the communities we are a part of playing a sport, there seems to be potential for us to feel more connected to other people or even to become more hopeful about the future. I love the scenes where you talk about the way that watching particular players on television, like tennis star Ash Barty, brings you a specific kind of joy. What did it feel like to watch Barty play? And what do you think it is about sport that makes us feel this sense of connection and optimism while watching?
EvN: Our community got behind Ash Barty in a big way—we are so proud of her. It is an amazing feeling—watching an Indigenous athlete who grew up in a similar part of the world as you—go on to become the number 1 tennis player in the world. Of course this is not unpreceded, Evonne Goolagong Cawley was this for my mother’s generation, she is a Wiradjuri woman who was number one and won majors in the 1970s. I remember Mum suggesting I write about Evonne for a school assignment when I was about eight—instead of the four white Australian athletes that we had to choose from I did do this and it unlocked a curiosity in me to learn more. Forty years later, watching Ash’s journey on the world stage was hugely influential for me and the older generation and the younger generation. Ash is not only a beautiful player but has an incredible warm spirit that is infectious. From seeing the Aboriginal flag being flown in the crowd during her Wimbledon victory to Ash winning a home grand slam, this collective joy uplifted us during tough times where our communities were experiencing grief and injustice. So it was also healing. We were also in admiration in the way Ash chose to retire—at the age of twenty-five and at the top of the game. She exited the game on her own terms—not willing to sacrifice her happiness and the other things she wanted to achieve in her life.
JA: You write, “This is an ugly book that was born out of the ugly language I grew up hearing in this country.” There are so many moments in this book where language harms, whether it was insults you received at school, deeply problematic names of soccer pitches or towns, or racial epithets. But you also write that “language can always be taken back and used to our advantage.” I love how many different types of writing you include in this book, everything from narrative essays to lyric fragments of prose to poems. How did writing this book shape your relationship to language of both the harmful and healing variety?
EvN: Language holds so much power. It was painful but necessary to write about how language (namely English) has hurt me and others and freeing to write in ways that represent flow, fluidity—to use language (English and language of my mother’s people: Yugambeh) to hold and to be held.
JA: You write about how, “unlike whitefellas, First Nations people don’t necessarily subscribe to the binary of work and leisure” and instead consider sport to be a “part of life, part of work, part of education, and part of looking after Country.” The way colonizing Europeans historically only allowed men and the ruling class to participate in sport, and their emphasis on the importance of winning, have trickled down to the ways in which trans athletes are being harmed or pushed out of sport now. How, for you, do these harmful histories show up in sport in the present day?
I’d like the future of sport to be responsible to land, inclusive to all people and a space that can show leadership in restorative justice.
EvN: Yes, histories of exclusion and discrimination in sport still have impact today when we look at issues in sport like sexism, racism, queerphobia, transphobia, ablism and classism. Despite progress, there’s still generally a massive pay gap between athletes in male and female sport. Participants in sport often don’t feel like there’s avenues for transformative justice when racism is reported. LGBTIQA+ people often face barriers to participating and experience discrimination. Where a young person grows up might impact their access to sport.
JA: What was it like tracing the histories of Country and sport and colonization alongside your own personal history? What did you learn about sport, place, people, and yourself along the way?
EvN: I grew up about an hour’s drive from my traditional Country, where my grandparents were born, and my ancestors lived for thousands of years. Where I lived and still live is in a city on what has always been Yagera and Turrbal Country—neighbouring nation to my nation. Prior to colonisation, we developed strong reciprocal bonds nation to nation and travelled widely to practice ceremony and culture. As a sporty kid, the first occasions where I travelled were with my parents driving to games and tournaments. I was taught more information about the places where I was moving and travelling but I was also acutely aware of the disruptions, fractures and violence of colonisation that had impact on the places today. I learnt when something bad happens on Country and is not acknowledged, it translates into a bad feeling felt in the environment and this continues to ripple. When we can name what happened, when we can feel supported in place and in relationships, when we can speak out and have a voice—this can be a strong start in addressing the injustices of harm to people and environment.
JA: In regard to the environment, you write about invasion, land grabs, destruction, and the colonialist exploitation of the environment that has caused such irreparable damage. In the first few pages of the book, you ask both yourself and readers, “What does it mean to play sport on First Nations land?” As you collected the physical evidence of damage, language marking the deeply horrific histories that have happened in specific places, and thought about the way rising tides, fires, floods, pandemics, and more are wreaking havoc on communities and the natural world, what answers have you come to?
EvN: What does it mean to play sport on stolen land also is what does it mean to play sport in climate crisis. We are experiencing devastating climate events that are disproportionately affecting the world’s Indigenous people and most disadvantaged people. While researching the book, I came across information I hadn’t made the links to yet—like the link between injury and drought—from playing on hard ground.
JA: Throughout the book, you note how First Nations knowledge is so often undermined and disregarded, leading to climate crises, a reliance on harmful binaries that impact both individuals and communities, and many other ills. You write that “resilience” and “reconciliation” are thorny terms because of what they signify: “re-silence,” and “to repeat, continue…conciliation—to placate or pacify.” What might true healing look like, and is that even a possibility? What would that kind of reparation require?
EvN: First Nations knowledges are still being ignored, even in times of major crisis, and after major crisis. And when there is interest in traditional knowledge, it is often cherry-picking—say an interest in cultural burning after devastating fires but don’t see that cultural burning is but just one aspect of cultural land management. First Nations people always had an active role in sustaining the land and waterways. Governments need to put resources into cultural land management which includes practices such as cultural burning, and this needs to be in the hands of First Nations people. It is hard to heal from colonial injury when there is still so much disadvantage and injustice—for example high rates of incarceration, high chronic health risks and not being listened to by government on what the best ideas and solutions are for each community. Land back. Bring everyone home. Indigenous languages are also vital for the future. It would be transformative if every jahjam (child) had the chance to learn their language.
JA: Thinking about the future of sport, and of course the ways that sport is connected to and representative of so much else, what does an ideal future look like to you?
EvN: It is important for sport to be seen as so much more than singular—rather let us see sport in pluralities. There are many diverse ways of engaging with sport that go beyond mainstream nationalist narratives. Personal Score is about connecting to the land you’re on and play sport on. Ideally, I’d like the future of sport to be responsible to land, inclusive to all people and a space that can show leadership in restorative justice.
When I first decided to write my novel, Their Divine Fires, I knew I wanted to draw on and honor the stories of my grandmother and mother. In the early 1900s, my grandmother’s uncles joined the Communist Party and fought to protect their country against warlords and Japanese soldiers. Decades later, my mother witnessed the Cultural Revolution and lived through the vast social and political changes that were brought about as a result. I grew up with these stories, stories of resistance and revolution that shaped how I understood who I was and my own place in history.
Much like the stories on this list, Their Divine Fires explores the ways that collisions in history and the choices of previous generations haunt the lives of the present. My novel follows the love affairs of three generations of women in one family, beginning in early 20th-century China and ending in modern-day America. Each generation must make difficult choices in order to survive the tumultuous times they live in.
The family sagas on this list are all in conversation with my own in some way. Oftentimes, they ask similar questions that I do in my novel: What are the ways that history haunts us? How can we reconcile and make peace with a past that goes beyond our own? How can we move forward while honoring and holding space for our ancestors? The following books answer these questions and more in complicated and heart-wrenching ways.
One of China’s “Four Great Classical Novels,” Dream of the Red Chamber is probably considered the Chinese family saga. Written in the 18th century by the poet and scholar Cao Xueqin, the novel follows the rise and fall of the Jia family clan during complex social and political changes of the time. At the center of the novel are a pair of ill-fated star-crossed childhood lovers who are unwillingly pulled into a love triangle. Hailed for its unusually sensitive depiction of the lives of women for its time—an aspect which inspired my own novel—Dream of the Red Chamber considers the ways that love shapes and determines our lives. And did I mention there is a magical talking stone?
Red Sorghum by Mo Yan, translated by Howard Goldblatt
One of Mo Yan’s most acclaimed works, Red Sorghum follows three generations of the Yu family who make sorghum wine in China during the 20th century. The novel depicts the tumultuous changes China underwent during this time—from the Second Sino-Japanese War all the way to the Cultural Revolution. Bandits, resistance fighters, even a pack of feral dogs live passionately and brutally within the pages of this novel, and die in much the same way. Fields of red sorghum serve as a fitting backdrop, as well as a metaphor for the violence, patriotism, and love of ever-changing world in which these characters inhabit. Characterized by Mo Yan’s particular brand of magical realism and myth-making, the novel makes a clear statement about the ways that resistance and revolution reverberate into the present day.
Moving between memoir, myth, and oral history, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior is a genre-bending tale about the complicated lives of women in her family. The work explores Kingston’s own experiences as a first-generation Chinese American who must reckon with the weight of her family’s stories. Along the way, Kingston interweaves tales of extraordinary women in Chinese history—from the 2nd-century woman poet Cai Yan to the woman warrior Mulan. Published in 1976 to great commercial success, the text had a lasting impact on many Asian American writers who followed.
A finalist for the National Book Award, The Leavers by Lisa Ko charts the journey of Deming Guo as he searches for his mother, Polly, who vanished when he was a child. Haunted by her disappearance, Deming grows up to be a young adult with self-destructive tendencies, longing for a sense of belonging and connection. “He was forever waiting to get past the secret entrance,” Deming describes himself early on, “and when the ropes did part he could never fully believe he was in.” Traversing several decades and two continents, The Leavers seamlessly intertwines both stories of mother and son to explain the ways that we leave (and return) to one another.
Another novel that centers on a familial disappearance, Searching for Sylvie Lee is a story about two related families—one in the US and one in the Netherlands—and their intertwined histories. When her older sister goes missing while visiting their extended family, Amy Lee must retrace her sister’s footsteps in order to find out what happened. Along the way, Amy uncovers dark family secrets from the past, secrets that upend her understanding of who she is and her loved ones. What happens in previous generations, Kwok suggests, can make or break the generations that follow and only by reconciling with the past can we find ways to move on.
Swimming Back to Trout River begins in 1981, when five-year-old Junie is left in the care of her grandparents in rural China while her parents go to America in search of a better life. Five years later, Junie receives a letter from her father, promising to reunite their family by her twelfth birthday. How will Junie decide where her loyalties lie—with her grandparents or her parents? How will her family finally reconcile with the passions and violence they experienced during the Cultural Revolution? Through all this, one question burns above all in Junie’s mind: “There’s a world out there trying to lay claim on you. What are you going to do about it?”
The Bonesetter’s Daughter spans nearly a century in its depiction of three generations of women, and what they had to do in order to survive. When her mother, LuLing, is diagnosed with dementia, Ruth Young arranges to have her mother’s handwritten memoirs translated in order to better understand her mother’s past and how it shaped their relationship. In this novel, family stories that can no longer be spoken outright are passed down through the written word, evidence of the power that writing our own stories gives us.
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