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.
Zack listens to his playlist Apocalypse Daze. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” comes up on shuffle as he arrives to Mason and Sandro’s cookout. Whether the song is a good omen or a bad omen, or an omen at all, Zack is unsure. He points for the driver—“Right there, thanks.”—pockets his earbuds, and glances at his phone for the time. “Have a great night, man.”
The Uber hums off. Zack takes in Mason and Sandro’s house. Christopher Cross blasts all the way around to the sidewalk out front. God forbid Mason enjoy something without the plausible deniability of it all being a joke. The partygoers are also at such a decibel level, commingling with the yacht rock, that Zack surmises Marta’s gotta be there by now. He’s satisfied with his well-timed arrival. Thinks of his app and takes a series of deep breaths.
In for four heartbeats.
Hold.
Out for four.
Hold.
The sun will start setting soon. Zack watches it through LA’s brownly orange haze and breathes there alone in the hot driveway.
“Don’t.”
“Dude,” Zack rolls his eyes.
“I’m asking you not to,” Mason takes Zack gently by the elbow. “Go meet the pig on the grill and chill, erwhatever.” Mason squeezes warmly once and releases. “The pig is tentatively named Gertrude until someone comes up with something that’s actually funny. Prize is first dibs on the carcass.”
“I’m just asking if she’s here.”
“And where.”
“Maybe I’m trying to avoid her.”
“This is a nice cookout, with a pig.”
“Yeah, you mentioned the pig, man.”
“Sandro and Berkeley are downstairs jamming. Get the nerves out, bro. Food’ll be up in like an hour.”
Zack can’t help but nervously shift his weight, glancing around the party behind Mason.
“And of course Marta’s here,” Mason says. “Were you expecting me to disinvite her or something for breaking up with you?”
A breakbeat is the only pattern Zack really knows how to play on the drums. He wishes he could churn out a relentless motorik, but his legs always cramp up. So he finds jamming both frustrating and monotonous when he’s stuck on drums. He stops. “Let’s trade up.”
Sandro nods. “I pack a fresh bowl, you guys . . . ?”
“Fuck yeah bro,” Zack replies.
Sandro hangs his guitar on a wallmount. Berkeley plops onto an IKEA loveseat draped with a cyberskull throw-blanket.
“My man, how you holding up?” Sandro fishes some weed out of his bespoke leather pouch and begins to fastidiously pack his resin-dulled skull pipe. Warped, radioactive skulls being his latest aesthetic makeover apparently. “You at, like, the suicide-note Stage of Grieving?”
“I’m at the perpetually-listening-to-The-Bends stage.”
“Oh, you been crying.” Berkeley hands Sandro a small, bright red skull. Sandro flicks it open and lights up with it. Skull on skull.
“Honestly, I’m not crying as much as I thought I’d be since I moved out. I’m more, like, still a little angry, y’know?”
Sandro exhales and hands Zack the bowl. “Well then good thing this is a super strong sativa.”
“Blue Dream?”
“Green Crack.”
Zack takes a deep hit. He wonders if it’s possible to develop a callous in the back of your throat from weed-smoking-frequency. Exhales. “She’s totally erased me from the band. Did you guys see the Pitchfork thing at FYF?”
“I was asking about the break-up, not the band, but OK.” Sandro takes the pipe back.
Berkeley drapes himself across the be-skulled loveseat, his head hanging upside down toward Zack. “I always preferred your solo shit. No shade to Marta and Kumiko.”
“Same,” Sandro adds and hands off the bowl to Berkeley, but Berkeley just passes it back to Zack.
Zack’s heart rises warmly as he accepts the weed. Of course they love his solo shit. He takes a hit. “Thanks, guys. That means a lot.” Exhales.
“You been writing some sad-ass Thom Yorke psych, erwhatever? Like, you gettin’ the feels out?”
“Pfft. I’m at like a . . . ” Zack takes another deep hit. Holds it for a beat before announcing: “Total. Creative. Block.” He exhales a massive cloud and hacks. They all laugh. Zack checks his phone to see how soon dinner is but it’s dead.
Mason’s cooking makes Zack feel like less of a man, but the epicurean excellence makes up for the blow to his ego. He doesn’t mind being one of the however-many people gathered shoulder to shoulder to appreciate and enjoy this culinary labor of love. Gertrude is a little too Faces-of-Death, Zack thinks, but the persimmons down the table practically glow. Zack notices Marta standing beside them. Browsing for what to put on her paper plate. Amidst a throng of friends.
Zack watches her discreetly. She won’t acknowledge him whatsoever. Surely she’s heard that he’s here by now. Maybe she’s even seen him. But she’s openly conversing with everyone around her without, conveniently, ever glancing over in Zack’s direction.
For fucksake.
“You grabbing brussels or no?” Someone Zack doesn’t know but always interacts with at these cookouts leans in.
Zack realizes he’s just been standing there. “Sorry, I’m super baked.” He serves himself some brussel sprouts and continues down the spread, grabbing some of the persimmons. When he looks up to see if Marta has any of them on her own plate, she’s gone.
Berkeley will probably eat with her somewhere. Zack will find them. Usually on the balcony. Marta was always jealous of Mason’s view.
Is it weird to bring your dinner plate with you to the bathroom? The fact that Zack even has to ask himself that question is its own answer. Nevertheless, he needs a moment to himself. Even in the bathroom off the living room, the gathering’s din is impressive.
He looks himself over in the mirror. Mason’s bathroom lighting situation is disturbing. Zack intends to center himself again, though. Remembers his app. Breathes. Holds. Breathes. Holds.
“I’m not trying to corner you,” he practices into the mirror. Eyes shut. “I just need to talk.”
He breathes.
Holds.
Breathes.
Holds.
Suddenly, phone alerts start going off on the other side of the bathroom door, rippling through the party. More and more of partygoers’ phones wailing with some sort of vital announcement. Zack looks to his own phone, forgetting for a moment that it’s a black brick. Amber Alert, he figures. Certainly not an earthquake or he’d hear people bolting for cover.
Disturbed, Zack takes in the sustained wall of sounding phones. An uncountable number of them blaring outside. The formerly boisterous volume of the cookout fades. Dies to zero. Then there’s a silence that holds. No klaxons anymore. No voices, either. No sound or sign of life remains.
The hairs on the back of Zack’s neck bristle. The entire party has vanished into a vacuum. He feels slightly embarrassed for feeling afraid. He steps toward the bathroom door. He can hear a few folks flopping onto furniture or pulling out kitchen chairs. So far, no words are spoken. He opens the door slowly, carefully, quiet pride rising for overcoming his fear. Everyone is still there at the cookout, of course. They all sit in silence. Or stand. Or lean. The same, or roughly the same, expression on everyone’s face. Staring down at the phones in all of their hands.
Sandro stands spellbound by his own phone beside the silent record player a few feet away. A bloody Osees record he was apparently about to put on dropped and forgotten, splayed open on the red rug beside him. A roaring, axe-wielding orc illustration on the album’s gatefold.
Zack walks quietly as he approaches Sandro. No one looks up. He leans in towards Sandro’s shoulder, speech feeling like a secret or some forbidden act for reasons Zack doesn’t understand beyond his reptile-brain’s present coaching.
“Yo,” he manages to get out. His voice quivering somehow on the single syllable.
Sandro hands Zack his phone. No eye contact. Nothing. Sandro just stares down into the orc at his feet. Zack hesitates to check the phone in his friend’s hand. Afraid of what he’s about to find. Less embarrassed about it this time. So he looks.
A bright red push-alert fills the entire foldable Android’s display. The thing’s haptics surge almost painfully in Zack’s palm.
Of course no one speaks. Who wants to be the first person to say it’s the end of the world out loud?
Kyiv is gone. Other places too. The names are long and Russian-sounding. But Zack recognizes Kyiv.
He thinks of Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Thinks back on all those times he heard about modern nukes being “X times more powerful” than the bombs dropped on Japan. But he can’t remember the value of X. He remembers being what feels now to be perversely impressed by X, though. Was it in the double digits? Was it a factor of hundreds? Thousands? He doesn’t know. What he knows is that Kyiv is leveled. He pictures a city-sized, flaming, radioactive flatland of rubble and dead bodies. But then he realizes that it’s probably considerably worse.
What’s he missed in the news recently? John Oliver and Colbert and the blips of KCRW on the way to Blue Bottle in the mornings keep him pretty in the loop—or at least knowledgeable enough about global goings-on to be marginally aware of the loops that he’s not in on. Was he, and/or everyone else on the planet, the proverbial frog in the pot coming to a boil, ignorant of some rising international tensions or the ascension of a trigger-happy madman? Or was Zack just not paying attention?
John Oliver and Colbert and the blips of KCRW on the way to Blue Bottle in the mornings keep him pretty in the loop—or at least knowledgeable enough about global goings-on to be marginally aware of the loops that he’s not in on.
Who’s behind all of everything right now? Zack feels like he needs to know, needs to attach his rational mind to someone in order for a logical sense of cause and effect to still exist in the universe. Blame is Zack’s only lifeline. Was it Russia? Moscow isn’t in the reporting yet, so could be.
Zack’s sphincter tightens at the word “yet.” Where else is in a Yet Situation? Is he himself in a Yet Situation? What about other places in the US? LA must be a valuable strategic target, right? What about the US as a whole? What about everywhere?
But specifically what about LA?
Zack looks around, away from Sandro’s phone. Sandro has abandoned him and migrated across the room to his girlfriend on another be-skulled, deep couch. The news of what’s happening is beginning to sink in for everyone. There are some brief expressions of shock. Wordless vocalizations from folks, attempts at something said but abandoned halfway through into the eery quiet again. Dazed hugs are exchanged. Language is taking its time to return.
His stranger/friend from the brussel sprouts breaks down. Others follow. Zack is glad he doesn’t know the stranger/friend well enough to have to blink himself out of his own shock to comfort the guy. Berkeley, though, leads him from the living room floor to the deck outside. Always the Boy Scout. The stranger/friend is still audibly crying out there. Zack doesn’t turn to look through the sliding doors. He doesn’t wanna see that right now.
The colors of the living room have lost their saturation. A deep night descending. No one currently with the presence of mind to flip on the lights, and no one noticing that no one has.
“ICBM’s still in the exosphere according to NORAD,” a familiar voice announces. Zack remembers NORAD as the Santa Trackers when he was a kid. How similar now is his belief that they can track these things, he wonders.
Someone breathlessly states the obvious: “More nukes.”
“More of them over the Indian Ocean,” another voice adds. “Origins unknown.”
“Pacific Ocean, too,” Sandro chimes in, a wavering shakiness to his voice completely unfamiliar to Zack and probably everyone else in the room. The notion of seeking shelter is broached briefly, but the conversation fizzles. What’s shelter?
“Maybe we should turn on the news,” suggests Sandro’s girlfriend. Zack remembers that her name is Emily. Maybe Emma. He doesn’t care.
“Where’s the PS5 controller?” Sandro asks to no one in particular and begins frantically going through his TV’s remote-routine. Zack half tip-toes over to a seat on the arm of an occupied La-Z-Boy. The TV visible now. He turns on the first lamp.
The room ripples into incandescence as everyone realizes they need it and switch things on. Sandro tells the Playstation to pull up CNN Live but it just hangs on buffering. A pin could drop and everyone would lose their mind.
From Zack’s new perspective on the fluffy chair, he spots Marta seated at the base of the steps to the upstairs. Her leg up against the wall beside her friend Anni. Zack always mostly liked Anni. She’s posed mirror to Marta. Leg up. They both stare at the same point in space somewhere between them, a few steps below. Lost in private distress, stumbling mentally through somewhere alien just like everyone else.
Zack wants to want to go to Marta when CNN Live flashes into deafening, blinding brilliance. Sandro leaps for the remote and rapidly turns down the soundbar. “Sorry sorry sorry.” The matrix of glowing CNN elements resolves onto the screen. White and blue and red and gold. The camera swoops in toward the anchors standing amidst moving walls and screens.
The anchor with a white beard leans, head down between his shoulders, dizzy, wobbling against the news desk. No one helps him. No one even seems to notice. Another anchor silently stares off-camera, nodding slowly, finger on her earpiece, listening to something that makes her mouth hang open.
A man beside a wall-sized touchscreen of a topographical map of somewhere with no information on it weeps. He pleads up to the display, “Don’t update it! Please. Leave it all blank for just another second,” he says. “Don’t make me look at it yet.”
“It’s like binging the first season of the Apocalypse in there,” Mason says to Zack and stubs out a cigarette on the bottom of his Adidas. At some point, Zack has to step outside to bum an American Spirit off Mason. They plant themselves on the curb beneath a sulphur-colored streetlight. Smoking in morose silence.
It’s deeply unsettling to Zack that overlooking Los Angeles, there seems to be nothing really happening of note. No sirens. No helicopters. Not even any car alarms. An invisible Apocalypse so far. Off a ways on the distant mountainside, he guesses there are probably less headlights on the 134. But maybe it’s just the smog.
Mason takes a drag on a new cigarette and breaks the quiet, “I’m afraid to ask for an update.”
“More in the air,” Zack says, looking upward for splotches of stars in the hazy urban clouds. “Everyone seems to have lost track of how many there are.”
Mason nods. “I guess we’d kinda be the first to find out.”
They’re quiet together for a moment. Emotional CPU’s frying. “I need one more before I go back in.” Zack turns to reach but Mason’s already got his pack out, arm outstretched, cigarette extended.
“I’ll be out here,” Mason replies.
“Ten figures.” That’s how the TV starts referring to the body count once it gets too high too fast to keep track of, which is a matter of about twenty minutes after the news really starts coming in. Zack recalls that the human population of the entire planet is somewhere around nine billion. So, “ten figures” could be most humans. Could even be all of them. All of them except for the folks in Zack’s direct line of sight and those presently on television.
The devastation is in the quintillions of dollars, a maybe made-up number. Pretty much everyone at what used to be referred to as a cookout agrees that handwringing prognostication regarding the economic toll of Armageddon is ill-timed at best.
“I’d like to know the real death toll so far, though” Emma/Emily appeals to the remaining guests at Sandro and Mason’s. “I think we’re all entitled to know.” Sure, Zack thinks. What good would that do, though? The news feels as useless as it always does.
“I’d like to know pretty much everything about what the fuck is going on overall,” replies Sandro from beside Emma/Emily on the couch, both of them nestled atop one another beneath the neon skull blanket.
“I think everyone still alive on the planet would like to know that,” Berkeley answers. He’d come in from the deck after Zack’s stranger/friend called himself an Uber. No one expected one to come, but it only took about 10 minutes for a Ford Fiesta to pull up out front. So the guy’s gone now, as are most of Mason and Sandro’s guests. Drove home regardless of inebriation level. Wandered home through the dark on foot whether they live nearby or not. Sometimes on the phone trying and occasionally succeeding to get through to a loved one. Sometimes hand in hand with someone. Sometimes alone. Some were taken home by friends or acquaintances, perhaps to ensure that no one leaped off a bridge or threw themselves into traffic failing to fathom the End of Civilization As We Know It.
Marta seems to be taking everything well, it seems. All Zack saw in her was that daze on the stairs before she went elsewhere when he didn’t notice. Her dusty shoeprints still linger on the eggshell wall like shadows. Zack can’t tell if the fact that Marta taking things relatively well is a good thing or a bad thing. Or if it’s even a Thing at all. He just knows that she’s still avoiding him, still hasn’t made any eye contact or acknowledgement. Her avoidance is inarguable now. Zack hasn’t seen her for a minute, though. He wonders if she trickled out with some of the others. She’s notorious for her Irish Exits. Now here Zack is, he thinks. Butt-hurt and likely doomed.
Although, when it comes to doom, the US remains unscathed after nearly three hours. Three hours of missiles and bombs and entire cities being ethered. Three hours of statistics so sublimely incomprehensible as to essentially bounce right off Zack’s cerebellum.
The pixelated firsthand footage comes in and out. Bodies clogging rivers. The deep mutilation of what a person can survive, but barely and not for long. What remains of human beings wander a fiery wasteland. Picture-in-picture on the TV broadcast. Maybe looped. Maybe not.
Are we being spared? Zack wonders if there’s simply an apocalypse-lag when you’re the sole remaining superpower. Perhaps soon to be the sole remaining liveable place on the planet. But what about Nuclear Winter? Or Radioactive Clouds? The Yet Situation hovers over him like so many impatient ICBM’s.
It seems somehow logical that Moscow eventually makes the list. Zack doesn’t know yet who’s to blame for kicking over the first nuclear domino, but everyone has their suspicions. A few offered them up to the group gathered at the TV earlier. North Korea. China came up twice. Iran for a reason Zack couldn’t quite follow. Sandro offered up a contrarian hypothesis about a preemptive launch by the US and the unspoken rage was so palpable that Zack could have sworn the room warmed several degrees. Now everyone’s hypothesis is their own. They’ll all find out eventually, Zack figures, or they won’t. Kinda doesn’t matter if it’s Russia anymore. Maybe they’d been a part of it for an hour or so. Now they’re gone. Like Kyiv.
Sandro offered up a contrarian hypothesis about a preemptive launch by the US and the unspoken rage was so palpable that Zack could have sworn the room warmed several degrees.
Like Mumbai.
Like Islamabad, apparently the capitol of Pakistan.
Like Sydney.
Like Tehran.
Tokyo.
Berlin.
Beijing.
London.
Rome and the Vatican.
All of Israel and Palestine.
The entire Korean Peninsula.
Like countless other places that never lived in the forefront of Zack’s brain and certainly can’t stay there now.
“Ten figures,” a TV anchor says again. Zack worries that he’s not really feeling enough about everything thus far. It settles over him that he’s starving, but doesn’t want anyone to see him eating at a time like this. He remembers his paper plate left in the bathroom; he decides to discreetly retrieve it and eat in the garage. Or out on the curb with Mason who’s on his third pack of cigarettes, resorting now to menthols someone gifted him on their drunken stumble back home up the hill.
Zack looks around for Marta as he makes his way to the restroom, and, yeah, maybe she’s really gone. Damn. Anni is still here, though, speaking softly in the kitchen to someone Zack doesn’t catch sight of as he passes. If Marta’s gone home, she’ll be going home to a boyfriend-less apartment. One that Zack assumes is still half-empty from when he moved out a few weeks ago. Her ADHD is likely working against her getting it all put back together, and Zack gets a certain satisfaction from that.
When Zack opens the door to the bathroom, he finds three people in there together apparently hurling. A round of mutual heaving seems to have just come to a close, and the trio of pukers all turn to Zack. Each one of them sweaty. Eyes bloodshot. Hair matted. Vomit on the corners of all their mouths and on their chins. None of them he knows. One of them he thinks he might, but if so, they’re unrecognizable. The smell of the room is overwhelmingly putrid. “Oh,” Zack blinks. “Excuse me.”
The three figures stare wordlessly up at Zack, startled out of their respective trances, eyes wide, expectant. Two share the toilet bowl. The third person is at the sink, faucet running but not particularly helping to fully cleanse the sink of the man’s partially-digested roast pig and persimmons.
Zack stutters, glances over at his dinner still beside the sink. From the doorway, visually untouched by the sink-bound puker’s splashback, but never mind.
He realizes that the six eyes are still on him. All vomiting suspended. The bathroom’s bleak lighting turning everyone into irradiated ghouls. Maybe Sandro’s Green Crack still hasn’t worn off. Zack wants to give the pukers good news. This is all a dream. Something.
“Don’t forget to breathe,” he says. “In and out.”
He feels like an idiot. So he leaves.
Gertrude the Pig is alone and forgotten in the dining room. Ripped to shreds as if half-eaten by wolves who fled when a real monster slouched out of the forest. An electric carving knife rests stabbed into her neck. Zack leaves it. His paper plate of cold brussels and corn bread will suffice. There are some potato chip crumbles in the bottom of a ceramic bowl that Zack remembers are Sour Cream and Onion. He pours out the rest of the mini-chips with their flakes and flavor dust onto his plate. The sadness Zack feels over his pathetic dinner is perhaps the only access he’s had to a recognizable feeling in the last several hours. It feels alien. Outdated even.
When he gets there, Zack finds Berkeley alone in the garage. Head in hands, seated in a metal folding chair over in the corner facing the shadows. A fluorescent workbench light full of dead bugs is the only source of illumination. Zack approaches his friend, trying not to startle him. “Hey man.”
Berkeley speaks into the darkness. “There’s a black widow over here,” he mumbles. “I couldn’t see the red hour glass before it went off into that hinge there, but you can see the spiky egg sacs.” He points.
“We’ll have to let Mason and Sandro know,” Zack replies.
Berkeley scoffs. “I’m sure they’ll get right on it.”
Zack takes in the back of Berkeley’s head. “You want some cornbread?”
Berkeley finally turns and looks up at Zack from his chair. His eyes puffy and bloodshot. “You got any butter?”
“Yeah but it was cold and tore the whole thing to bits.”
“I’ll have some corn-bits,” Berkeley shrugs.
He pulls his chair along the concrete floor to where Zack unfolds his own in the buzzing light. They sit together and eat off Zack’s plate amidst the nostalgic scent of gasoline residue.
“I brought these Sour Cream and Onion chips,” Berkeley says. “Kettle Cooked.”
“Crunchy.”
“Yeah, they’re my favorite brand. Glad they were a hit.”
Zack finishes the rest of his leftovers in silence as Berkeley softly cries, sucking the last of the flavor dust off his fingertips.
The small music space off Sandro’s bedroom is the only place in the house where no one will find or bother Zack. He sits again now at Sandro’s drum kit. Needs to be alone. Never got to reset in the bathroom before the world started burning. Now Zack intends to attempt another reset. He tries to quiet his mind. Seek comfort. He had so many opportunities, though, to say something comforting to others. Friends. Strangers. Strangers/friends. He always came up short. “Ten figures.” Zack resents the fact that it’s something he must now process or to attempt to wrap his brain around.
He picks up the drumsticks and feels the raw wood in his palms. It comforts him. He taps on the taught snare lightly with one of the sticks. Slowly at first. Tentatively. Then he starts drumming, almost without quite noticing. A motorik beat. Circular. Hypnotic. Driving. He plays loud and hard. He leans into crashes and curt, martial fills. Plays harder. He wants the sticks to break. Wants to break the skins of the drumheads. Wants his hands to bleed. Wants to wail with his fists a scream that no throat could ever vocalize. The soundproof room thundering. He plays louder. Harder. A chain reaction. Exponential.
Something painfully slaps into the side of Zack’s head, breaking him out of everything. He spins on the drum stool, rubbing his cheek, looks down—it’s a baseball mitt. “BRO!!” Sandro stands in the doorway. Red in the face. Snot all over his upper lip. Fuming. He catches his breath. Shakes his head. Shrugs. Tears in his eyes. “Shut the fuck up.”
The cymbals sizzle their final resonance into the renewed quiet. “My bad,” Zack whispers. He sets the drumsticks back down onto the snare. He notices that the thumb on his right hand is bleeding. The drumstick has a dark red stain on it. It makes him snicker.
The Apocalypse broadcast, all told, is about five and a half hours long before it dies down to a whimper and then the TV coverage starts to speak in the past tense. And then, sometime around two in the morning, the news is gone. Phone reception goes, too. Internet down. Zack assumes landlines are down as well, but no one who’s still at Mason and Sandro’s has any way of checking. Zack’s been assuming he’ll wake up tomorrow and get the final figures. Process this all then. Find out what happens next. Now he isn’t so sure.
A wave of exhaustion overcomes him when there’s no more television. Relief-like. Time to go home. He’ll walk like most of the others did, he decides. So he rises from his seat and slips away from the stragglers trying to fix the TV connection. A laptop out to stream something as a backup plan. Someone desperately looking for an HDMI cable like their life depends on it.
Zack works his way up the stairs to say goodbye to Mason and Sandro. Marta crosses his mind. Ducking out like she did. Sandro’s door is closed. He peeks into Mason’s dark room, lit by a sole midcentury brass desk-lamp and the light spilling in from the deck. Los Angeles sparkling like starlight on a pond in the distance. Marta and Anni on the balcony taking it all in.
Zack’s stomach drops. Since he arrived, he’s known deep in his heart that he never truly wanted to speak to Marta. Never actually knew what he would say to her. Just wanted to confront her and then planned to go from there.
Anni steps inside when Zack steps out onto the balcony and approaches. She just nods and ducks inside the other side of the sliding doors, back through Mason’s dark, empty bedroom. Marta leans on the railing. Not surprised at all to see him.
“Hi,” she says and doesn’t move from the railing to embrace or hug or anything. Zack abruptly realizes that he was leaning forward expecting her to. He almost stumbles.
“Hi,” he replies. “Um.” He considers for a moment what he thought he knew how to say a moment ago, but it’s gone. “I kinda came to this party to confront you.”
Marta blinks. “Huh?”
“About the interview. From FYF. On YouTube. It’s obviously not relevant now.”
“No. It’s not.”
“I’m glad I’m not dead, though, and I’m glad that you’re not dead either and that I got to see you before I left.” He hesitates. “I wish you hadn’t avoided me, though.”
Marta turns away and takes in Mason’s view she’s always been so envious of. Plucks up a bottle of Pacifico. Holding it to herself for a beat. “Y’know, I thought about you tonight. About the last time I saw you.” She turns back from the cityscape and looks into Zack.
Zack shifts his weight. “I don’t wanna talk about that. Not at a time like this.”
“You punched a hole through my big canvas painting,” Marta bluntly states. Zack looks around like someone might hear. “You can’t fix that, y’know? That painting’s dead now.”
“This is kinda the last thing I wanna be talking about, Marta.”
“When I took the painting down,” Marta continues, “I realized you broke through it into the wall. There was a your-fist sized indentation in the drywall of my apartment.”
Zack blinks.
“Did you wreck your hand? Did you break something?”
“My hand was cut a little bit,” Zack replies sheepishly. “I figured it was the picture frame.”
Marta nods. “Right. Well. That’s your legacy in my life, so you know. Not the music. Not the camping. Not the fucking. Just a favorite painting of mine with a hole blasted through it, and the imprint of your fist punched into my wall. I thought about that during,” she swirls her finger in the air, meaning everything, meaning nuclear holocaust. “I thought about plastering over your fist print.”
“. . . Why?” is all Zack can muster.
Marta shakes her head and looks back out at shining LA. “I dunno, Zack.” She takes a sip of her beer and thinks on it. “Because I think maybe from top to bottom, macro to micro, individual to whatever, on every possible level,” she turns back to look into Zack again, “we’re just fucked and there’s no getting out of it.”
Zack doesn’t know what to say.
Marta takes him in for one last beat, sighs and slips inside through the sliding doors.
Zack is left alone with the skyline and Marta’s hanging words. He takes a beat to swallow and process. He’s more numb than ever. He looks out at the far-off city lights. Remembers his app and takes a series of deep breaths.
In for four heartbeats.
Hold.
Out for four.
Hold.
In for four.
Hold.
Out for four.
Hold.
He imagines an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile descending on Los Angeles faster than the speed of sound. The city alighting in a blinding flash before Zack can even hear the sound of the missile coming. He figures his best hope is to be close enough within the missile’s blast radius that he’d get vaporized instantaneously. He hopes it would be painless.
I thought it would be easy to compile a list of books where women live alone. And it was, but what is considerably less easy it to think about books where women live alone and don’t fall into, or emerge from, a completely deranged state. I asked friends, and one replied, “the first thing that came to mind was Marian Engel’s Bear, then I remembered she has sex with a bear.” We then debated whether having sex with a bear disqualified the book from “a novel where a woman living alone isn’t deranged” and we reluctantly decided it did. I’m interested in stories where women in solitude are not abject, feared or discarded.
In my memoir Arrangements in Blue I write about finally making a home for myself, alone, in my early 40s—something I felt might never happen—and while it is an imperfect as any home is on occasion, it is also a state of grace, comfort and the site of my whole creative life.
It pleases me that my list—by accident rather than intent—is formed of books where in solitude women contemplate their relationship to other women (in the main), rather than to men. It’s as though I’ve unwittingly passed a kind of Bedchel test.
Here are 9 novels about women living alone:
Still Bornby Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey
I always feel a sense of tremendous relief when I read a narrator who isn’t going to have children and is (broadly speaking) ok with that. In Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born, translated by Rosalind Harvey, two friends—Laura and Alina—explore their own paths through maternal ambivalence. While Alina pursues motherhood, Laura, who lives alone, encounters motherhood in an entirely different way. The portrayal of Laura’s relationship to motherhood, via being a daughter and her friendships with mothers, are incredibly moving and nuanced. That Laura also lives alone, in apparent contentment other than disturbances from pigeons and the disruptive and compelling lives of others, made the book all the more affecting to read.
Jean is an artist who doesn’t need anyone to confer the status of artist upon her. Her home, where she lives alone (other than an occasional, tacitly invited houseguest), is her studio and gallery. She longs to connect to her estranged stepdaughter Leah, and the novel is told in their alternating voices. Jean welds scrap metal together to create towers she embellishes with words and symbols and trinkets. The towers are imposing totems of Jean’s vitality, of all she’s learned from her experiences and from her beloved artists Louise Bourgeoise and Agnes Martin. The novel is uncomfortable and confronting at times, but it is invigorating too. An artist can create themselves at any stage of life and be aflame with artistic intent until the very end.
If you live with animals, can you truly say that you live alone? I wonder because while I don’t live with another human, I do share my home with two cats. We live together but I know my little family household won’t be recognised as such by some. Tokarczuk’s protagonist Janina lives in rural Poland and is alone since her two beloved dogs—her “little girls”—disappeared. Her life is further disrupted by the brutal murder of her neighbor. She lives mainly in her kitchen, her “small, cluttered centre of the Universe” where she watches TV, specifically The Weather Channel. Janina describes herself as “made for solitude” but the story is populated by strange, intriguing friends and foes as the search for the killer intensifies. I read feeling as though Janina was never truly alone, except perhaps (in the novel’s realm at least) her “endless sense of mourning for every dead animal,”
Pond is a short story collection that allows you, the reader, to burrow completely into the narrator’s domestic space as though it were a novel. There’s something of the home of Pond I want, a ‘splendid deep wide sill with no wooden overlay, just plastered stone, nice and chilly: the perfect place for a bowl’. There’s porridge with black jam, cleaning the fire grate, there’s bright green parsley on the doorstep outside, neighbours and ratcatchers, a boyfriend, a stir-fry thrown in the bin, a party imagined and realised, shirts to be ironed, coffee drunk from a small noodle bowl, all kinds of weather. Intimate life is described from the alert vantage point of solitude and its pleasures, desires and conflicts are brought into sharp, clarifying focus.
Described by one critic as a kind of “ghosted memoir,” the book unfolds over a sequence of 12 chapters, each formed of several immaculate vignettes, told by Sonia, a horse trainer. It’s the sort of book that could be read all in one go; it has a powerful, propulsive energy. But I found myself reading one or two each night, as I would poems. Each sentence is perfectly calibrated, each left me fizzing with my own desire to create. It was almost too much, too potent! I’m obsessed with this book.
Sonia largely lives alone “in a trailer, a motel room, a stall at the track” and sometimes out of her truck. She describes the kind of living environment I would hate, a bedroom that “looked onto a cow pen” and the possibility of waking up to a goat chewing on my sleeve if I left the door open, but Sonia herself is so pulsing with her electric life, her passion for horses and sharp expressiveness, I felt I wanted to live like her, if not with her.
Aaliya Saleh is a 72-year-old who lives in a Beirut apartment building. She has translated into Arabic 37 books that have never been read by anyone, except for herself before she places them in a box and has her celebratory two glasses of wine. In An Unnecessary Woman she reflects on her life, “I made my bed —a simple, comfortable and adequate bed,” and her life in literature. Divorced, without children and grieving her “one intimate,” Aaliya has led a life that her culture (despite her devotion to it) is not ready for. And at times she battles with it too, confessing that while she has always been bothered not to be like ‘everyone else’ she has at the same time desperately sought to be different. But somehow, she finds that the literature that has given her purpose and companionship might also be the key to transforming her loneliness into something altogether more appealing—solitude that can at last transform and open up to new connections.
Common Decency by Susannah Dickey
Susannah Dickey’s second novel Common Decency is a darkly funny and moving story of neighbors in a Belfast apartment building. Lily is reeling from the death of her mother, unwilling to share her grief less the sharing causes her to lose her experiences in the process. Upstairs, Siobhán is consumed with her affair with a married man called Andrew who has “recalibrated her emotional vocabulary.” Lily displaces all the loss into an obsession with Siobhán, and when Siobhán rejects Lily’s attempts at friendship, Lily’s obsessiveness is propelled into action; she’s no longer content to listen to the sound of Siobhan’s microwave that “squeals like a pig when the food is done.” Dickey is a brilliant poet as well as novelist, and the brutal accuracy of imagery and clever, sharp word-choices showcase her skill. When those skills are used to describe the unguarded, private behavior of women living alone you’ll find yourself wincing and seen with alarming alacrity.
Now that her two adult daughters have moved to Canada to live with their father, Leda is finally free of “the anxiety of having to take care of them,” and free to follow her own desires. In an unusual state of well-being, she leaves the city to spend Summer in a small Italian coastal town. She overcomes the disappointments of arrival to settle into a peaceful routine of “work, daydreams and idleness.” But she begins to observe and feel inconvenienced by a large family of Neapolitans on the beach, who remind her where she came from, invoking both her fascination and disgust. Eventually, her observation turns to what Leda later describes as a gesture of hers that made no sense. It is a novel of brutal reflection, one where Leda’s fear of a love so powerful it might prevent her from becoming herself comes to pass, as she unravels entirely.
Breasts and Eggsby Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett, David Boyd
In Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, we meet three women: the 30-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko. The novel is in two halves, in the first “Breasts,” the three women reunite as Makiko travels to Tokyo in pursuit of breast enhancement surgery. In the second, “Eggs,” set eight years later, we spend time with Natsu as she contemplates growing old alone and pursues her own dream of becoming a mother.
If you give birth to a baby during a global pandemic and that baby is born with a birth defect that requires neurosurgery, the splitting open of a tiny, hairless head at ten weeks old; if you are reminded of this daily by the giant, astronaut-like helmet he must wear afterward, barely supported by his floppy neck, by the checks he must do at the doctor’s office where only nonelective cases go (because no one is even leaving the house)—if all this happens, you might become anxious. It might feel like the world has fallen apart or maybe proved itself to be the unaccountably dangerous thing you always suspected it was. In quiet moments alone with your baby, your heart might beat wildly at the thought of rare cancers, foreign wars, or the recall of a crib that is not your crib, fear slicing through your consciousness like a blade.
On the last day of her vacation, Irene Redfield is in Chicago, searching for presents to bring back to her sons in New York. She’s been to six shops, the sun is beating down, and the sidewalk is blistering, so she escapes into the coolness of a hotel. Because it is the 1920s and Irene is a light-skinned Black woman, she must pass as white to enter the Drayton. Irene can do this easily, but generally doesn’t, since she lives in Harlem with her husband, Brian, a doctor, and their two sons. When she does pass, it’s for “the sake of convenience” in a segregated world, to access certain theater tickets and restaurants or, as now, to escape the heat of a brutal summer’s day.
Irene is reviving herself with an iced tea when she encounters Clare, a childhood friend she hasn’t seen for twelve years. Clare is stunningly beautiful and, Irene remembers, the product of a tragic upbringing. She was raised alone by an abusive, alcoholic father until he died in a barfight. The last time Irene saw Clare was just before she was sent to live with her aunts, racist women who insisted Clare pass permanently to hide the “tar-brush” in her lineage.
After the chance meeting at the hotel, Clare forces her way into Irene’s social circle in Harlem. It’s a fraught, intense relationship of opposites. Irene is pragmatic, respectable, and embedded in the Black community. Clare is charming, impulsive, and essentially child-free, having shipped her daughter, Margery, off to school in Switzerland. She is also, Irene learns, courting real danger by coming to Harlem. Clare escaped her aunts by marrying John Bellew, a man who’s not only overtly racist but has no idea his wife is Black.
Passing(1929) by Nella Larsen is a story about many things: race, gender, segregation; friendship, family, desire; the New Woman, the Harlem Renaissance, and the changing culture of interwar America. It is also a story about an anxious mother.
From the moment a woman becomes pregnant, the list of things she should fear begins to grow, unstoppable and unending, like a computer set to spit out the numbers of pi. Alcohol, caffeine, Advil, licorice tea, deli meats, sushi, uncured cheese, unwashed lettuce. Genetic diseases, hypertension, hyperplasia, sleeping on the wrong side. A baby that is too big, too small, badly positioned in the womb. A mother is conditioned to fear things immediate and distant, real and impossible, or so unlikely as to be impossible. Often we are unsure which.
Irene Redfield is a woman “for whom safety, security, were all-important.” What is security to Irene? On the one hand, she believes it’s simply life without Clare, a woman who not only invites real peril by breaking racial barriers, but who Irene begins to suspect is having an affair with her husband, Brian. But Irene is anxious before and outside of Clare. She worries that the boys at her son Junior’s school have given him inappropriate ideas about sex—a notion Brian cruelly dismisses by saying sex—that is, sex with her—is a disappointing joke. She is worried, not unrelatedly, that Brian, long restless, will finally leave her. Irene also worries that the NWL charity dance won’t go smoothly, that her son Teddy will be upset if she cannot find the right drawing pad, that, on a winter’s day, it’s warm and springlike when it should be crisp and cold.
Mothers are biologically primed to be anxious.
Mothers are biologically primed to be anxious. In 2016, researchers discovered that a pregnant woman’s brain undergoes numerous neurological changes that prepare her for motherhood, including loss of gray matter and increased levels of oxytocin, both of which help her empathize with her baby’s needs but also increase anxiety. I wonder if we knew this already, told in our stories to each other, in our confessions of ourselves. If you are quite literally primed to anticipate danger, what do you do when you are faced with a world that is inherently unpredictable, constantly shifting, forever outside your control? You might try, as Irene Redfield does, to nail down the exact nature of the threats.
After my son was born, I pickled vegetables, froze coffee, and kept our pantry stocked with enough chickpeas to last five years. I hid my fear under the pretense of the pandemic, but I continued to hoard even after supply chains were back to normal, even though I knew I wasn’t preparing for lockdown but something else, something still to come. One day, I assembled a go-bag, then stuffed it under the couch and didn’t mention it for weeks, flushed with embarrassment at my precaution. I finally blurted out its existence to my husband when I became worried that something might happen to me and he wouldn’t know we had one or where it was.
Irene tries to prepare, but the threats are too extensive. When, for example, Irene thinks of Brian having an affair with Clare, she cannot decide what the devastation will look like. There could be a variety of possible consequences; it could mean he doesn’t love her, or she no longer loves him, or that she’s never really experienced romantic love. Maybe there will be social shame or embarrassment or, we can assume, the loss of a certain lifestyle and class; Brian’s medical practice pays for their brownstone, with its maids and cook. Of course it will affect the boys, but how? “If so, what, then, would be the consequences to the boys?” she asks herself after a litany of what-ifs, but she has no answer.
What person in a two-parent household hasn’t, at some point, wondered what would happen if they became a single parent? Maybe it would be fine, or maybe it would be an emotional, financial, or logistical nightmare. Maybe the kids would be resilient, or maybe they’d be fucked up, maybe for a year, or maybe forever. The possibilities of a split are too many, too unpredictable. And so Irene freezes. She holds tight to her life, trying to control it and those she loves.
Passing is a portrait of an anxious mother and not necessarily a flattering one. In Irene, Larsen employs that old cliché that motherhood makes women overbearing, unattractive worriers. Clare is effectively childless, having “no allegiance beyond her own immediate desire,” and therefore represents beauty and sex and allure, while Irene, the self-identified mother of the two, is anxious, sexually unsatisfying—the proverbial ball and chain.
“Security. Was it just a word?” Irene wonders. “If not, then was it only by the sacrifice of other things, happiness, love, or some wild ecstasy that she had never known, that it could be obtained? And did too much striving, too much faith in safety and permanence, unfit one for these other things?” When Irene asks if women must trade their sexuality, among other enjoyments of life, for security, she seems to be leading us to answer: yes.
Anxiety may be inherent in motherhood, but it doesn’t make a woman unfuckable.
We need to be careful to recognize this assumption and push back. Anxiety may be inherent in motherhood, but it doesn’t make a woman unfuckable. There doesn’t always have to be a trade-off between security and sex, or safety and happiness, or stability and love. But to point out this trope is not to say that Larsen should have erased Irene’s anxiety or made it less ugly, insidious, or painful. Just the opposite—we need to take on Irene’s anxiety, sit with it and feel its weight, like a heavy coat. We should ask ourselves: What is it like to be inside Irene Redfield’s head?
If the goal is perfect safety and security, what do you do in a world that is unpredictable? You clamp down. You try to limit yourself to what’s known. Movement, which equates to volatility, becomes a threat. See how Clare is always in motion. In her fluttering dress of green chiffon, she passes between cities and neighborhoods and, to Irene’s annoyance, the floors of Irene’s town house, wandering into the living room and down to the cook’s room and up to the playroom so that Irene can’t always see her. Even the NWL dance, one of so many that Irene has been to and that should be a comfortable social event, becomes an unsettling whirl of activity. (Who is Clare dancing with? Everyone, especially Brian.) Later, Irene can’t pin it down in her mind; it is a “blurred” and “mingling” memory.
Mothers often experience movement as fraught. Moving with children requires preparation—snacks, water, diapers, changes of clothes, toys or other distractions, scheduling. Mothers must again and again decide if something is safe or a threat. And what if they cannot tell?
Mothers must again and again decide if something is safe or a threat.
As the literary scholar Anne Anlin Cheng has noted, “The whole point of ‘passing’ is that it profoundly disturbs our certitude in what the visible can tell us; it is an act and a phenomenon that questions how we come to know something.” Motherhood, too, disturbs our sense of what’s real, our ability to rely on what we think we see. Almost every mother I know has had that moment where she stood over her sleeping newborn, watching its tiny chest rise and fall, needing to make sure (could she be sure?) that the baby was breathing. Children grow; questions proliferate. Is there mold hiding in the bath toys? Is this organic baby food full of heavy metals? Is our child’s behavior normal, or something else?
By the end of Passing, Irene is so out of her mind with anxiety that she doesn’t even know whether she pushed Clare out of the window or if Clare fell. Clare disappears through the frame, and “what happened next, Irene Redfield never afterwards allowed herself to remember. Never clearly.” The scene is brilliant in its ambiguity, a fitting culmination to the book’s propulsive, noirish plot. People love to debate the ending, and many read Irene’s so-called confusion as a cover-up for a crime. She couldn’t really not know, could she?
I have ten cans of chickpeas stored in my pantry. If it comes to it, I’ll puree them for the kids, call it hummus. Better remember the can opener, a fork for mashing, olive oil, salt. How long do crackers last? Should I store something lighter than cans if we need to carry them? How many cans fit in a backpack, anyway? I’ll get some granola bars, too.
Perhaps it is obvious to you if I am being prepared or overreacting, if I’m justified or crazy; if Clare Kendry fainted at being discovered or Irene pushed her out of a window in a fit of jealousy. It’s not obvious to me. I suspect it’s not obvious to other mothers.
To see how uncertainty affects mothers, look at the statistics for maternal anxiety during COVID, a time when everything was unknown: how the disease worked, who would get sick, if we would keep our jobs, how we would keep our children safe. Harvard researchers who questioned mothers during the pandemic found that 31 percent of the women reported elevated levels of anxiety/depression and 43 percent felt post-traumatic stress, despite the fact that only 2 percent of them had actually been diagnosed with COVID, and only 7 percent had even been in contact with someone with the disease. Fear of the thing can be almost as damaging as the thing itself.
Should we just accept that the world is unknowable? I wish I could. But even if I do come to terms with danger, it’s not how society tells me to parent. Mothers are expected to aim for what Sarah Menkedick calls the goal of zero risk. In her book OrdinaryInsanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America, she describes how, after giving birth to her first child, she developed a paranoia around mouse poop that soon multiplied into fear of almost everything—lead, toxins, baby soap. She was paralyzed by anxiety over her child’s safety because in America, mothers are told “the only acceptable risk is no risk at all.” By the time doctors agreed Menkedick’s anxiety had perhaps gone overboard, eventually diagnosing her with OCD and postpartum anxiety, she was two years out from having the baby.
When something—anything—happens to children, the response is to shame their mothers for failing in their duties, then spread fear of the event, like a contagion. And so as mothers, we push harder and harder to control the variables, laboring under the belief that we might achieve complete security. Zero risk is, of course, an impossible goal. Aiming for it is enough to make you crazy, like the new mom who told Menkedick she strapped ankle weights to herself at night terrified by the thought that she might sleepwalk and hurt her baby.
Irene is the ultimate example of how the goal of zero risk fails mothers. She has to deal with not only motherhood and marital instability but also the incalculable dangers of race in America. How does it feel to be the mother of Black children in a country where you cannot know what will count as a threat and to whom? When Clare hosts Irene and another childhood friend, Gertrude, for tea, Irene is technically among two Black women, but they’re all passing. Clare is married to a white man who doesn’t know she’s Black and Gertrude is married to a white man who does. The women discuss their relief that their babies came out pale, as though it were the only, obvious thought. “I nearly died of terror the whole nine months before Margery was born for fear that she might be dark. Thank goodness, she turned out all right. But I’ll never risk it again. Never! The strain is simply too—too hellish,” says Clare. Gertrude agrees: “But, of course, nobody wants a dark child.” Irene, whose husband and sons are dark-skinned, is shocked and humiliated.
Tea at Clare’s house proves the impossibility of Irene being able to anticipate her sons’ safety in a racist world. Where and with whom will her boys be safe? In Harlem, with Clare? How about at a traffic stop? When they go for a run, open their front door, call 911, or ask the police for help? How, in this country, could Irene ever feel at peace?
If you have a baby who is born at the height of a pandemic and that baby requires neurosurgery, people will understand your anxiety, given all that you’ve gone through. But if you tell them that you were anxious with your first child, that fears of cancers and toxins and recalls of cribs that aren’t even your crib were already there, then they may revoke the privilege of their understanding.
Whose anxiety do we validate? Not Irene’s: despite understandable fears for her sons, no one in Irene’s life commiserates with her. Not Sarah Menkedick’s, until she forced the issue with doctors. Not Black mothers, as we fail to address systemic racism or make reforms that will keep their children safe. Not most mothers in America because, on the whole, we assume that worry is part of the job. That doesn’t change the fact that mothers are suffering. That for an estimated one in five postpartum women, and countless others with undiagnosed or ongoing anxiety, fear has become a constant state of mind rather than what it should be, a knee-jerk response to get out of the way of an oncoming truck.
“Stupid!” Irene cries to Brian. “Is it stupid to want my children to be happy?”
No, it isn’t stupid. But in a country where a child’s happiness is expected to align with absolute safety, it is impossible, exhausting. It is enough to drive you mad.
K-Ming Chang keeps redefining what we consider “reality.” Her latest three books—which she views as a “mythic triptych” (Bestiary, Gods of Want,and Organ Meats)—all inhabit surreal worlds where temporalities, species, and folkloric myths collide. In Bestiary, a Taiwanese American daughter wakes up with a tiger tail and finds herself swept into folktales and family histories that traverse generations and continents. In Gods of Want, short stories explore a constellation of different Asian women—ghostly, bestial, and hungry with myriad desires. And in Organ Meats, two childhood friends morph into dogs, as their intense relationship illuminates the intimacies between life and death.
Chang’s prose balances both the lyrical and the fleshy, navigating queer desire alongside decay. Threading together collective histories and futures, the mythic triptych opens the door to reimagining our relationships to the dead, to the bestial and the elemental, and to our own bodies. (For those who have read all three books and still want more: Chang has a new novella, Cecilia, which she frames as being in the same world as the triptych.)
This was the first collective interview that any of us had done, three Asian women drawn together by our interest in Chang’s books. It seemed fitting, considering how Chang’s work is always imbued with the plural, the collective, the literary lineages we seek out and horizontal connections we create. In a group Zoom conversation before Lunar New Year, Chang talked about rethinking the novel form as a quilt, writing about climate justice, and believing in queer futurity.
Jaeyeon Yoo: Your publicist mentioned you view these books as a “triptych.” Could you speak more about that?
K-Ming Chang: I joke that I missed the opportunity to call it the “fecal trio” instead of the mythic triptych, which would have been an even better name. I think of the three books almost like doors in a hallway. I realized they were a trio not just aesthetically or thematically, but in the way that they were oriented. The narrators are people who have the future at their back and are looking into the past in a very speculative way. In thinking about speculative histories—what it means to patchwork or cobble together one’s own lineage or to have chosen ancestry—I’m interested in poet Safia Elhillo’s idea that you can find a sense of origin, lineage, and ancestry in those who are “horizontal” to you. In the case of Organ Meats, this is very much a friendship. They are both children, and yet they are each other’s ancestors. I was interested in the idea of chosen lineage, and in some ways, I think these books were also reaching for a literary lineage—especially the works of Maxine Hong Kingston and Marilyn Chin.
Sophia Li: I love that idea of horizontal ancestry and a rhizomatic past. Maxine Hong Kingston has described herself in interviews as a kind of “rational link” between legends and reality, but I think you actually go in a different direction. Could you talk about how you position yourself—as a writer and a person—between the mythical and the real?
For me, mythology is inseparable from morality.
KC: I’m really interested in folklore as a kind of futurity. I’ve talked about speculative history and writing into the past, thinking of a fabulist past or a form of collective history that is able to pull from all kinds of realities, but I also think there’s something very futuristic about mythology and retelling stories. To me, it feels like the cutting edge of speculative fiction. For me, mythology is inseparable from morality. It’s inseparable from the social rules of the world and intergenerational relationships. So much of folklore are stories that you hear as children, from elders or peers, and mythmaking, too, is this collective intergenerational activity. If folklore and mythology are ways of making the rules of your world, what would it mean to remake the rules of this world through that form? I’m fascinated by the infinite and cosmic possibilities of rewriting those stories, of mutating them or alchemizing them out towards a kind of liberation—and what that could look like.
SL: Can you speak to the process of character-making and world building for each of your books?
KC: I actually wrote Bestiary as a book of essays and was considering it as nonfiction when I was first drafting it. I think that gave me permission to think about Bestiary as a quilt. My grandmother was very into quilting, and the first piece of writing that I created was a quilt that I made when I was seven. Rather than thinking about a linear narrative that I wanted to follow, I was thinking of building out this landscape, this horizon. I was also thinking a lot about rivers in terms of structure, because there is a central river that runs through that book. I wanted to create this aesthetic of digressions—for the story to not get to its point, and for that to be the point. I allowed each sentence to be a micro-myth if I needed it to be.
For the second book, Gods of Want, I was thinking about story collections as a neighborhood and a community, and the short story form presenting that possibility of containing many collective voices. I’m always interested in the collective first person. I feel like in literary circles, it’s like, “first person is so indulgent, it’s so myopic, it’s so narrow and contained.” But I actually think first person can be beautifully collective and gesture toward a “we” or an “us”—opening outwards, in a kind of cone shape that then widens and touches upon a collective experience. Again, a kind of quilting metaphor there!
With my third book, I began with these accounts from Dutch missionaries who were colonizing Taiwan at the time, which were discussing indigeneity and indigenous people. I was fascinated with diving into these archives, using them as a leaping off point to think about land and water as an animate force possessing its own voice, its own subjectivity, its own agency. From there, I ended up with this chorus of dogs that was narrating a collective history. And then I was like, “I can’t just write about dogs for 200 pages.” I mean, I kind of did.
Jae-Min Yoo: I love the dogs, and these fuzzy divisions you have between humans, animals, plants, and also technology. You mentioned earlier how you’re interested in remaking the rules of this world. I think these blurred boundaries are a moment when you really do that. Why is the bestial such an important figure in your work?
KC: I love the bestial, I could talk about it forever! Part of it is the mythological and folkloric kind of pantheon that I’m constantly drawing from, which contains a lot of animal imagery and metaphysical transformation. There’s an inherent playfulness to myth and folklore that I love. Part of my obsession with animals is the way that I saw other people responding to animals with such wonder, like, “that’s so incredible what their bodies are capable of.” And yet, we view human bodies as the exact opposite of that wonder; it’s so full of shame and subjugation and degradation. So I wondered what it would be like for me to look with wonder and turn that gaze onto the human-animal body. I was also interested in collapsing hierarchies of the animal and the human—that is something we inherit, the human being supreme and master of all creatures. I was interested in what it would mean to subvert that and see human-animal transformation, a symbiotic relationship.
JMY: I noticed that animality comes to the fore most prominently with moments of strong desire in the books, and I’m curious how queer desire plays into what you just talked about?
Queerness is the future that has not yet arrived.
KC: For me, queer desires are always inseparable from the collective and from the preservation of matrilineal stories and history. This desire to resist patriarchal forms of storytelling and story-keeping in lineage is always deeply embedded within queer mythology and mythmaking. I remember in reading Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Pu Songling) and hearing children’s stories growing up, that the indicator of someone being strange or monstrous is their turning into an animal—a fox spirit, a snake. I thought that was such an interesting form of othering. What makes them strange or destructive to the fabric of society is this transformative potential. They’re slippery or illegible in some way. And I thought, what if I could harness or channel that very intentionally, and see the liberating possibilities of that otherness? What if I made that otherness a home for oneself rather than having them excluded from society?
SL: I especially want to thank you for writing these Asian American queer sexuality stories that aren’t necessarily partitioned off from the family, where navigating queerness can exist in the same spaces as issues of family.
KC: That was something I had a revelation about when I was writing Bestiary, because I’d thought that those two things had to be separate. There’s the family story, and there’s the queer story. I remember taking a writing class with Jenny Zhang and feeling so freed by that. She was talking about the Western coming-of-age story being about leaving the home as much as possible and finding your identity by throwing off the shackles of one’s family. I’m very interested in the domestic as a place that’s as interesting as the public, as interesting as going off on a hero’s journey where you leave home and come back. I want to tunnel backwards and burrow into the family as a form of queer coming of age.
SL: In all three books, but especially in Organ Meats and Gods of Want, I thought there were some complex and beautiful relationships between the supernatural, the real/living, and the dead. Could you speak about how these themes play out together?
KC: I find that oftentimes, in my writing, whenever a birth occurs, a death occurs, and whenever a death occurs at birth occurs. Whether that’s metaphorical in the language itself or a literal pairing of a death and a birth, those things are constantly emerging for me in the same space, sometimes even in the same sentence. And then between the supernatural and real; I think in Western literature, it’s common to other the supernatural. Even naming it the “supernatural” is a form of othering it, of establishing the boundaries of what reality is or should be. “Who gets to say what’s real,” and “for whom is it real?” are always questions that I’m asking. I’m fascinated by the idea of ghosts being a last resort. The living won’t fight for us, and the living have failed us in so many ways. But the dead, the dead won’t. This collective history that we draw upon won’t fail us, and it’s the one thing that won’t if you’re surrounded by failure and apocalypse and collapse. That’s something I remember the elders in my family telling me: don’t pray to some deity or some higher being, pray to your dead because they’re the only ones who will listen. We don’t have the ability to summon these kinds of deities in any way. But we have this shared history, this tapestry of voices and stories that we’re constantly weaving. That’s one thing that you can always have.
JMY: You talked earlier about wanting to capture land and water as an animate force in your writings. How do you see your writing interfacing with conversations around climate change?
KC: I recently got solicited to write for Orion Magazine, which is a climate justice magazine. I never considered myself a writer who engaged with climate change, because I always had this impression that you have to be qualified. You have to somehow be formally knighted into writing about the climate, about ecology. That, to me, seemed terrifying. But I got to talk with the editor, and I was like, oh, the human and nonhuman, collective narratives are questions of ecological justice. I’m always writing about the destructive forces of capitalism and national patriarchy, and all of these things are what is destroying the climate. I find that I write a lot about land and water as possessing a voice and also being inseparable from the voice of the people that it’s in relationship to. It’s all one world. I definitely now see myself in that literary lineage as well.
SL: Speaking of literary lineages, I wanted to go back to Jenny Zhang because I’m a big fan of dirty realism, this kind of grittiness from a child’s perspective. Could you talk about what appeals to you about child narrators?
KC: I love how much Jenny Zhang’s characters feel. Their feelings are always such big feelings. I remember listening to an interview with her, where she was talking about how everyone always talks about the economy of language, but she wants to be wasteful with language. That blew my mind because I feel like child narrators are that space where the sacred and the profane can come together in the writing. Childhood is such a space of mythmaking and ritual making. It’s being deeply serious and everything feels apocalyptically important and, at the same time, there’s always this sense of playfulness and humor.
JMY: We’ve talked so much about collectivity, and working through that in your writing. One thing that strikes me is that there are still gaps within collectivity, whether it’s different generations, language, geographic location, experiences of war. How do you think about bridging them—or not?
KC: I find that oftentimes, that gap can’t really be filled. I’m not so much interested in bridging that gap so much as finding a way for the characters to acknowledge those gaps. I always think of someone turning inward, trying to find a way to live that is inclusive of those gaps in some way, or tending to them. [The gap] is typically like a void or dead space or dead air, but I try to think of it more as this space to tend, to examine, to explore, to think about, to nurture, to watch it grow—what can be fruitful about those gaps? What can sprout from them, what can take root in them: I’m trying to think of the gap as fertile ground.
JMY: That reminds me of the holes in Bestiary. Which makes me think of letters, a form that you use both in Bestiary and Organ Meats. What does the epistolary form do for you?
‘Who gets to say what’s real,’ and ‘for whom is it real?’ are always questions that I’m asking.
KC: Besides the fact that it’s a form that’s very familiar to me, I’m interested in what can’t be spoken, but what can be written or deliberated over in that way. The “you” in that form can be very direct, and that is also as much about the narrator—the one who’s writing—as it is about that “you.” What does it mean to address something to someone, but really write it for yourself? I didn’t grow up with written archives; within my family, everything was oral, everything was spoken, everything was transmitted in various non-written forms. I’m fascinated by using the letter form to create something on the page that feels like it could be read out loud, to combine the written form and the oral form.
JY: To wrap up this conversation—you talked about liberation earlier in this interview; aside from liberatory writing, do you think liberatory futures are possible?
KC: In José Muñoz’s book, Cruising Utopia, he has this beautiful sentiment that I’m always talking about. He says that queerness is always in the future. It’s never here. It’s never located in the present. That’s what queerness is. It’s the future that has not yet arrived. That kind of blew my mind because I was like, oh, that is how I experience queerness. He talks about it as glimpses of utopia in the present, gesturing toward a utopic future. And I definitely feel that way. Queerness does feel like these glimpses of what is possible, and the ever-dawning future. I feel like that is what I’m writing towards. When I write, in the back of my mind, I’m always thinking about that idea of glimpsing utopic bonds in the present and gesturing to a future that has not yet arrived.
I think that comes with a lot of grief. It sounds wonderful. It’s like, oh, yes, utopia is possible. But if it’s always perpetually in the future, there’s also a tremendous amount of pain and grief. In some ways that makes the present even worse, because you can see what’s possible. It’s like this double gaze: you can see what’s possible, but you also know what is. I think the discrepancy between that can be deeply painful to live with. I’m interested in characters who are able to see those two things or straddle those two things. I’m interested in the void as in the sense of deep and utter hopelessness and the desire to destroy oneself and destroy the world, this place of annihilation. But I’m also interested in emerging from that void, or tunneling into it so deeply that you emerge into this utopic future that I think queerness is always gesturing toward—or is.
Something I’ve also been thinking about is grief as this fertile ground for rage. Grief being a kind of anger and a refusal to accept. But these acts of refusal—whether it’s refusing to forget, refusing to move on, and refusing to accept reality as it is—I think that fuels the magical intervention, or the desire to remake the rules of the world.
I have spent nearly all my adult life living in foreign countries. That includes working, dating, marrying, and now—parenting abroad. Aside from the potential challenges of language and geography, what it means for a woman to be in a foreign land is to understand and navigate the joys and threats of womanhood particular to another culture. A woman abroad comes to see herself and her romantic partners through a different set of expectations, standards, and biases. She sees herself anew.
My debut novel, Shanghailanders, features a Japanese-French woman who moves to Shanghai with her husband. In the span of nearly 25 years that the book covers, Eko suffers from anxiety at her foreignness, has a short-lived affair with a local, and wrestles with the ways she and her husband and children change or do not change. I was interested in exploring how a person forms over time, and how outside forces—including place—come to shape a life.
The following books are all narratives about women pursuing love in foreign countries (and, in one case, foreign universes). All these novels follow characters experiencing literal and emotional displacement. They are met with the challenge of redefining their relationships, and themselves, on new grounds.
To the young French girl living in 1929 Indochine, her entanglement with an older Chinese lover is a breach of multiple boundaries in her life—of race, class, and age. A lush, sensual, nostalgic novel, The Lover portrays a romance that breaks the narrator’s family and home, and that shapes her future as an artist. She is sent back to her “original” country of France, while the lover is married off to a more appropriate Chinese woman. But we come to know, from the beautiful structure of the book, that she has been chasing her lover, writing him onto the page, for the entirety of her life.
Taiwanese Sanmao and her Spanish husband José are newlyweds living in the Spanish Sahara, where José works, and Sanmao writes about her charming, dangerous, and sometimes naïve adventures abroad. Her account of their time in the desert includes accounts of the endless paperwork needed to get married, a near-death experience with quicksand in the desert, a study of the local Sahrawis’ bathing habits, and how to keep a husband happy and well-fed. If one reads more about both Sanmao’s and her husband’s tragic early demise, this early life portrait of love in the Sahara takes on a bittersweet, elegiac tone.
The unnamed narrator of Kitamura’s intricate and deftly layered novel moves to The Hague to take up work as an interpreter at an international criminal court. Soon thereafter, she begins an affair with a man who has recently separated from his wife. Throughout the novel, she exists, tenuously, in the liminal spaces of romantic ambiguity, cultural and ethnic ambiguity, between languages as an interpreter at the Hague, and in the budding early days of a new friendship. The narrator herself is quiet, unclear. Where is she coming from; and where is she going next? She must grapple with agency within the vast grey areas of morality and existence. The pressures produce, by the end, a possible note of clarity and hope.
In Y/N, a young Korean-American living in Berlin falls in love with a K-Pop singer called Moon. She feeds her obsession rigorously and, in the latter half of the novel, travels from Berlin to Seoul in order to meet Moon in person. Y/N is a story about love for another, but it is also a story about self-definition, about closing the gap between an idea and reality. Who is the beloved, and where does he most vibrantly exist? Who is the narrator, a woman who is tethered so loosely to countries and identities that they move fluidly, surreally, into abstractions? In this novel, every sentence uses language to surprise and delight and distort. Language reconfigures and prods the imagination, as do the characters, as do the book’s conceptions of love, of anything that might tether a reader to what is real.
An “Americanah” is a Nigerian who returns to Nigeria after spending time in the U.S. and adopting Americanisms. Ifemelu, the heroine of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s contemporary romantic masterpiece, is one such returnee, who feels neither completely at home while studying abroad in America nor after moving back to Lagos. At every turn, Ifemelu is confronted with her outsider status, in life and in love. But her great romance is with Obinze, her college sweetheart from before leaving Lagos, and who has also lived life on two continents.
The Expatriates rotates perspectives between several women expats living in Hong Kong who are forced to redefine what love means in their changing lives. One is grieving from the disappearance of her youngest child; one is closing the last chapter on an unhappy marriage; one is suffering from guilt and shame from a set of disastrous actions. Hong Kong, with its particular brand of wealth and privilege and cosmopolitanism, provides both the structure and the seductions for the dramatic events of the novel. Ultimately, the book lands on an exploration of what motherhood means across cultures, and what it teaches us about how to handle life’s slings and arrows: with grace and forgiveness.
We first meet Raffi as a young woman who is searching for her place in life: should she continue her lab work cataloging stars in the quest for dark matter? Should she continue dating her college boyfriend, fall into something comfortable with her kind roommate Graham, or explore an alluring friendship with Britt, an artist who reminds her of someone from her past? Raffi, traversing universes, is always searching for that someone we might call her first love. Pronouns shift gracefully over the course of the novel from “she” to “they”—the plural encompassing both the experience of Raffi’s ever-evolving gender identity, as well as the many versions of themselves across the multiverse. The book works in the Whitmanesque sense of multitudes; it works in the Moore-ish Anagram sense; it works because the writing is elegant and wise and dripping with heart-rending beauty about the feelings of being in and out of time, place, body, and love.
The year I turn twelve, Mom and I talk a lot about death. Ever since my older sister, Shira, learned about the concept of infinity in school, she’s been scaring me with ideas about the universe and what happens when you die. I get terrified thinking about it, but Mom says not knowing is the scariest part, so we muse about the afterlife together.
We imagine what age you live at after you die. Whether we are all old, or all young, or can choose to spend forever at the age when we met the person we loved most in life. I tell Mom I would choose this age, forever. I would always be her child.
We muse about the Fire, whether it’s like an endless tunnel slide. You speed past openings from which voices you recognize ring out in laughter, but you can never stop and reach them. You’re stuck in a downward spiral, unable to catch a glimpse of the faces you long to see.
We wonder whether souls can get lost in Heaven. If Heaven and Hell are actually the same place, but Hell is never finding your loved ones again, and Heaven is when you do. We wonder about the holding place—a waystation for the departed, everyone waiting to board their train in order of arrival.
I tell Mom that if I die first, I will wait for her. I will let all the trains pass until I see her face appear. I will be the first to greet her, and we’ll never worry about getting lost. My mother tells me she will do the same.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
It begins like this:
Our last weekend in the old house. To me it is already the old house, because Mom, Shira, and I are moving to the new apartment next week. Mom’s already signed the lease, and Dad isn’t coming. Dad’s staying behind, and I like that just fine.
Dad is here this weekend to help us move. He’s back from China where he spends most of the year doing I’m-not-entirely-sure-what. I was only four when Dad quit his job, with dreams of starting his own business back in China. In the eight years since then, we only see him a few odd weeks at a time. Years ago, Shira made a rule that we have to say a prayer for Dad every time we see a plane overhead. I followed along for a few years, but now I just pray the planes will stop bringing Dad back.
Since Dad is here, I have to sleep in my own room. Usually I run over to Mom’s room when I can’t fall asleep, and she’ll fling back the covers and beckon me in: “来吧!” Come on! We stay up for hours whispering, telling jokes until Mom notices the red numbers on the radio alarm clock. Then she remembers she’s the parent and shushes us both, pulls the blankets up snug around our shoulders. She turns her face to the side, so I can rest my hand on her cheek. We have a name for this gesture, it is so common between us: “摸脸.” Hold my face.
I’m not good at sleeping alone. But tonight when I call Mom from her doorway, Dad wakes up too. He says, “Agh, twelve years old and still need Mom to fall asleep!”
But I like knowing Mom is there beside me. Mom crawls into my bed and whispers, “Don’t worry, go to sleep.” She turns her face to the side, and I lay my hand on her cheek. I know the texture of Mom’s face perfectly, know the scent of the moisturizer she puts on before bed. I close my eyes with Mom’s face in my palm.
Friday morning. Mom is downstairs, ready to take me to middle school where I just started seventh grade. Shira already left for high school downtown; her side of the bathroom shows evidence of her morning rush.
Mom drops me off at my carpool, then rushes to work. The other kids in my carpool, two eighth grade boys, are sad they won’t get to ride with Mom after we move. Mom is all our favorite carpooler. But the new apartment is walking distance to my school, so Mom won’t have to worry about driving me anymore. Which is really good, because she already drives two hours each way to work in Mankato.
I haven’t seen the new apartment yet, but Mom likes it, so I like it. There are only two bedrooms—Shira will get her own, and I will share with Mom. I don’t mind. Mom and I are happily planning the decorations for our new room. She’s always dreamed of traveling the world, so we’re going to buy maps for the walls and stick pins where we want to go.
I tell Mom I would choose this age, forever. I would always be her child.
No one talks about what it means that Dad will stay behind in the old house. Part of me suspects this is also why there are only two bedrooms in the new apartment. So that everyone understands: Dad is not coming with us.
Late Friday afternoon, we all go to the local mall together. Mom, Dad, Shira, and me. We need some last things for the move, and Mom thinks it’ll be nice for us to eat out. It’s been a while since we all went anywhere together. I think Mom wants us to share this last outing as a family, before the definitive break.
At the mall Shira and Dad walk in front, and Mom and I walk behind. We always pair up like this, and not just because Shira and Dad are tall, and Mom and I are mini. These are our teams for Scrabble and tennis, hiking and amusement park rides. Shira was eight when Dad moved back to China, and I guess those extra years with him made a difference. Shira makes it seem a given that we should love our father, even though I’ve seen her face streaming with tears while he rips up her homework, watched him throw her out the front door because she played a wrong note on the piano.
Mom asks where we should eat. There are so many options in the crowded food court—Panda Express, Potbelly’s, Sbarro. But Shira wants one thing, and I want something different. We bicker, then Dad’s face drops and that’s the end of it. Before he can erupt, Mom cuts in: “算了”, forget it, and ushers us back to the parking lot.
As soon as we get home, Mom turns on the stove to start cooking. I want to apologize to her as she warms up the broth for noodles—because it was my fault. I was the one who started it, who wouldn’t agree with what Shira wanted to eat. I was the one who didn’t want to sit with Shira and Dad in the first place and was happy to go home.
Later, when I think of Mom’s face, I wish I had given her this. Just one, last happy memory of the four of us together.
Looking back, it’s hard to find any happy moment of us four in the years leading up to this weekend.
While the move to the new apartment would have signaled a definitive break in our family, in reality things had been broken for a long time. From the first time Dad hurled his dinner plate like a discus, and it missed me by a hair before shattering against the wall. From the fifth time the neighbors called the police to report on the screams coming from our house.
Everything was tense when Dad was home. It was like his dark mood settled over each of us, imbuing us with the anger and frustrations he carried. When Dad returned every half-year or so, Shira and I pressed pause on our games as if by some unspoken rule. No blanket forts in the living room, no sleepovers under our desks. No running up and down the stairs when Dad was home. We kept our voices low, and I kept out of the way.
By the time we were supposed to move and leave him, Shira and I had already ended all our games, anyway. It happened on our last visit to China, though I can’t remember what argument set things off. We’d screamed at each other across our grandmother’s home in Beijing until I said, “Why don’t we just end everything, then?”
By this I meant abandon Spy Club, Environmental Club, Komitadee—our own invented martial arts—and all the other games we played together. We’d both made this threat before, but this time we actually followed through. I even ripped out all the pages of my “conversation journal,” a twin of one my sister kept, which recorded years of our shared reflections.
Shira always said I was bad—a bad sister, a bad daughter. She called me selfish and mean, like when I lied about asking her to come run errands with me and Mom, so I could have Mom to myself. Or when I angled to get the best pieces of food, not caring about others.
I didn’t hate Shira. I grew up following her—she dictated the games we played, and the terms of our secret clubs. She’s my older sister.
So when Shira said I was bad, I believed her. When Shira insisted Dad was part of our family, I thought I must be wrong for wanting him gone. So I never said it out loud, and neither did Mom. Really, I thought I didn’t need my father at all. I only wanted Mom, I only wanted Mom to be happy.
I was content in the divide pushing our family apart. And then I was alone on my side of the canyon.
Saturday morning, I wake to the familiar sounds of Mom in the kitchen: the sizzling of hot oil in the pan, an audiobook playing over the stereo.
I think Mom wants us to share this last outing as a family, before the definitive break.
I yell out to Mom from my bed and she calls back, “来了!” Coming! I hear the click of the gas stove turned off and the clink of a lid on the pan, then Mom bounding up the stairs. I shout in greeting and fling my covers back, so Mom can lay in bed with me to start my day. This is another ritual of ours.
Mom’s volleyball league has a game today. Mom has more after-school activities than me—she takes guitar lessons, sings in a choir, and plays volleyball. Even though we’re moving today, Mom doesn’t want to miss the game, and even got Dad a spot as a sub. Dad has already left to warm up, taking Shira with him. I don’t want to go, and especially don’t want to hear Mom’s volleyball friends question why Dad isn’t moving with us, as if that’s a bad thing. I stay home to pack, and Mom keeps me company for a bit.
It’s my favorite time just me and Mom. I eat breakfast at the kitchen counter, 鸡蛋饼, unaware this is the last time I will ever spread creamy peanut butter over the egg pancake and roll it up like a flauta.
I’m on the floor in Mom’s room while she gets ready for volleyball, when Mom gives me the rings from her finger: her wedding band, and the sapphire ring she loves. She twists the gold wedding ring in circles until it comes loose, pulling hard until it breaks free of her knuckle. I observe the red imprint left behind, a reminder of where the ring used to be.
Mom holds both rings in her palm. She balls them in her fist; her other hand grabs my own. She takes my hand between hers for a moment, then unlocks her fingers so the rings are cupped between our two hands. She says, “好好帮妈妈看著.” Keep good watch over these.
My mom has never given her rings to me for safekeeping before. In fact, I’ve never seen her without both on her finger. I clench my fist and enjoy the weight of the two metal bands, still warm. I brim at the responsibility. It eases the familiar guilt that I am as Shira says—bad, selfish. Here, Mom trusts me. Here, Mom loves me. I know Mom will always choose me.
Downstairs, I wave at Mom from the door as she backs down the driveway. We shout to each other: “Love-ee!”, our version of “I love you.” I wave until she’s out of sight, then run to check on the rings. I slip them onto my own fingers, but they are too large and slide right off.
They are still too large.
Later, Shira will say Mom knew everything that would happen next. Shira will attribute a prescience to my mother, say Mom could sense events to come. I will not believe Shira, because Mom would never choose to leave me. I will not believe Shira, except when I remember the rings.
Later, Shira will make this claim not to me directly, but to my father with me present. It is often like this between the three of us, in the years after. There are few conversations between my sister and I, or my father and me, in which we’re not screaming at one another. Sometimes it’s easier for them to talk around me.
Only once, Shira will ask me if I know what happened to the rings. And I will lie, because I do not want her to take them from me.
Even now I fear Shira will lay her claim upon the rings, demand her rights to half my mother’s love and legacy. Even now I hold tightly to these two metal bands, reminders that once there was someone in this world who loved me, just like this.
Saturday afternoon and I’m home alone, waiting. Mom, Dad and Shira should have been back by now.
Before this, I’ve never been afraid of the empty house. Most days I’m the first one home, and I get to play on the computer until I hear Mom’s car in the driveway. But today I’ve exhausted all my home-alone activities far past their enjoyment. I’ve already snuck up to read Shira’s diary, which details her own recent trespass into my diary. I’ve logged onto several chat rooms I’m not supposed to be in, and sent messages to all my friends.
Now I’m listening for the familiar sound of a car pulling up to the house, with an unfamiliar sense of dread. As the late summer day drags on, I wait for the roar of the garage, the soft crunch of gravel. I am anxious to hear my mom’s greeting: “妈妈回来了!” Mama’s home!
When Shira said I was bad, I believed her.
When I finally hear a car pull up, I run outside. But it is not Mom’s car, or Dad’s car. Aunt Isa is here to take me to the hospital.
It begins like this:
A nurse leads me to the room where Shira and my father hunch over my mother’s bed. My mother is unconscious; a plastic tube down her throat pumps oxygen to her body. I’m late to what’s happening. I had no idea I would find her here, unconscious. By the time I arrive, Dad and Shira have already processed a reality I cannot yet grasp.
In a few hours my mother will be dead.
I don’t know this yet. I only know my mother is unconscious, my father and sister aren’t speaking, and I am lost. Only later do they tell me Mom complained of a headache during volleyball, then collapsed.
I want to say something, to demand answers, but nobody is speaking. Dad stands in the corner, his mouth a thin line. Shira sits next to Mom’s bed and spares me no glances. I’m nervous around them but still, right now, I need my sister. I turn to Shira with a plea, a truce. I say something, the first thing that comes to me. Something like: “It’s not even funny.” I can’t remember what’s not funny. “Is this a joke? It’s not even funny,” or “I’m so scared, it’s not even funny.” Or maybe, “What is happening? It’s not even funny.”
I am twelve, and it is the wrong thing to say.
Shira looks at me, and I recoil. I’m not crying yet, not yet aware a world without my mother could possibly exist. Will not only exist but will surround me forever, inescapable. When Shira looks at me I think only: she hates me. My sister hates me. I do not think: this is how it will be for the next ten years of my life. I will always say the wrong thing, and Shira will always hate me.
When I meet Shira’s eyes, I don’t know this is where it begins: my life.
Some weeks later, Dad, Shira, and I move into a new apartment. Not the one Mom found, but a three-bedroom downtown Dad rents in a hurry. He stays barely a month before he’s back in China, leaving Shira and I alone. We are sixteen and twelve.
Sometimes I don’t see Shira for days. The evenings she’s gone are a constant replay of the worst day of my life: me waiting alone, listening for a sound at the door, anxious for anyone to come home and greet me.
During a fight one morning, Shira locks the car doors after getting in the driver’s seat. I punch the top of the closed trunk and scream at her in the parking lot as she drives off to school without me. It is one of many, many unexcused absences I’ll have that year.
Sometimes when Shira disappears without a word, I’ll regret whatever argument passed between us, though I’m not brave enough to say so when she inevitably returns. Instead, we glare at each other and say nothing. I eat peanut butter out of the jar for dinner and for the first time in my life, I’m skinnier than Shira.
More than ever before, I’m scared to fall asleep.
Another beginning:
For a long time, I worry about the promise Mom and I made: “I will wait for you.” I imagine Mom in a crowded station, all the other departed passing her by. Only she stays behind, waiting, held back by our promise from somewhere Divine.
But I prayed and prayed, and now I am certain my mother is exactly where she needs to be. Now, I only worry about the vast expanse of the afterlife, the old fear of whether I can find the one I’m looking for among all the countless souls who wait for Judgment Day.
So I’ve made a deal with myself. I will rack up so many good deeds, I will die with such a long record of goodness that it will be impossible for me to end up anywhere but the highest levels of Paradise. I will give to the needy, I’ll take care of the young and old, and I’ll repent for every bad thought I ever had. I’ll make up for every ill wish I ever made.
And if for some reason there’s a mistake and Mom was left in a Garden further below, I’ll split my rewards with her and all her friends too, so we can be together. I will beg for the right to intercede; I will testify to the angels on their behalf: “They’re with me! They’re with me!”
I’ll have so many good deeds still left over, I’ll bring Shira and Dad along with us. That way, it won’t matter if we haven’t said all the things we wanted to say to each other in life. There, we’ll have time to say everything. There, we can clear up the misunderstandings and mistakes. We’ll redo the food court and the mall. Shira can choose from any of the endless fruits of Paradise, and I won’t argue at all. I won’t argue with Dad either, and I’ll give this gift to Mom, at last.
There we’ll begin again, anew. There we’ll begin again:
The poet’s journey from writing verse to lyric essays to memoir is now a veritable pipeline, with more and more poets turning away from lines and stanzas to incorporate poetic techniques into prose. Poetry can often be rooted in memory already, using imagery and figurative language to explore the history of the self—or a “speaker” who “resembles” the self. Embracing memoir wholesale means removing the mask of the assumed persona in a poem’s speaker. The poet steps forward and says “This is who I am.” But as poets, these gestures are not always direct and straightforward. Poet memoirs have the capacity to deconstruct the new genre, to hybridize narrative and lyricism, and employ conceits, extended metaphor, and innovative forms to convey their stories.
I am a participant in this pipeline. My earliest poems did plumb the depths of memory for subjects and gestures, but over time I moved away from writing plainly about the self. My first book The First Risk employed persona all over the place, but by the time my third book, Instructions between Takeoff and Landingarrived, my lived experience was again my subject. Perhaps it’s no surprise that my next book, Splice of Life: A Memoir in 13 Film Genres reveals my life as its subject—at least partially. As a poet, I reserve the right to lyricize any space I enter. In this case, it’s to hybridize traditional memoir storytelling in each chapter with a discussion of a single film whose themes, plot, or symbols resonate with my story.
Here are 8 poet memoirs that, like hermit crabs, occupy memoir storytelling with poetic sensibilities.
Bruja by Wendy C. Ortiz
Ortiz dutifully documents her dreams upon waking, and Bruja is the fruit of this labor—a memoir of Ortiz’s subconscious dream life. Populated with the family and friends of her waking life, set against familiar locations, each entry hinges upon the acausal chain of events that roots our dreams. There’s an old joke about how boring it is to hear someone recount their dreams, but Ortiz’s book is gripping from the jump. One of her strengths as a writer is fearlessness. Her ugliest impulses, her deepest anxieties are on full display here. This memoir is perhaps one of the most refreshing for this reason: Ortiz makes no apologies or explanations for the content of her dreams, inviting the reader in to assess the remnants of her days. Instead of judgment, we find empathy here, and a feeling that even our own most troubling dreams are a normal function of living.
In the wake of her parents’ deaths, Chang uses the epistolary form to write letters to them, her daughters, her unnamed teachers and friends. These one-way communications are part confession, part investigation. Chang pieces together her family’s history with found documents, photos, half-remembered conversations, and notes, seeking at first to understand them but ultimately, it seems, to understand herself, her place in this world. Between the letters, Chang incorporates visual collages of modified photographs overlaid with snippets of text or writing. These visual art pieces reflect and resonate with the collaging within each letter. Memories weave together with philosophy, quotes from other writers, Chang’s own hopes and fears, and her lingering questions. What results is an unconventional memoir that, rather than recounting a specific story or experience, develops the writer’s sense of self—a way of becoming that would be unachievable without the stark reflection and vulnerability of these pages.
Trinidad’s subtitle accurately reflects how this collection amounts to an annotated index of recollections. In a series of flash essays, Trinidad mines his lived experience for vivid Polaroids of people, places, and moments reaching all the way back to his childhood and young adulthood in the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles, his years in New York City studying at Brooklyn College with Allen Ginsburg and the years that followed, and his more recent life in Chicago. Trinidad’s work tends to focus on the past, offering it back to us as a museum in poems, but here he allows memory’s inherent free association to run unbridled through each piece, demonstrating that a single moment in our lives is always part of a larger, more complex web of facts, feelings, and impressions.
“I’m writing a book about the liver,” Rankine writes throughout this book as a kind of refrain that points toward the main idea of her project. In a series of recountings of personal and public events, Rankine peels back the veneer of American life to reveal the toxic underbelly of our culture, whether it’s a warmongering government, the senseless murders of Black people, the pharmaceutical industrial complex and its attendant maladies. The liver flushes toxins out of the body, and Rankine’s book transforms itself into a kind of cultural liver, gathering up what harms Black bodies in our country and, by naming it and documenting it, flushing away its power. Graywolf will release an expanded version of this book in July, twenty years after its original publication.
Sinclair’s poetic sensibilities and command of language make her descriptions of the Jamaican landscape leap from the page in this memoir of growing up Rastafari in the 80s and 90s. Sinclair’s adult perspective applies an annotated transparency on top of her memories, identifying the moments of disconnect between the Rasta insistence on peace and love and her father’s restrictive, patriarchal belief system that pressed upon her with increasing force in those years—even as she’s told the real enemy is Babylon, the system of white oppression against Black people the world over. Discovering poetry, she locates a voice she’ll harness to liberate herself and her loved ones from abuse. Language she weaves into beauty helps her discover forgiveness, but her power is in rendering the truth as it was, so that she can become who she must be.
Monson’s nearly lifelong obsession with the 1987 action movie Predator takes center stage here. It serves as an organizing principle around which he revisits his childhood in Michigan, adolescence in Riyadh, and adulthood in Arizona. Violence—especially gun violence—and its inescapability in the fabric of American life takes center stage in Monson’s musings as he connects—sometimes at a frame-by-frame level—what he sees on the screen with what he has seen in his life. The often-breathless narration seems always about to boil over, but Monson’s control of the many moving parts keeps it ruly. Monson draws an inspired and impressive number of connections from a fairly basic 80s action flick to any number of aspects of contemporary American life, always returning again to the book’s moral and emotional center: the self that exists within this chaotic culture, both as a remembered past self and a present self that is greater than the sum of it parts.
What about the Rest of Your Life by Sung Yim
This book has three sections: “Who is this Bitch,” “What’s this Bitch Doing,” “Where’s this Bitch Going.” The irreverence of the table of contents belies the merciless unpacking of traumatic years of addition, codependency, and family abuse within Yim’s pages. The straightforward lyric prose of the early sections devolve into “Some Notes on Healing,” a footnoted series of definitions, and further into fragments that hover in the center of pages. Yim’s storytelling devastates as it falls apart structurally, at points confessing directly to the reader what they’ve never told anyone else. The reader naturally picks up speed while moving through this book, inviting a kind of manic energy as pages flip by—turning the act of reading into something like an act of living.
Smith unpacks the unspooling of her life as her marriage unravels in the wake of the viral success of her poem “Good Bones.” After discovering evidence of her husband’s infidelity, Smith documents resonant moments large and small in a life that evolves with or without her influence. Short lyric sections accumulate the story and her emotional truth as the book unfolds, but keeps interrupting itself with questions about the memoir impulse itself, and even the structure of a story, the reader’s expectations. The reader is aware of Smith’s machinations to recount her story in a way that presents a satisfying ending for the reader, even if that ending is only the understanding that she and her loved ones are good, perhaps even better off in their changed lives.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Greater Ghost by Christian Collier which will be published by Four Way Books on September 15, 2024.
“Wholly. / The way a famished fire washes over a building’s flesh & marrow,” Christian J. Collier writes of the consuming revelations of death and love. In his debut poetry collection Greater Ghost, this extraordinary Black Southern poet precisely stitches the sutures of grief and gratitude together over our wounds. These pages move between elegies for private hauntings and public ones, the visceral bereavement of a miscarriage alongside the murder of a family member and the specter of police brutality.
The poetic brilliance of this work manifests not only in its lyrical gestures and soft musicality but in its persistent double consciousness, the terror of mortality encapsulated and amplified by praise for the living. With profound awareness of literary tradition, Collier enters into the American canon and dialogues with Black Southern noir—a poem like “Beloved,” whose title expresses not only a genuine tenderness in its term of endearment but also invokes Morrison, contextualizes this book within the legacy of racial injustice in the U.S., presenting again the prolific losses and disproportionate Black mortality across time, and yet remembers the resilience of love and transformative possibility of self-actualization from inside tragedy.
Despite all this, Collier never settles into platitudes or pat oversimplifications. The dual meaning of every line honors the complexity of experience and vast terrains of contradictory emotions. This poem concludes with a consummate haunting: “I was divined by you. Made angel already.” Inside this ending, the collection’s thesis rests, that to love and be loved means to encounter the self as a mystery awaiting divination, an incomplete riddle whose solution and salvation depends upon entering into relationship with the world and its people. At the same time, it implies consecration, to be anointed as holy—and therefore accepted and understood—exactly as you are. None of us need prove we are worthy; our test, and our mandate, is to cherish one another as perpetual works in progress. This is the supreme wisdom encapsulated within “made angel already,” how it indicts the injustice of structural violence and mourns premature death while also proclaiming the here and now as sacred, counting each of us among the always and already complete, the fundamentally miraculous, the perfection of perfect enough.
Here is the cover, artwork by Mario Henrique.
Author Christian J. Collier: “By the time I’d assembled the first version of what would become my debut full-length collection in early 2020, at least seven people in and around my family had passed, so I felt very strongly that literal ghosts surrounded my work. I thought it would be fitting to acknowledge and celebrate them given how many of the poems are talking to and about the spirits I’m haunted by, and the title Greater Ghost found me. It felt apt for the open and honest ways I believed my art was addressing my apparitions.
During my breaks on my day job, thinking about what the book would be, I began delving into the things visual artists were posting on Instagram, and that endeavor introduced me to Portuguese painter Mario Henrique. I was immediately bowled over by his portraits due to the explosion of color each contained as well as the faces he’d labored into existence. Each boasted eyes that felt both alive and as if they were peering back at me. However, when I saw Fragmenta no. 5, I thought it perfectly nailed the essence of my collection. The face in the portrait appears ghostlike—a bit blurry with erased and missing parts. Its eyes are black, as if they’ve witnessed too much and are now cursed. The speaker or speakers in my book are wounded and not all the way present due to what has been lost and taken away through life as well as death. Their world, much like the world of the portrait, fluctuates between the dark and the light and both.
Click to enlarge
I took a screenshot of it, knowing somehow it would be the cover of Greater Ghost and the image sat in my phone for a few years until I was asked to submit cover ideas for consideration. Over that span of time as the manuscript changed, I revisited it every few months—imagining how it would, hopefully, introduce readers to the world I built. Thankfully, Ryan Murphy at Four Way Books loved it, too, and Mario agreed to allow us to use it.
I’ve been stunningly blessed with the covers for my books so far—my chapbook with Bull City Press, The Gleaming of the Blade, designed by Ross White and featuring art by Nate Austin, features a portrait of a Black man’s back as he faces a wall of newspaper clippings that document racial conflicts old and contemporary. In Greater Ghost, the portrait faces the reader. Both works dare the audience to remain engaged and resist the urge to flinch or turn away. The poems between both covers do the same. I can’t express how honored I am to have Mario’s art be the face of Greater Ghost.”
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