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.”
Self Portrait (in robe with masks attached), Claude Cahun, 1928
I’m seeing it now, my ghost, and telling it to behave as if it were me, which leaves me to wonder what it will do.
I walk, it walks; I sit, it sits. The chair is covered in faux fur, the pattern the skin of a zebra. So far, it’s as I thought: There are at least two sides to everything.
I also see the ghosts of those who said I couldn’t be whoever I was. I twist those into pretzels and put them in my mouth.
Mary of the Stairs
Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, Titian, ca. 1534–1538
There are no staircases per se, although there are elevations: high, higher, and higher yet. Below, Saint Thérèse is napping shoeless under an altar. I’m searching for the overhead rapture—it holds such promise. Its role is to transport us out of this life and into inventive distractions from the acetone odor of sanctity rising from the blood flowing from a stone—a leftover sign of the times when people believed miracles actually happened. I tell myself, “You have to be a saint to keep waking and sleeping in this world.” Ironica. Uronica. It wasn’t me on the grilled cheese sandwich. It might be Mary Pickford née Smith. Or the equally long ago Clara Bow, the It Girl who starred in It. We all look alike standing on the steps, our diminutive dresses, our faces facing the world that says smile for the camera. Once captured, we’re handed back a facsimile we can use to compare ourselves to the Mary we’re told we should be.
Mary Jane
“Mary Jane’s Last Dance” Official Music Video, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, 1993
Each thought a puff of air until, finally, there it was, the atmosphere as dense as a fogged-in city.
Still, I saw the going-up stairs on the face of the brick building opposite. The sun above
the sky line. A bird making a beeline across a balcony. What I didn’t see standing next to me was my future.
After all that was left was an ember at the end of a roach clip, the blond-haired boy
from some Scandinavia of the mind began to stroke my arm as if I were a cat. I moved my arm
but he didn’t stop. Some people think they can act on every odd idea that comes into their heads.
I got up, closed the blinds, then, sat back down again. He went back to petting me like a cat.
I looked at my shoes. I heard the future say, “Someday, you’re going to have to learn to speak.”
The rise in productivity culture over the past ten years has resulted in success being defined by individual efficiency and labor. We’ve turned people into robots, optimized to the very last second. We’re more than our jobs and our value shouldn’t be tied to our contribution to the economy or the hours we’ve spent at our desks.
Of course, with the peak of productivity culture comes the inevitable backlash. We’re all exhausted. How can we not be when the cogs of capitalism are determined to consume our life force and transform it into dollar bills?
If hustle culture dominated our society pre-covid, post-covid we’re setting boundaries and practicing self-care. The language of productivity culture replaced by therapy-speak, both the product of toxic labor conditions and a woefully inadequate social safety net. That drugstore sheet-mask is a just band-aid for a mental health crisis and a loneliness epidemic. We don’t need to thrive in the workplace, we need to burn the system down to the ground.
These ten writers use workplace fiction as a lens to examine late-stage capitalism, the gig economy, and the dark side of productivity culture.
Molly McGhee’s debut novel, a surrealist office drama, follows a hopeless, broke man who is offered an unlikely escape by a government loan forgiveness program. Jonathan is tasked with clearing debris from the dreams of corporate workers while they sleep, an opportunity that provides him with the chance to clear his debts and begin a new life. A workplace novel that satirizes corporate culture and reckons with the costs of crushing debt under late-stage capitalism.
Ms. Shibata escapes sexual harassment at her old job by finding a new position in Tokyo, but quickly discovers that as the only woman at her workplace, a company that manufactures cardboard tubes, she is expected to perform all the menial tasks. She decides to fake a pregnancy to escape, forcing her to keep up an all-absorbing nine-month ruse. Soon, however, the lie becomes all-consuming, and boundaries between the lie and her own life begin to blur.
After societal collapse due to the Shen Fever pandemic in 2011, Candace Chen continues to work at her unfulfilling job at a Manhattan-based Bible company named Spectra. As businesses shut down as the pandemic worsens, Candace accepts a lucrative contract as one of the few remaining office-based workers, until she is the only employee left after being abandoned by her superiors. Candace documents New York City’s collapsing infrastructure on a blog named NY Ghost before escaping the city as one of the last survivors.
This workplace novel by the Danish writer Olga Ravn is structured as a series of witness statements compiled by a workplace committee. On board the interstellar Six Thousand Ship, the crew, composed of both humans and humanoids, complain about their work in staff reports and memos. When the ship begins to take on strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes deeply attached to them and mutiny and tension begins to boil.
An adjunct professor in New York City, Dorothy has poured years of effort into her academic career only to be trapped in a series of low-wage contracts without hope of finding a permanent position. As she watches her successful friends and peers pursue high-powered careers and start families, Dorothy feels stuck, unable to imagine an alternative future for herself. Darkly humorous and incisive, Life of the Mind is a brilliant satire of campus culture, a biting critique of adjunct labor in academia, and an unforgettable portrait of an ambitious woman on the edge.
Joe is a struggling vacuum cleaner salesman who proposes an unorthodox idea to stop sexual harassment in the workplace and increase productivity. His solution is “lightning rods,” anonymous women who provide sexual release at the office for high-performing male employees, an idea that proves to be a runaway success. This humorous, satiric second novel by the author of The Last Samurai offers a damning critique of the corporate world and workplace sexual harassment.
36-year-old Tokyo resident Keiko Furukura has never felt like she fits in, but when she starts working at the Hiiromachi branch of Smile Mart at the age of 18, she finds a sense of peace and purpose. By copying the social interactions and mannerisms of her coworkers, Keiko attempts to play the part of a “normal person,” until people around her begin to pressure her to get married and start a professional career. Convenience Store Woman is an incisive look at work culture and the pressure to conform in contemporary Japan.
The New Me is a darkly funny novel about a young woman named Millie who works a depressing temp job while sinking into greater despair at the idea the job might become permanent. When the possibility of a full-time job arises, Millie dreams of a different future but realizes how empty that vision has become. A fierce critique of consumerism, productivity culture and the stagnating job market facing young workers.
A woman in her early twenties named Mae Holland gets hired at a huge conglomerate social media company known as the Circle, run by “Three Wise Men” who recruit “hundreds of gifted young minds” every week. Mae is incredibly grateful for her new job and gradually becomes completely integrated into the sinister and far-reaching activities of the company. A satire of the superficiality of the online culture Eggers terms “technoconsumerism,” The Circle is a searingly relevant and unforgettable social commentary.
Help Wanted focuses on a group of underpaid workers at the big-box store Town Square who plan to get rid of their bad boss by getting her promoted to a position so high she won’t be able to bother them. The novel is a comedic critique of contemporary labor and a corporate culture that prioritizes efficiency above all else, even when it’s derived from underpaying workers. Adelle Waldman’s second novel traces the desperate striving for stability by minimum wage workers in America.
As we move out of winter and into spring, the days are becoming longer, but a chill still lingers in the air. In this reading list, monsters are made real, queer love blooms in spite of oppression, and friendships are both nourished and torn apart. Spanning Cameroon to Scotland, these indie authors reinvent the coming of age story, imbue their writing with magic, and turn the mundane into the extraordinary.
Now more than ever it is vital to support indie publishers. Here are 15 to start with:
Daniel is a first generation Chicano college student on scholarship at a university on the opposite coast as his family. In the dorms, he is paired with white upper-middle-class Sam. The two have an immediate chemistry, but as closeted young men, they dance around their friendship, each not knowing when—or if—it will become something more. Yet, Daniel and Sam form a strong bond, despite their different backgrounds. As summer approaches, Daniel makes plans to visit family in Mexico, and Sam to his own family, but a rift forms between them. It is in their separation that Daniel begins to understand the unconditional love his family has for him, and while in Mexico he learns more about his gay namesake uncle, who died young. This is a story of first love broken apart by tragedy, written as a love letter. It is also the story of a family breaking through trauma to heal old wounds. A wondrous, emotionally charged novel that centers both love and empathy.
A woman and her toddler witness a murder at a grocery store, a woman chills herself in an ice bath so her body feels cold enough to play dead for a fantasy her lover has, and yet another woman acts on her suicidal ideation which her partner does not intervene in. In the world of Tender Hoof, leather sofas are the actual bovines wearing their hides as upholstery, and Aunt Lupita’s breast cancer illuminates the past lives of punk rockers and engenders visionary dreams. Across 18 short stories—each one a study of emotional violence paired with tenderness—Rivas cuts into some of our deepest fears, like abandonment from family, terminal illness, and the uncertainly of the future. With vibrant descriptions and relatable characterizations, Tender Hoof enters the conversation about contemporary literary fiction with memorable short fictions and positions Rivas as a writer to watch.
Four years into World War I, Leona Pinson is unmarried and pregnant on a farm in Mississippi, and the father of her child has just enlisted. She and the man have no formal arrangement, but Leona is sure he will return to her. As the war rages on, Leona must make her way as a young single mother, judged by the people in her small town and shamed even by her mother and brother. Even worse, there is no word from the man who left her pregnant. There is one person on the farm, Luther, the son of a former enslaved person who has a deeply complicated history with Leona’s family, who cares for her in the way of a parent. Yet, Luther, a widower, has his own problems with his own child, and Leona and her family are making things worse. When Leona’s lover returns to town with a new wife in tow, she questions everything she thought she knew—and a revelation from Luther unmoors her even further. A beautiful exploration of family and the power of secrets.
Marcia Aldrich writes with such lucid detail it is easy for readers to imagine oneself in her position. These wide-ranging essays always track back to linked themes of how we interact with and understand different generations. Aldrich addresses family and aging, looks to films of other eras for context, and contemplates both what it means to be a mother and to have one. Studio of the Voice is the rare collection where personal introspection and critical inquiry meet without the writing feeling wrought or academic. Deeply affecting, and wonderfully effective.
A matriarchy of vampires run an allium farm while a teenager chafes at the family business, an oprhan runs a roadside attraction featuring his best friend who happens to be a pond creature, and an archeologist unearth an ancient—and perhaps otherworldly—prehistoric bird in the yard. In this collection, monsters are real and when the stork delivers babies, they are disembodied robot components. Yet, rather than being fantastical, Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause The Flood reads more like hopes and fears made true. Across the stories, there is a longing for connection and family: lament for family lost, hope for reconciliation. Set in the American South, both the gothic and magical realism are at play, but what Sides is at his best when he is writing about the deep wounds of children, intergenerational relationships, and the intersection of communities. Each story offers its own strange beauty.
Young Black millennial Khaki Oliver has not spoken to her white former best friend Fiona Davies in ten years: after Khaki left suburban New York to attend college in Los Angeles, their friendship cleaved. While living in suburban LA, Khaki receives an unexpected invitation to a baby shower, celebrating Fiona’s adoption of a Black child, and Khaki spirals into memory. Written with passion and biting observation, the novel explores the intense—and intensely unhealthy—friendship between the women when they were teens. Both struggled with disordered eating, and both kept each other ensnared in secrets. Their relationship feels like how a drowning person will drag their rescuer down, though it is not always clear who is playing the rescuer and who is drowning. While trying to decide if she will attend the shower, Khaki reflects on how deeply the friendship and its loss impacted her.
University of Alabama Press / Fiction Collective 2:Tannery Bayby Steven Dunn and Katie Jean Shinkle
In Tannery Bay, it is always July, and the bay itself is a viscous purple from the waste of the tannery. Yet, the people of Tannery Bay do what people do: create meaningful moments out of their lives. It seems like the loop of summer will be forever, until a spectral figure emerges, in waders, leaving a trail of cockle shells. In an already enchanted town, the woman brings visions and waking dreams, and the residents are spurred to hatch a plan against the town owners, with a local artist at the center. Tannery Bay is a story about a community rallying around art, against injustice, and ultimately understanding their power as a collective. It is also a story that celebrates the force of blood and chosen family. Dunn and Shinkle have achieved the best of co-authorship in terms of a deeply imaginative novel that will delight readers with plot turns. Yet, for all of the inventiveness in the storyline, it is the characters who make this book a page-turner. To read Tannery Bay is to feel alive.
University of Massachusetts Press: The Long Swimby Terese Svoboda
At an annual getaway, a patriarch presides over the family, but cloaked by joking banter is what they really want to say to one another, a marriage is ruined by an affair with a daughter’s friend, a woman is worried that her partner’s two sons—one deeply unstable and the other addicted—will become her legal problem. Across the 44 stories in The Long Swim, Svoboda leans most deeply into the private, unspoken hurts between lovers and family. Though the stories are quite short, each one has a weight to it—and the collection is imbued with a sense of unavoidable doom. For example, readers will not be surprised at the outcome of an escaped circus lion encountering a man and a woman embroiled in an extramarital affair, but that doesn’t mean it’s not satisfying. Svoboda’s world is imaginative, inevitable, and narrated with emotional precision. Equal parts mercurially strange and delightful.
In this retelling of Frankenstein, Faustina Godínez is an ambitious lawyer who begins a romance with a “stitcher,” a derogatory term for people who have been “stitched” together to form bodies that are reanimated and wiped clean of memory. In this version of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s masterpiece, set against a highly charged political backdrop, the intersection of what is possible via scientific breakthroughs collides with capitalism: the re-animated are valued for their work, not their humanity. Faustina’s lover is a highly competent paralegal, as they engage in the mundanity of the everyday, the reanimated man awakens to a broader range of emotion and consciousness, with his past resurfacing. When a doctor crosses an ethical line, Faustina and the man she is becoming partnered with have to reckon with their future together. Richly imagined, Olivas delivers a new classic.
Bessem lives in Cameroon, a country where being gay is punishable by law and tensions between Christians and Muslims, Anglophone and Francophones, are at a boiling point. As a young university student, she has life-defining relationship with Fatima, until Fatima’s brother, a conservative Muslim, physically assaults them both. Bessem never sees Fatima again, but she’s always thinking about her and looking for closure. 13 years later, Bessem is a university professor. Her best friend is a closeted gay man, and she and Jamal are a support system for one another, and despite the environment of persecution, they have reasons for not leaving their home country. When Bessem sees an old friend of Fatima’s, a fire is ignited in her and she begins a search that will led her to dangerous places. Written as letters that alternate between Fatima and Bessem’s perspectives, this debut by Xaviere is heartbreaking—and gorgeous.
When Girl receives a scholarship, she leaves Australia and her tight-knit working-class Malaysian family for a month-long artist residency in Scotland, bookended by stays in London. Intending to take a break from her doctoral dissertation on Sylvia Plath, Girl plans to use the time to work on her postcolonial novel. Under the shadow of the disappearance of a Malaysian Airlines plane, Girl navigates both the subtle and outright racism in academia and the art world, while outwardly performing the role of the grateful immigrant. At the residency, Girl cautiously interacts with her peers, but never quite forms a connection with any of them, despite spending hours sitting for a portrait with one of the artists. Away from her parents and her grandmother, she reflects on the pressure and expectations that come with being a child of working-class immigrants. But The Girl is a force that layers the past and the present to reinvent the coming-of-age novel.
From the early periods of American colonialism and up to the present day—including the Covid-19 pandemic—much of Wilderness & The American Spirit focuses on the Applegate Trail as a way to begin to answer the a question: how did we get to where we are now? McConnell traces the route itself, an alternative to the Oregon Trail, filled with spectacular natural beauty and extreme hardship. She chronicles the people traveled it from the past into the modern era, and the environmental destruction caused by the policies of unfettered western expansion. From disease brought by white settlers to indigenous populations, to forests being broken up to build shopping malls, McConnell draws a through line from America’s collective relationship to wild places from everything to the fate of the Donner Party to the CIA’s MKUltra program. Infused with rich details from deep research, Wilderness & The American Spirit is a fascinating read.
In How You Were Born, girls play Bloody Mary, an aging professor who has been married six times breaks into the home he is sure is occupied by his double, a holocaust survivor is convinced he has been re-interned when his family moves him to an assisted living facility. Three linked stories tell the story of a gay couple who conceived a daughter via sperm donor, exploring what it means at different points in the journey. These stories are laced with mythology, ghosts, and the magic of childhood imagination, small moments turn into revelations and big events are compressed into concise jewels. Cayley writes with such exactness even the mundane is lush, and the outlandish hyperreal. The collection is threaded together with a deep desire for connection, to love and to be loved. These are narratives that dig deeply into the messy business of living, where characters, despite having to confront their mistakes and accept the cruelty of the world, still find powerful beauty. Masterful.
A dead woman becomes pregnant, a vagina is an Airbnb, a woman lives with half of her sibling’s body inside of her, a middle-age woman decides to take advantage of her cultural invisibility to the point that it becomes literal. Schmeidler’s stories have a touch of the gruesome and absurd, but the currents that run through the collection are longing, desire, and outrage. Each story has a different narrator, but there emerges a collective voice for women in different times, points of life, and indeed, material planes. The possibility—and power—in these fantastical situations mirror many of the anxieties of real life: eroding reproductive rights, gendered violence, sexual freedom, and aging. There is also a warning embedded in the narrative about how time slips and bodies change. A wild and original collection.
University of Texas Press:Loose of Earth by Katherine Dorothy Blackburn
K.D. Blackburn’s father is a runner, a former Air Force pilot, and civilian captain for American Airlines. Her mother is a veterinarian. It is somewhat inexplicable, then, in a family headed by parents whose careers hinge so deeply on science, that when the father is diagnosed with colon cancer in 1997, they lean harder on their evangelical faith than medical treatment. In one harrowing moment, Blackburn’s paternal grandfather implores his son to seek care other than prayer and supplements; in another, a pre-teen Blackburn herself—the eldest of five children—believes it is her own lack of devotion that is getting in the way of God healing her father. Underpinning the narrative is Blackburn’s father’s military service, and the prevalence of the use of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS, also known today as “forever chemicals.” Loose Earth is a complicated and beautiful exploration of caring for family in the best ways we know how.
Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s smartly interior debut novel But the Girlappears to follow the path of a bildungsroman. Our protagonist, simply named Girl, is on a flight out of Australia for an artist’s residency in the lush Scottish countryside.
She is leaving behind her tight-knit Malaysian family and her PhD dissertation on Sylvia Plath, in hopes that she will produce a postcolonial novel (a term she added “to make it sound more legitimate”) during her time of intense self-discovery. But Girl’s coming-of-age story is complicated by her awareness of the harmful ways that people of color are misrepresented or not represented at all in Plath’s work, her inability to escape her family’s overbearing presence, even in their physical absence, and the frenemy relationship she develops with a dazzling, overconfident female painter at the residency.
Yu and I talked over Zoom about why a bildungsroman fails to capture the coming-of-age experiences in non-Western societies, being an Asian token, and how the missing Malaysian Airlines plane looms over the writing of this novel.
Lim May Zhee: Since Sylvia Plath is a character that’s central to the novel, I wanted to start with her and what she meant for the different people in the novel—for Girl, our Asian protagonist who is a writer and Plath scholar, and for Clementine, who is a white female artist—as well as what she meant for you.
Jessica Zhan Mei Yu: I like that you call her a character because she exists in the novel as a present, but not quite present, character. I think Sylvia Plath is just one of those huge figures that you can’t escape. When I was writing a novel, I started reading some Plath scholarship. A lot of those books are kind of prefaced with the idea that it’s really hard to write about her because there are all these huge debates and so much has already been written about her. There are misconceptions or conceptions of her that are loaded with all these different projections. And I thought that was just a really rich, fertile ground to talk about.
To Clementine, Plath represents this figure of rebellion in the sense that she wasn’t conforming to gender expectations in her era. She’s this stereotypical artist type. She had mental illness that was idealized and romanticized by a lot of people. She’s a really beautiful writer and she’s inspiring to Clementine, who feels that as a woman she doesn’t conform to the gender stereotypes of her era either.
With Girl, it’s this weird thing where she loves literature that hates her. Girl goes to university and she reads all these canonical texts—I mean, whether or not Plath was canonical is up for debate—but Girl is a writer and she’s reading all these texts in which she finds herself misrepresented or not represented at all. So she wrestles with that misrepresentation of herself or people that look like her in the class work. Plath was a really complicated figure for Girl because on some level, she sees herself as that stereotypical artist who is unconventional and breaking form and wants nothing more than to make beautiful art. But Plath also writes about people of color in ways that are inhumane, and Girl is hurt by that.
LMZ: I think we can say Plath is canonical. I feel like denying her that is a bit sexist. She’s so widely read and interpreted.
JZMY: Yeah, it would be kind of gross not to.
LMZ: What would Sylvia Plath have meant to Girl’s parents?
JZMY: My novel isn’t autobiographical, but it is autofictional. I talked to my mom about this recently. She was like, “Well, I didn’t know who Sylvia Plath was when I read your novel. So I had to do some Googling and I kind of understand it now.” And then she read a review of my book in a journal and she said,”Now I really understood it because the reviewer really explained it to me.” Then she was ready to go to my book launch. So yeah, there are parts of the book that are very much based on my parents.
She loves literature that hates her.
My parents are very open-minded and intelligent people but books and writing are not really their thing. They taught me to read, and my dad would read Enid Blyton to me before bedtime every night. But I was kind of exploring what was considered good literature by myself through the school system and libraries. So yeah, I think Sylvia Plath would have meant nothing to Girl’s parents because immigrant parents can be kind of really hands on, but hands off. They’ll say, “Don’t drink cold water in the morning otherwise you’ll get sick” or something, but they’re not necessarily in with the nitty gritty of your everyday life. They wouldn’t necessarily know what’s going on in your dissertation. They’ll make sure you have food to eat but they’re not sitting there trying to pick your brains every single night over the dinner table. I kind of enjoy that. The intellectual room to run by myself, I guess.
LMZ: I love that your mom didn’t know who Sylvia Plath was and then found out through your novel. That’s amazing to me. Is that true of Girl too? Did she enjoy having that intellectual room away from her immigrant parents, or did she want more from them?
JZMY: Girl is a lot younger than I am now. I’m 30 and Girl is in her 20s. I think when you’re younger, you want to feel understood and Girl doesn’t really have that. She doesn’t really understand the freedom that gives you. She’s a young woman in her early 20s trying to just feel seen by something or someone, to feel understood, and she’s not really finding it. She’s not totally finding it in her immigrant family so maybe she would, I don’t know. It’s very possible that she would have a younger person’s view on that stuff compared to me.
LMZ: I definitely feel that tension in the novel. There’s a part where Girl says, “I had grown upamongst people who had believed that talk was the cheap currency of the Ang Moh. It was the overprinted paper money of a self-satisfied alien race. As for expressing the self, which seemed to be the great project of the Western world, this was simply embarrassing given the sacred otherness of another person’s interiority. It didn’t make any sense to put one’s interior self on the market via an open house inspection.” I relate to this passage a lot because it’s how I experience the intergenerational gap between me and my much more reserved Asian parents.
JZMY: Girl’s interior monologue is not really shared with anyone else in the book. There’s a need for her to have a proxy of thoughts in her own emotional life. Girl is inside the contradiction of those two kinds of ways of being, which I’ve written there as really binary, and maybe that’s too extreme, but I do think that. Western culture is very much about like, we want to know more about you, we want you to say something. Broadly speaking, I feel like the kind of culture I was brought up in says that’s not really important. I enjoyed that privacy about my life when I was growing up. It was more about my material, physical needs being met. It always feels a little strange to me because in the culture I was raised in, my parents would be like, “That’s talking about yourself too much. That’s arrogant, that’s full of yourself, that’s a bit confident.” (I’m using the word “confident” in a negative tone.) They were suspicious of communication. If you’re charming, that must mean something’s wrong with you inherently. That’s very Chinese. Is that how you feel?
LMZ: Definitely. Vanessa Chan, another Malaysian Chinese author, likes to say that our grandparents love us by not speaking. That made a lot of sense to me.
JZMY: [laughs] I like that I can go to my parents’ house and say almost nothing.
LMZ: This actually leads me to another thread in the novel, which is the different ways that love, and in particular, familial love is portrayed. The way that Girl’s family shows her love might look very different from what the other artists at her residency imagine a loving relationship would look like.
Maturation for me and for Girl is realizing that there’s never any exit.
JZMY: No one in the residency really talks about family that much. It’s not that it’s not important to them, it’s just not prevalent in their life in the same way as it is to Girl. Clementine talks about her father in this very specific, posh, Western kind of way. There’s a cliche that ethnic, minority cultures have this real sense of family, of that being really important, but it’s more that it’s not possible to ever fully escape your family. My brother has his own family but he lives right next door to my parents on the same lot of land. They built the houses specifically thinking about how they’re all going to live communally. It’s a very different view of what family and growing up looks like. That’s why I was interested in the idea of a bildungsroman and how it’s like, you leave your family, you leave your childhood, maturation is like an exit, but maturation for me and for Girl is realizing that there’s never any exit. There’s something beautiful and kind of bittersweet about that at the same time.
LMZ:I like that. The bildungsroman is such an individualistic way of thinking about the self and that is not at all how people who are not from Western cultures experience it.
JZMY: Yeah, it’s actually a very Germanic, Euro-centric, Anglo-centric genre. It was interesting to play with that and use that in ways that made sense to me.
LMZ: I wanted to ask you too about the novel-within-the novel that’s written by Girl called Pillar of Salt. Is that Girl’s more authentic voice? Does it feel like something she’s finally writing for herself, or because she’s at this residency and has to show a group of people her work?
JZMY: It made sense to me to show Girl’s actual writing, which is about memory and looking back and about how Girl is like the repository for her family’s memories and paths. She is always looking back because of that. Her novel is meant to hold all the things that she’s collected inside of herself, all the secrets and family histories. The novel matters a lot to Girl. It’s the truest expression of who she is in some weird way, more so than even the kind of like intense internal monologue or the interactions she has with the other artists; this novel is actually who she feels like she is. So when it’s not received in the way that she needs it to be, she just feels really unseen again. It’s this really horrible thing for her.
LMZ: Yes, in the scene, everyone responds to Girl’s work by praising the fact that it’s a diverse story and saying that it’s so important right now, instead of asking her about her craft or process, which they did with the other white artists, who are allowed to just embody their work.
JZMY: When you write a book and it’s going to be published, it’s going to become a commodity. But Girl isn’t at that point, her novel is at quite a nascent stage. So to have it commodified in a racialized way so quickly, it’s just really depressing. But I think a lot of writers who have been through a lot of workshops can relate to that, especially writers of color. It’s a really common response. Maybe not as extreme as that, but it definitely happens all the time when you’re a non-white writer. All that matters about your work or your identity as a writer is your race. The commodification of that. And it’s just hurtful. I don’t know how else to put it. It happens more in these kinds of progressive spaces than you’d expect. It crops up in ways that are subtle and not so subtle.
LMZ: I feel like Clementine is the perfect encapsulation of that sentiment. She’s a white woman who means well but is oblivious to the consequence of her actions.
JZMY: There were times when I was reading the novel and felt like I was over this Girl protagonist. She’s all like, “Aw, shucks, me, really?” That kind of naivete was really wearing on me. And then Clementine would come onto the page and be really funny and witty and crazy, and kind of mean. She was a bad person but she was really invigorating to me. It was enjoyable to write and I hope it was enjoyable to read as well.
When you’re a good girl, you’re always kind of thinking a little bit about what it would be like to be a bad girl, right?
I was with some friends last night who were also Malaysian and one of them was explaining to me how when you grow up in a strict Malaysian Chinese family, things are always your fault. Even an accident is kind of your fault because you should have been more cautious. I need to like, self-correct, somehow. It does make me a pretty competent person in some ways, because I’m aware of myself and my weaknesses and flaws. It can also be a little over the top. What is most agonizing about Clementine is she doesn’t ever realize how much of it is her fault, and she has the mysterious ability to just keep going. She’s not really aware of herself in that way, not consumed by that kind of self-loathing. She’s not as anxious and stressed as Girl is, which is probably a good thing. But she also doesn’t really see other people sometimes. I mean, Girl doesn’t really see Clementine either. They kind of objectify each other. It’s the part of their relationship that’s very dysfunctional.
LMZ: I want to hear more about this, about your two main characters not really seeing each other.
JZMY: Clementine sees Girl as this good minority girl, who is boring and not an interesting, artistic person who breaks the rules. But she doesn’t really realize that Girl is raised this way because her parents told her you’ve got to be savvier and better and smarter and stronger than other people to keep yourself safe. And Clementine hasn’t had that. But then there is this beautiful confidence about her. Girl sees Clementine as, like, the bad girl that she wishes she could be. When you’re a good girl, you’re always kind of thinking a little bit about what it would be like to be a bad girl, right? And Clementine represents that for her. They’re both projecting their fantasies of pathways to womanhood onto each other, and they don’t really see each other as people. That’s where the relationship goes awry.
LMZ: In the novel, Girl is constantly tokenized. She’s always asked to be in photographs for her school and then in photographs for her residency because she’s the only Asian person in the group. I like how you flip this act of tokenization, or rather you mirror that act with Clementine painting a portrait of Girl over a portrait of Sylvia Plath.
People looked at her face and all they could see was the plane.
JZMY: Girl is aware of her marginalization and the way that she’s essentially objectified, both sexually but also as an object to people. And she’s hurt by that, rightly so. Something that she starts to gather, as she gets older and as she matures in the book, is that she can objectify others, too. When people have done the wrong thing to you, you can still be a bad person yourself in many ways. Girl is realizing that she objectifies Plath and Clementine. While there’s still a power imbalance there, it’s still a way of being in the world that isn’t loving or particularly ethical. And Girl wants to be a good person. That’s really, really important to her. Realizing that she’s been a bad person too, maybe not as bad as Clementine, is crushing but freeing. Like, okay, I’m just a bad person like everyone else. Because Girl has some kind of power. She’s powerless in so many ways but she does have agency; she just doesn’t always exercise that in the best ways.
LMZ: My final question is maybe a bit of a downer. The missing Malaysian Airlines plane is mentioned at the start of the novel, and it hangs over the story, coming back again at the end when Girl is taking a flight home. We’re actually right on the tenth year anniversary of the flight’s disappearance. What was the significance of this event for you, for the writing of the novel, and for Girl?
JZMY: Well, thinking about The Bell Jar as a loose framework for my novel, Plath starts off by saying “it’s the summer the Rosenbergs were electrocuted.” My book starts with the spring after MAS just went missing. I remember that sense of loss that was in the air. It has nothing to do with Girl in some ways, but in other ways she feels that sense of absence or loss inside of her. It’s a metaphor which I feel kind of weird about. Should you make a metaphor of someone else’s world event that really affected their life? Maybe that’s part of what Girl does right or wrong.
I remember my cousin, who was studying in Australia at the time when all that happened. When she told people she was from Malaysia, they would ask her what happened to the plane. People looked at her face and all they could see was the plane. They somehow believe that she had some special insight into the plane. I just wanted to put that into the novel somehow. I wanted to capture that feeling of like, it’s a horrible world event that’s quite racialized.
It wasn’t very long after that I took a MAS flight on a similar route and there was no one on the flight at the time. I was just lying down because there were so many empty seats. Everyone was just so frightened. It was kind of strange. I actually met someone recently. Her partner’s dad was on the flight. It was crazy to hear about that. Like, how does her partner deal with that? And she was like, oh, you know, it’s a lot of questions. That’s the only way to deal with it. There’s no closure, essentially. They have a death certificate, but that’s all they have.
In April of 1956, as a PhD student in the physics department at Princeton, Hugh Everett III finished writing Wave Mechanics Without Probability. The paper received little attention at the time (due perhaps to its extremely boring title); later, however, it would gain acclaim as the foundational text for the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. The Many-Worlds interpretation was an attempt to resolve the strangeness that lives at the heart of quantum mechanics—namely the fact that it requires particles to exist in contradictory states at the same time. Schrödinger’s cat, the archetypal example, is both dead and alive simultaneously. But Everett’s formulation offered an alternative interpretation: the cat is dead in one universe, alive in another. The mathematical equations do not imply simultaneous co-existence in one universe, they imply co-existent parallel universes.
I wrote a version of the above for the first time nearly fifteen years ago, as the opening to my college thesis. I was living something close to the life I’d always wanted—a career path that made people say wow you must be so smart, a relationship that helped me convince myself I was lovable—and I was miserable. I could barely understand my own research; I felt a lingering discontent in my relationship that I couldn’t explain. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the idea of infinitely proliferating alternate universes captivated me, but it took writing a book about it for me to see the connection clearly.
My novel, In Universes, is the story of a failing physicist who becomes enamored with the idea of the multiverse—a fixation that ultimately sends the narrator careening across alternate worlds. It’s a story of the disconnect between what we’re taught to want and what we truly desire. A story about queerness, guilt, inherited trauma, and, ultimately, the joy of belonging.
There is something fundamentally queer, to me, about the multiverse. How many of us grow up living one life while dreaming of another? Fearing it, wanting it, living half in the real world and half in a parallel one. But of course the multiverse offers itself up as a metaphor in so many ways, as evidenced by the books below.
A tech billionaire has invented a machine that lets people travel to alternate worlds. But there’s a catch—if you try to visit a parallel world where you’re still alive, you die. Enter Cara: a self-proclaimed “garbage git” who lives in the dystopic conditions outside the walls of the wealthy Wiley City and whose parallel selves are nearly all dead. The book offers a fast-paced, whip smart plot, sharp social commentary, and a fascinating exploration of how we are made and unmade by our circumstances: “Even if you think you know yourself in your safe glass castle, you don’t know yourself in the dirt. Even if you hustle and make it in the rough, you have no idea if you would thrive or die in the light of real riches, if your cleverness would outlive your desperation.”
Those Beyond the Wall, Johnson’s newly released second novel, is set in the same world though it’s an entirely distinct story. While the multiverse is slightly less of a focus, it still plays a central role in the plot, which follows a character called Scales as she tries to discover why people in her community are dying in a strange and brutal way. It’s a novel about the power of story—those we tell ourselves, those we tell others, and those others tell about us. It is a book with rage at its core. In an introductory note, Johnson says, “Anger with a target is Rage, and Rage is sister to Hope alone. We rage because we do believe things can be better, by fire if necessary.” This is a book that insists on the possibility of better futures while refusing to look away from the brutality that is sometimes required to get there. A brilliant depiction of a morally complex character, with an ending I’m still thinking about months later.
Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom by Ted Chiang
Time and again, I’m blown away by how Ted Chiang manages to take a science lesson and transform it into a brilliant story, and this novella is no exception. Set in a world where there are devices that allow you to communicate with your parallel selves, the story is both a remarkably clear explanation of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and an exploration of what it might mean to try to understand ourselves as multiple rather than singular.
This slender novel, translated from Norwegian, is delightfully weird. It follows the lives of Anna and her daughter Laura, who were split into parallel universes when Anna—a writer and translator—misread a word in a poem. Trädgård, Swedish for garden, becomes the nonsense word tärdgård. “Misreadings like this,” a mysterious narrator informs us, “often result in new words that have never existed before, brand-new creations that have no direct meaning, that point toward a nothingness, to put it another way, toward something incomprehensible, toward a potential word that might have existed if only someone had thought of it.” And in this specific instance what might have existed opens a doorway to a parallel world—a doorway through which three-year-old Laura disappears. This is a novel that offers more questions than answers, closer to poetry than fiction in its movements. A very brief chapter entitled “The Horses” begins: “This is the twenty-third chapter. There’s practically no one here, only some horses standing sleeping.” It’s a book for anyone who has had the sense that something inexplicable is missing from their life.
According to the opening of this anthology, the stories within it “have been gathered from across the Simulacra and, taken together, they illustrate a burgeoning, if inchoate, awareness of the Simulacrum, emerging without coordination or communication across universes, across writers, across minds.” Each chapter offers a different view of said simulacra—a collection of worlds where nothing is quite what it seems and where people, places, and events shift in ways that only the most observant notice.
What if two people could be everything to one another: friend, lover, sibling, caregiver, parent, and on and on? We see the main characters of Silvey’s novel, Thora and Santi, in all of these permutations and more. Perhaps most impressive is the way the characters feel both distinct and consistent across universes: recognizably themselves but also authentically altered by their changing circumstances. But the novel is more than a character study. At its heart is a mystery whose answer beautifully brings together the novel’s disparate worlds.
In a way, any piece of fiction is a kind of collapsed multiverse. An author, imagining a story, dreams of different possibilities. Each draft, a slightly different world. In Oyeyemi’s brilliant and bewildering novel, we’re introduced to a writer named St. John Fox, his wife, Daphne, and the muse he’s dreamt up for himself, Mary Foxe. Mary, refusing the constraints of St. John’s imagination, decides to teach him a lesson about killing off his female characters. Thus commences a series of dueling stories, often (always?) inspired by Bluebeard-esque fairytales, within which Mary and John cast each other as different characters across a wild array of fictional worlds.
And Then There Were (N-One) by Sarah Pinsker
If you received an invitation to a convention where you could meet all your alternate selves, would you attend? In this novella, Sarah Pinsker the writer tells the story of Sarah Pinsker the character saying yes to such an invitation and heading to an island off the coast of Novia Scotia for Sarah-con. There’s a real playfulness to the story, as it delves into the nitty gritty of what it means to try to differentiate oneself in a room filled with people who share your name and face. But when one of the Sarahs shows up dead things take an Agatha Christie turn, as our narrator-Sarah—an insurance investigator—tries to figure out which of the other Sarahs might be capable of murder.
In this epistolary novel, Red and Blue are agents for opposing factions in a war that takes place across branches of the multiverse. While there’s an intricate and satisfying plot, the novel’s primary delight for me is the relationship between the two agents, who pursue one another across universes, leaving notes in wildly elaborate code: grown into the circles of a tree’s rings, transmitted by the stings of bees. It’s an effusive, effervescent novel, and one that I turn towards when I need to be reminded that there are always more hopeful endings than we might first imagine.
“I Heard My Son Kissing a Girl” by Yukiko Tominaga
On Oscar night, I heard my son kissing a girl. He was fifteen years old and this was the first time he had brought a girl to our place. He told me at the dinner table prior to the kissing incident that they were watching Rango in his room. Did the cartoon involve a lot of kissing? Maybe, but I couldn’t remember, so I tried to listen to them to figure out whether the sound was from the screen or from them. Each time I heard the pecking sound, it became more real and I put together the thread of their conversation. Are you okay? said my son. Yes, yes. I’m fine, said the girl.
Between witnessing the first time a Korean movie won best picture and a pit-bull-size raccoon trespassing on our front porch, I texted my son, who was two feet away, just on the other side of the wall. Are you guys ok? There is a giant raccoon outside. Do you guys want to see it? No answer. The pecking sound (now I’m convinced it was) kept leaking through his wall. Of course, they were more than okay, but I didn’t know what else to say or not to say. I would have been more prepared if he had told me she was his girlfriend. I could have told him our house rule, Someone has to be home when you bring a girl, if you do things you don’t want me to see or hear, and, and . . . what?
We lived in San Francisco in a hundred-year-old, two-story house with housemates. The layout of the house allowed our housemates and us to have our privacy. We shared a garage, kitchen, backyard, and laundry room. The sunroom in the back and the entire second floor, two bedrooms and a shower and toilet, were my housemates’ space, and a living room and one huge bedroom with a bath and toilet on the first floor were our space. I divided the huge bedroom into two bedrooms when my son was six. We used two bookcases that my first housemates had left to create two-thirds of the boundary, and we covered the space above them with Ikea curtains. We didn’t build a wall between us.
It’s a miracle that we could still afford to rent a place in this city. Levi had owned his house on this same street, but he died during the rise of the housing market crisis and the house went into foreclosure. It was a miracle that we found a rental on the same street and that my son grew up with the same neighbors and friends. Our landlord, a retired firefighter, a man of few words, never raised our rent until four years ago, and every time he did, he said, “I’m so sorry that I have to do this to you.” There were times when I couldn’t find new housemates, but he didn’t charge me the full house rent. He said, “Just pay what you’ve always paid. You are a single mother. Focus on raising your son.”
Families we collected over the years became Alex’s fathers, mothers, aunts, and uncles, and my best friends. They watched Alex while I went to school at night. They invited us over for dinners, camping trips, and into their phone plans. It’s a miracle to be able to feel the entire city helping to bring up one child. My son’s friends didn’t tease him about his living situation. On the contrary, one boy begged his mom to find a housemate and get rid of his brother. This was back when they were still in third grade. The boy who wanted to give away his brother still came to have a sleepover, and I often found him in our living room on the weekends, now six foot two, so he couldn’t fit on our couch to sleep. He slept on a giant beanbag, half of his body hanging on the floor and my son on the couch sleeping, curled in a ball. Whether your parents owned a Tesla, had a vacation house in Tahoe, or lived with housemates, kids didn’t care. They saw each other as they were. The things I saw on the TV show—the social hierarchy, rich kids looking down on poor kids, or poor kids feeling ashamed of their parents—they weren’t our reality. So our nonexistent wall had never been a problem to us . . . until this Oscar night.
The girl’s mother came to pick her up at a quarter after ten.
The mother asked her, “Did you have fun?”
The girl said, “Yes.”
The mother and daughter left with big smiles.
My son came to the living room looking at his phone. He’d just read my text. He smiled and shook his head, “Yes, we’re okay.”
“I could hear you guys and I didn’t know what to do. Is she your girlfriend?”
“Yes.”
“I see.”
I couldn’t recall what kind of conversation led us to sit down on the couch across from each other. All I remember was asking him, “Are you guys going to have sex? Do you have a condom?”
He answered, “No, I’m not going to. I’m only fifteen. I don’t want to have a baby. We’ve had sex education, not just once but multiple times. If I have a concern, we have a school counselor for that.”
I told him that it’s better to be safe than sorry so if he needed a condom, I’d buy it. If he didn’t want me to, he could always ask Sam’s dad, Walter’s dad, or any of his fathers. I wanted him to know he could speak to me or any of us.
“I know, Mom. Please. Can you just stop?” he said and left to take a shower. I could see he was getting upset. I knew I had failed at our first talk and possibly I had lost the chance for it forever. I sat on the couch while he took a shower thinking about what had happened to my ideal parent image, that I would be a parent who listens to her child, be open to his freedom, and trust his answer. So, I decided to leave a box of condoms in his room without mentioning it. Did condoms have a size? I didn’t know. If they did, what size would I need to get for him?
When he came out of the bathroom, Alex said, “I know you’re worried and I’m glad that you spoke to me. I got upset because you began to rumble the same line over and over. I’ve already heard about sex and protection so many times from so many people.”
I told him I was happy that he was with her, especially knowing he had asked her out back in September, and she’d told him she was too busy at the time. He smiled and we said good night and went to sleep. The talk was done. Good, we made a verbal contract, I thought.
I worried about everything. I worried if he could make friends, if I could feed him in this city, if I could retain my job, if I could help with his English homework, and if I could behave well enough to be accepted by his community. But with each worry I had, his life proved they were only my fears. He was much more resilient and so was I.
There was one more worry, which I had not resolved. I had never had a serious, committed relationship after Levi died. This was not a sacrifice. I wasn’t worried that my love life would ruin my son’s life. I was worried about spending money. I didn’t want to spend money on a dating site, transportation to a meeting spot, activities a date and I might be doing together, birthday cards for him, birth control pills, and other miscellaneous expenses that would come with having another person in my life. I also didn’t want anyone to pay for my portion. I was now an independent woman, unlike when I was married to Levi, when I had to depend on him for my survival. My life was already full of love with people and with the community we were involved in. I didn’t need any more love.
Could a parent without romance teach a child how to love? How could Alex learn to care for his girlfriend if I failed to show him what a couple should look like? So many novels and movies were born out of passion, and I knew loving someone was never a waste of time even if it only lasted three weeks. I knew it in my head, and sometimes I wanted to hire someone to be my boyfriend once a month so I could show my son that love was the greatest thing a human could experience. But I couldn’t. I loved my life and I hated spending money.
Sometimes I wanted to hire someone to be my boyfriend once a month so I could show my son that love was the greatest thing a human could experience.
The following week, Alex acted the same as before that night. He let me hug him, and some mornings he came to my bed to lie next to me. At dinner, we spoke a bit about his girlfriend and her overweight Chihuahua mix in the midst of conversation about his schoolwork and the volleyball team. But I was still consumed by that night. Alex moved on from the subject and I couldn’t.
There was a ninth-grade parent meeting on Thursday night before the school play. After the meeting, I went to introduce myself to Alex’s counselor and spoke about his passion for history but really to seek her advice about my son’s love life. “Yes, AP U.S. history sounds great. What I want to ask you about is that he has a girlfriend now. Will they have sex?” I asked.
She, with a serious look, said, “I cannot answer yes or no. But they are learning about protection and consent. You can set a house rule, speak with her parents, and ask him to inform you where he is.”
I asked her if it was common in this country for fifteen-year-olds to kiss, and she said it was. She also told me, in a pitying tone, that it would only get harder from here.
Right after we said goodbye, she held my hand and said, “You must know your son is a great kid. He’s friends with everyone and cares for them all. Really cares. That’s a gift. I’m not just saying this to make you feel better. I want you to know how special that is!”
At the play, my son instructed me to sit in the front row, alone. I turned my head to the back. In the dim light, I spotted the shadow of his girlfriend’s head leaning on his shoulder. They seemed so comfortable with each other.
Who had told him that lending your shoulder makes others relax?
I didn’t have any memory of being loved by men. I remembered I had been loved, but I couldn’t remember what it felt like. It wasn’t as dramatic as a hole in my heart or my memory having been blocked out by a traumatic experience. My past must have existed because of what was born.
At night, when I was alone in the kitchen, I often listened to its buzz while I brought the corner of the fridge into focus. As I sat looking at the corner, my mind time-traveled to seventeen years ago with Levi. The diner that served the large blueberry pancakes, the heated conversation about our ideal society (back then I was into a barter-based society), the desire to be open to someone and the wish to find a person who would be my soul mate. Our coffee had gotten cold––the sign of enthusiastic discussion, we’d forgotten the time and space. I remembered the sensation, but this wasn’t my emotion because I didn’t taste it. Buzz, buzz, buzz. What’s so noble about loving someone anyway?
“What’s wrong with having sex?” my ex-roommate number 3 asked. Mi Cha and I were at a sake bar a few blocks from my house, owned by an elderly Japanese couple. Mi Cha had recently discovered a wonderful American TV show called Cheers and suggested I should find a go-to bar but with the twist of an owner who could act like a therapist so that I could prepare for the empty nest.
“Getting pregnant and having a baby at fifteen,” I answered. “People who have a child at a young age live in poverty. It’s a guarantee for suffering. Why do you dive into a situation that’s already a clear tragedy? Can you imagine the dream your child has to give up to raise his child? I don’t want to see him regret his life and blame the kid for it. Passion does not raise children. Planning does.”
I could have gone on more but I stopped.
“So, if they don’t get pregnant, you’re okay with them having sex as much as they want?”
“Oh yes, all day, every day! In fact they should explore what gives them pleasure when they are still young. Both are equally naïve about love. Every touch and whisper feels like a new discovery. We don’t get that kind of joy once we’re under the pressure of having a roof over our heads. Sex becomes body maintenance, like eating fiber and going to the bathroom.”
“Or a business transaction.”
“I love sex being a business transaction, Mi Cha! Except once we become accustomed to American culture and we begin to voice ourselves, ‘more free time, less sex,’ husbands travel to find another young naïve woman who dreams to live in America. Or, they evaporate suddenly and we find them in Japan with another woman. That happened to my friends Kotomi, Maki, and Yoshi. Yoshi told her husband she wanted to focus on raising their kids rather than spending time in bed with him. He said she didn’t love him anymore and he took off next day. Poof! Just like that. A few months later, he sends a divorce paper from Japan. The husband traveled to Japan and brought back a woman who was ten years younger than Yoshi. Can you believe he crossed the sea, to her home country, to pick another wife?”
“My friend has sex with her husband when she wants a new handbag.”
“Why can’t a husband have an affair with someone and leave us alone, and just give us money to take care of our children? For us, Asian wives, family comes first and sex . . . not even on the list! But when we tell that to a therapist here, they say it’s our fault that we neglect the couple part. The couple part? People in this country are so obsessed with being a couple!”
“Asian immigrant. Because we can’t speak for Asian American wives. Asian immigrant wives. Or do we say immigrant Asian wives?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m Japanese. My English is as bad as yours. Hey, Mr. Sasaki, does ‘immigrant’ come before or after ‘Asian’?” I asked the couple who owned the bar in Japanese.
“We were dancers who made a life in America by serving sake and fake sushi. We didn’t need much English,” the husband said in Japanese. “But I tell you, the other day, I was watching this Japanese TV program. The show asks ordinary people to show inside their house. They visited a young couple’s house and found out that this couple had five kids. They had an accident pregnancy when they were fifteen but decided to have the child. You’ll think their stories are packed with suffering. No, the opposite. Full of joy. They had no financial help so they struggled but their parents welcomed their decisions with their whole heart. No questions asked. You see, a problem becomes the problem when you see the incident as a problem. And the best kind of happiness is the one that happens without planning. Let it unfold. You should watch the TV program. It made this old man cry.”
“You cry for everything,” the wife said. “You cried with a video clip of a cat giving birth to six kittens. You cried when our granddaughter played an awful violin at the recital. But yes, the best joy comes from an accident. We fled to America because my father threatened him with a Japanese sword when we asked his permission for marriage. My father was a famous sword master and wanted me to marry his apprentice. The worst thing my father had ever done to us brought the best outcome.”
We left after three sakes. Mi Cha paid for my drinks. I asked the bar owners if they could accept me staying at the counter with one cup of sake next time and as an exchange, I would do dishes for them. I would leave, of course, once the bar got busy. They laughed and said yes. If every single seat were taken, they would consider me good fortune and keep me in the corner forever because it had never happened in the last twenty-five years.
“How long will it take you to forgive Levi?” Mi Cha asked. We were just passing Precita Park. Sake had warmed us, and we decided to take a detour to my house. We were tipsy.
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t talk about him and it’s as if he never existed. You’ve told me how he died and about him as Alex’s dad but not as a man you loved.”
Love? I was stuck with the word, again. I’ve examined, analyzed, and dissected the word, and come to a conclusion: the definition would be more precise if we replaced the word with “attachment,” “survival instinct,” “loneliness,” “excuse,” or “infatuation.” “Love” is a cheap, vague, lazy, overrated word that allows us to escape from any situation.
“Nothing to forgive him for because there is nothing he did wrong. Well, except that he had no life insurance. I don’t care if Buddha tells me the source of all suffering of humankind comes from attachment, I’m going to attach, glue, fuse, embrace to the life insurance!”
“Hear, hear! No life insurance, unthinkable.”
“Yes, if the sex becomes a business transaction for couple, financial security should come with it.”
‘Love’ is a cheap, vague, lazy, overrated word that allows us to escape from any situation.
“Right! Right! But, Kyoko, you know, dead people don’t get hurt. Only alive ones do.”
The Japanese TV show that Mr. Sasaki suggested showed the house of a couple in their thirties. They lived with five children in a three-bedroom single-family house, a small distance away from Tokyo. The mother showed the camera crew around the house. The laundry machine runs in the morning and at night. There is always someone taking a bath. Look at this place, it’s like a steam room. The camera shot the edge of the shower door. The black mold stained the silicone sealant. Don’t show the mold on the TV, it’s embarrassing, said her daughter. The mother laughed while her daughter giggled, hiding behind her. Despite the number of people living in the house, the living room was well organized and clean. Two refrigerators were occupied in the kitchen, and a son and another daughter were cooking curry rice. The son sliced onions and the daughter sautéed them with carrots and meat. Another giggled from shyness about their showing their cooking skill on a national TV show. The reporter asked the eldest daughter, who was twenty, Don’t you want to have your own place? I thought about it a bit when I was sixteen but no, she said, they are like friends who will never leave me no matter what, including my parents. The reporter asked the eldest son, who was nineteen, Don’t you wish to have privacy? Well, this is all I know, he said, and he shrugged. The reporter became even more aggressive with the parents and asked, Might you have been able to do things you wanted to do if you didn’t have a child so early? The father scratched his head and said, We couldn’t wait to get married. By the time we were legally allowed to marry at eighteen years old, we had three children. My wife and I literally skipped our way to the city hall. It was hard to raise five with a high school diploma. My wife quit school and we’ve borrowed money from loan sharks. But I cannot think of any other life besides this. At the end of the show, they shot the mother and the youngest son dancing along to music on the smartphone, then switched to the dining scene, where some kids ate standing and others sat on the sofa while the mother ate sitting on a stool. They all found their place in one room. “Imagine” by John Lennon began to play, and the screen and music slowly faded out as the show ended.
Friends who never leave you no matter what, I wish I could give siblings to Alex, I thought. The bar owner was right, every incident has two sides.
Even if his girlfriend and Alex got pregnant, and decided to keep their baby, it was possible that this could turn out to be the best event in their lives rather than the worst. Even for me, it would be an opportunity to hold a baby again. They would need help while they were in school. I could help! I might become good friends with her parents, and we could be a family of six. I’m still young. If things work out, I might be alive for their great-grandchild.
I began to see a bright future. If a person who still struggled to figure out the word order of “immigrant Asian wives” and “Asian immigrant wives” was able to raise a child in this country, our kids should be fine. Besides, he wasn’t alone. He would have his girlfriend, me, and her parents. The child would be loved by so many people. And just as Alex had, the child would bring abundant joy to the parents.
When I freed myself from my own prejudice, I hit the greatest spiritual plateau. Yes, mental freedom was much more important than physical freedom. The lump I had been holding in my chest for a long time, which I used to torture myself, was finally melting away. I’ve got to start taking vitamins. I must live long for their baby.
On the following Saturday, my son told me he was going to his girlfriend’s house at night.
“I’m thinking about your future and your baby. I think I’ll be okay. I mean we’ll be okay,” I said as I followed him to his room.
“What?”
“I was afraid that having a baby would make you unhappy. But that was my fear, and I realized the same incident can make other people happy. So I won’t worry anymore about you having sex with your girlfriend.”
“I told you, we watch movies in the living room and her parents will be in and out.”
“Of course it’s okay, if you wear a condom. I’m just telling you I’ll be honored to be a grandmother.”
“I won’t have sex.”
“Why? I said it’s okay.”
“Because I’m only fifteen and I want to go to college. I bet she does too.”
“But you’re a teenager. And by nature, they are impulsive, romantic, and unrealistic. You will have sex and when you do, there is a chance . . .”
“STOP!” he shouted in English. “Just leave me alone! I said I don’t want to, okay. She doesn’t want to either. Why do you keep bringing that up? All you think about is sex. You are disgusting. I just want to spend time with someone I care about!”
Care. Before a baby, before sex, and before love, there are two people who simply enjoy being with each other.
“Please, please, Mom, just leave me alone,” he said. He was in the corner of his room, his head down and his arms in front like he was protecting himself. I’d seen him in that exact position at his karate dojo when he was scared of being hit. Did I do this?
“I’m so sorry, Alex.”
“I don’t know why you’re so worried. I mean I know because you care about me, but you know I’m not stupid. I can think.”
I had always been able to make him feel better, but I knew, this time, only our distance could heal him. I left the room.
The sad thing about being fifteen was that you had to be driven to your destination when no bus was available, and the biggest protest you could make in response was to sit in the backseat of your mother’s car. Two hours later, Alex asked me to drop him off at his girlfriend’s house. He sat in the back and we said nothing.
“Do you want to meet Abigail’s parents? They are very nice,” he said right before he got out.
“Yes, I do.” My future in-laws! I wanted to joke, but I knew he probably hadn’t recovered from our last talk.
I followed him to the front door. As soon as the door opened, Alex and Abigail disappeared inside.
“Oh, so good to see you again.” The mother hugged me. “We love Alex! Abigail couldn’t be happier since they started dating. Tonight, they’re going to cook for us. I’ve bought all the ingredients for quiche. He is such a good boy. He is always welcome to stay at our house. He’s like our son to us.”
They insisted that I should come back for dinner. I declined their invitation politely and told them I’d be back at eleven. Abigail’s mother said they understood. “No rush. Enjoy your free night,” she said.
I went to my car and stayed a bit. I had no plans for the night. Their large living room window faced the street where I was parked, and behind the sheer curtain, I saw shadows crossing back and forth. The white curtain and the warm light that cast shadows. Alex was in the midst of mundane happiness, and I watched it from outside.
I arrived at five minutes after eleven. He got into the passenger seat.
“Did you have fun?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied.
“I’m glad,” I said and started driving.
“You know, the baby talk you did earlier. Were you doing the reverse psychology thing?” he asked.
“No, I was not. I was serious. I had this enlightening experience at a sake bar and that led me to accept being a grandmother. My mind was free from pain, and I saw a bright future ahead of us.”
“A sake bar; they must have served you some shit, Mom.”
“They also serve fake sushi.”
“What’s that?”
“California rolls, Boston rolls, dragon rolls, rock-n-rolls, you know.”
He laughed and said, “You know, I talk about you to Abigail all the time.”
“Like what?”
“Like this. Things you do and say are so weird and my friends find it entertaining, especially when you’re serious about it. All other parents are, how do you say, nice, right-minded, boring.”
I laughed with him. I was already in his memories and soon would only be in his memories. He could find his own happiness, I thought. From now on, I’d find myself more of an observer than a participant.
“What if I told you that I decided to marry your father only after I found out that I was pregnant?”
“What? What’s that got to do with me?”
“Well, everything, if the what-if was true, no? I’m only wondering because I saw a Japanese reality TV show the other day and—”
“Okay, Mom. First, you watch too many Japanese reality TV shows. You know they aren’t really real. Second, I’m too busy living now to care about how I came to be. My life is happening as we speak. It’s here and now. And it’s all mine.”
“Am I too narcissistic?”
“Nah, more like self-absorbed. People just don’t care about you as much as you care about yourself.”
“That is narcissistic.”
He laughed.
“Besides, I’m five foot nine and know more English than you do. I’m a healthy ordinary person with a bit of a big ego and you still drive me to my girlfriend’s house and pick me up at eleven p.m. Do you get my point?”
“My baby.” I stroked his cheek.
He rested his face on my hand and cooed.
I told myself to remember this moment, his skin, his profile from the driver’s seat, and the love that drove me to madness.
“Prosthetics are so advanced now,” a nondisabled stranger tells me in passing.
“Mine is held on with Velcro,” I reply pleasantly, to give them a splash of real talk, but also they aren’t listening and don’t care. They already have their beliefs set.
The promise of prosthetics is one of restoration of ability, and this narrative leaves little room for reality.
The promise of prosthetics is a rote call-and-response for those looking to inject a little technological optimism into their daily lives, to believe in the power of technology and restoration, and the idea that problems are solved tidy-like. They also then don’t have to worry about disability, or disabled people, or about building that ramp that they are already 32 years late installing.
The promise of prosthetics is an ending of disability, but that’s a promise from people who don’t know disabled people or disabled communities. Disability is longstanding and not going away—the future will give us new ways to be or become disabled. New viruses, new patterns of animal migration and disease thanks to climate change, new weather patterns, hopefully new ideas of work and of good bodies, too.
My body is good.
I love Velcro. I like the sound it makes. I like how well it works with secure fit and adjustability. With my last leg, I used to adjust my Velcros a lot more. I used to have three Velcros, now I have two. Carefully cut, melted, and then sewn with the giant sewing machine in my prosthetist’s lab by his son, who is also his technician. My Velcros are mine only, perfect for my leg.
Imperfect, too.
I used to have white Velcros and a white upper on my prosthesis, but they got skanky and discolored from the darker-wash jeans I prefer, and every little fiber they pick up shows—not that I’m hiking my pants up every day to show off my Velcros, so it didn’t matter that much. I have an old-style prosthesis, almost like a Hanger leg[1] for those familiar with disability design. My amputation is very fancy. Some people like me still use lacers instead of Velcro, and others are using the snappy adjusties you have on skis now, too. High tech.
The promise of prosthetics is one of restoration of ability, and this narrative leaves little room for reality.
I know that there are at least some people who are curious about the intimate relationship I have with my prosthesis as a body part, or, worse, for me to tell you a tale about getting jiggy[2] with my prosthetic leg on, or off. What do I do with this equipment if I want to have sex? What’s the plan for the leg?
But that’s boring. And you’ve read enough idealized tales where bodies sing electric, where man is one with machine, where flesh is made whole again, and where people can then get freaky with the manic pixie cyborg electric-sheep-dream girl.[3]
The disability intimacy I want to address is about when prosthetics are a shield preventing intimacy, when the narratives we have about prostheses put real-life prosthetized people in a pickle. Prosthetics are a shield to other people’s ideas of intimacy that I do not share with them—those who gawk and give unwanted attention, who smirkingly or even sincerely ask things like “leg on or leg off?” My legs are not an invitation to your education, or your desire.
There is no good way to be an amputee because of all the stories and expectations and images that are out there about us, and the questions and information people think they are entitled to through that media, too. The promise of prosthetics is a curse.
Prosthetics are a defense.
Some amputees talk about how they put their leg on first thing and take it off last thing and don’t want to be seen without their leg on. They will literally work through terrible blisters, rashes, and pain to avoid going legless, or be seen outside their homes with any assistive devices other than prostheses.
Disability is longstanding and not going away—the future will give us new ways to be or become disabled.
The promise of prosthetics has meant for them that they need to appear as close to nondisabled as possible. To make themselves invulnerable to other disability narratives that may haunt their existence—of helplessness or need, of shame and pity, and even of just desserts: that they are not trying hard enough to “overcome.”
Instead, the promise of prosthetics—that they re-enable us and make us whole again—requires our constant work to be “good crips,” those who confirm the power of technology over disability.
I’m not against prosthetics; I’m wearing one, aren’t I? We amputees are (or some of us are) quite lucky for the technologies we do have, and the choices about those technologies. I love my leg and my perfect Velcros. Access is key: we should be able to get different types of technologies to try out, and then also afford.
But I also want to be able to take off my leg without fear that people will reconsider their judgments about my capability and competence, my status as re-enabled and whole.
You see, if we crips don’t buy into prosthetics as redemption, they won’t either, and we’ll go back to being seen as incompetent and incomplete. Broken.
My legs are not an invitation to your education, or your desire.
There is actually research about perceptions of people with bionics (prosthetic limbs, retinal implants, exoskeletons). In a paper called “Disabled or Cyborg?” (a false dilemma), researchers share their conclusion from an online study that asked people their impressions of various groups. They gathered that:
“People with physical disabilities who wear bionic prostheses . . . are perceived as more competent than people with physical disabilities in general [but both groups still less competent than nondisabled people] . . . So-called cyborgs are perceived as much colder than able-bodied individuals [and others with physical disabilities without bionics]. . . .”[4]
The fact is that puzzling out how to do things differently can offer a space of personal creativity and new surprise and pleasure in the mundane tasks. But I only hear those stories in disability groups (and not just amputee groups), and then only rarely and sometimes abashedly. Joy is not what we’re supposed to feel or what we’re supposed to share to get “peer support.” These crip intimacies include not a triumph over something, but the sharing of everyday tricks and ways we have, in sharing the creativity of our embodiments with and for one another.
Prosthetists and physical therapists get praised for their humanitarian work. News stories pump up engineers working on better prosthetic feet or hands. But I really like Fred’s Legs: an amputee and his spouse sell stretchy prosthetic socket covers out of stretchy fabrics, sewn on a home machine with some small customization possible. This is very cheap and easy tech, and they ship all over. I don’t need a prescription to order from Fred. I don’t need to leave my home. The things we do, get, and learn, and even sometimes buy from each other are never on the nightly news. They can’t see us in our making and our sharing, with joy and some frustration and community, too; they want too much for us to be tragedy so the abled can be the heroes, can save us. The promise of prosthetics is that a humanitarian engineering team takes over.
I want to be able to take off my leg without fear that people will reconsider their judgments about my capability and competence.
Prosthetic devices make it so that we may pass for a time as less disabled (or at least stave off being recognized as disabled under some circumstances)—this includes cases of breast prostheses and cosmetic prosthetic covers for arms and legs. With my leg, I look ambulatory, though I might look disabled with a limp or cane. I look less disabled to other people; I am no different, but different perceptions get placed upon me. People can forget for a time that I am disabled.
Showing up wearing my prosthesis means I get routed to a long staircase. (No thank you.)
Passing is its own burden: to avoid being fully seen, but also to avoid being discounted. Because disabled people are discounted. “Disabled or Cyborg?” Best to stick to the side where you are judged as cold but competent.
Of course, it’s a luxury many non-prosthetized disabled people don’t enjoy: to be able to convince others of not-quite-the-truth, playing on their expectations.
Better to pass sometimes, and deliberate carefully about disclosure:
When and to whom you reveal yourself (and whether they will treat you differently after that disclosure),
Where your need for accommodation or access is so great that you have to disclose (and whether what you then encounter is retaliation for being disabled),
How to best explain your body and what this explanation will produce in those around you (e.g., pity, understanding, questions about your ability to live/laugh/love and work).
I do this, too—ask myself about what I reveal as a hard-of-hearing, chemo-brained amputee with Crohn’s and tinnitus—where disclosure is important and not. Rarely am I handing out the list, and recipients wouldn’t know what to do with the list anyway.
The promise of prosthetics to this cyborg is that I can push people away who would do me damage.
There is a list of people I try to appear as abled as possible to. People who would weaponize any perceived incompetence against me. People who would swoop down in helper mode to make me doubt myself. People who would point out perceived faults to my children or my colleagues. People who would cry about me, even though I have no tears for me. People who have said enough nonsense about other disabled people that they cannot be trusted.
A couple shares a story about a friend who became “a vegetable,” but they just mean quadriplegic. He got a spinal cord injury from an accident. They visited him at his home once about six months after his accident, judged him to be too sad, and never visited their once-friend again.
So awkward to watch people tell a story with no self-reflection or shame, recognizing that they would just as soon turn away from you—judge you and your life “too sad” from a single visit.
And perhaps tell my partner he should leave me, and take our kids. His leaving would be typical of the experience of a woman who acquires a disability: our partners are statistically much more likely to leave. And parents with disabilities are at much higher risk of having their children taken away.
They have told a short anecdote from decades ago, and they have opened up my mind to a series of horrors that would undo the life I know and remove the support I have.
They tell this story in passing, and so I pass as hard as I can.
The promise of prosthetics is that I can betray my disabled brethren and fuel the ableist narratives that feature bodies like mine.
I keep my leg on all day when they visit, on my feet and busy working, and every visit after. There are physical consequences to appearing this way, trying to put on the ruse that I am not “really disabled,” or at least not in the way they would find sad.
I get called an inspiration, and I know the vast separation between their experience of me and my actual experience. I want to scream, but can’t have them suspect mental infirmity in addition to my physical invalidity.
I want no intimacy with them. I will choke down an Advil, smooth on extra Adaptskin 50, and be absolutely exhausted trying to keep up the ruse that I don’t need to sit down, don’t need to slow down.
The promise of prosthetics goes:
Gaslight (prosthetics are so advanced now),
Gatekeep (you certainly aren’t like those other disabled people),
Girlboss (you can do it all, forsake your bodymind).
The promise of prosthetics is that I can betray my disabled brethren and fuel the ableist narratives that feature bodies like mine. The promise of prosthetics means that I can pretend for a while and hide my vulnerability away—people will believe me “re-enabled” if I appear just so, play into their expectations about prosthetics. “Wow,” they say. “Prosthetics really are so advanced; you get around great on that thing.”
Footnotes:
Imagine a classic historical post–Civil War old-timey leg with a below-knee socket and joints on either side of the knee and an upper leather portion around the thigh that laces up to hold the leg on securely. ↩︎
Do people still use “getting jiggy” as a euphemism for sex? ↩︎
Before I had children, I was fascinated by fictional depictions of daughters whose mothers had bailed. How were they shaped by this primal loss? How could any mother justify inflicting such damage?
I became a mother myself, and suddenly my point of view shifted. I was still mindful of the ways our mothers’ choices form us, but I woke to a second perspective: Being the mother was immense, all-encompassing, life-and-identity rearranging. Being the mother was hard, and once you had undertaken it you could never go back to the life you once had.
Or could you? During the most intense early-mothering moments, my creative dreams, intellectual pursuits, and very identity buried under mounds of dirty diapers and unfolded laundry, I found I could justify leaving—at least in my imagination.
My debut novel, The Mother Act, grew from the seed of an I-would-never-act-on-it yearning to leave this new mother self behind and hop the first bus back to the person I used to be. But the novel explores both sides: The daughter growing up in the fallout of abandonment, and the mother whose need for self-actualization is great enough to trigger this cataclysm.
I never lost my narrative sympathy for the left-behind child, but after I became a mother I wanted more than knee-jerk judgments of “Selfish! Reprehensible!” in stories with mothers who left. These eight novels deliver that nuance—four from the perspective of an abandoned daughter, four from the perspective of the absent mother.
Jo’s mother vanished when she was 14, becoming a wound that Jo “could never fully stitch,” isn’t even sure she wants to. The loss is deepened by the unresolved mystery. Was her mother murdered? Kidnapped? Did she suffer amnesia? Run away? In the 14 years since, Jo has imagined it all. But in this dystopian world where women are closely monitored for magical inclinations and other signs of deviance, perhaps the most dangerous explanation for her mother’s disappearance is that she was a witch. Which means Jo herself is under suspicion, especially as a Black queer single woman approaching the age 30 deadline by which women must marry. When her mother’s will turns out to contain a mission for her, Jo sets off on a trip to an island in Lake Superior, where answers—and surprises—await.
Olga and Prieto haven’t seen their mother, Blanca, in over 25 years, since she abandoned them as young teenagers to fight for a militant political cause. Their only contact is the letters she sends, always knowing what they’re up to, frequently judging their life choices. She’s proud of Prieto’s success as a congressman representing their Latinx Brooklyn neighborhood but disapproves of Olga’s work as the go-to wedding planner of the one percent, work Olga comes to realize she embraced in rebellion to the very values that led Blanca to leave. What different choices might she have made, Olga wonders, had her mother deemed her worthy of time and affection? Blanca is an unfulfilled longing, existing to Olga as “a floating entity,” her only location “inside the many envelopes that arrived from destinations unknown”—until the day she resurfaces in the flesh, asking for help.
Louise is 9, growing up in 1960s suburban Toronto, when her mother walks out. The note she leaves on the refrigerator reads “I have gone. I am not coming back. Louise knows how to work the washing machine.” Louise has always felt her mother’s attention to be elusive and untrustworthy, and even as her father follows every lead to track her down, convinced she’s been enticed away by “a fancy Dan lady’s man,” Louise is sickened by the possibility of her return. Instead she turns her desires toward Mrs. Richter, the new neighbor Louise prays will adopt her, and eventually Mrs. Richter’s son, Abel, whom she loves with a devotion that grows deeper and more desperate in adulthood. Abel is ultimately as elusive as her mother was, and Louise considers him “the real tragic loss” of her life, “next to which the supposed tragic loss, the one that garnered all the pity, counted for nothing.”
Motherhood abounds in this celebrated debut: motherhood desired and undesired, mothers absent through suicide or estrangement, and “The Mothers” of the title, the older church ladies who watch over and judge the protagonist, 17-year-old Nadia Turner. As the novel opens, Nadia is reeling from her mother’s death by suicide, wondering what people expect her to say: “That one day, she’d had a mother, and the next, she didn’t? That the only tragic circumstance that had befallen her mother was her own self?” When Nadia discovers that she herself is pregnant, she knows she can’t allow a baby to “nail her life in place when she’d just been given a chance to escape.” She has an abortion, a choice that reverberates over the following decades as she struggles to come into her own as a motherless daughter.
In this novella from the author of the Neapolitan Quartet, Leda is alone on a beach holiday when a young mother sparks memories of her own maternal transgressions. At an academic conference years before, her daughters small and her life force sapped by the demands of domesticity, Leda was reawakened. Returning from the trip, she felt her daughters’ gazes “longing to tame me, but more brilliant was the brightness of the life outside them, new colors, new bodies, new intelligence…and nothing, nothing that seemed to me reconcilable with that domestic space.” She left her husband and daughters and had no contact for three years. Though she eventually returned—“when the weight in the pit of my stomach became unbearable”—the period of absence still haunts her.
Maribeth Klein is an exhausted working mother. She’s keeping too many balls in the air for her job, her husband, and their four-year-old twins when she has a heart attack at 44. She survives, but her recovery is hampered by the mental and physical labor no one else seems able to shoulder long enough for her to properly recuperate. When she withdraws $25,000 of inheritance money, pays cash for a train ticket, and disappears, her act feels like a matter of life and death. Alone in her new furnished apartment, she grapples both with what she’s done to her family and with her own experience as an adoptee. One night she watches a movie about a mother who abandons her kids, and she knows the character will be redeemed because she’s given screen time and a voice. Despite her own justifications, Maribeth fears that in the made-for-TV movie of her life, she is the villain.
Laura Brown, one of three protagonists in this 1998 novel, is a post-war suburban housewife and mother suffocating inside the ill-fitting expectations of her role. Her deepest desire, on the single day we follow her, is to read uninterrupted, to lose herself—reclaim herself—inside the pages of Mrs. Dalloway. She leaves her young son with a babysitter and checks into a hotel for a few hours’ solitude. There she finds herself contemplating suicide, thinking how deeply comforting it would be to “simply go away. To say to them all, I couldn’t manage, you had no idea; I didn’t want to try anymore.” When she does return for her son, she is unsettled by his watchful devotion, by the knowledge that he will always intuit her failure to be what he needs. Her ultimate departure from her family occurs off the page, clarified by a surprising reveal late in the book.
In this mesmerizing 2023 debut, women the world over have begun to vanish from their homes. All of them are mothers. The disappearances are becoming a public health crisis, and the missing mothers are analyzed, sympathized with, reviled. “It’s the greatest stigma of all for a woman. The leaving of the child.” Are mothers revolting against their roles? Succumbing to their animal natures? Ada is distressed by the phenomenon, as she is by so much else: flooding, forest fires, whether she made the right decision bearing a child into ecological collapse. Her husband, Danny, is more consumed by his work than by the disappearances—until the morning he wakes to find Ada’s side of the bed empty.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
