15 Indie Press Books to Read This Spring

Posted on by Jo Lou

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:

Tin House: How We Named the Stars by Andrés N. Ordorica

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.

Thirty West: Tender Hoof by Nicole Rivas

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.

Regal House Publishing: That Pinson Girl by Gerry Wilson

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.

Wandering Aengus Press: Studio of the Voice by Marcia Aldrich

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.

Montag Press: Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood by Bradley Sides

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.

Soft Skull Press: I Love You So Much Its Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall

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 Bay by 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 Swim by 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.

Forest Avenue Press: Chicano Frankenstein by Daniel Olivas

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.

Catapult: These Letters End In Tears by Musih Tedji Xaviere

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.

Unnamed Press: But The Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu

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.

Overcup Press: Wilderness & The American Spirit by Ruby McConnell

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.

Book*hug Press: How You Were Born by Kate Cayley

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.

Autumn House Press: Half-Lives by Lynn Schmeidler

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 on Loving Literature That Hates You

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s smartly interior debut novel But the Girl appears 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 up amongst 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.

9 Books About Multiverses

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

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.

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

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 by Micaiah Johnson

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.

Present Tense Machine by Gunnhild Øyehaug, translated by Kari Dickson

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.

Many Worlds: Or, the Simulacra edited by Cadwell Turnbull and Josh Eure

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.

Meet Me in Another Life by Catriona Silvey

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.

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

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.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

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.

(And if you don’t want to take it from me, take it from this extremely viral tweet.)

My Son’s Love Life Is None of My Business, Except It Is

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

“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.

The Promise of Prosthetics Is a Curse

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

“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:

  1. 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. ↩︎
  2. Do people still use “getting jiggy” as a euphemism for sex? ↩︎
  3. “Not a girl,” says Janet from The Good Place. ↩︎
  4. See Bertolt Meyer and Frank Asbrock, “Disabled or Cyborg? How Bionics Affect Stereotypes Toward People with Physical Disabilities,” Frontiers in Psychology vol. 9, November 20, 2018 (Chemnitz University of Technology). There is a lot to unpack about this study and the categories used, but that goes beyond the scope of this essay!  ↩︎

From Disability Intimacy edited by Alice Wong. Compilation copyright © 2024 by Alice Wong. Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Ashley Shew. Published by arrangement with Vintage, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

8 Novels About Absent Mothers

Posted on by EL Assistant2

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.  

The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings

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 Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez

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. 

The Romantic by Barbara Gowdy

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.”

The Mothers by Brit Bennett

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.

The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein

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. 

Leave Me by Gayle Forman

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.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham 

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. 

The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman by Molly Lynch

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.

“The Shining” Helped Me Acknowledge the Violence in My Marriage

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

When I watched The Shining for the first time, the movie got stuck right when Jack Nicholson’s character takes an axe to the door of the room where his wife is hiding. “Here’s Johnny,” he’s about to declare, thrusting his face through the half-demolished door. But we got stuck just before that, when the door is still largely intact. The wood is splintering, the axe is poking through, and Shelly Duvall, face wild with fear, is cowering in the corner and clutching a kitchen knife with both hands.

As I was wiping the iridescent disc against my shirt—it was the era of Netflix DVDs, and this one had a stranger’s thumbprint on the back—my husband asked what I thought of the movie so far. Even though the DVD was no longer in the drive, the laptop screen still had the image from the movie on it: the door, the axe, the terrified face. I was scared, the way you get scared when you watch a scary movie. I really couldn’t see a way out of this for Shelly Duvall, and my heart felt tight in my chest, like a giant hand was squeezing the breath out of me. Maybe that was why I didn’t think before answering, with total sincerity, that it reminded me of us.

If you can imagine a marriage in which that was an honest answer, then you can also imagine what a bad idea it was to give it. Luckily, my husband was more surprised and hurt than angry. It might have been the first time I’d come so close to mentioning his violence towards me. We never talked about it, the way we never talked about certain bodily functions or his unwritten dissertation. I can’t really remember what happened next, but I must have walked my comment back successfully, because I know we finished the movie and that the sight of Jack Nicholson’s demonic face, frozen and blue, left me dizzy with relief.  

To be fair, my husband never came after me with an axe, and I never screamed the way Duvall does in that scene. As I discovered when he careened around our apartment armed with smaller, duller bladed objects, I am not good at screaming: I can yell in anger but, when terrified, I make a kind of rusty squeak. The real parallel between us and the Torrances, though, wasn’t Jack’s axe, but the creative ambitions that led him to pick it up in the first place. On this first, electrifying viewing of the film, all I could see was a link between creativity and violence, and all I could hear was what I took to be its central message: stay away from writers. Too late for me; like Wendy Torrance, I had married one.

There are, I can now see, other things in The Shining. It’s a movie about alcoholism and weird hotels and the genocide of America’s Indigenous peoples—to name just a few of the seemingly infinite interpretations out there. But that first time through, it boiled down for me to writing and violence. Typewriter and axe. The film articulated a circuit between creativity—or at least creative ambition—and destruction. This circuit was the defining feature of my life at the time, and far more than anything I had read online about the cycle of violence, the movie told me that what I was going through fit a pattern and was therefore really real. By recruiting the viewer’s sympathies for Wendy while making Jack into a maniacal villain (at least in the movie’s final scenes), it also told me that I was, astonishingly, not the one in the wrong. That this was a revelation tells you the degree to which I had entered into a weird version of reality, one in which my husband’s writing was the center of the world, and anything that impeded it warranted his rage.

We had met soon after college and started graduate school together, but while I was on track to finish a dutiful and exciting-to-no-one-but-me dissertation, he had set his aside to write essays on art and film. For a long time, even as I came to understand writing as an essential part of my husband’s being, I thought of his anger as a wholly separate thing. It felt like something optional and temporary, like an ugly jacket. He was a gifted writer and quickly found some success, but “some success” was never enough. When his writing wasn’t going well, or when an editor passed on his work, I would suffer. He would sit on me, or shove me in the closet, or throw me down on the bed—actually, a second-hand futon held together with tape and dowels—and hover over me with one of our thrift store kitchen knives, glowering. Once he threatened to cut off my head. I think I laughed. It would have taken forever.

About two years before I left, he began to cut off my breathing regularly. Holding the back of my head, he would press my face against some soft surface: the bed, his own chest. Once, he held my head against his chest for so long that I thought I might die. I remember the shift from not being able to see because my eyes were closed to not being able to see because I was losing consciousness: the familiar multi-colored dark behind my eyelids disappeared, and real darkness took its place. After that, if I felt the household weather shifting, I would slip on my shoes, grab my backpack, and be gone before he knew it.

All I could hear was what I took to be its central message: stay away from writers.

But for a long time, none of it felt real to me: the threatening, the shoving, the knives. It all seemed temporary, false: a bit of bad theater. What felt real—what felt true—was singing private, made-up ditties in the kitchen, or walking for miles to see a green hill covered in yellow poppies, or seeing his work show up in my inbox and stopping my own to tinker with it. In the story I told myself about our future, when the time came—when he was successful enough, lauded enough, published enough—he would set his anger aside, and its unreality would stop casting a shadow over our “real” life. Watching Jack Torrance terrorize Wendy on screen, I saw a different story, one in which the habit of anger became inextricably entwined with writerly ambition and finally replaced it, becoming an end in itself.

If something crystallized in that moment, something was lost, too. It wasn’t just that I loved my husband (and I did). It was that I couldn’t imagine even a single day on earth without him. To take his anger seriously—to acknowledge that it put me in actual, physical danger—meant letting go of a long, shared history. If I had once told myself his fury wasn’t real, by the end, I had trained myself to assign that unreality to everything that had ever been good between us. I had to, to be able to leave.

After I left, he called relentlessly, making endless demands, one of which was that I never write about him. For a decade, I didn’t. In retrospect, the request strikes me as prescient (after all, here we are) but strange. For most of our marriage, I focused on academic work, constructing carefully researched arguments over a satisfyingly blocky foundation of footnotes. I typed all the time, but I didn’t write the way he did: widely, freely, using personal experience as a lens to view the world.

For most of that decade after our divorce, I associated creativity with violence. At its start, I briefly dated someone who worked in a theater. If he expressed the hope that a show would go well or (worse) the fear that it wouldn’t, I would, like clockwork, dream that he was screaming at me or chasing me. In one dream, he tried to skin me. It was a relief when he cheated: when he left, his nightmare double went, too.

After that breakup, in a bar with a friend, I overheard a man droning on and on to a very patient woman about his screenplay. My friend rolled her eyes: men. I rolled mine, too, but inside I was freaking out. Was this lady safe? This guy wanted to write a whole movie. Could she not see how dangerous that made him, how dangerous to her, specifically?

Even scholarly pursuits struck me as suspect, which caused problems; I work in an English department, and my colleagues’ research agendas made me secretly nervous. I trusted myself to handle roadblocks (even when they seemed to darken my whole future) and rejection (even when it made years of work seem suddenly meaningless). But other people, I didn’t trust at all. Basically, if someone was devoted to an activity that involved any amount of hope or anxiety or ego, any kind of soaring hopes or shattering disappointments, I steered clear.

Over the years, this feeling has shifted. Life has forced me into sustained contact with a number of creative individuals, and not one of them has ever chased me around with an axe. Through my job and sheer geographical luck, I’ve ended up with novelists and poets as friends. And, in order to be a friend, I’ve had to suspend my fears. I lived with a playwright for a while, and it turns out you can’t be a good roommate to someone who both writes and makes theater without getting caught up in their hopes and disappointments. Nor can you befriend poets and novelists precisely because they love language the way you do, and then avoid reading what they write. At first, I suppressed reflexive terror when a friend sent me their work, but I welcome it now. A friend’s writing is, after all, a distillation of that friend: a portion of their unique, weird being fixed in language. My partner, a fellow academic, is always absorbed in a project, and I find myself more enthused than alarmed when he shares work with me.

When his writing wasn’t going well, I would suffer.

I’ve even started writing more myself. During a recent, precious sabbatical, I started working on a novel instead of a second scholarly book. “What’s going on?” I asked my playwright friend, alarmed. “Why am I doing this?” She said I was possessed by “the imp”—her version of the muse—and that I had better just let it take charge.

The word “imp” made me picture a small green creature with a malevolent, self-delighted expression not all that different from Nicholson’s “here’s Johnny” face. An imp is a mischief-maker. An imp will mess things up. But I took her advice, and I kept writing, and now I’m filled with hope and anxiety and ego, and it sucks. The soaring hopes and shattering disappointments are a daily torment. Still, I haven’t smashed down any doors with an axe.

A few weeks into my imp-induced writing fit, I read an essay by the man who grew the world’s biggest pumpkin. It turns out that for pumpkin-growers, maybe even more than for writers, success is elusive and the possibility of failure ever-present. The author, Travis Gienger, planted just two seeds in order to give his pumpkins the level of care and attention that they needed—a level that limited his social life and drew him away from ordinary pursuits. Both seeds produced vines, and both vines produced giants, but one burst before it was done growing. Imagine the heartbreak, the disappointment. Reading about it, some shadowy, mouse-like part of me cringed with fear: what does a person do—to themselves, to the people around them—when a dream pumpkin splits? But I kept reading, and as I read, I kept rooting for Travis, who was so clearly possessed by his own incredibly specific imp.

The Shining taught me that what was happening to me in my marriage was real: the link between writing and violence I felt in my home existed. But in order to grasp that link, I simplified the story, and that simplification involved telling myself a lie: that creativity is a man with an axe. My friends helped me begin unlearning that lie. It was Travis Gienger’s pumpkins, though, that helped me formulate an antidote, one that told me that our imps—the drives behind our wild pursuits, our impractical dreams—make living in the world possible. For some people, they’re as vital as air or water. That was true of my husband, which wasn’t in itself a bad thing. It’s true of my writer friends, too, and of my partner, who throws his whole being into his work (his imp is rigorous; it keeps long hours). And yet, those pursuits, those dreams, are inevitably risky, difficult, quixotic. You want to grow a huge pumpkin, so you spend less time with your family and friends; you lie awake at night plotting and worrying and strategizing; you protect your vines from frost and hail; and you do all this knowing that it could all be for nothing. Your pumpkin might flourish—it might win—but it also might burst.

Triumph and loss are both part of the process, and you have to be able to absorb both. Plus, you have to cope with the imp. The imp doesn’t care about triumph and loss. It just wants something new to exist.

“You’re breaking my concentration,” Jack snarls in an earlier scene in The Shining, when Wendy suggests, tentatively, that he show her what he’s writing. Then he smacks his forehead, rips a page from the typewriter, and tears it to pieces: miniature acts of violence meant both to frighten his wife, and to illustrate just how disruptive he finds her presence.

The thing is, though, Jack was never writing on that typewriter. He was just typing, banging out the same sentence, over and over, line after line. I don’t think he even had an imp, the bastard. He had ambition, maybe, and he had anger. Those—I’ve finally learned—are not the same thing.

23 Indie Presses to Support After the Close of Small Press Distribution

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

On March 28, Small Press Distribution (SPD), the 55-year old company that helped 385 indie publishers deliver their books to customers, collapsed without warning. This is an existential blow in a business where finances are delicate at the best of times. Books remain stranded in warehouses and could take months to be recovered, past income from previously-sold books has been withheld, and hundreds of small presses need to find new ways to get books into readers’ hands.

Most small presses make little profit. They’re primarily motivated by their love for books and the literary community: filling gaps in the market, bucking trends, broadening the sphere of voices that get read, handling authors’ work with great care, and propelling innovation and diversity in literature. 

On April 25, the Poetry Foundation announced a bridge fund to support small presses impacted by the closure of SPD. The $150K fund is accepting applications for a maximum distribution of $7.5K per press. However, indie publishers need as much support as possible if they hope to weather this crisis and continue publishing books. Everyday readers can contribute by donating to their fundraisers, purchasing their books, and spreading the word.

Some small publishers have launched fundraising campaigns, including Black Lawrence Press, Fonograf Editions, Rose Metal Press, Cardboard House Press, ELJ Editions, Kore Press Institute, Game Over Books, and Noemi Press. Additionally, we have compiled a list below of 20 small presses to support and books of note that we think our readers will love, but don’t stop here! Find more indie publishers affected by SPD’s closing at this link.

Editor’s note: All purchase links in this article are directed to the presses’ websites.

Anvil Press

This East Vancouver-based publisher has been making a home for out-there Canadian literature since 1990. Anvil publishes poet laureates, debut short fiction writers, and everyone in between. Their two 2023 prize winners, Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister in the Brotherhood by Hilary Peach and But the sun, and the fish, and the ships, and the waves by Conyer Clayton come highly recommended!

Forthcoming: The Tenants by Pat Dobie (July 2024)

Dobie’s short novel follows the intersecting lives of three Vancouver residents struggling to live in their rapidly changing city. The winner of the International 3-Day Novel Contest, The Tenants is “stark, observational, darkly comic, and deeply human.”

Apogee Press

Founded in 1997, Apogee Press publishes innovative and experimental poetry, pushing boundaries and conventions of art, style, and thought. Their catalog is culturally and formally diverse; with each new book, they expand the definition of their press and its approach to poetry. They have published the debut full-length works of Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Andrew Maxwell, Pattie McCarthy, Denise Newman, Truong Tran, and Khaty Xiong. Check out Tran’s dust and conscience, winner of the 2002 San Francisco State Poetry Center Prize.

Blackwater Press

A young, West Virginia-based publisher, Blackwater works with a group of international editors and supplements its publishing with inhouse editorial and translation services. They host short story competitions (the winners of which are published in a best of anthology) and have a special “Interesting Lives” series that specializes in biographies and historical studies of figures from the 18th century.

Forthcoming: Burying Norma Jeane by Leah Rogin (August 2024)

Rogin’s novel tracks a mother-daughter road trip across America: their pursuit to liberate the late Marilyn Monroe — born “Norma Jeane” — entombed next to Hugh Hefner. As an “epic adventure novel,” Burying Norma Jeane will certainly thrill readers. 

Black Lawrence Press

Since 2004, this press has published a broad range of invigorating and electrifying literature. They primarily print contemporary poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, in addition to hybrid work, anthologies, and German and French translations. Around 50 of their writers have published multiple books with Black Lawrence Press, and their continued work is a testament to the press’ collaborative and enjoyable publishing process. Not surprisingly, Black Lawrence Press produces about 24 books each year—a robust number for an independent publisher—but every book proves as captivating as the last. 

Forthcoming: Horsemouth and Aquariumhead by Elizabeth Horner Turner (September 2024)

Winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, Horsemouth and Aquariumhead features twelve tales that are surreal yet relatable. With humor, tragedy, and fantasy, Turner’s flash fiction prods at readers’ own realities through imaginative and odd characters.

Black Square Editions

In 1999, John Yau launched Black Square Editions with a goal to publish translations of little-known books by well-known writers, as well as new work by emerging and established writers. They have published novels, novellas, short stories, prose poems, poetry and essays. Their authors include Matvei Yankelevich, Rosalyn Drexler, Brian Evenson, Andrew Joron, Eugene Lim, Gary Lutz, and Michael Leong. They are an imprint of Off the Park Press, a nonprofit literary arts organization based in New York, NY. Award-winning poet Charles North has published many books with Black Square Editions, including his most recent book of poetry and prose: News, Poetry, and Poplars.

Cardboard House Press 

Named in honor of renowned Peruvian author Martín Adán’s 1928 debut novel The Cardboard House, Cardboard House Press occupies a niche in the literary landscape as an exclusive publisher of Spanish-language poetry in bilingual editions. Since 2014, they’ve introduced a number of important Puerto Rican and Latin American poets to anglophone literature, including Olvido García Valdés and Mariela Dreyfus. In addition to their regular publishing schedule, they release a series of handmade Cartonera books, created through public workshops in which participants learn the craft of bookbinding. 

Forthcoming: Bridges / Puentes by Alicia Genovese, translated by Daniel Coudriet (June 2024)

In Bridges / Puentes, Genovese embraces bridges as sometimes a link, sometimes an obstacle. Originally written in Spanish, the long poem interweaves her childhood and adolescence with the political landscape of Buenos Aires.

C&R Press

Founded in 2006, this independent publisher is “conscious and responsible” (literally, in the name), so they prioritize sustainability and social good while bringing outstanding independent literature to wide audiences. C&R Press publishes across genres, producing novels, story collections, memoirs, art books, experimental works, poetry, chapbooks, history, essays, and anthologies. The 2021 winner of the Independent Publishers Gold Book Award in Poetry, Lauren Berry’s surrealist collection, The Rented Altar, follows a young bride trying to find her footing as a new stepmother in a new neighborhood.

ELJ Editions

ELJ expands the definition of “emerging” to encompass the endless series of new beginnings and jumping off points a writer must face—whether publishing for the first time or experimenting with genre and form, this press honors the process of reinvention. Founded in 2013, they run the Afternoon Shorts novella series, the Redacted series to highlight marginalized and underrepresented experiences, and publish upwards of twelve books a year. Their motto? “Be Well. Write Well. Read Well.”

Flood Editions

Flood Editions has released four or five books every year since 2001. They champion poets and writers at all stages but also stand out for their willingness to delve into the archives and reissue forgotten classics. Case in point, Ronald Johnson’s Radi os, a bold revision-through-excision of Milton’s Paradise Lost that appeared and then disappeared in 1977. They’ve published giants like Fanny Howe and Jay Wright, newcomers like Ann Kim, and even the odd book of photography and visual art. What binds this eclecticism together is a discerning eye for literature that combines strangeness, beauty, and a profound capacity to redraw the parameters of what is considered art. 

Fonograf Editions

A prolific, young combination nonprofit publisher and literary record label, Fonograf Editions has released thirty books and records since its inception in 2016. They’ve published work by poet and translator Isabel Zapata, essayist Hilary Plum, uncovered and released 70’s era 12-inch recordings of John Ashberry and Audre Lorde, and run the revolutionary artist Ray Johnson inspired imprint, Bunny. Tied into their emphasis on genre-bending and expanding the realms and mediums through which we experience literature, is a commitment to affordability and public-access. The press hosts free public events throughout the year and shares components from each of its published works for free. Their packed upcoming publication schedule includes a long out of print rock album by Anne Sexton!

Forthcoming: A Mouth Holds Many Things edited by Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan

Comprising 36 literary experiments from women and nonbinary BIPOC writer-artists, this full-color print book straddles collage, AI-generated writing, image-text montages, and a host of other novel expressions. It’s an exploration of the many vessels that can hold language and meaning, engaging all of the five senses in a quest to expand what is legible.

Game Over Books

Founded in 2017, this small publisher is a Boston-based press run by “nerdy artists.” They publish fiction and poetry, emphasizing new and emerging writers. They also host craft workshops. In their words, Game Over Books strives to “push creative writing forward into the Next Level.” The press has numerous forthcoming books: Check them out here. 

Forthcoming: A Wellness Check by Bri Gonzalez

Gonzalez places the reader in the mind of a so-called villain recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder, prodding at pop culture’s use of mental illness as spectacle. In this collection, they artfully blend hybrid prose, poetry, screenplays, and fragment essays.

Hanging Loose Press 

Founded in 1966, this literary magazine-cum-indie press has championed young writers, translators, and sidelined voices for almost six decades. Poetry is at the heart of their mission—they published Maggie Nelson’s debut collection, Shiner, and were once edited by Denise Levertov—but over the decades they’ve expanded in every direction. The annual Loose Translation Prize gives MFA students the opportunity to publish a full-length work of translation and launched the career of luminary Anne Posten. Their biannual journal is one the few long-standing platforms to dedicate a section to highschool writers, and their back catalog is a literary treasure trove. We recommend Barbara Ann Porte’s He’s Sorry, She’s Sorry, They’re Sorry Too.

Kore Press Institute

An intersectional-feminist literary arts organization, KPI is dedicated to “keeping the margins in the center.” For over two and a half decades they’ve published writing in every genre that foregrounds marginalized voices and agitates for change, including Alexis V. Jackson’s debut poetry collection My Sisters’ Country and Alexis Orgera’s celebrated exploration of family grief and mental illness, Head Case: My Father, Alzheimer’s & Other Brainstorms. Beyond publishing, KPI hosts the Notes from the Motherfield live storytelling series that platforms “radical mothers committed to telling complicated truths.”

Litmus Press

Founded in 2001 within a constellation of older presses that included the now-defunct O Books and The Post-Apollo Press, Litmus began with a publishing-out-of-your-kitchen determination. They’ve since grown into an established small press that specializes in poetry and translation, and they are spearheading a new open-access e-book publishing platform called Open Poetics.

Forthcoming: Fall Creek by Lyn Hejinian (April 2024)

A prolific writer, Hejinian’s latest collection of poems ponders the everyday detritus of the world, stringing images and philosophic musings together into “meandering specifics” about the strange contemporary moment.

LittlePuss Press

Founded by Cat Fitzpatrick and Kay Gabriel in 2021, this small publisher is “a feminist press run by two trans women.” The young press publishes fiction and nonfiction, specializing in work by transgender writers. They also throw parties: fun, eclectic, queer, literary parties. LittlePuss Press is currently working on The Trans Reprint Project, an initiative to reprint historically significant literary works that are no longer available, written by transgender authors. Already, they have reprinted the Stonewall-award winning anthology Meanwhile Elsewhere: Science Fiction & Fantasy from Transgender Writers. 

Forthcoming: Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix by Katherine Cross (June 2024)

Cross’s fiery, fierce, and funny essay argues against the mingling of social media and political activism. According to LittlePuss Press, it’s a “a poisonous love letter that asks: Is this all really the praxis that posting was supposed to be?”

Mason Jar Press

Based out of Baltimore, Mason Jar Press has produced handmade chapbooks and full-length books by established and emerging writers since 2014. They seek to challenge the status quo while publishing work of high merit. According to the press, they offer “strong, straight-forward poetry and prose that’s just a little off.” Accessible yet boundary-pushing, they reach beyond the mainstream while reaching toward a diverse range of readers. 

Forthcoming: Bone / Blood / Blossom by Mandy May (May 2024)

Through enchanting, lyrical language, May’s poetry explores the realities of chronic illness, embracing beauty, authenticity, and pain. 100% of profits from the book will be donated to Type 1 Diabetes research.

Noemi Press

Embracing work considered “too much, too loud, and too other,” this press publishes daring, forward-looking literature. They have over 100 works in print, including fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry. A historically brown and queer press, Noemi Press strives to print work from new voices that might be marginalized elsewhere. Their Infidel Poetics Series offers a space for writers to interrogate the overlap between poetry and politics in short critical works. Additionally, Noemi Press and Letras Latinas co-produce the Akrilica Series, which features innovative Latino writing. The press’ Spring 2024 books include Love the World or Get Killed Trying by Alvina Chamberland, Girl Work by Zefyr Lisowski, and Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian. 

Rescue Press

With their emphasis on the sui generis, this editor-run press prides itself on publishing work that straddles forms and genres. They release poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, and also a host of titles that sit somewhere in between. Estranger by Erik Anderson begins with a memoiristic recollection of a grandfather’s death, but then swiftly reinvents itself as an essay on cinema, a monograph on Camus, a personal reflection on fatherhood. Together, Rescue Press’s Open Prose Series and Black Box Poetry Prize present regularly showcase highlights from the outskirts of American literature.

River River Books

Embracing the idea that “you cannot step in the same river twice,” this press aims to publish two exceptional poetry books a year, distributing them to as many readers as possible. Their limited catalog enables their editors to support and engage with their authors thoughtfully, approaching their work with patience, care, attention, and respect. Founded in March 2022, River River Books prints a diverse range of poetry that “lives with and among others.” Their values are evident in all of their work, notably including An Eye in Each Square by Lauren Camp, the poet laureate of New Mexico.

Rose Metal Press

Since 2006, Rose Metal Press has been a home for hard-to-categorize literature, eschewing traditional literary forms like poetry and fiction in favor of the innovative novellas-in-flash, the bespoke work that combines text with images, just about anything that falls outside the normative pigeon holes. From their Massachussettes base, they’ve published forty-one shape-shifting books, including the 2023 PEN/America finalist The Anchored World by Jasmine Sawers. In addition, RMP’s field guides and anthologies of unique pockets in contemporary literature like The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction edited by Zoë Bossiere and Dinty W. Moore, have been incorporated into hundreds of high school and college classrooms.

Sixteen Rivers Press

Named for the sixteen rivers that flow into the San Francisco Bay, this publishing collective was founded in 1999 to create a sustainable, shared-work press that provides an alternative publishing avenue by and for Bay Area poets. They print at least two outstanding books of poetry each spring. As of 2024, they have produced 65 books, including the recent Women Twice Removed by Christina Lloyd and Red Studio by Murray Silverstein.

Tupelo Press

For innovative books that excite and grip readers’ immediate attention, look no further than Tupelo Press’s poetry, literary fiction, and creative nonfiction. The press prizes urgency: of language, imagination, distinctiveness, and craft. They honor writers’ work with attention to detail in every aspect, from design to paper quality. The press has produced over 300 books since 1999, many of them prize-winning, and all of them, in their words, “necessary.” From its start, Tupelo Press has highlighted writers of diverse cultural backgrounds, and notably, women authors comprise over 65% of their list.

Forthcoming: Green Island by Liz Countryman (June 2024)

Winner of The Berkshire Prize for Poetry, Countryman’s rich, raw, and awe-inspiring poems explore the relationship between place and imagination. Harmonizing interior experience with external frameworks, Green Island moves readers deep into the past and deep into the present.

Unicorn Press

Established in 1966, Unicorn Press publishes handbound books of poetry. With an ambitious dedication to the fresh, the unique, and the unconventional, this press strives to produce remarkable works that are unlikely to be published elsewhere. They have printed poetry in nearly every form, from postcards to books. The press views poems as individuals, and they believe that readers should “spend at least as much time reading a poem as the poet did writing it.” They currently focus on chapbooks and smaller, cohesive full-length poetry collections.

Forthcoming: Our hollowness sings by Ruth Dickey (May 2024)

Dickey’s intimate new book of poetry explores human brokenness and the devastation, beauty, and tenderness of loss. Her poems are moving yet joyful, heartbreaking yet wondrous.

Electric Literature’s Favorite Indie Bookstores

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Whenever I travel to a new city, my favorite way to get to know the community is to venture into local bookstores. Anything from feminist shops that highlight writers of color to bookstore/cafe hybrids, I never quite know what I’m walking into, and that buzz of excitement never gets old. Last year, we shared some of our favorite independent bookstores across the US, and we’re back with more recommendations of these literary landmarks.

All She Wrote Books in Somerville, Massachusetts

“All She Wrote Books is Somerville’s intersectional, inclusive feminist and queer bookstore, offering up a thoughtful curation of books spanning all genres, with a special focus on titles that celebrate and amplify underrepresented voices. They started in 2019 as an idea that evolved from a cart of books into a first brick-and-mortar location the following year. Owner and founder Christina Pascucci Ciampa envisioned a space where anyone experiencing marginalization would know they were welcome no matter what, and ultimately be able to take a piece of that home with them, with a book. After being displaced from their old location last summer, All She Wrote was able to raise funding from the community for a move and is now open in their new space, hosting a robust series of inclusive events for book lovers and celebrating their 5-year anniversary this month.” —Preety Sidhu, Associate Editor, Recommended Reading and The Commuter

Astoria Bookshop in Queens, New York 

“There are precious few bookstores in Queens and at 11 years old, Astoria Bookshop is perhaps the longest standing of them all. Founder Lexi Beach is a stalwart of the burgeoning Queens literary scene. Astoria Bookshop is warm and inviting, the staff are so friendly and always eager to recommend new books to their customers—I highly recommend picking up bookseller Nino Cipri’s queer speculative short story collection Homesick!—and they have a robust events calendar filled with storytimes for children, book readings, author talks, writing workshops, and open mic nights. And you’ll love their adorable mascot: shop dog Quincy the King Charles Spaniel!” —Jo Lou, Deputy Editor

Black Garnet Books in St Paul, Minnesota

“Nestled next door to a boba shop and my favorite Chinese hand-pulled noodle restaurant is Black Garnet Books. Opened in 2020 on University Ave, Black Garnet Books offers a wide range of books—memoir, cookbooks, fiction, children’s books—all authored by writers and illustrators of color. Black-owned and operated, the bookstore works to combat the racial inequality still rampant in the publishing and literary industry by championing these authors, as well as offering anti-racist buttons and posters. This is a spot you don’t want to miss next time you’re in St Paul. There’s even an adorable dog who will greet you at the door.” —Kristina Busch, Editorial Intern

Capitol Hill Books in Washington, DC

“I lived in Washington, DC (for the first time) during my junior year of college. I was a political science major who realized, three weeks into my political science internship, that I absolutely did not want to work in politics. Suffice to say: it was a very long semester and I would not have survived had I not lived down the block from Capitol Hill Books. The storefront is unassuming—it’s an old white building featuring a window filled with tidy shelves of books. Do not be fooled by the tidy shelves. Inside, it’s chaos—three floors and every single one of them is stuffed with books. (The bathroom is currently housing the foreign language section, and the business books can be found in the closet.) If you’ve ever fantasized about losing yourself in Borges-esque infinite library, this secondhand bookstore is for you. When I was a squatter customer at Capitol Hill Books, I generally preferred to wander in and see what happened, but if you’re the kind of reader who comes with a list, ask the staff. Whatever you’re looking for, they know where it is.” —Wynter K Miller, Managing Editor

Mac’s Backs Books on Coventry in Cleveland Heights, Ohio

“Though I currently live in New York City, I travel back to Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where I grew up, with more and more frequency. Located a mere two blocks from the childhood home is a wonderful used bookstore, Mac’s Backs, where I always make sure I visit at least once. Mac’s rests next to a restaurant I grew up going to, a charming and delicious neighborhood spot with the best milkshakes I’ve ever had: Tommy’s. My friends and I would put our names down at Tommy’s and linger in Mac’s, thumbing through magazines and searching for vintage paperbacks, and even new issues of journals like McSweeney’s—places where, at that time in my life, I never dreamed I’d be published. While having three floors filled with used books, Mac’s stays just as current as any other bookstore, and their staff members have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything they have in stock. Mac’s Backs is a Cleveland Heights staple. Stop by, put your name on the list at Tommy’s, and feel free to get lost in the stacks.” —Denne Michele Norris, Editor in Chief

NewSouth Bookstore in Montgomery, Alabama

“Once called Read Herring Books, NewSouth Bookstore is an almost thirty year-old gem in the heart of Montgomery. I’m by no means a local—I stumbled in the doors by chance on the way to a 90th birthday party—but this hyper-local bookstore has lured me back to the city almost once a year ever since. It occupies a large room on the ground floor of a converted shoe factory (you’ll still find a big, boot-shaped sign hanging outside) that also houses indie press NewSouth Books, the store’s namesake, upstairs. Behind a tidy front display stocked with local authors and new releases from the upstairs press, there’s a remarkable selection of regional literature stuffed into low slung shelves. They’ve got new books, old books, out of print books, just about anything southern, southeastern, or somehow related to the area. Browsing the shelves is like being initiated into a glorious niche in American literature. The staff are all aficionados themselves—on my first visit they sent me off with a monograph about the Fugitive Poets and a copy of The Velvet Horn. Above all though, NewSouth exudes the calm, overstuffed-couch allure that marks truly great used bookstores. It’s a great place to settle down in and read.” —Willem Marx, Editorial Intern

One Grand Books in Narrowsburg and Livingston Manor, New York

“One Grand Books in Narrowsburg, New York, run by multi-hyphenate editor/author/podcaster Aaron Hicklin, offers a rotating selection of books selected by influential cultural figures, from Greta Gerwig to Kehinde Wiley. Narrowsburg is a charming town on the Delaware River, and home to the Deep Water Literary Festival, also run by Hicklin. With another location in Livingston Manor, and a curated shelf in Everything Nice, a record store in Ellenville, One Grand Books has become the premier bookseller of Sullivan Country and the Rondout Valley.” —Halimah Marcus, Executive Director

The Bottom in Knoxville, Tennessee

“In the 1950s, ‘urban renewal’ and institutionalized racism led to the destruction of the Black community in East Knoxville known as ‘The Bottom.’ In 2019, Dr. Enkeshi El-Amin, a local sociologist, founded a bookstore and community center of the same name in that neighborhood. Despite the difficulties they faced opening a business during the pandemic, Dr. El-Amin and several other women succeeded in turning The Bottom into a community hub that also includes a podcast studio and a sewing studio. The bookstore features a curated collection of Black-affirming or Black-authored literature for all ages, author talks, and storytelling events. They also started the LitKidz book program, which provides one free book a month for kids ages 0-18. The Bottom is one of the most welcoming spaces I’ve ever walked into, both as a reader and community member.” —Kelly Luce, Editor, The Commuter

The World’s Borough Bookshop in Queens, New York

“Jackson Heights is the most diverse neighborhood in the world, a working-class immigrant community, home to 180,000 New Yorkers and 167 languages. Under the shadows of the 7 train is a cacophony of street vendors hawking everything from Himalayans momos and Indian gulab jamun to Colombian arepas and Mexican birria tacos. A few blocks from all the bustle is The World’s Borough Bookstore, a cozy haven for BIPOC literature, run entirely by just one person, Adrian Cepeda. There’s a small children’s reading corner, cards and artwork for sale by local artists, regular author events, and it’s dog-friendly. The World’s Borough Bookstore is a new but integral part of Jackson Heights, a place that is first and foremost ‘por y para la comunidad.'” —Jo Lou, Deputy Editor

Trident Booksellers & Cafe in Boston, Massachusetts

“I’m a sucker for a bookstore cafe, both because of the unbeatable ambience and the ability to fuel my two greatest addictions: drinking coffee and buying books. Trident has been a longstanding favorite of mine, a store I’ve loved since I was a kid (long before the coffee part was a draw). They have a great selection of titles and a robust amount of remainders for book buyers on a budget. It can get pretty packed on weekends, but sometimes that’s part of the fun—I personally love to see a busy bookstore! A perfect place to grab a book and a flavored latte (maybe even an eggs benedict?) and stay a while.” —Katie Robinson, Associate Editor, Creative Nonfiction

[words] Bookstore in Maplewood, New Jersey

“I grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, known for its artistic culture and family-friendly community. The heart of our town, Maplewood Village, holds a fitting subtitle: “small wonder.” Perhaps its most beloved small wonder, [words] Bookstore welcomes readers of all ages and interests, particularly those with autism or other special needs. In addition to frequent author readings, the store regularly hosts events designed for autistic and special-needs children, and they have provided vocational training or jobs for over 100 autistic individuals. [words] also leads a real-life Where’s Waldo? game throughout every July, free of charge. As a kid, I enjoyed searching Maplewood’s independent businesses for six-inch-tall Waldo figures, culminating in a celebration at the bookstore. As an adult, I visit [words] every time I return to Maplewood—my town wouldn’t feel like home without it. If you’re ever in New Jersey, wander into [words]. The welcoming, knowledgeable staff will make you feel at home, even if it’s your first time there.” —Vivienne Germain, Editorial Intern

My Body Carries The Story of My Desire

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Labyrinth by Jan Edwards Hemming

When I think of Girl #3, I think of the tiny scars I carry: the word whore; my disdain for pugs; accusations of poisoning oatmeal. I don’t do shots anymore. When people ask why, I usually say I’m too old for that, but what I mean is Because the last time I did shots, cops came. If someone rolled a montage of photos of us, I’d have stills of my head slammed into granite, the skin behind her ear broken with the butt end of an iPhone, keys screaming across a room—and, after all that, the two of us fucking for hours. There’s something romantic about the admiration of tragedy. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

This story begins a long time ago. 

Let me try again. 

As a child I watched Labyrinth over and over. I, like a coming-out character trope, worshiped Jennifer Connelly. Of course I stared open-mouthed; of course I wanted to run my hands through her hair. But there was something more to the crush. When she spoke to Jareth, her green eyes steeled, I mouthed along with her the words that left her perfect lips: For my will is as strong as yours, my kingdom as great… You have no power over me. I wondered what it felt like to be that sure. Perhaps somewhere, as far away and secret as the goblin king’s castle, there was a version of me like that.

When I was nine, we moved houses. In our new neighborhood lived two ladies in a house around the corner. One day my mom was parking her minivan when they strolled by, waved as they trotted past with the dogs, shaggy Shih Tzus on matching leashes. My mother turned the wheel, smiled at them, and sang, Disgusting, through her teeth. 

I didn’t understand, but I did.

When I was sixteen, I kissed Girl #1 in her driveway after returning from the movies. The month before we had been at the same condo complex at the beach with our families. One day we’d been in her kitchen eating peaches. They were the best peaches I’d ever tasted: inexplicably sweet, the juice dripping down our chins when we bit into them. She laughed. I wanted to lick it up and lay her back on the cold white granite counter and watch her nipples harden when I didn’t stop at her mouth. 

That night in the car, when our lips parted, she put her hand on my face and stared without speaking. 

The next day we had lunch with her boyfriend, who often took us for drives in his Land Rover. Sometimes we went to the park and got high in the backseat. Sometimes we all kissed, even though I also had a boyfriend. Sometimes I wanted her boyfriend and my boyfriend to cease to exist. I wanted to straddle her lap in the back of that Discovery and explore her every inch. I didn’t want the feeling of the pills we stole from our parents. I wanted to be stoned by her. 

Sometimes, when we were alone in her room, she’d draw on me in highlighter and lie next to me in bed, neon glowing along my veins. I’d face her and stare into her eyes like in a movie. She’d stare back into mine in the black light, her fingers a feather on my lips. 

They were the best peaches I’d ever tasted: inexplicably sweet, the juice dripping down our chins when we bit into them.

I can still smell her hands: the teenage summer telltale of astringent and sunscreen. We never

talked about what it meant. 

When she switched schools, I took three baths each day so I could masturbate unbothered

while I thought of her mouth, which had only ever been on my mouth, but I pictured it on all the parts of me that were softest and wettest. My want was a literal pulse between my legs as I lay in the water, the downward flick of my middle finger splashing persistently and quietly, until I imagined her tongue circling where my hand was. I bit my lip to keep quiet. 

I carried this story on my body, the crease between my legs so swollen and tender it hurt to wear jeans. 

I found a boyfriend; after him, I found another. 

I walked with Girl #1 on my mind and kept her a secret in my gut.

In college there was a girl down the hall in my dorm. (She doesn’t get a number; this is just a moment.) She was the first out lesbian I ever knew, with short-cropped hair and chipped black nail polish and a tongue ring. She worked with me in the library. When I came to relieve her Sunday afternoon shift, I wanted her to take my hand and lead me back into the stacks. 

I wanted her to want me. I went to Wal-Mart and bought a five-pack of Hanes “wife beater” tank tops. I wore my boyfriend’s khaki cargos and basketball shorts. I hoped the girl would see the changes. I didn’t know how else to behave. 

One evening she stopped by my room to ask if I wanted to go to the dining hall with her for dinner. In the narrow doorway, she stood a foot from me, and two futures hung in the air between us. I had a strong urge to feel her tongue in my mouth. I wondered how to have sex with a girl.

On Valentine’s Day she covered my library shift so I could go to dinner with my boyfriend. I wore a pink lace thong and thought of her while I fucked him. I wondered if I could will her to think of me, too. 

Fast forward to twenty-four: I packed up, went north for grad school. 

In New York, I met Girl #2, who shared my Southern roots and depression. She lived in the tiniest apartment that smelled both sweet and solvent. I’d know that scent anywhere: it is the redolence of a ghost. 

One September night we sat on the hardwood floor and drank two bottles of cheap wine. We read every poem we’d ever written aloud to each other, my head in her lap on the futon, her hand on my hair. I had never felt so full. 

One night while we cooked, she asked, Is it warm in here? and cracked a window. I pretended I hadn’t heard, hadn’t been hoping she’d take off her sweater. 

I wrote poems that were like prayers, each word a code for something more: kitchen for Let

her love me; gold for Let me kneel between her legs. 

At a party we shared a joint on a windowsill. We kissed on the train. Back in her room, we removed each other’s clothes without our lips ever coming apart. We slept entwined like the limbs of ancient oaks. It was the end of what I thought love was. 

She picked another girl, said I wouldn’t come out. I cried, naked in her bed, said, I will, I will, I swear I’ll call my mom right now. But she chose and wrote a poem about the moment; she called my body a question mark on her bed. I was: so crooked and curved with grief. 

I couldn’t stop making lists. Every step I took I cataloged: thoughts, events, dreams, movies, the things I had imagined. My college roommate, the girl who’d lived down the hall, my

best friend. I walked the streets and pictured Girl #2’s blue coat and the way her hand had felt in mine when I held it under the workshop table, and it was everything; but she was right: I didn’t know how I’d ever tell my mother. 

Back in her room, we removed each other’s clothes without our lips ever coming apart.

I tried to imagine myself with a man, in the forever or short-term sense. I fucked a few more and tried to love them, but once one was above me, my eyes closed, I found my hand cupping a phantom, my tongue out, dying to taste the soft skin of an imagined breast. 

I tried, I really did, but when it rained I could only think of Girl #2’s red hair and love like a thunderstorm. I kept her letters in a box collecting dust. How long would that love last? How long would it take to mend the holes? 

Then: I cut my hair and donned a black lace tank and lipstick, took a cab to my gay friends’ apartment, said, I want to meet a girl tonight. I was still so sad, but I had something to prove. They took me to Stonewall to dance. 

In the dark a woman put her hand on my shoulder, said, I saw you and I followed you. Isn’t that romantic? Her green eyes held mine like magnets. I thought I saw a wedding ring. I was worried but enticed. I gave her my number. 

Girl #3—the green-eyed girl—and I couldn’t stop. Kissing. Fucking. Lying. Hurting. But I loved her hands. I had never come harder. I worshiped her body and craved her taste: pennies and oyster salt. I loved dancing with her in an empty room. She bought me dinner and left me notes on my bed. She said she loved me. I believe she loved me. 

After a year, I moved with Girl #3 to Los Angeles, despite all of what happened.

My mother texted on Easter: I’m getting rid of the baby clothes, the Noah’s Ark things, since you won’t have any use for them. I held my phone, stood among boxes, and packed for California. 

I liked the name Noah for a boy. 

In California things were worse. I thought if I kept trying, it might work. I could love Girl #3 into love, into believing I wasn’t what she thought I was—and she could hurt me into being who she wanted me to be, and I could hurt her into realizing she was wrong, and we could stay in that fucked up place we called symbiosis, and then I would be gay enough. I could finally prove it to both her and to my mother.

But our love was combustible, and I shook and heaved in bedrooms and wallowed in the ashen blooms of what was left of me. 

Let me try it this way:

You are sixteen and it’s late summer and you’re with Girl #1, who is your friend but maybe more. Her mother hasn’t died yet and so she’s still happy, still yours for a little while. Your mom still lets you have sleepovers and go to the movies without suspecting anything is wrong. You, however, secretly know something is wrong because people in your town use words like “bull dyke” and “fucking faggot” to describe people who do the kinds of things you do with her: touch each other’s faces in the dark, trace lips and brows with fingers, sneak sniffs of perfume from her soft neck, feel the uncontrollable urge to lay your cheek against her smooth brown shoulder, or slip her bikini bottom below her tan line and touch your tongue to where the skin is white. 

You are with her in Gadzooks (remember that store?) and you have purchased a t-shirt from a band with a dead singer and are considering holding her hand because there is explicit merchandise in this store and it makes you feel brave. As you walk out of the store and look over your shoulder at her, she’s smiling and the thin skin at the corners of her eyes crinkles and your stomach flips and somewhere, in another world, you stop and kiss her. But in this one, you turn back around, hands to yourself, and then he is there, across the maroon tiling, near the fountain. The Boy. Your boyfriend. No, your ex. Recent. You see his close-cut hair and full lips. His long fingers slip into his pockets; there is his hemp necklace; there are his white teeth. Your ears buzz and your face gets hot. You need to move worse than you’ve ever needed to move, but your limbs have suddenly grown rooted to the floor. 

Now you do grab her hand, but not because you are brave. Your mouth hinges open, just slightly. Words form but are stuck inside your brain; they are pulled back like ankles sucked into wet sand. You are both moored and dizzy. You mouth his name and point with your eyes and turn back into the store, folding yourself on the gray carpet beneath the crowded clothing racks and dim fluorescent lights, trying hard to breathe past the lump that seems to be filling your throat. Your heart pounds. It laps and breaks and you stay where you are, legs sinking deeper into the surf. But you are also elsewhere: in the cause of the feeling, in the moment where something went to shit. (You don’t know it yet but you are having a panic attack. You won’t have a word for this until you are much older and in therapy and finally prescribed medication for this thing that happens to you.) 

The Boy has a pretty face but you’re scared of it, not in the way you’re scared to hold the girl’s hand but in a way that fills your whole chest with hysterical dread. Because you are no longer on the floor of this kitschy store but at a party in the corner of a classmate’s bedroom, your shoulder knocking against an open armoire. You are backing up from the bed and you are

I shook and heaved in bedrooms and wallowed in the ashen blooms of what was left of me. 

naked and saying, Please no. His right hand pulls back in a fist. He’s never hit you but he really looks like he will. He is speaking in a low voice, softly but with venom. He is calling you a fucking cock tease. He is calling you a slut. He is smiling a little and that might be the scariest thing. He is telling you that you owe him this because he just made you cum with his mouth. But you had your wisdom teeth out two days ago and he knows that you can hardly fit a fork in your mouth. Yesterday the mashed potatoes you were trying to eat smeared on your lips and he wiped them gently away with a finger. You’re wondering now if he was thinking then about shoving himself into you, hinging you open. You tongue the holes behind your back teeth and you feel dirty and exposed. You wish you were at least wearing your bathing suit and move your arms to cover your chest. You say, Please, once more, just in case. 

You watch his hand fall as if in slow motion. You flinch but he’s only reaching down to untie his swim trunks. With the other hand he pulls you forward and pushes your head down. You are crying. You are nodding. You are on your knees. He is in your mouth and your jaw screams. 

On either floor, you are trying to tell yourself it wasn’t all bad. You wanted to kiss him. You had been swimming and in the house the air conditioner was cold on your wet skin and your nipples were hard and you will never forget the first time you felt a tongue between your legs. You were on painkillers and felt like you were floating. 

You wonder how long he has wanted to hurt you. 

Before that moment anything having to do with sex felt fun. You read the Kama Sutra with your friends in Books-A-Million. You took Cosmo quizzes and dreamed of desire. You have even given a blowjob before and felt courageous and adult. You liked the control you had, the way you could wield your mouth as a kind of power totem. From this point on, though, something will be different. 

Girl #1 asks if you are okay. Is he gone? you ask. She nods and squeezes your hand, pulling you to your feet. 

Your parents would call your reaction in the mall dramatic, but deep down, you know you are right to be afraid. Since you broke up with him, The Boy has been stalking you. He and his friends send you horrible messages on AIM. You stare at the computer (there’s the feeling again) and your hands shake while you type stop it and fuck you and leave me alone. He does not stop; of course he does not stop. Behind the screen you imagine him laughing, a low, frightening chuckle in his black eyes. 

You are afraid enough to print the pages and take them to your father, a lawyer. You say you think maybe you need a restraining order against The Boy. You hang your head and your father reads them. He says, In a court of law, they’ll say you provoked him. He hands the papers back to you. Later, a friend will see the boy drive past your house, up and down your street, in the night. Much later, he will leave a note, written on the back of a gas station receipt from the town where he lives, on your car, which you don’t drive anymore. It says simply, I’m watching you. Your mother sends a photo of the note to you at college and you would know his writing anywhere. Now, your younger sister sleeps in your old room. Now, she drives this car. This time, your father can do something. He buys blackout shades for the windows. 

You find the printed pages when your mom mails a box of your high school things. It’s been almost twenty years but the feeling still comes. Your mouth waters and there’s the sound of waves pounding in your ears. You know that, physically, you are on the floor of your apartment in L.A., but in your head you hear “Anna Begins” and you see his red Taurus and also it’s suddenly summer and your wet swimsuit is on the floor and you can taste the tang of margaritas. Your breath is stuck in your throat. You realize that until this moment when you read back the words—you are a cum-guzzling whore; you are worthless; he will burn down your house with you inside it—you thought you maybe made it up. But here is this paper: this dated evidence. You are frozen to the floor, sobbing. 

Before that moment anything having to do with sex felt fun.

You look for them again as you write this essay. You want to prove that you aren’t crazy. But you can’t find them and there it is again: the room is too warm and your chest is tight. Remember how much he loved your mouth. 

You have a vague memory of throwing them away, trying to rid yourself of things that do not serve you. 

Remember, you provoked him. 

You rifle through every box. They are not there. 

Remember, you swallowed. 

You are frantic. Why would you throw them away? 

Remember, you are a whore. 

Every year The Boy sends you Facebook friend requests and tries to follow your Instagram account. Each time you are sixteen again. Each time you are painfully aware of your mouth. 

Girl #1 lives in Texas and you have not really kept in touch. She wore Abercrombie 8 perfume. It smelled soft like the beach and you wanted to drown in her. Sometimes you consider that had it been her mouth between your legs, you never would have  been in this situation at all.

The smells you remember from him are shitty weed and sour cum. You picked a fleck of pot from your tongue. You wiped your cheek. 

This is how it works: eight months in, Girl #3 sits on your chest screaming, You’re fucking him, aren’t you? in reference to one of your best friends. She tells you that if you want to act like a whore, she’ll treat you like one. When she grabs you and pushes you onto the bed and rams her fingers between your flailing legs and spits, Is that how you like it? Is that how you let him fuck you? Are you thinking of him right now? through gritted teeth, you are just sixteen again: Back in the living room of your childhood home, handing your dad a stack of printed papers. Back in the corner of your best friend’s bedroom. Back in the restaurant where your mother took you to confront you about what she read in your diary—you stupidly wrote about the assault but you made it sound sexy because you couldn’t write the truth; back in the booth where the spinach and artichoke dip turned to chalk in your mouth as your mother told you, Good girls don’t give blow jobs, said, If you’re going to act like a little slut, people are going to call you one.

She wore Abercrombie 8 perfume. It smelled soft like the beach and you wanted to drown in her.

In some alternate universe, in each of those moments, you find a way to speak the words you’ve harbored since childhood, since Labyrinth: You have no power over me. You shout it to The Boy and your parents and Girl #3—or perhaps you never date Girl #3 at all, because you long ago found your voice. 

But in real life, you cannot speak because Girl #3 has one hand wrapped around your throat, and the chorus of you fucking whore you fucking whore you fucking whore and the chaos of kicking limbs is so, so loud that you cannot even remember the line. You only buck and bite and leave a perfect crown of teeth marks on her upper thigh. 

Finally, it is over, and while you lie panting and crying in the dark, you hear the echo of the only thing you know and have always known:

The you is me, and this—all of it—is my fault.

Let me try again.