Selected Arcana from My Literary Tarot 

Posted on by EL Assistant2

From a young age, I’ve been a collector and trader of cards: Topps movie tie-ins, the Garbage Pail Kids, Yo! MTV Raps, TGIF Laffs, and Starline’s Hollywood Walk of Fame, among many others. There was a real boom in the ’80s and ’90s where it seemed every last tendril of the shared cultural experience—from American Gladiators to Operation Desert Storm to Twin Peaks to the British royal family—was entitled to its own trading card series.

For the past few years, I’ve been reading pop culture tarot at house parties. The spread, the decks, and the interpretations are my own invention. My ’80s and ’90s decks are often the most popular; querents enjoy receiving a reading through a nostalgic lens. Because I’m a writer, eventually I decided to build myself a literary deck. All I had to start with was a battered batch of playing cards from the late 1980s that my sister and I played Go Fish with as children. Remarkably, this Go Fish variant, known as “Authors,” has remained a widespread and educational game for over one hundred and fifty years. Most Authors collections contain only the most obvious writers: usually the backbone is William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and James Fenimore Cooper, et al. Many of them contain only one woman, if any (usually Louisa May Alcott). However, the passing years brought many variants (“20th Century Authors,” “Children’s Authors,” “Mystery Authors”) which allowed me a wider range of choices. I was also able to pluck literary cards from existing series, like the Americana history line, Grolier’s encyclopedic trading cards, or Booksmith’s custom set (made by a legendary Haight Ashbury bookstore to commemorate its author events).

My full literary tarot contains seventy-eight cards, which range from the prescriptive (Haruki Murakami’s card could imply that the querent ought to take up physical activity, like running) to the ominous (Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express card may portend a conspiratorial plot) to the extremely meta (Italo Calvino is the only member of my deck who used tarot as a narrative device in one of his novels, 1973’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies). The following are selected arcana from my literary tarot:

Franz Kafka 

Card Series: Laurence King Publishing’s Writers Genius (with illustrations by Marcel George), 2019 

Arcana: Depending on its placement, this can be a card about day jobs, or in Kafka’s case, a Brotberuf (“bread-and-butter job”). Ten hour days at an insurance company doesn’t allow for much creative output, but still, we can make it work…or else we find another job with shorter hours (evaluating industrial accidents?). This is a card of both major milestones and minor increments, of sweeping metamorphoses and bureaucratic stagnation. For better or worse, it’s a card of interiority and obsessive anxiety. As Kafka articulated, “I usually solve problems by  letting them devour me.” This card is its own worst critic, and it’s unduly hard on itself. Not quite “having one’s crime carved into one’s body via a Rube Goldberg-style torture machine unto  death” hard, but definitely “destroying ninety percent of its own prose output out of insecurity” hard. With its predilection for nightmare and/or disaster, it would be tempting to compare this card to classic tarot’s “The Tower,” but it’s not without an absurd, deadpan humor—remember, Kafka routinely laughed uproariously through readings of his work. This card may be a cage in  search of a bird, but joy still peeks from between the bars. 

Judy Blume (feat. Wifey) 

Card Series: Whitehall’s Women Authors, 1991 

Arcana: In many respects, the Judy Blume card is one of reassurance, wit, and nostalgia. But it’s  not a sheltering nostalgia, it’s a survivor’s: frank, levelheaded, and tenacious. I must also note that this is the Wifey (1978) card—her first adult novel, one of suburban malaise, mid-life crisis,  sexual experimentation, and misadventure. It was greeted with, according to Blume, “an uproar.” This card can point to a second act in life, stepping out of one’s comfort zone, a desire not to be  pigeonholed. This card’s emotions are complex but accessible. As a bestselling author who remains one of the most-banned in American schools, Blume’s card can prescribe a thick-skinned reaction to a temporary setback. In the artwork, Blume’s expression is archly confrontational—it’s a card that, one way or the other, demands a reaction.

James Baldwin (feat. Notes of a Native Son) 

Card Series: U.S. Games Systems’ American Authors, 1988 

Arcana: James Baldwin can be seen in one sense as a card of bypassed expectation (his preacher stepfather had insisted he follow in his footsteps, a role he performed only until the age of seventeen). It’s a card that diligently fulfills the responsibilities of the eldest of nine children, but  also takes wing as an icon of found family. In this sense, it can be a voracious traveler, often on  the move; a child of New York City, Istanbul, Moscow, Dakar, and Paris. It resists easy categorization, and, like the essays in 1955’s Notes of a Native Son, zeroes in on details in culture and travel and day-to-day life to reflect larger, crueler truths: the foundational flaws of a society. This card is confident in its ability to size up problems, even if it concedes the complexity and occasional impossibility of their solving. Baldwin maintained, “People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming  specialists in self-deception.” And yet, this card is unafraid to express anger, call for drastic  action, and wade forcefully into conflict. It’s fueled by past experiences, good and ill, to “finish the work.” And it carries a warning for the querent: “People who shut their eyes to reality simply  invite their own destruction.”

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald 

Card Series: Panarizon Publishing’s Story of America, 1981 

Arcana: This is a card of joie de vivre, instability, faerie-like energy, and “no tomorrow.” It’s a  sudden and deeply-felt whimsy that for a moment becomes the most urgent notion in the universe. If it’s pulled relating to your present, your Roaring Twenties may very well be  peaking—dancing through life, splashing around in champagne by the gallon, and running up frivolous bills. If it’s in your past, it might speak to the attempted recapture of glory days (in 1932, Zelda Fitzgerald wrote her first play, Scandalabra, in an attempt to make her “original  Flapper” archetype relevant again). This card also can allude to a codependent figure in your life  and their potential for inciting destructive cycles or fueling perpetual crisis. If Zelda is a runaway train, her husband F. Scott is a micromanaging engineer, just as likely to run the train off a cliff as he is to save it. The psychological harm they inflicted upon each other is as legendary as their  glamour: Zelda refused to marry F. Scott until he was a published novelist; he “borrowed” work from her letters and diaries to build This Side of Paradise (1920); they fought over her novel Save Me the Waltz (1932), because it drew from material from her breakdown to which he felt  entitled. This is a card of dramatic embellishment and apocalyptic quarrels, of triumphant highs  and collapsing lows—a painful and passionate tug-of-war performed for an ever-expanding  audience. “I am only really myself when I’m somebody else whom I have endowed with these  wonderful qualities from my imagination.”

Toni Morrison  

Card Series: Laurence King Publishing’s Writers Genius (with illustrations by Marcel George), 2019 

Arcana: The image of Toni Morrison on her card is on the verge, but of what? Gentle laughter?  Harsh critique? A formative experience of Morrison’s childhood was when, after her family had  fallen behind on rent, their landlord set fire to the house—with them inside. They escaped with their lives, and Morrison’s parents treated the incident with dark humor: “For four dollars a  month somebody would just burn you to a crisp. So what you did instead was laugh at him, at the absurdity, at the monumental crudeness of it…that’s what laughter does…You take your life back. You take your integrity back.” This card speaks to intense, unforgiving, and horrifying experiences, which, with some effort, can be clarified, redeemed, or reclaimed. It can speak to  romantic connection in many contexts: earnest, passionate, jagged, or disillusioning. It’s a card which is poetic, but precise; patient, but not a pushover; benumbed, but empathetic; lofty, but not above the political fray. As she wrote in Song of Solomon (1977), “You wanna fly, you got to  give up the shit that weighs you down.”

Stephen King (feat. Cujo) 

Card Series: Whitehall’s 20th Century Authors, 1991 

Arcana: This is a card which is largely defined by its featured novel, the relatively straightforward killer-canine tract, Cujo (1983). No, it does not specifically forewarn against an attack by a rabid, unvaccinated Saint Bernard; its true meaning is tied to the circumstances of its  writing. As King puts it, “there’s one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all. I don’t say that with pride or shame, only with a vague sense of sorrow and loss.” On the heels of a  meteoric rise, it was a potent mixture of alcohol, cocaine, Valium, Xanax, Listerine, Nyquil, and  clinical depression which led to this gap in King’s memory (if not his work ethic). This is a card  which can be about a relentless force—within the psyche or in one’s family—that seems to  march tirelessly toward self-destruction. But that is not the end: in King’s case, treatment and enduring success were around the corner (just past 1986’s Maximum Overdrive and 1987’s The Tommyknockers). This is a card of temporary martyrdoms, insidious dependencies, and the  hounds within: cuddly in one moment, and in the next, foaming and chaotic. 

Emily Dickinson 

Card Series: Starline’s Americana, 1992 

Arcana: It would be tempting to see this card as a direct match with “The Hermit” from classic tarot, but, like Dickinson herself, it’s not so easily pinned down. It can speak to a phase of reclusivity or a period of self-reflection, and, depending on its position, could even prescribe a welcome pause in an overactive lifestyle. Tragedy lingers at this card’s fringes, but so does relentless productivity. It is a card of contradictions: its “soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience,” but it might also spend twenty years primarily speaking to visitors from behind a well-fortified door. Like her puzzle poems, it maintains a sense of mystery and dwells in possibility, among matters yet unsettled.

Gertrude Stein (feat. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) 

Card Series: Whitehall’s Women Authors, 1991 

Arcana: There are many levels to this card, which depicts Stein in the early 1920s and spotlights  her conceptual 1933 “autobiography” of her four-decade romantic partner. Featuring the wild rhythms and startling language of Stein’s prose, this card values conversation, thirsts for  adventure, and delights in bringing people together (like the artistic community Stein built through her salons). In highlighting the Autobiography, it’s a card of reflection and romantic  connection—the ability to see one’s self through one’s partner. There are some darker aspects to this card as well: a thriving community will always be subject to fallings-out and friendships turned sour. Stein’s mentee Ernest Hemingway would go on to refer to his depiction in the Autobiography as “some bullshit.” Even as this card champions stability (“We are always the same age inside”), it hints at the dangers of complacency and disengagement (Stein’s turning a blind eye to the offenses of Vichy France).

Louisa May Alcott (feat. Little Women) 

Card Series: Russell Games’ Authors, 1935 

Arcana: I chose this card out of all the Louisa May Alcotts (I had nearly a dozen to pick from),  because it depicts her around the time she sold her first short stories. Unlike her better-known works, these were “blood and thunder” narratives of Gothic romance, Grand Guignol-style  murders, con women, and plentiful hashish. In letters, Alcott characterized Little Women (1868) as “moral pap for the young” written at the prompting of her father and publisher, and so I’ve always imagined that she would have preferred a career as a writer of tales of mystery and  imagination. When you pull this card, it speaks to an unresolved duality between your public and private faces. It can represent a desire to let your freak flag fly (or, an unexpectedly mainstream triumph from a countercultural soul). It can speak to one’s secret motives and cautious machinations, a branching pathway to be navigated with focus and determination. In Alcott’s  words, “I will make a battering-ram of my head, and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world.”

Ayn Rand (feat. Atlas Shrugged) 

Card Series: Whitehall’s 20th Century Authors, 1991 

Arcana: There’s a lot going on here, to say the least. It’s worth noting that the image bears little  resemblance to the actual Ayn Rand, even before you factor in the unexpected choice of blonde  hair. Depending on its context, this card could represent personal conviction or a well-earned  moment of self-confidence. It could speak to a youthful but formative arrogance, or to a future commitment to myopic selfishness. This card is a friend to soapboxes and long-windedness, heavy on theory and thirsty for debate, but disconnected from the fabric of everyday life. Sometimes it represents a reductive answer to a complicated question, a fool’s gold which feeds  the id and strokes the ego. Eventually, it dabbles with imposter syndrome and blurs the line between Objectivism and camp. This card is riddled with amphetamines, and makes pronouncements like “existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two  corollary axioms.” This card is not particularly fun at parties.

Clive Barker 

Card Series: Booksmith, 2002 

Arcana: “No tears, please. It’s a waste of good suffering.” On the one hand, the Clive Barker card is one of splatterpunk beauty, forbidden pains and pleasures, the holy and profane entwined—a kinky journey of flesh and fantasy, hosted by barbed and leather-clad extradimensional beings. On the other, this card depicts Barker in a moment of endless comfort, barefoot in his dwelling, wearing a curious combination of hippie jewelry, suspenders, and some pants that, let’s be honest, are probably pajamas. It has such sights to show you: the infinite Pandora’s Box of hells we could imagine for ourselves, juxtaposed with quotidian moments of simple relaxation, far off from the horrors. This card doesn’t mind being cool and uncool, though it’s certainly not for the faint of heart.

Elena Ferrante 

Card Series: Laurence King Publishing’s Writers Genius (with illustrations by Marcel George), 2019 

Arcana: Never mind that the shadow of “Elena Ferrante” here actually looks more like Ayn Rand than the Ayn Rand card (or is it Andy Warhol?), but, in all, this is a unique addition to the  arcana. You could say it’s a card that represents complicated friendships, unwanted parenthood, wild confessions, psychological breaks, calcified jealousies, revolting curiosities, intriguing  revulsions, and the complicated ways in which we escape reality. In Ferrante’s words, “I believe  that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.” In its anonymity, the card may allude to self-care and self-protection, secrets better off remaining buried, the walls we can build around ourselves, or the freedom to self-express without collateral damage. It lives somewhere in this vast and mysterious gulf between modesty and self-erasure: “I will be the least expensive author of the publishing house. I’ll spare you even my presence.”

Theodore Dreiser (feat. The Financier) 

Card Series: U.S. Games Systems’ American Authors Card Game, 1988 

Arcana: This is the patron card of back-handed compliments. For an author with several novels  entrenched in the 20th Century canon, I have rarely heard Dreiser’s work praised without massive, undermining potshots being taken at his talent (Saul Bellow: “clumsy, cumbersome…a poor  thinker,” E.L. Doctorow: “there is reason to doubt…he has even the hope of wit,” Dorothy  Parker: “[he] had the purely literary good fortune to be a child of poverty,” Ayn Rand: “apart  from content, his works have no structure or style,” etc.). Indeed the text of this card itself reports that he “wrote with great power but was verbose and sometimes obscure.” The image of Dreiser seems to take umbrage at this assessment, but there’s little he can do about it. You could say this is a card about swallowing one’s pride, or ignoring one’s critics (…or the importance of finding a  good editor?). The card’s featured novel, The Financier (1912), is a story of dowager-seducing,  insider trading, and embezzlement; a post-Gilded Age, pre-Great Depression portrait of ambition and greed. There’s no “crime doesn’t pay” moralizing, only social Darwinism inflected with  futility and Greek tragedy. This card also contains a curious allusion to dodging destiny: Dreiser was very nearly a passenger on the RMS Titanic, only missing the boat because his publisher  wouldn’t spring for the luxury ticket. So perhaps it can also speak to the rare personal  inconvenience which translates to literal salvation?

Jorge Luis Borges 

Card Series: Laurence King Publishing’s Writers Genius (with illustrations by Marcel George), 2019 

Arcana: Perhaps the most arcane card in my arcana, Jorge Luis Borges evokes infinite labyrinths, cults of wisdom, splintered realities, and sacred geometries. If tarot itself is a search for meaning in patterns, then Borges is our metaphysical hierophant, both a poser of riddles and interpreter of dreams. It’s a card of blindness and clarity (Borges lost his sight entirely in the mid-1950s and published over three dozen volumes afterward), reality and irreality, a true garden of forking paths. In this sense, this card is defined by the others that surround it: it can disintegrate a straightforward reading into mystifying elements, shadowy and unresolved. It can find cosmic order in a chaotic spread, like the rare, comprehensible volume plucked from the stacks at the Library of Babel. “Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”

7 Genre-Smashing Horror Novels in Translation

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

The most compelling horror novels are those that resent the very rules of their own genre. These books throw their elbows around and demand more space, pushing against the parameters, which quickly become elastic, until the novels defy easy categorization. To call them horror, then, is a disservice, but so would calling them “cross-genre.” They stand as good books that do whatever they please—and in the course of their doings, they make you feel very strange.

I’m an emotional writer. When I try to be calculating, I write stiff and spiritless fiction. Instead, I try to write toward a feeling. If that sounds like a messy enterprise it’s because it is—but feeling, more than intellect, is what I’m looking for in art. In the case of my novel A Brutal Design, I set out to write a book that might fill others with the same matrix of feelings that, to me, embody the best of horror literature. These are the ugly interstices between home and displacement, transparency and conspiracy, the real and the unreal, the question and the answer. To me, any book that splashes around in those mucky areas is worth reading, and may even make me feel something.

The books on this list are horror novels that might scoff at being called horror. In some cases, they brush against the genre incidentally; in others, they wage outright war on it and emerge barely scathed. But in all cases, they make me feel deeply strange in new ways, and that’s the whole point.

The Cremator by Ladislav Fuks, translated from the Czech by Eva M. Kandler

As a genre, horror is predicated on tropes, and the best of it finds ways of subverting those tropes in unexpected ways. For horror that targets the human psyche, this often means pushing people to and beyond their limits and reveling in the deranged aftermath. In The Cremator, Ladislav Fuks’ brilliantly sinister novel set during the 1930s, the soul in extremis belongs to Karel Kopfrkingl, a crematorium operator in Prague. Obsessed with class, freakishly fascinated by Tibetan Buddhism, and obsequious to an embarrassing degree, Kopfrnkingl is easy prey for the ubiquitous Nazi propaganda swirling around Europe. Whether a result of his gruesome chosen profession or the oppressive atmosphere of hatred building in the streets, Kopfrnkingl gradually transforms from a peculiar yet professional family man into an agent of death. When Reinke, a visiting former compatriot and proud Nazi, persuades him that the “drop of German blood” in Kopfrnkingl’s racial makeup makes him special, it’s all the cremator needs to find his purpose as a heroic liberator of souls from their bodies—including those of his family.

The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Idra Novey

If Gregor Samsa is who you think of first when you think of fictional cockroaches, then the cockroach at the heart of this existential nightmare should be the second. The titular G.H. is a bourgeois Brazilian sculptor who cannot recall the name or face of the maid whose quarters she enters to clean—but no matter: her thoughts dissolve when, upon opening the wardrobe, she encounters a cockroach. In fright, G.H. crushes the wretched thing halfway through the door in such a way that its carapace is stuck, oozes viscera, slowly dying. Yet, instead of moving on with her chore, the site of the dying insect grabs G.H. by the soul in a vice grip, preventing her from leaving the room and forcing her to confront the horrors — and joyous revelations — buried deep within her. The breathless plunge into the self that follows, represented by Lispector’s both philosophically lucid and addled prose, culminates with one of the most nauseating, yet enlightening, actions in fiction.

The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky

Don’t be afraid of its publication date. This bitter novella about the dangers of indulging in sinful excess is horrifying, uncanny, and just waiting for Robert Eggers to adapt it for the silver screen. Though very much a Christian morality tale, complete with lessons-to-be-learned, The Black Spider pulls no punches in depicting the dark side of a souring agreement. Jeremias Gotthelf, the Swiss pastor who penned this tale, imagines in gleeful detail the punishment exacted on a mountain village of peasants who make a deal with the Devil in exchange for his help in assuaging the merciless lord of their hamlet. All the Devil asks in return is the life of an unbaptized newborn. Unwilling to hold up their end of the bargain, the villagers incur the Devil’s hellish revenge in the form of a murderous black spider — a stand-in for the plague — that grows out of a dark spot embedded in the putrid flesh of a woman’s cheek and preys sadistically on the villagers.

The Notebook by Ágota Kristóf, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan

The first book in a trilogy, The Notebook is the story of a pair of nameless twins who live with their grandmother in a European village during World War II. The hypothesis of this relentlessly bleak, ferociously disturbing experiment of a novel suggests that a person must descend deep into nihilism to survive war. In short, one must do whatever it takes. You won’t find The Notebook in a bookstore’s horror section; it does not conform to any of horror’s typical tropes. Instead, its horror lies in the depths of its perversity and depravity, a kind of Eastern European Cormac McCarthy novel, but without the bravado or decoration. This is a crude, mean novel about a crude mean thing. The twins treat their odds of survival with a disquieting rationalism, recording the results of their successful strategies in the notebook you are reading, and Kristóf’s writing is as harsh and blunt as their behavior. By far the most harrowing novel on this list, The Notebook’s true horror lies in its proximity to real life.

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin’s short first novel achieves its triumphant sense of unease through the economical use of information. The book is comprised largely of unmoored dialogue, and the story that unfolds does so with great ambiguity. We are lost, but buoyed along by the sense of a near mystical presence lurking in the shadows. That presence may very well be, in fact, the existence of worms. We come to learn that Amanda is dying in a rural clinic, and that David, a child, is interrogating her. We learn that David became sick from drinking water from the river. We learn that David isn’t the only sick kid; other children in their small and neglected town were born deformed, missing vital parts or boasting an excess of them. And finally, we learn the truth, and it’s hardly supernatural: these are the effects of toxic agricultural runoff. The effects, in fact, of a world being brutally poisoned by progress. This deeply creepy novel is eco-horror at its most gruesome and most tragic.

The Vanishing by Tim Krabbé, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett

The Vanishing belongs to the same camp of compact and freaky literary realist novels as Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers—both addictive explorations of people who act in cruel ways simply to see what it feels like. Subsequently adapted into the phenomenal 1988 George Sluizer film of the same name, Tim Krabbé’s second novel is about protagonist Rex’s obsessive, decade-spanning quest to find out what happened to his girlfriend, Saskia, who disappeared during a routine gas-stop during a road trip. Krabbé splits narrative duties between Rex and Raymond who eventually reveals himself to Rex as Saskia’s abductor. In the end, Raymond offers to reveal what happened to Saskia, but on one harrowing condition: that Rex meet the very same fate.

Out by Natsuo Kirino, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder

Natsuo Kirino is one of Japan’s finest contemporary crime and mystery writers, and Out perfectly justifies that epithet. This is a crime novel, make no mistake, but one that presents the bloody actions and reactions of its characters with a cynicism and banality that is bone-chilling. This is a novel about what happens when violence against women becomes a feature of a society and not a bug. With functional prose stripped of any adornment, Kirino crafts not so much a page-turner but a kind of hypnotic drone: impossible to turn off and impossible to ignore.

I Wanted To Be Kinky But I Didn’t Know How

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Mars the Father by Eryn Sunnolia

Now that Quinn was in front of me, on their knees, ass in the air, I realized spanking might be more complicated than I’d thought. Like, where was I even supposed to spank? All over? Upper cheeks, middle cheeks, lower cheeks? How fast? How hard? Was I supposed to only spank the whole time, or should I use my mouth, my fingernails, touch between their legs? 

In my queer relationship, I was being asked to play a role I’d never played. Shaped for submission from years of sex with cis het men, I knew my perfectly feminine role to play. I could be innocent, or bratty, or excited, but I couldn’t be daddy. 

Now, my partner wanted me to hurt them in every good way, and they trusted me enough to give themself over to me. Poised over their waiting body, I had no idea what I was doing. 

Aries placements are a Thing in my family. In astrology, Aries is a fire sign known for its leadership, bravery, boldness, independence, and dominating nature. All signs have their shadow side, too. Aries can fall into hyper independence, aggression, selfishness, stubbornness. And like any fire sign: anger.  

Most people are familiar with their sun sign. It’s the horoscope you read as a kid and what you mean when you say, “I’m an Aries.” But everyone has a multitude of planets in other signs, too, and you can see them in your astrological birth chart: a snapshot of all the planets at the moment of your birth.

When I first looked up my dad’s birth chart, I gasped at the Aries sliver packed with planets. I knew he was an Aries, but I didn’t understand how many planets he had in the sign: his sun, Chiron, Venus, Saturn, North Node, and Mercury. In astrology, this is called a stellium: a cluster of planets that strengthens the energy of whatever sign they fall into. 

I have a planet in Aries, too—my moon, which represents instincts, innermost needs, how to deal with your feelings, and the ways you might parent your inner child. My need for freedom, my instinct to blow through my feelings at a rapid clip, the way I run away from what’s emotionally difficult, the swiftness with which I go after my desires, the same bravery and stubbornness that has had my dad and I at odds over the years, that’s all Aries. It’s what my dad and I share.

I thought maybe the anger was his alone. But flipping through my middle school journals, I saw pages with huge furious scrawl, pen punched through in some places from the hardness of my grip, detailing my rage: toward my sister when she stole my clothes, the boy at school who called me names, my father. Reading my own journal gave me whiplash: on one page, he stormed into the den where I was listening to song clips on iTunes and feeding my Neopets, and yelled at me for reasons I didn’t understand. On the next, he apologized, kissed my head, told me he did what he did because he cared and didn’t want me to get hurt. On another page he hit me; on the next, he was going on a business trip, and I would miss him. I loved him just as much as I was afraid of him. 

Aries is a fire sign known for its leadership, bravery, boldness, independence, and dominating nature.

The word Aries comes from the Greek god Ares, the god of war. He was known for his cruelty, warrior nature, and brutality. His counterpart, Athena, was known for strategic war tactics and heroism. But unpopular Ares was associated with chaos, destruction, and violence for violence’s sake. 

As the story goes, Ares loved his mother, Hera, but hated his father, Zeus, who scorned and rejected him.

Here is what I know about my father’s father: 

He was from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. 

He dated my grandmother when she was 18, and she found out she was pregnant with my dad the autumn that she was the first in her family to go to college. She dropped out, left Baltimore, and came home. 

At some point early in my dad’s life—maybe even before my dad was born—his father left. Rejection, certainly, if not a scorning.

Decades later, when my sister and I were kids, he sent my parents a check as a gift for us. They used the money to re-do our bedroom. My sister and I excitedly picked out everything: pink and purple paint for the walls, bright reversible bedspreads for our bunk beds, all from this ghost of a man, a mirage of a father, of a grandfather.

“I don’t think I’m very kinky,” I told Quinn weeks before our first spanking attempt, our love still new, tucked into their chest under warm sheets. “But I might want to be.” 

“I don’t know,” They laughed after I listed my sexual interests. When we were quiet, we could hear the candle wick flicker vanilla and honey beside us. “You sound pretty kinky to me.”

It would have been more accurate to say: I was kinky, I’d just never really had the chance to be. I wanted to be kinky, but I didn’t know how. They, on the other hand, had been plugged into Philly’s kink scene for years. They knew what they liked, and they were excited to introduce me to kink – if I wanted.

Together, we took the now TikTok-famous BDSM quiz, an educational test to determine what kind of kinkster you are. Did I like to be totally helpless and at my partner’s disposal, physically unable to resist what they did? Was I willing to try anything once, even if I didn’t think I would like it? Did I like forcing my partner into submission? 

It laid out my interests: Experimentalist. Switch. Rigger. Rope Bunny. Submissive. Degradee. Dominant. According to the test, I had dominance inside me, braided like sweetgrass with submission. 

Every astrological sign has a ruling planet, which gives it some of its qualities. Aries’ ruler is Mars—Rome’s god of war, the planet of energy, action, and desire. While his Greek equivalent Ares was little worshiped, Mars was one of the most important gods in Rome. 

He didn’t start out that way, though. He was originally associated with agriculture and fertility after Juno, queen of the gods, gave birth to him from being touched by a magic plant. He was soft. Tender. Before something happened that made him fierce.

“Just wait until your father gets home,” my mom said when my sister and I fought or talked back to her, red-faced with tears. 

I was kinky, I’d just never really had the chance to be.

In our room, we waited, knees hugged to our chests, tensing for the sound of the garage door slowly rolling open. 

When he finally got home, he came upstairs with the same wooden spoon my mom used to scoop fluffy mounds of mashed potatoes onto our dinner plates. I waited my turn in the corner of the room with my arms crossed over my chest, my pulse thrumming in my wrists, watching as my sister’s small body, bent over my bottom bunk, crumpled under the thwack of the wood. She always sobbed and got off easy, emerged wet-faced and splotchy, full of I’m sorrys and I’ll never do it agains.

Then it was my turn. I got it harder, in that pink and purple room, when I clenched my jaw and refused to let him see me cry. The wood stung my skin like a promise.

Soft. Tender. Before something happened that made them fierce. 

But the next day he would dance with us in the living room to Whitney Houston CDs, or sing hours of karaoke with us in the basement, or make us laugh so hard our stomachs hurt. He rode roller coasters with us and always knew the answers to our math homework. Where I learned to see my mom as an emotional woman in need of protection, I saw him as someone who was free. Southern Baptist Christianity demanded I be like her, but I wanted to be like him.

A moon in Aries is a moon on fire. Maybe the clash between my dad and I can be traced to our warring placements, our shared inheritance. We share stubbornness, we share hyper independence. We share fire. We share a dad who left. 

When I came out at 26 around the dining room table at my parents’ house, my dad barely said a word. He left the table angry, and didn’t speak to me for nine months. 

For weeks afterward, I leapt at each buzz of my phone, waiting for a response from my dad that never came. “He feels betrayed, abandoned,” my mom said over the phone. “He doesn’t want to talk to you.”

Tears silently dripped down my face onto the comforter I had burrowed myself beneath. I wouldn’t let her hear me cry.

“You two are so stubborn, just so similar,” She continued. “Do you remember senior year of high school? You two barely talked that whole year.” 

I don’t remember us barely speaking. What I remember is the anxiety that flooded my chest when I received a text from him that read something like: Come home now, we need to talk. Your mother found your birth control pills.  

Aries’ ruling planet, Mars, has two moons. The moons are named after a set of twins in Greek mythology, Phobos and Deimos, who accompanied their father Ares into battle. Phobos was the god and personification of fear and panic; Deimos, of terror and dread.

At 17, I came home after reading his text and lied my face off. I knew how close I was to the beginning of my real life beyond their house and the church. I could feel the tug of the rug underneath me as it all threatened to collapse, and I clamped my foot down. 

“It’s for my period pain,” I shot out defensively, fear personified. “My lower back cramps.” I knew my going to college in the fall was on the line if they found out about the nights I was spending sleeping in my boyfriend’s bed in lingerie from the mall instead of a sleeping bag at my best friend’s house. 

“I should take you to the gynecologist, and have them tell us if you’ve been having sex,” my dad threatened, sitting in his swivel chair with his huge wooden desk behind him. Aries needs to hold the power, needs to control.

My body shook so hard I was afraid he could see it. “Fine!” I said, looking him straight in the eyes. “Do it.”

He grounded me for the next few months, but he didn’t take me to the gynecologist. 

For years in my childhood bedroom, fiercely holding back tears with my dad’s wooden spoon, I learned that my dad would hurt me, and call it love. Maybe he and I have more in common than I think: I too was once soft and tender before it was beaten out of me. I wove barbed wire around me and hid within its protection. 

I knew how close I was to the beginning of my real life beyond their house and the church.

For years after moving out, I worked to turn some of my walls into doors. I learned how to cry again. How to peel back a stone rib cage as delicately as an orange peel. How to share what is soft and fluttering underneath. 

By the time I found myself poised over Quinn’s waiting body with no idea how to hurt them in the way they wanted, I couldn’t imagine being a person who could hit them and call it love. If I was a tender person who cried looking into my cat’s eyes, rubbed my friend’s backs when they were sad, and wrote poetry about being in love, what would it mean for me to hit my partner and enjoy it?

Mars is quite literally the red planet, thanks to the iron oxide in its soil. In Roman mythology, red was associated with courage, war, and the military. Soldiers were revered in a culture that upheld war and violence, but if they stepped out of line even a little bit, they were fined, demoted, or beaten.

There is so little my dad shares about his childhood: riding a bike up and down the small hills at the trailer park, picking bugs out of cereal bought with food stamps, being beaten with a wooden spoon for the tiniest of infractions, a mother who loved him and alcohol very much, a stepfather who became like a father, who loved him and alcohol very much, who in the end, left too. 

My great-uncle, my grandma’s brother, tells the story like this: he went to his sister’s house for a barbecue one day. I don’t know how old my dad was. Old enough to miss his stepfather, old enough to have been attached for years. 

“Where’s Jim?” My great-uncle asked. 

“Jim’s not coming back,” my grandmother said, flipping burgers on the backyard grill.

And he didn’t.

In ancient Rome, Mars was called many things, including Mars Pater: Mars the Father.

Back in their room, Quinn directed me to the right places. I brought my hand down, watching their skin slowly redden. Their body sank lower into the bed. I traced over the red with my fingernails and reached for the tools they’d given me. The paddle was heavy in my hands, and I found the thuddiest edge of it. I was clumsy, too gentle, afraid to hurt them. I wanted to make them feel good. They were patient, walked me through it, told me not to worry. 

I learned that I could like being dominant. I’d tasted it in small moments – stepping on their waiting chest in my platform Pleasers, a little light choking, claiming them mine as I sat on their face. But I was afraid of the part of me I’d need to get to know in order to fully embody dominance. I was afraid to be daddy.

“It was really important to your dad to be the good dad he didn’t have,” my mom confided when I was in high school, sliding a stack of clean plates into the kitchen cabinet. 

I am lucky to have not had the childhood he had. Even if we share abandonment, my dad was here in the ways his dad never was for him: changing my diapers, teaching me to ride a bike, taking pictures at my first Homecoming dance, helping me apply for college. But when he wasn’t speaking to me, I was haunted by him. A ghost of a man. A mirage of a father.

At the first Christmas after he stopped being “sick” when I was coming to a family gathering, we sat across the room from each other precariously and I thought about the email I sent him last winter, telling him how much I loved him and missed him and wanted to talk. 

Quinn and I did a few more spankings. I was cautious, but I wanted to learn.

I could never forget his response: “Yes, I’m not interested in talking. It will only make things worse for everyone so pass.”

“Tough place for life,” NASA’s website explains of Mars. “At this time, Mars’ surface cannot support life as we know it. Current missions are determining Mars’ past and future potential for life.”

My sun sign is in Libra, the sign opposite to Aries. Aries is how I traveled around the world to places people told me I should be afraid to go instead of trying to fix a life that wasn’t working, it’s how I started working for myself, it’s how I tip-toed into exploring my sexuality with a threesome. 

I was afraid of the part of me I’d need to get to know in order to fully embody dominance.

But Libra is in me, too—in my sweatshirt that says your interest in beauty is not trivial, in the daily alarm I had set for years to go off at sunset so I could watch it every night, in how I lose myself in a relationship because I can’t imagine anything more important than being my loved one’s person, in how I struggle to leave a job or a relationship that isn’t working because I can talk myself into seeing every side. 

A sun and moon in opposite signs means I was born under the full moon—and so astrologically, part of the work of my life is the balancing of opposites. The embodiment and integration of different, sometimes warring, parts of self. I am dominant and submissive, abandoner and abandoned; if I had to abandon my dad to not abandon myself, so be it. I am my dad and I am not. I choose what to do with these shards, with this inheritance. 

Astrologer Jeff Hinshaw once shared a few questions for Aries signs to reflect on: who am I? What do I desire? How am I being invited to more lovingly stand in my power? 

He also shared these affirmations: I am. I transform. I start anew.

My training wheels on, Quinn and I did a few more spankings. I was cautious, but I wanted to learn. Finally, we went to a kink party together. I hadn’t known what to expect even with their primer, but it was a welcome surprise: a lot of friendly, non-judgmental queer people consensually hitting each other, tying each other up, and eating chips. 

In the beginner’s room at the kink party, my partner laid on the leather spanking bench, their body an eager thing. People around us twirled floggers and chatted while an impact play teacher demonstrated techniques and guided me through using them. 

It turns out, there’s more to a good spanking than you think: warming up the skin, reading the signs of your partner’s body, knowing when to keep going and when to withhold, using the right amount of force at the right time, finding the right rhythm, dancing with the tools as an extension of your own body, mixing a thuddy fist or paddle with a stingy palm or, in our case, a wooden spatula. A pervertible, my partner said: an ordinary object used for sex. 

I finally got into the moment, body flushed from the inside out. My wrists flicked as I moved loosely around their body, delivering thwacks and thuds. A part of me I’d hidden from wriggled out from the dark room they’d been tucked inside and held the spatula with me. After forty five minutes of spanking, I buzzed from the high of hitting Quinn exactly how they wanted to be hit. My baby. I wanted to take care of them. This was how.

“The Stone Home,” My Second Novel, Was Crafted From Shocking Historical Truths

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

In January 2016, I was an unpublished writer working on my first novel when I learned of an artist residency on a tiny island off the west coast of South Korea. Excited, I daydreamed of finishing my manuscript in my motherland, visiting family, and of course, eating an abundance of delicious food. As I dug deeper into the history of the island though, I unearthed troubling revelations. This artist residency had a rumored past as a concentration camp in the 1940s, under Japanese colonial rule. 선감학원 (Seongam Academy), as the camp was known, was established with the purpose of housing “vagrant” children. In reality, the children of political dissidents were abducted and forced into labor under horrific conditions of abuse. Spooked, I closed my residency application, afraid of what I’d soak in on those grounds. Coming from a family of women who have spoken to ghosts through their dreams, I know the permeability of our living world.

A few months later in April, I came across an Associated Press article that chilled me with recognition: “S. Korea covered up mass abuse, killings of ‘vagrants.’” But the article wasn’t about the Japanese in the 1940s, but rather, institutions created forty years later. I shuddered. The exposé revealed human rights atrocities at 36 “social welfare facilities” or “reformatory centers” in the years leading up to the 1988 Seoul Olympics. They found that these abuses, most notably at one of the largest facilities called 형제복지원 (the Brothers Home), were orchestrated and covered-up by the government for decades. 

The 1988 Olympics occurred when I was a year old. Recent history—these institutions were in place during a time that was within reach, that could be felt in my body. Social welfare facility, reformatory institution, concentration camp: whatever the name, the facts remained the same, and it was incomprehensible to me.

I began to research these places of horror, driven by a need to understand. In the early 1980s, the South Korean government, which was a thinly veiled dictatorship, hoped to win the bid for the 1988 Olympics, seeing it as an opportunity to showcase South Korea’s rapid transformation from war-torn and impoverished into a “developed” country. The Olympics would herald international recognition and reputation. The price? Thousands of innocents, imprisoned without recourse to justice. The inmates, sometimes locked up for years, were most often from the margins of society: the houseless, the disabled, and orphaned were all forcibly removed in the government’s efforts to rectify their image. Others, too, were rounded up: street vendors, political dissidents, loitering teenagers who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

I began to research these places of horror, driven by a need to understand.

The levels of complicity were shocking. Police officers were often promoted based on the number of “vagrants” they captured, while the facility owners received government subsidies based on the number of prisoners they housed, which incentivized them to work together for mutual benefit. Once imprisoned, the inmates were forced to labor without compensation and often brutalized into submission in order to churn out financial profits. At the Brothers Home, inmates glued together shoes, sewed blankets and dress shirts, and assembled ball point pens. These products were distributed not only within the borders of Korea, but sent abroad to Japan and Europe. It’s unclear if the companies who hired these facilities knew the conditions under which their products had been made. 

The parallels between the abuses at Seongam Academy, perpetuated by the Japanese, and the ones at the Brothers Home, perpetuated by Koreans in power four decades later, was uncanny, unconscionable. What did it mean that Korea’s dictators reenacted the oppression of our colonizers? 

Humanity’s brutality gutted me, and I wanted to look away. I forced myself to keep researching, and soon, I became obsessed. I read as many articles I could find and pored over photographs: a truck crammed with children, a boy in a blue shirt jumping off the back, unaware of what lies ahead. A crowded room of girls in beige sweats, bent over sewing machines. Boys in striped tracksuits gluing soles onto leather sandals in a dark room. 

Strikingly enough, the reenactment of the country’s oppression happened on a microcosmic level as well. Within the institution, inmates were encouraged to betray one another for personal benefit. Those who exhibited allegiance to the leaders rose through the ranks, becoming guards with access to tools of violence, which were then used to control their peers. The limits of our humanity fascinated me—how could a person who had endured such abuse then justify their behavior and complicity as abuser? 

How could a person who had endured such abuse then justify their behavior and complicity as abuser?

A year later, I began writing what would become The Stone Home. I wrote not to find clean answers, but to wrestle with the unknowability of ourselves. I wanted to understand our darkest impulses. If I were imprisoned, how would I behave? What lengths would I go to protect myself, or someone I loved? Under what circumstance, if any, would I betray my peers? 

As I tried different narrators and approaches into the story, I found myself stuck. I set aside my scattered pages, unsure of how to continue. I had gathered information, but I couldn’t imagine myself into the body of my characters. I needed to learn more.

On a rainy afternoon on April 23, 2018, two years after I had first read about the Brothers Home, I arrived at the Seoul National Assembly. On the sidewalk outside the government building’s gates, I found a makeshift hut next to a wall of posterboards. The images: a room full of boys kneeling beside bunk beds, children shoveling dirt and hauling wood, and infuriatingly, images of the director of the Brothers Home receiving an award for his efforts at social reform. There, a man greeted me in a bright yellow zip-up jacket. He had dark hair streaked with gray and wore glasses spotted with rain: Han Jong-Sun, a survivor, an activist, and the man I had been looking for. 

Accompanied by my aunt, who acted as my cultural and linguistic interpreter, we went to a nearby tea shop, and then later, to a restaurant. Over many hours, Mr. Han described his life before captivity, how he was caught when he was 9 years old, the grueling days within the Home, the violence which he both endured and witnessed. He detailed the hopelessness he felt, the competitive tensions amongst the prisoners, and the community he forged with a few friends. The despair that consumed him as an adult, physically released if still not mentally uncaged. It was only when he began advocating, despite fear of retribution from those in power, that he found purpose. Since 2012, Mr. Han had been protesting, demanding apology from the government for their crimes.

While Mr. Han spoke candidly, I also felt his guardedness: What would I do with this information he shared? Why, when so many people were unwilling to look, did I want to write about this ugly period of our history? As somebody who had survived the horrors of one of these institutions, trust had to be gained. 

He detailed the hopelessness he felt, the competitive tensions amongst the prisoners, and the community he forged with a few friends.

We spoke for hours. He asked me to consider: what if I had been a kid walking along a beach on holiday and I was taken by cops, simply because I didn’t have my identification papers? This happened time and again, so much so that my aunt exclaimed in sudden recognition. In her youth, there was a saying adults used to scare children into obedience: If you’re out late at night, the men will get you. She had always thought it was a figurative spook, a made-up story. 

Though I wanted to write about our Korean history, I knew that similar institutions had targeted Indigenous Australians, First Nations children in Canada, and Black Americans. Migrant children are being imprisoned at the border of the United States right now, as I type these words. I spoke to Mr. Han about how this repetition and refraction of history is what propelled me to write. There were questions I wanted to untangle: What does it mean that state-sanctioned violence happens across cultures? Whose stories are silenced, and how does that erasure contribute to future crimes against humanity? How do we create change? 

At the end of our conversation, Han Jong Sun wished me luck and asked that I treat this subject matter with care and respect. He asked me to not only witness, but to act.  

Mr. Han’s directive fueled me. I crafted an institution that was modeled on what I’d learned of Seongam Academy and the Brothers Home, buttressed with layers of fictionalization. I wanted to represent the abuses that occurred, but I didn’t want to speak for the survivors. Fiction has the ability to carry you into the body of another, to allow you to feel and taste and move and experience. Fiction can ask you to witness by subsuming you into the life of another. This was my hope for my novel, and the force behind my characters. We have fierce, protective Eunju as our narrator, and she works hard to protect her resourceful, underestimated mother Kyungoh. Stubborn Sangchul is our second narrator, imprisoned alongside his idealistic older brother Youngchul. Grief-struck Narae opens the book in 2011, and insists on excavating the truth to the very end. 

I wanted to represent the abuses that occurred, but I didn’t want to speak for the survivors.

As I wrote, I realized that I had been fixated on the injustices of these institutions, but equally important, as Mr. Han had taught me, was survival through community. Looking back at my research, I lingered on a story of a group of girls who escaped the Brothers Home by working together in secret. I incorporated this coming-together, this solidarity among the imprisoned. Without each other, we cannot survive. Without each other, we cannot create a more hopeful future. 

My wish for the readers of The Stone Home is that they can feel this thread of optimism and connection. I want it to buoy them, as it did me. I also hope, reader, that you don’t look away from the hard parts. It is only by knowing our past that we can guard against the future.

9 Books About Invisible Disabilities

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

One of the most defining aspects of living with an invisible illness or disability is its accompanying isolation. That your suffering is not seeable—and thus, seemingly less real or impactful—means people in your life often struggle to understand, believe, or empathize with your needs. Even worse, others will often directly accuse you of lying or dramatizing your symptoms, needing to invent some excuse to dismiss your pain so they can avoid grappling with the random, pervasive ways disability impacts us all. And because of the unidentifiable nature of invisible illness, it’s easy to feel alone in a sea of abled bodies, making it challenging to build community with other chronically ill and disabled people. 

That’s why it’s so important that the publishing industry has recently started supporting chronically ill and disabled writers in sharing their stories. In the books that follow, writers with a variety of diseases and conditions depict the multiplicity of experiences that come with living with an invisible illness or disability. In doing so, they offer personal insights and unique perspectives that finally give voice to a group of people that has been ignored for too long. 

None of them stand as the definitive example of invisible illness—because no one book can—but they can act as a source of guidance, relief, and solidarity for those of us living with illnesses and disabilities that are not readily apparent. And for those who do not yet know illness or disability, allow these books to challenge your misconceptions about the complexities of living with invisible conditions. 

What Doesn’t Kill You: A Life with Chronic Illness — Lessons from a Body in Revolt by Tessa Miller

Detailing the cultural stigma and isolation surrounding chronic illness, What Doesn’t Kill You is a moving memoir about Miller’s journey living with Crohn’s disease, an incurable form of inflammatory bowel disease. A journalist, Miller weaves together research and resources with personal narrative to advocate for a greater understanding of chronic illness and disability. If you’re looking for useful guidance, touching solidarity, and beautiful writing, start with this book. 

Seven Days in June by Tia Williams

Seven Days in June is a fun, yet complex romance novel that follows two Black writers: Eva Mercy, a successful erotica writer and single mother who lives with chronic migraines, and Shane Hall, a reclusive and acclaimed novelist. The pair unexpectedly reunite at a literary event fifteen years after developing an intense connection as teenagers, and over seven summer days, they embark on a renewed romance while navigating buried trauma and unresolved emotions. Although the romance genre is steadily diversifying, there are still very few chronically ill or disabled heroines. Williams brings awareness to the intersectionality of race and disability and counters the stereotype of disabled women as pitiable and sexless by depicting Eva and her invisible disability in a refreshingly developed and integrated way.  

Vagina Problems: Endometriosis, Painful Sex, and Other Taboo Topics by Lara Parker

Illustrating the extensive personal and economic costs of living with an invisible illness, Vagina Problems candidly shares Parker’s years-long journey navigating chronic pain caused by endometriosis, pelvic floor dysfunction, and vaginismus, among other things. Shaped by the profound trauma of being repeatedly misdiagnosed and dismissed by doctors, Parker sheds light not only on the challenges faced by women seeking accurate diagnosis and treatment for endometriosis but also on the deep toll chronic pain can have on one’s relationships, career, and mental health. 

The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke

Mixing memoir with scientific and philosophical inquiry, The Invisible Kingdom investigates the rise of chronic illness and autoimmune diseases with an eye toward their disproportionate impact on women. Set against the backdrop of living for years without answers about the cause of her debilitating symptoms from Lyme disease, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and eventually, long COVID, her investigation highlights the systemic failures of the medical establishment in recognizing and treating conditions that defy easy diagnosis. By including her narrative, O’Rourke brings a needed humanity and personal solicitude to the challenges imposed by an unseeable illness: “In retrospect,” she writes, “it is painfully clear that the invisibility of my illness was one of the most challenging parts of my suffering, wearing my silence down over time… the near total absence of recognition of how sick I was confounded me: it rendered my suffering meaningless.” 

Life on Delay: Making Peace With A Stutter by John Hendrickson

Stemming from a viral essay Hendrickson wrote in 2019 about then-candidate Joe Biden’s stutter, Life on Delay is an essential memoir that delves into the intersection of masculinity and disability by way of Hendrickson’s lifelong stutter. It offers an unfiltered glimpse into the daily struggles of living with a speech disorder as Hendrickson shares his experience of being bullied, substance abuse, depression, and isolation. Simultaneously humorous and emotionally crushing, this book is a testament to the power of self-acceptance. 

Sex With a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery by Annie Liontas

In Sex With a Brain Injury, Liontas shares her experience of enduring multiple concussions in her thirties, highlighting the effects invisible disabilities can have on our closest relationships. Intertwining personal narrative with historical and cultural analysis, this memoir explores the intersection of disability, mental health, and queerness. 

Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul by Evette Dionne

A compelling, gratifying exploration of the experience of fat Black women, Weightless braids memoir with cultural criticism to poignantly analyze the treatment of bodies, race, and gender in American society. Dionne sheds light on the pervasive biases faced by fat women, especially by the medical industry, through a series of insightful essays that detail her journey from facing fatphobic harassment as a child to receiving a diagnosis of heart failure and pulmonary hypertension at age twenty-nine. Challenging readers to confront how their own biases are shaped by often harmful societal norms, Dionne unflinchingly depicts the reality of how being a fat Black woman shapes the experience of having an invisible disability. 

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories From The Twenty-First Century edited by Alice Wong

Disability Visibility is a groundbreaking anthology that brings together a wide array of disabled writers to challenge societal stereotypes about disability and advocate for disability justice, representation, and inclusion. Although it doesn’t exclusively explore invisible disabilities, it is the perfect companion for chronically ill people in search of a wider community and for able-bodied people looking to understand the plethora of disabled experiences. 

The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir by Jami Nakamura Lin

Structured around Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan folklore, The Night Parade explores Lin’s undiagnosed bipolar disorder and losing her father to cancer within the themes of mental illness, grief, family, and cultural mythology. Lin blends the supernatural with the deeply personal to offer readers a unique perspective on the complexities of invisible illness and its broader place within the human condition.

You Keep My Heart In Its Cage

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

eager years

i love you forever because / i saved you / i wanted your life / more than you did / and like spring / gave it back / when you wanted it / once more / we shared jeans / a notebook like a spare brain / listened to sade / burned the lawsuit money / i get jesus / and his big expectations / of the living / because we’re all out of wishes / when we’re dead / i love you / permanently / i’ve never forgiven or forgotten / my whole human / life which is / longer and dumber and / tenderer / than we ever imagined / tender like a new bruise / bad voicemail / a picture you can’t see / without your heart falling through your ribcage / today / you stir the oil into peanut butter / wearing creases at the corner of your eye / like it’s nothing / and i am so moved / see i wasn’t built / for any of this / freak lightning behind my face / in the future you / entrust me with your kid / for an afternoon / the smallest life / a sparkplug brain / it’s totally different / we eat sushi deconstructed / by tiny fingers / we walk laps / around monet’s water lilies / my lovers rock cd skips now / i’m still here / you’re still here / i’m still here / you’re still here / .

after the car accident

you picked me up from the hospital
we got giant diet cokes and
threw rocks in the river
the thuds and splashes restoring
my expectations of gravity and
the whole ride home i stared
at the guardrail hemming
the highway, that endless swath
of thin metal rippling like water.

Aisha Sabatini Sloan on Allowing the Space for Perspective

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

In Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s revised essay collection Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, we encounter a narrator who is compelled to serve as witness. These varied acts of witnessing are how she builds a vocabulary for herself as a daughter, teacher, friend, and writer. Artists are this narrator’s intimate companions—Prince, Richard Diebenkorn, Kiese Laymon, her father. Place becomes the site for all the orbiting they do together and perhaps no place of deeper significance to this narrator than Detroit, the beloved birthplace of her parents. “For my family,” our narrator professes, “Detroit has always been inevitable. It is the place we have been heading back to my entire life.”

Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit is a collection about the piercing, almost haunting nature of memory. It is also a book in which meditations on Black life and death, teaching, travel, gender, and love are incisively juxtaposed to articulate new questions and curiosities about the contemporary. In Sabatini Sloan’s hands, the essay itself offers a wide aesthetic terrain to tread through such investigations. The form is akin to breathwork throughout these pages in that her prose provides a steadying, capacious rhythm. Her language is precise and exacting but never sterile, never off beat. And the act of return as presented by this revised collection is an opportunity to reconsider the very fragile frame of nonfiction as a category itself. Sabatini Sloan is in a dance with form.

I spoke with Sabatini Sloan over Zoom about the lessons of revision, what it means to learn with and alongside the people we love, and why the question of genre is never really, simply, a question of genre. 

Jessica Lynne: In these essays, the narrator wears so many different hats, from daughter and relative, to researcher and teacher, writer and art critic. Visual art and music, in particular, are the pulses of so much in these essays. What opens up for you by training your attention to cultural production in this way? 

Aisha Sabatini Sloan: That’s just where the magic happens. There was an interview that Fred Moten gave where he talked about art as an act of survival and the art of survival. It’s an act of constant improvisation to be taking in or noticing where there is danger and where the allies are, and then improvising from there. That reminded me of this quote that I was obsessed with for a long time from Ralph Ellison’s National Book Award speech where he talks about the necessary shape shifting that the Black American artist has to do. I think it’s fascinating to watch how people manage that and how people code their message in different ways. It’s endlessly exciting and exhilarating to look at and to learn from. 

JL: You’re the art critic, but you are also the daughter, and that role is a central part of this collection, especially your relationship with your father. It’s a relationship that is never one note. How did you approach writing about your father in this way? Looking back, are there things that you wish you would have withheld, or does it remain the container best suited for talking about this person who shows up for you in many other ways across other projects? 

ASS: I think about that especially because I’m in a different moment with my parents as they’re getting older and both doing a lot of thinking about their lives. My dad thinks a lot about his contributions, and it has always been one of the reasons I don’t write as much about my mother. She’s shyer and my dad has always been so responsive and positive when being written about no matter what it is. In some ways, it ends up feeling like a conversation, an extension of a conversation between us. There’s a way in which I feel like he helped me. He really encouraged me to write about him and he loves witnessing people. He’s always tried to interpret and explain people and dynamics and relationships. That’s a way that we connect—in my witnessing of him and our relationship. We find each other through the ways that we overcome things and then find each other afterwards. 

We inhabit different perspectives in different moments.

But I’ve definitely wondered if I’ve changed or altered the course of our relationship by writing about him. As he’s gotten older, I’ve been feeling more sensitive about him out in the world. How he’s perceived and how he perceives himself. It’s a tricky road, I think, to wonder if there’s something that I regret in particular on the page. There’s probably things that, for one reason or another, will get kicked up that might haunt me, but I feel like the grace that my father has had over the course of the last decade and a half of me being a writer is the bottom line. We are artists together and part of that is witnessing each other. If people can see that there’s a lot of beauty in our relationship, that’s what matters to me. 

JL: Still, your parents are very much present together in how you experience Detroit throughout these pages. This edition also closes with a new essay that is a reflection on Black art, the legacy of the collector Dr. Cledie Collins Taylor, and the Detroit Institute of the Arts. How has your relationship to that city changed, if at all? 

ASS: It’s strange because I’m closer to Detroit now than at any point in my life because I live in Michigan, but I’ve spent the least amount of time there because of the pandemic, having a baby, and being kind of homebound. My parents, because they’ve gotten older, are spending less time in their house in Detroit because it’s a lot of work. So through them and through that absence, I feel wistful. I really miss spending time there. It’s the center of our family life and our relationship with my extended family. That house that they have embodies this dream we have about ourselves: the possibility of creating an art space and having exhibitions and artists coming to stay. It is a bit like a stand in for the city in some ways. There’s a sense of a future there that is really rooted in hope and of idealism, so I feel nostalgic about it. Detroit feels like a portal to the world in a way that Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti do not. 

JL: In “Gray’s Anatomy,” the narrator wonders about blood lust and thee blood lust on the part of law enforcement specifically. Though this essay comes after “D is for the Dance of the Hours,” in which the narrator spends the day shadowing her cousin who is a police officer in Detroit, there is a shared curiosity. Do you feel as though you have different questions or new questions about blackness, and policing as an infrastructure, and how that shows up in a city like Detroit? 

ASS: One of the reasons I like an essay collection is for what you can do in the space between pieces. You can reposition and have a different angle on the “thing” and it’s still you. But we inhabit different perspectives in different moments. 

But before even talking about blackness, I feel an undercurrent for the essay about the ride along with my cousin that is maybe absent from the writing is the role of women in the department and the fact that so many of the men that perpetrate crimes against women work in law enforcement. I felt super aware of this while I was writing that and I’m not trying to say that anybody is excused from anything based on gender, but it was really on my mind how people orient toward aggression, depending on how they manifest. In addition to that, in the last several years, we really have gotten a lot of information about actual attempts to infiltrate law enforcement by white supremacist organizations. It’s a studied phenomenon. And the fact that both misogyny and violence against women, and violence against black people are institutionalized in that way was something I was far more viscerally disturbed by, by the time I was writing “Gray’s Anatomy,” whereas in 2014, when I wrote that “D is for the Dance of the Hours,” I didn’t have the same visceral relationship to the way that those kinds of oppression are woven into those institutions. There is a dawning of awareness happening from one essay to the next. 

JL: I see the essay, “Black Abundance” as a love note both for Kiese Laymon and for Black folks, broadly. Why was it important for this kind of love note to be included in this revised edition? 

ASS: In some ways, I feel like witnessing the trajectory of Kiese Laymon’s work over the last ten, eleven years has been a real point of growth for me. He’s helped me learn how to be a writer and a teacher through witnessing how he constructs a sentence, how he comports himself in an interview, and how he communicates encouragement and appreciation and respect and critique. There are ways in which this collection represents that growth period through different sort of flash points. I like the idea of having that in there as a nod to the role I feel like he played in my growth as a writer, thinker, and a teacher. 

JL: What has working on this revised edition taught you about revision? 

ASS: I was very inspired again, by, Kiese Laymon and the way he framed his own experience of revising his essay collection. When I got that opportunity, I was a bit uncertain of how I wanted to contend with the fact that they’re these different selves represented in different pieces. Rather than trying to contend with the fact that I might not have written something that way now, I let myself be the same person that I was in those essays and tried to shape the process of revision with my editor, who was helpful in this, to show more of an arc.

This is a life process, art as life.

The thing that I struggled with when I first started writing nonfiction was the idea that when you state something in an essay as truth, you’re fixing something in time that is likely to change. So, one of the reasons I am attracted to fragmentation and leaving space for things to breathe—either between essays and even within essays—has to do with allowing the space for perspective and the understanding that perspective is what it is in a certain moment. That’s what’s being crystallized—not me and what I think and what I believe. To an extent, there are declarations, but I do still feel like it would have been more of a lie for me to pretend that I had been someone then that I might not be any more, than to, just let the reader experience a variety of those selves. 

JL: In the written adaptation you gave as the keynote for NonfictionNOW in 2017, you write:

The genre says, “NON’ and then it says “FICTION.” But writing that confuses illustrates a lived experience of conflict and dissonance, of winking, of knowing how good it feels to be winked at, of being at once invisible and hyper visible, of struggling toward multiple forms of fluency. This kind of breakage on the page can get messy, and maybe it’s hard to teach, but it’s coming from an impulse that is all too often seen as somehow adolescent, somehow something to be tamed and redirected. But not all of us are allowed to live in this one dimension where you can’t hear all these other voices. These sometimes screaming voices that are saying: that’s not my truth! Or they are ghosts, mostly.”

You speak to a very specific readership in this speech, a white American readership as you write. In your opinion, what is lost if we’re not able to open ourselves up to the stream influences that you embody in your work but are also rightly call for, in this speech, as a wider mode of or approach to reading and writing?

ASS: I was a little relieved because it was nice to know I still feel that. My first thought is well, it’s always going to be a fight because the problem is power and how power is wielded. 

This is also an issue for academia. I’m called upon to name or define creative nonfiction a lot, but I’ve never liked the term creative nonfiction, and I don’t know if there’s any term that does justice to the openness that’s required. So, it ends up being a question of what we are trying to do when we give it this name and whose rules are we following. 

For some people, it feels possible to have this be a question of genre. For some people, it’s possible to separate those things because they don’t feel under attack in the same way, but for a lot of us it’s not. I have to go to therapy for this. I have to exercise. I have to teach my child different things. This is a life process, art as life. What do you call having to be on your feet all the time? It’s art but it’s also, going back Fred Moten, it’s survival. This is one of those questions that you answer every time you wake up.

7 Books About Unconventional Situationships

Posted on by EL Assistant2

Situationships are underrated—said no one ever. But dare I say, as much as I despised situationships IRL (despite spending much of my teens and early twenties in them), I do love them in fiction, where they indeed might be underrated. Many a novel has been written about marriage, affairs, star-crossed lovers and the one that got away, but a surprising few have hung their mast on undefined relationships born not of fate or even human conniving, but of mere circumstance. Still, situationships make for great stories, especially if you’re not the one in them, because they keep you guessing until the very end.

I should know: I built my entire debut novel, The Band, around a series of seemingly ordinary and unplanned glitches that end up upending everybody’s lives. A boy releases a viral song about a fisherman and his son, but given his geopollitical context, it just so happens to piss off not one, not two, but all three of East Asia’s superpowers. He escapes to America, where he stumbles upon a woman at an grocery store carrying the one dish that reminds him of home. She happens to be a therapist; he happens to be on the verge of a mental health crisis. The situationship that follows drives the both of them—along with everyone else in their orbit—down a rabbithole populated by revenge plots, AI, and a future neither of them see coming. 

Of course, I’m not the only one who loves a good situationship gone awry. Here are seven other books that feature the kind of unconventional relationships replete with the kind of sexual tension that makes you wonder: will they or won’t they?

Second Place by Rachel Cusk

It’s no accident that my own novel starts with a quote from this book—“his desire, when it comes, extinguishes her.” In Second Place, a middle-aged woman with a striking resemblance to the author invites an artists to stay at her house. She is married with children and a career, but no matter—the most distinguishable plot in the book is her consuming desire for this man who, at best, treats like like an appliance—helpful, sure, but not something he’d take to bed. Throughout my own reading of the book, I kept on waiting for him to break and give in to her advances, but alas, in fiction as IRL, changing someone’s mind is harder than it looks. 

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

Some readers went crazy over the fact that at the end of 432 pages, Selin and Ivan (the protagonist and her love interest) seems to have never consummated their relationship. I found it the most relatable thing I read all year because I, too, spent all my college years in the same kind of sexual repression driven by a cocktail of being the good daughter of immigrants meets excessive intellect meets nerd school. Like the elusive Hungarian mathematician that is the (potentially underserved) target of Selin’s desires, the book can come off like a giant tease—the literary equivalent of blue balls—but then again, that might be part of its appeal. 

Y/N by Esther Yi

Shortly after I wrote/sold The Band, I started to hear about Esther Yi’s Y/N, the one other literary fiction centered in the world of Kpop—a topic that is apparently usually reserved for YA (likely thanks to the long-standing, albeit outdated, stereotype about Kpop fans being mostly young girls). Yi’s stark portrayal of a Berlin woman who goes to Seoul to search for a Kpop idol named Moon takes on an obsessive but undefineable edge wherein she wants the boy desperately—despite being formally attached to a German boy named Masterson—in an extreme, parasocial kind of way. Multiple detours mark the subsequent breakup with the boyfriend and prolonged surrealistic journey to find the idol, but one the constant throughout is the thoroughly ambiguous nature of the unnamed narrator’s desire for this boy about which she knows nothing and everything at once. 

I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel

Patel’s obsessive, thoroughly modern novel also has plenty of sex—forget “spicy”; this book will burn the roof of your mouth with the searing, unflinching way it talks about the kind of intercourse that can only be called f*cking and not “love-making.” This makes it all the more ironic—and unusual—that the central relationship of the book is not between the 31-year old narrator and her roster of both official and unofficial lovers, but rather, between her and the woman she is obsessed with, the ex-girlfriend of the man she wants to be with. It’s a situationship—or “delusionship”—unlike any other and I am here for it. By all the critical accolades it’s been getting (here’s to the Women’s Prize), I’m not the only one. 

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

This short story collection has plenty of conventional relationships—of the married, divorced, extramarital, and one-night-stand variety—but the central locus upon which everything else rests is between a tenuously-connected pair of protagonists, Benny Salazar and his assistant, Sasha. Benny, an aging music executive, and Sasha, his young and attractive—albeit kleptomaniac—hireling, both start and end the novel. Under normal circumstances, this might set the reader up to expect something to happen between the two of them, as is often the case when an older man with resources is in the orbit of a younger woman with looks but no money. But Egan takes us on an unexpected ride through multiple situationships where sex is frequently dangled but rarely fulfilled. In one chapter, a woman goes on safari with her boyfriend and his two children but ends up being attracted to the tour guide—a fact that is apparent only to one of the kids. In another, an actress gets to play the role of a lifetime: the real-life girlfriend of an infamous dictator. 

The Cleaner by Brandi Wells

The heroine in Brandi Wells’ debut novel, The Cleaner, is an almost deity-like character who sees all and does an enormous amount of meddling, but when it comes to her own relationships with the people in her life, she resort to the kind of ties that defy definition. The cleaning woman at the center of the story doesn’t really have family or traditional friends for that matter—the people she is closest to appear to be a co-worker named L. and a woman whose desk she cleans nicknamed Sad Intern. But every time we are attempted to assume that she wants to be besties with either of these two women, the cleaner reveals something to shatter that: she’ll visualize hitting her colleague so hard she bruises and steal the intern’s laxatives. Her romantic life is no different: whether an invitation to go on a walk with the delivery person is supposed to be a date or a platonic hangout remains an open question, a trademark of every situationship. 

Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

Perhaps the weirdest of all the situationships on this list is the relationship Mrs. Caliban has with a sea creature named Larry in Rachel Ingalls’ unforgettable novella that everybody apparently ignored when it first came out years before I was born but now is finally making a much deserved comeback. It has all the hallmarks of a regular affair, complete with a deadend relationship that primes the protagonist to meet someone new and more exciting, except in this case the meet-cute happens in her living room when a nearly seven foot tall escaped frog enters through her screen door. For a cross-species union, their romance does take a quick turn towards the physical. I’m no herpetologist, so I’m not sure if what they do together counts as sex per say—but the point is this: can a situationship get any more conventional than when a married woman has a torrid romance with a fugitive member of a different species?

Queer People Still Struggle To Find Support, Meaning, and Connection

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

The film opens with a view of London’s skyline; doused in a deep blue evening sky. Lights of the city blink. The onset of night reveals a man standing behind a window, translucent, looking down. He is shirtless; his arms are crossed; his expression is still and pensive. As he comes into focus, a pale orange glow begins to overwhelm the blue, and the image is washed out. The title appears across the screen, All of Us Strangers, and promises a tension that cannot be resolved: A collective estrangement, connection born by isolation.  

All of Us Strangers, directed and written by Andrew Haigh, is a time-bending, supernatural exploration of grief and the darker shades of queer life, which ultimately poses substantive questions about how struggles with queer identity have persisted over time.

The film follows Adam, a middle-aged, gay screenwriter played by Andrew Scott. He lives an isolated life, ensconced in a sterile apartment in a high-rise building only inhabited by one other person—Harry, a younger man played by Paul Mescal, who Adam softly rejects when he shows up drunk at his door.

His childhood perceptions and adult experiences intermingle and collide.

Adam is working on a screenplay about his childhood. His parents died in a car crash when he was 12, and when he visits his suburban childhood home for research, they materialize there, the same age they were when they died. He visits and explains his adult life to them—his career, his home, and most painfully and vitally, his queerness. He falls in love with Harry as he reintroduces himself to his spectral parents, opening himself to the vulnerability and care of an intimate relationship for the first time in years.

Time loses its linear thread. His childhood perceptions and adult experiences intermingle and collide, pulling him inexorably toward the injuries of his early adolescence: The loss of his parents and the dawning of his queer sexuality in a hostile world. Adam tells Harry that the lingering pain of these traumas formed a “knot” inside him, an ossified manifestation of his terror of being alone.

The film’s final reveal is that Harry himself is dead: Adam discovers his body in his apartment, but his ghost still appears and speaks. Whether Adam’s parents and Harry are products of Adam’s imagination or spirits with their own consciousness is left open, but the complex interplay between them and Adam suggests ineffable presences: Even if only projections, their own subjective experiences of love and pain emerge. Like Adam, they are there and not there, alone and not alone.

In creating All of Us Strangers, an adaptation of Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, one of Haigh’s aims was to portray the emotional contours and edges of his generation of gay men. As he noted in an interview:

“I’ve wanted to do that for a while, but I could never quite find the right story to do it. And then telling it in the form of this strange ghost story about, essentially, what haunts us felt like the perfect way to explore a certain generation of people and what happened to us in the ’80s and ’90s. Connecting that with a story about grief and about a need to reconnect with parents felt like this perfect osmosis.”

Adam, as a gay man in his 40s, came of age in the 1980s and lived through three decades of turmoil, oppression, and progress in queer communities. AIDS ravaged the lives of innumerable queer men in the 80s and 90s and made them the objects of societal scorn and fear, sometimes manifesting in outright government repression (see the U.K.’s Section 28, which outlawed the “promotion of homosexuality” in schools and in local government in 1988). As the film depicts, these dire conditions could leave a child like Adam feeling that to live a gay life would be to live a desolate one.

Yet legal and social changes were to come in the decades ahead: Spurred on by committed queer activism, over the next twenty years effective treatments for HIV/AIDS were developed; public acceptance of gay people increased; and legal rights for queer people, including the right to marry and to serve in the military, were established in numerous countries (primarily in the Global North).  

Shifting political tides have created a more equitable world for queer people, but this does not neatly map onto personal experiences of queerness. Haigh expresses the disjuncture between the appearance of a better world and one’s internal relationship with that world. When Adam comes out to his wary mother, who knows nothing of the world beyond 1987, he explains to her that “things are different now,” and asserts he’s content with his life. She doesn’t buy it. She stares at him with a searching concern, and she says it must be a “lonely life.” Adam rebuts this, but his face cracks. “If I’m lonely, it’s not because I’m gay. Not really.” “Not really,” she echoes, her perceptions confirmed. His “not really” marks the schism between outward contentment and inner pain. Progress has not alleviated the pain of coming of age, alone, in a society that deliberately pushed queer people to its margins.

Some critics have noted that All of Us Strangers presents a quandary that is specific, maybe exclusively so, to queer people of Adam’s generation: in Vanity Fair, Richard Lawson writes that “the film may seem awfully foreign to some younger queer people who, while no doubt still suffering the batterings of an often hostile world, can’t quite identify with Adam’s internal wrestling: his fear, his coded shame, his hermetic longing. Older viewers may run headlong toward the film’s despondency, finding solace, even catharsis, in its haunting ache.” Reflecting how Haigh views his film as an exploration of “what haunts us,” not only in the literal appearance of ghosts from but also in the shadowed, stalking presence of the recent past’s injustices, Lawson observes that those too young to have known these ghosts in corporeal form may not identify with Adam’s pain.

Haigh anticipates this critique in the film itself through Harry. Though one could read Harry as a projection of Adam’s own wants and fears, the subtle layers of his characterization and Paul Mescal’s thoughtful, sensual performance suggest a presence with his own past and his own will.

Harry, in his 20s, cuts a different figure than the tightly coiled Adam: He is direct, flirtatious, and relaxed, but drifts in and out of a diffuse melancholy. He is comfortable approaching Adam and honestly discussing queerness, yet it still hangs a shadow over his life.

Those too young to have known these ghosts in corporeal form may not identify with Adam’s pain.

After Adam and Harry have sex for the first time, they lie naked in Adam’s bed, shrouded in a soft darkness. Adam, who has already revealed some of his childhood and his formative pains to Harry, asks Harry about his own personal history. Harry came out to his parents as a teenager, and though they did not react dramatically, he says it “confirmed” the difference he always felt from his family; to name his sexuality was to define his intractable separation. He tells Adam that he has “drifted” from them, and that he feels on the outskirts of their lives compared to his straight siblings. Adam responds that “things are better, of course they are. But it doesn’t take much.” Again, the acknowledgment of life being “better,” followed by the admittance that something is still missing at the core.

Harry is not much better off than Adam. On the surface, his life is undeniably easier, as someone who entered adulthood with more enshrined rights than someone of Adam’s generation, and without the threat of AIDS hanging over him (when Adam confides to Harry he used to be afraid he’d die from having sex, he adds that it must be hard for Harry to understand). He was provided for in his childhood and adolescence, without fear of violence or abandonment because of his sexuality. And yet, he is untethered and solitary, sunk in the same pool of time-stretching isolation as Adam, and for reasons directly related to his queerness. In Harry’s characterization, Haigh expresses that queer people’s separation from the structures of straight life have persisted unabated across generations, engendering the same feelings of isolation and shame for individuals in their 20s and in their 40s.

The heterosexual family is key to All of Us Strangers: A foundational structure that society organizes itself around, which queer people, as their internal sense of difference rises within them, may realize was not built for them.

Adam’s grief for his parents is compounded by the fact that he could not share who he truly was with them—in coming out to their ghosts, he makes up for lost time and sutures wounds left unaddressed by their loss. Though Harry’s comparatively placid childhood and uneventful coming out would seem to leave him on sturdier ground as an adult, his queerness not only marked him as inherently “different,” but severed him from his family. His siblings, who married and had children, deepened their ties to their parents and created a multi-generational bond, while Harry, as a single, queer man, cannot connect in the same way. Adam, though without parents, is left isolated by the same metric: His straight friends eventually married, had children, and moved to the suburbs.

Queer people, of course, are now able to marry and to have children via adoption or surrogacy in many countries, but the fact of one’s ability to assimilate into the dominant culture does not mean one feels at home in it. Adam and Harry are both characters who grew up in conventional nuclear families: with middle-class, white, suburban, heterosexual parents, who presumably expected their children to form families in a similar image when they grow up. Growing up with a burgeoning sense of one’s own queerness in such a configuration can knock a child off their axis. One thinks they belong, and as they develop a sense of self and mature sexually, they realize they do not.

The fact of one’s ability to assimilate into the dominant culture does not mean one feels at home in it.

Even someone in Harry’s generation, growing up with the reasonable hope of a baseline tolerance and certain civil rights, must reconcile their own queerness with the straight world around them. To assimilate fully into the norms of straight culture—to start a family and move to the suburbs—may feel like denying one’s essential difference for the sake of belonging, even with a same-sex partner. And given the recent rise in attempts by right-wing politicians to curtail the rights of queer and trans people, one’s acceptance as a queer family or couple is precarious at best—the future is never guaranteed.

In his review of the film, Michael Koresky cites queer theorist Lee Edelman’s polemic No Future, an argument against “reproductive futurism”: the concept that the preservation of society relies upon prioritizing future children over the concerns of the present. Edelman argues that society is structured around this concept—that the “social order” relies on us projecting our hopes for the future on a symbolic “Child,” a figure unrelated to the actual lives of children (rather, the amorphous “child” that appears in the rhetoric of politicians inveighing us to “build a better world for our children.”)  Queer sexuality by this argument, stands in direct opposition to reproductive futurism, instead embodying “the social order’s death drive.”

All of Us Strangers, notes Koresky, embodies the ideas of queer theorists like Edelman, making literal the concept that queerness, in its alienation from dominant forms of social organization, is unbound by conventional perceptions of linear time. The forward march of time is marked by a set of socially determined milestones, essential among them marriage and children. Children endow us with a concept of futurity, of continuance of our lives past our own deaths. When one’s identity grates against these, time can drift, keeping us stagnant or sending us back into the past, rather than propelling us forward into an illusory future. One can feel, even in a “better” world, that they are dancing on the edge of a void.

Andrew Haigh’s 2011 film Weekend, the story of a profoundly intimate 48-hour affair between two gay men, anticipates some of the narrative and thematic concerns of All of Us Strangers: A connection emerges out of deep loneliness, and the changing role of queerness in society is discussed and examined from multiple angles: After too much cocaine, the couple has a heated argument about the value of gay marriage, with one arguing for the radical potential of two men publicly proclaiming their love, the other decrying the assimilation into “the system” that gay marriage entails.

Haigh’s two films, made over a decade apart, illustrate what has changed and what has not. The struggle for some civil rights, marriage chief among them, is settled law in many countries, instead of a debate. Yet for queer people, there is a continued struggle to find support, meaning, and connection. Progress in the form of legal rights and greater public acceptance, which could only occur after years of dedicated activism, has helped queer people achieve some level of equality and safety, yet ironically, Haigh’s screenplay for All of Us Strangers posits that certain difficulties of queer life have become harder to talk about as a result. If it is collectively agreed upon that “things are better,” it can be hard to pin down what is still painful, what has not been resolved.

What ultimately compelled me most about All of Us Strangers is how Haigh examines this challenging tension in queer life: That a sense of separateness from mainstream society persists, in younger generations of queer people and older generations. That one can be physically present in the world, but feel that they are watching it, half in shadow, from behind a pane of thick glass.

On the other side of this central tension, though, is connection and love. Thrashing through his own isolation for the film’s duration, Adam embraces Harry at its end, illusory as this relationship is. Lying under the haunted surface of this narrative is the concept that the pain of isolation and separation is, paradoxically, inevitably, shared by others. The tension established in the title reverberates: What isolates us and what connects us, across time and generations, can spring from the same source.

8 Thrillers About Dysfunctional Mother-Daughter Relationships

Posted on by EL Assistant2

What happens when the most intimate relationship in nature—mother and child—is perverted and twisted beyond recognition? Nobody has more power to harm than the one entrusted to nurture and protect. So observes Dr. Lily Patel, the strange psychiatrist in You Know What You Did: 

“The mother-daughter bond is one of the strongest in nature. When you’re young, it keeps you tethered, protected. Later the same ties can hold you back, strangle you.” 

This aptly describes the conflicted relationship between the novel’s main character Annie Shaw, who is an artist, wife, and mother, and her own mom Mẹ, a troubled Vietnam War refugee. After Mẹ, dies, Annie’s obsessive-compulsive disorder, which she thought she’d vanquished years ago, comes roaring back—but this time, the disturbing thoughts swirling around in Annie’s brain might be coming true. 

The eight thrillers I’ve gathered below explore the darker side of mother daughter relationships. Though they vary in degrees of dysfunction from “Maybe we’ll skip Thanksgiving” to “Hide the knives,” each book is guaranteed to deliver raw emotion, tension, and complexity.

Gone Tonight by Sarah Pekkanen

When does the maternal instinct to protect verge into toxic control? With her signature intricate plotting and whiplash-inducing twists, Sarah Pekkanen explores the question of mother daughter boundaries in Gone Tonight. Twenty-four-year-old Catherine Sterling has never spent more than a few nights away from her mother Ruth. When Catherine finally decides to spread her wings by accepting a job offer in another city, Ruth embarks on a desperate mission to stop her daughter from leaving. Triggered by her mother’s increasingly strange behavior, Catherine begins to ask questions. Why did Ruth insist that the two of them relocate every few years, and why was she always prepared to move at a moment’s notice—even in the middle of the night? As Catherine secretly investigates Ruth’s past, Ruth intensifies her campaign of manipulation and subterfuge. Pekkanen masterfully ratchets up the tension with perspective alternating between Ruth’s old journal entries and Catherine in the present day.  

All Her Little Secrets by Wanda M. Morris

“With Martha, I could never be sure whether her touch would hurt or heal, whether her words would cut or console.” Ellice Littlejohn refers to her abusive, alcoholic mother as “Martha” or “Ma’am” never using any specific maternal reference. Indeed, during Martha’s frequent drunken stupors, it is Ellie, herself, who must keep house and serve as a stand-in mother to her own little brother. With the help of a neighbor, and against Martha’s wishes, teenage Ellie escapes small-town poverty to attend a private boarding school, eventually earning an Ivy League law degree and landing a plum in-house corporate lawyer job. On its surface All Her Little Secrets is a conspiracy thriller with a white-collar backdrop. But what makes the novel truly pulse-pounding is the very real dimension of racism and Ellie’s situation of being the only black woman in a c-suite of white men. With interludes to Ellie’s childhood in Chillicothe, Georgia, Morris examines whether or not we can truly suppress the past and to what extent can we reinvent ourselves.

The Leftover Woman by Jean Kwok

The Leftover Woman is a poignant family drama with the page-turning engine of a thriller. Jasmine Yang flees her rural village in China and travels to New York City in search of her daughter, given up at birth for adoption by her abusive husband. In debt to the snakeheads who smuggled her into the United States, Jasmine is forced to work as a waitress in a seedy strip club. Just a few miles away—but it might as well be another country—privileged publishing executive Rebecca Whitney struggles to balance a high-powered career, marriage, and caring for her adopted Chinese daughter Fifi, who Rebecca begins to worry has bonded a little too much with the new Chinese-speaking nanny. The dual storylines collide in an emotionally satisfying conclusion to Kwok’s suspenseful study of motherhood, identity, and class.

Darling Rose Gold by Stephanie Wrobel

Loosely inspired by the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case, Darling Rose Gold quickly departs from its real-life source material to create an even more twisted mother-daughter relationship, predicated on coercive control, simmering rage, and the blinding need for validation. The novel opens as Patty Watts is released from prison after serving five years for poisoning and abusing her daughter Rose Gold in a case of Munchausen by proxy syndrome. Patty makes the chilling declaration, “My daughter didn’t have to testify against me. She chose to.” So why is Rose Gold now welcoming her mother back into her life? Wrobel expertly wields dual timelines and head-to-head POVs to craft a taut cat-and-mouse story, only the roles of predator and prey shift constantly between mother and daughter in a delightfully destabilizing turn.

Jackal by Erin E. Adams

Jackal, a novel that is in varying proportions thriller, horror, small-town suspense, and contemporary fiction, cannot be forced into any one literary genre. This is apt as its main character Liz Rocher has long felt out of place both in the predominantly white rust belt town where she was raised by her single Haitian immigrant mother and in the neighboring African American community. After spending fourteen years away in New York City, Liz reluctantly returns home to attend her best friend’s wedding. Even as an adult, the single and childless millennial struggles to conform to the expectations of her mother, an accomplished physician and perfectionist, who immediately blames Liz’s recent breakup on weight gain. Literally and figuratively, Liz has spent her entire life trying to make herself smaller to fit in. “I cut away parts of myself. I made space for someone—something else…I turned myself into the perfect vessel for a monster.” Enter the titular Jackal. During the wedding reception, the bride’s daughter wanders into the woods and disappears. As Liz investigates, she uncovers a decades-long pattern of missing Black girls overlooked by an apathetic police force and largely unremembered by the local townspeople—except by their mothers and sisters.

The Push by Ashley Audrain

Simultaneously bleak and compulsively readable, Ashley Audrain’s horror-tinged psychological thriller lays bare the dark side of motherhood. The first-person narration of Blythe Connor draws us into a nightmare in which every single maternal insecurity, every single fear is realized. It’s like a literary version of those Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbooks (Motherhood Edition). Interspersed throughout Blythe’s account are the stories of her mother Cecilia and her grandmother Etta. Blythe comes from a long line of distant, disturbed mamas. After giving birth to her own daughter Violet, Blythe has trouble bonding with the baby. As Violet grows older, Blythe observes her daughter’s lack of empathy and worries the child might even be capable of violence. Fox, Blythe’s husband, blames her for being a bad mom. Is it a question of nature versus nurture? “The Bad Seed” or an unreliable narrator? Much like motherhood, the answers are not so simple, and Audrain keeps us guessing until the final, gut-wrenching paragraph.

Things We Do in the Dark by Jennifer Hillier

This dual-timeline thriller toggles back and forth from a present-day Hollywood homicide investigation involving an aging comedian and his sugar baby wife to a twenty-five-year-old Canadian murder trial pitting daughter against mother. Three generations of Reyes family women—Ruby Reyes dubbed “The Ice Queen” after she is convicted of killing her married lover; Ruby’s daughter Joey an exotic dancer who dies in a tragic fire; and Lola Celia, Ruby’s immigrant mother who at one point takes in Joey—illustrate the grim cycling of sexual violence through generations of passivity. The novel’s abusive maternal relationships are unabashedly dark. However, Hillier’s characteristically tight pacing and rapidly shifting settings, from seedy Toronto strip club to tony Beverly Hills mansion, keep your eyes glued to the page.

Mother-Daughter Murder Night by Nina Simon

Nina Simon’s captivating debut is a sanguine exploration of mother daughter dysfunction. After a cancer diagnosis upends L.A. real estate mogul Lana Rubicon’s life, she finds herself convalescing 300 miles north of the city in her semi-estranged daughter Beth’s remote coastal cottage. Just as the sexy fifty-seven-year-old begins to ponder whether boredom or cancer will kill her first, Beth’s teenage daughter Jack discovers a murdered man floating in the Elkhorn Slough nature preserve and becomes the prime suspect. Lana, eager to exercise her vitality after months of grueling chemo, leaps to her granddaughter’s defense. But she can’t clear Jack’s name on her own, and the three generations of fiercely independent Rubicon women must work together to solve the case. In the process, they unearth a mare’s nest of lies, betrayal, and unresolved family issues—their own as well as those of the colorful locals. Simon succeeds in crafting both a smart contemporary mystery and an exquisite ecological love letter to Monterey Bay.