Page 116 – Electric Literature

Newly Single in a World of “We”

Posted on April 8, 2024October 7, 2025 by Preety Sidhu

“Women Who Rule the Screen” by Kate Axelrod

The woman sitting next to me on the train had pink hair and wore a bracelet made with small alphabet beads that spelled out *DEAD*DAD*CLUB*. She snored for most of the trip, but it was more meditative than disruptive. I was headed upstate to see my cousin Carly who’d had a baby a couple of months earlier. Her wife, Zoe, was a visiting professor at a liberal arts college along the Hudson, and they were there for the semester. I really wanted to meet the baby, but I also felt desperate to briefly sidestep the loneliness of my day-to-day life. I was no longer in a place where I could accurately say I was going through a breakup, and yet, I still really felt like I was going through a breakup.

Normally I loved taking the train; I didn’t have to talk to anyone and nothing was expected of me, I could just read while being hurtled forward in relative silence. But I was hungover, and I winced when the sun shone, intermittently, through the dusty windows. The night before, I’d gone out for my friend Jackie’s husband’s birthday. Jackie’s husband was kind of a tool but also really nice; he was an I-banker, an expression I hadn’t heard of prior to meeting him, but as Jackie liked to point out, he was also a budding philanthropist and mentored a boy whose mother was in prison.

We were at a bar in the West Village and I was waiting for my Negroni when an EDM cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came on over the speakers. I bonded with the guy next to me who shook his head sadly and said something about Kurt Cobain rolling over in his grave. We went home together because all of my friends had gone home with their partners. He was a movie producer with thinning hair and a scar where there’d once been an eyebrow piercing. I remembered bits and pieces of the night; namely that he seemed like a real grown up because he had remote controlled window shades and a bar cart that held different kinds of whiskey. Rich, my friend Becky said. You just mean he’s rich.

We made out on his leather couch and then he fingered me and I realized, with a flash of horror, that I’d forgotten to take out my Ella, the silicone cup that held my period blood.

“Dude, what is that?”

“Fuck, I’m sorry.”

“Do you have a plastic pussy?”

“Something like that,” I said and I hopped off the couch and adjusted my pants. I wasn’t interested in explaining and then having him either a) smugly voice his support of my period and its related paraphernalia or b) express mild distaste for the situation and think of some reason to order me a car home. Recalling this on the train made me laugh out loud and I texted my group thread to share about my plastic pussy. Jackie responded immediately. Omg. Guy’s lucky it wasn’t dentata down there.

Carly and Zoe were almost a decade older—not my peers—and so their contentment was not something to disdain, it was aspirational. I’d seen Carly through her own mess of sorts: a stint of religious observance, and a period of disordered eating which may not have ever crossed over to an Eating Disorder proper, but still. And yet she’d arrived on the other side of forty with a graceful equilibrium. It was nice to be around.

I’d idolized Carly forever and at family functions I paid close attention to her ladybug studded earrings, a tortoiseshell hair clip, the Doc Martens she wore for years. She talked often of Ani DiFranco. Once I overheard her say, I’d rather date someone who cared about religion, any religion, even if it wasn’t my own. This struck me as wise and mature, and I was disappointed when I realized years later that I didn’t actually agree with it.

I was still hungover and nursing a watery iced coffee when we pulled into the station. I tried to gather my belongings quietly so I wouldn’t disturb my seatmate. My head throbbed as I bent to get my backpack from beneath the seat. Her eyes fluttered open and shut and she let out a soft belch.

Carly was waiting in the lot beside the station. Baby Louie, named after our Grandpa Lou, was in a car seat with a fist in his mouth. He had a huge, goofy grin on his face. Carly’s breasts were enormous.

“You have a baby!” I cried.

“Sure do!” She was beaming, not harried with purple circles under her eyes like I’d expected. We hugged and she pulled back quickly.

It was late April and the first warm day in a while. I hadn’t left the city in so long and I’d forgotten how clear and big the sky could be.

“I smell terrible,” she said. “It’s a thing, apparently. So Louie can smell me. But it’s still gross and I did shower yesterday, I promise.” I squeezed her hand.

Carly and I had been at the supermarket when we learned over the radio that Eric Clapton’s son had died. I was seven and I loved sucking on uncooked pasta straight from the box.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she’d said. It was the first time I’d heard her curse and I looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to apologize or blush, but she did neither. She’d grabbed two boxes of rigatoni and headed toward the register. People were murmuring on the check-out line. A woman held packages of frozen French fries and cried.

When we got back to my parents’ apartment, a postwar high-rise near Lincoln Center, Carly had turned on the television and I’d poured a handful of pasta into my palm. Clapton’s son was four-and-a-half and had fallen out the window of their fifty-third-floor apartment. We were on the tenth floor and our windows barely opened but I felt a flutter of panic and imagined myself tumbling out, soaring briefly before thudding onto the navy awning outside the lobby. Carly eyed me sucking on the pasta.

“You’ll have to have some protein soon, okay? At least have a cheese stick or something?”

That particular weekend, Carly was babysitting because my parents were in Baltimore, moving my great uncle into an assisted living facility. He had Parkinson’s and had lost most of his speech by that point. Sometimes he wrote me notes in big, loopy script. Whenever I saw him he’d take my hand and kiss it, his lips damp with drool. This was just a year before my parents split up, and I often think of it as the last intimate expression of their partnership.

That night, Carly’s boyfriend Andy came over with Burger King: two Whoppers, a six-piece chicken tenders for me, and a large fries that we shared. We all agreed that the fries were inferior to McDonald’s but ate them anyway. Andy wore baggy corduroy pants and a hoodie over his curly hair. We were listening to the classic rock station and Clapton’s hits were on repeat: “Layla,” “Bell Bottom Blues,” some Cream songs.

“It’s just so sad,” Carly said again.

Andy was unmoved.

“I guess. That dude’s super racist.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well MTV probably didn’t advertise it. He said some really awful shit a while back. Blamed it on being drunk, but you know that wasn’t it.”

“Okay, but it’s still really sad.”

“I suppose. But this is your problem, you really play into this idea of hero worship with celebrities. It replaces interpersonal relation with fixation on an illusion. And you don’t actually think critically about why you’re idolizing them.”

And you don’t actually think critically about why you’re idolizing them.

“I don’t idolize him,” Carly said softly. A bouquet of plastic carnations collected dust on the dining room table and she brushed a finger along the petals.

“It’s like the same way you romanticize ‘Princess Di.’ That she’s so down to earth and empathetic and that the Royal Family’s torching her—those’re two sides of the same smug, entitled, neo-colonial coin.”

Carly stood up and took a can of seltzer from the fridge. “Can we talk about this later?” she asked.

“Sure,” Andy said. “So, Carly says your parents are in Baltimore this weekend?”

“Yup. My dad’s from there,” I told him.

“I was in Baltimore once when I was a kid,” Andy said. “My parents took me to some indoor play space with friends of theirs and I pissed my pants in the ball pit.”

I laughed and pieces of chewed up French fry came out of my mouth.

After dinner I sat on the sofa and braided and unbraided small sections of my hair, which was straight and brown but would become curly after puberty. My parents called to check in; my mom told me to brush my teeth before bed and reminded me to wash fruit before I ate it. I walked around the apartment with the cordless phone, surreptitiously looking at Carly and Andy. Things were tense but at one point I saw him put his hand in her back pocket.

On the last night Carly babysat, I was in my room when I heard her crying across the hall.

“Can you please stop?” she asked. “Why are you acting like this?”

I was going through a phase of reading young adult Holocaust fiction—stories about pre-adolescent girls forced from their homes, some to the Warsaw Ghetto and others into hiding.

“Seriously, I don’t understand,” I heard Carly say between sobs. “If you actually think that about me then you don’t know me at all.”

After she hung up, she came into my room and sat cross-legged on the carpet.

“He’s allergic to me,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist. She began to cry again, her shoulders shaking uncontrollably. I felt ill-equipped to handle such emotion but moved that I was present for it. I held one of her hands and rubbed my thumb along her palm.

The phrase hung around idly in my thoughts for a long time. For a while I imagined that Andy broke into a rash when they touched, but as I got older it became obvious it was a metaphor, though I couldn’t say for what.

Later that night, we got into my parents’ king-sized bed and I braided Carly’s hair while she read aloud from my favorite of the Holocaust books, about best friends in Denmark. One of the girls was Jewish and they pretended to be sisters in order to stay alive.

Carly and Zoe’s house upstate was sweet and charming in a generic Airbnb and Pinterest sort of way—exposed shelving in the kitchen, lots of candles and mason jars, rugs with geometric prints. For dinner we got roasted chicken from the supermarket and Zoe sautéed spring beans and asparagus while Carly nursed Louie.

Louie snorted while he ate. Carly laughed and readjusted her nipple.

“You’re a little piglet,” she told him. She contorted her breast again, squeezed it at the base, and Louie latched like he was eating a hamburger.

“Let me pour you some wine,” I said. I pulled out a bottle of rosé from my backpack, chosen from the $12-and-under table at the liquor store on Atlantic Ave. Zoe handed me a corkscrew.

“Can you please, please tell us something interesting?” she said. “We’re painfully bored of talking and thinking about all this baby stuff. Sleep sacks and swaddles and nipple shields and a hundred different pumps.”

“Literally just two pumps,” Carly said. “But yeah, it’s not particularly compelling. Please tell us things.”

I poured us each a glass of wine. It was warm so I added a couple of ice cubes into the mason jars. I was so bored of myself I didn’t know how to answer the question. All I thought about was the same stupid shit over and over again. My ex Jamie, other people I’d slept with or tried to sleep with or refused to sleep with. I thought of the time I went to see a therapist at student health my first year of college. I was unhappy and told her I wanted to transfer to Brown like everyone else I knew. She smiled smugly and said, “You know, you’ll still be stuck with yourself wherever you are.”

“I wish I had anything to share,” I said now. “I did get a new job fairly recently, but Carly already knows.” I told them about the historical society I was freelancing for, how I was working on an exhibit about tuberculosis in the late 19th century. The city had been ablaze with infection, spreading rapidly in part because of the architecture of the tenements. I’d been out of work for a while, and it felt good to be back, as if someone had taken out my batteries and flipped them around, like I used to do with the remote when I was a kid.

After dinner, I watched them give Louie a bath in a little turquoise tub. He squealed with delight each time they poured a cup of warm water over his belly or the top of his head. I made exaggerated faces at him and he smiled gleefully. I couldn’t help but feel envious of him—how simple his needs were and that they were unequivocally met. Louie just wanted love reflected back at him, and he got it.

Carly and I sat on some wicker furniture on the screened-in porch while Zoe finished up the bedtime routine. I asked her how her brain felt. I told her I’d been expecting her to be anxious and overwhelmed but she seemed remarkably calm.

“Thanks,” she said. “Yeah, I’m sure once I have to go back to work I’ll have a meltdown, but I feel pretty even-keeled at the moment. Though I’m fucking exhausted all the time. It’s like being on a red-eye from LA to New York, every single night.”

Zoe came out holding a jar of weed in one hand and the baby monitor in another. Even though Carly wasn’t smoking, she generously offered to roll us a joint.

“So, I hate to ask this question,” Carly said, breaking the weed apart with her fingernails, “but are you dating? Still talking to Jamie? What’s going on?”

I was both relieved and embarrassed that Carly had asked. Jamie and I hadn’t spoken in many months. I blocked him on all social media but later I learned he was public on Venmo, and this was currently my only means of gathering information. Once he had given six dollars to someone named Jessica very early in the morning—a coffee cup emoji—clearly the result of a one-night stand. But more recently there were consistent payments between him and a woman named Lila: once the spaghetti emoji and then a taxi. It made me slightly queasy to see, but then I figured the relationship couldn’t be that serious if they were still reimbursing each other for things.

There were consistent payments between him and a woman named Lila: once the spaghetti emoji and then a taxi.

“Nothing with Jamie in a while,” I said. “I’ve been dating, I guess. Or like, seeing people here and there. I don’t even really know how to talk about it. It all feels rather pathetic.”

“You were together a long time! You can’t expect to just shrug it all off quickly,” she said.

I told them about some of the internet dates I’d gone on recently. Like the guy who was so nice but kept referring to Ray’s Pizza on 4th Ave as a pizzeria and it drove me nuts. Another guy I was in bed with—extremely hot and scruffy in a ’90s Ethan Hawke sort of way—who seemed promising until I discovered he had a Dave Matthews quote tattooed on his chest.

“Alix!” Carly exclaimed. “I had no idea you were such a judgmental little bitch.”

“Have you met me?”

Zoe and I passed the joint back and forth. It was short and starting to get soggy.

“You know how periodically the Style section or New York mag will write an article about best friends raising a family together? ‘Challenging the paradigm’ or whatever? What if I just want that?” I said. “Why do I have to do all this stuff?”

“You don’t have to,” Carly said. “Come live with us.”

The sun had been sinking slowly but suddenly the sky was dark, much darker than I was used to. Carly flicked on a porch light and Zoe played around with the baby monitor. The image was gray and pixelated and Louie was stirring. When he opened his eyes they lit up like a feral animal caught in the wild by a nature show.

“This is so random,” I said. “But Carly, do you remember that weekend you stayed with me when my parents were in Baltimore with my dad’s family?”

“Of course. And Eric Clapton’s son died.”

“Yes, exactly. And you and your boyfriend were fighting a lot. You were super upset, crying a ton and when I asked you what was wrong you said he was allergic to you.”

“Huh.” She slapped a mosquito that hovered above her thigh.

“Do you remember what that was about? For some reason it has lingered in my brain forever and I always wondered what it meant.”

“No, I have no recollection of that at all. I don’t even really remember him being around that weekend.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s wild. You were like, completely heartbroken.”

That she could have been so devastated and no longer remember, this was not something I could understand. I wished so much that I was capable of forgetting, but it seemed my destiny to hold on to these sorts of things forever. Sometimes I wondered how my parents were able to rebuild after the divorce, how the undoing of our family wasn’t the focal point of all our lives. For years they’d been regarding each other coolly, not openly hostile but cordial; there were periodic birthday or graduation dinners, and my father attended shiva after my grandfather died. He’d brought a platter of cookies and sat quietly in the living room of the Upper West Side apartment they’d once shared.

Intellectually, I understood my current despair probably had less to do with Jamie than it did my place in life, or rather the feeling of being behind, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt shameful to be so consumed by a breakup and it didn’t align with my understanding of myself: I’d gone to an all-women’s college! My favorite category to watch on Netflix was Women Who Rule the Screen! I’d always prioritized my friends and family, was not one of those people who lost themselves in a relationship, who, as Carrie Bradshaw once said, had “committed the cardinal sin” of disappearing once partnered.

“Well, what’s heartbreaking to me now,” Carly said, “is that one day he’ll just be that guy, the one you dated when Grandma died or the one who went to Thailand, whatever. You won’t even remember! You don’t believe me but it’s true.”

One by one, my friends had stopped shit-talking their partners. There was no longer talk of Jake’s banana-shaped dick or of Anthony’s boring finance job. The 11 a.m. texts on Sundays to meet up for bagels and a debrief of their evenings were replaced with come hang out with us! Tim will make you brunch. Allegiances were shifting. Even Becky, who historically would leave people’s houses after fucking them and crawl into bed with me to watch Netflix, was often feeling cozy at home with her boyfriend. I felt desperate to be with Jamie, I did, but I still couldn’t shake the idea that men were not my allies.

Zoe drummed her fingers absently against Carly’s knee. My head suddenly felt heavy and my mouth was dry.

“I think I’m really high,” I said and went inside. Carly came in a few minutes later. She was wearing a nightgown and looked very Victorian. She handed me fresh pillowcases and a hand towel and we unfolded the couch together.

“I hope Louie doesn’t wake you up,” Carly said. “He stirs a lot and makes noises, but he’s not upset so we try to ignore him. There are some earplugs in the bathroom if it gets bad.”

“I’m not worried.” I gave her a kiss and thanked her for taking care of me even though she had an actual baby to worry about.

I was used to hearing my neighbors walk from one room to another or the swell of an engine as a car raced south on Washington Avenue. The silence was unnerving and I was up for a long time. We’d left the bottle of rosé out on the table and eventually I finished what was left of it. Carly was right, Louie did babble a lot. He didn’t seem upset, more like he was in conversation with himself. Both delighted and exhausted by his own sounds, a series of vowels strung together.

“Ah ooh,” he said, like a little wolf pup. “Ah ooooh.”

I recalled holding Louie earlier in the day, resting my chin on his small fuzzy head. The warm weight of him in my arms. I listened to the whir of the noise machine outside of the nursery and fell asleep.

Before I left, Carly packed me a peanut butter sandwich and a bag of baby carrots for the train. Louie was propped against a cushion and had two stuffed animals in his lap: a soft yellow duck and a blue whale with a sweet smile and a gleaming black button for an eye.

“Did you know,” Carly asked, “that whales are the only mammals aside from humans that go through menopause?”

“I definitely did not know that.”

“It’s called the grandmother effect.” She described the way that older maternal whales cared for their communities, how it had become so vital to their survival as a species, that it became part of the DNA. There was something solemn and beautiful about what she said, yet I felt desperate to get home, back to my life, even if it meant back to Becky and her dumb boyfriend, back to swiping and fucking guys with DMB tattoos, but before that, feeling the flicker of promise as I drank and flirted, conversed in a way that I knew was leading toward sex. I wanted to feel that moment just before it all shifted, when the night was still taut with possibility.

I gave Louie a kiss and told him he was a lucky boy.

7 Novels Set in Refugee Camps

Posted on April 8, 2024April 4, 2024 by Intern Electric Lit

“Every refugee’s story opens in horror, passes through betrayal, and ends in a question.”

This sentence, spoken by a protagonist in my new novel, The Good Deed, came to me on one of my visits to the overcrowded, fetid refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos. I began going there in 2018 when I learned that the island had become a major gateway to Europe for people fleeing war or persecution in the Middle East and Africa. I wanted to see for myself how people live from day to day in such inhumane conditions, and how they manage to cope with the trauma and tragedy they left behind.

The Good Deed follows four women living in the Samos camp, three of whom are Syrian and one Sudanese. When an American tourist comes to the island to escape her own dark secret and does a “good deed,” she triggers a crisis that brings her and the refugees into conflict. In essence, the book explores the criminal inhumanity of refugee camps today, while also confronting an essential dilemma for the privileged when faced with the destitute: how to negotiate the turbulent waters between altruism and selfishness, compassion and arrogance.

These days, refugees are so commonly demonized by populist governments as burdens, parasites and criminals that it’s easy to forget that nobody chooses to become a refugee for any reason but to survive. Life as a refugee is heartbreaking, not only because one has lost one’s home, culture, community, history, love, family and place in the world, but because refugee camps and shelters so often force the young to live without schools, adults to live without work, and everyone to live without autonomy or even a choice over what will happen to them. As Susan Abulhawa, one of the authors I discuss below, wrote, “The future cannot breathe in a refugee camp. The air is too dense.”

Yet, in all seven novels I’ve picked here, the overarching theme is not misery but love, whether for a romantic partner, a parent, sibling, friend, or child. This might seem surprising, given all that refugee camps represent: war, the mercilessness of the powerful, and the brutality of xenophobia. Perhaps the refugees in these novels love so fiercely because they have lost everything else. Or perhaps they cling to love because they have learned in the most cruel of ways what really matters in life and what doesn’t. Either way, the theme of love makes all of these novels about much more than suffering. They are also about hope.

Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa

Abulhawa is one of the most celebrated Palestinian authors of today, and this book was an international bestseller when it came out in English in 2010, but these days, as the war rages on between Israel and Hamas, and the death toll in Gaza climbs to over 30,000, the novel reads as if it were being written now, in real time. Spanning the years from 1941, when Palestine was still a free country, to 2022, the novel follows a woman named Amal (which means hope) from her childhood through most of her life, tracing the fates of her family members as they are forced from their homes by the newly formed Israel in 1948 to live in camp after camp, eventually ending up in Jenin. (Now in the occupied West Bank, Jenin is a camp-turned-city that is only one square mile, and was attacked by Israel just this past November.) Overall, however, the novel is a generational saga about love.

The story opens with Dalia, Amal’s mother, when she is a wild Bedouin girl defying the rules of her people. She is brutally punished for her independence, a foreshadowing of much of the novel’s story, which traces the passing of suffering and trauma from one generation to the next. As the story moves on from Dalia’s life to her daughter’s, however, triumph and happiness also arise. This is the great strength of this book: not only is it written in poetic, gorgeous prose, with wisdom and insight, but with balance. Nobody is an angel, including Amal. Nobody is all villain, even a murderous soldier. Abulhawa allows everyone their history, Arabs and Israeli Jews alike, and everyone their flaws and virtues. In the end, however, she is making a much larger point about Palestinians: “They had endured many masters—Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, Ottomans, British—and nationalism was inconsequential. Attachment to God, land, and family was the core of their being and that is what they defended and sought to keep.”

Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury, translated by Humphrey Davies

Like Abulhawa, Khoury is a Palestinian author telling the story of his people and lost land through a saga of love. In witty, self-mocking prose, he weaves the strands of many people’s stories together into a colorful tapestry. As he quips, “A story is a life that didn’t happen, and a life is a story that didn’t get told.”

The premise of the novel is simple: The narrator, Dr. Khalil, sits by the bedside of his friend, mentor and hero, Yunes, who is lying in a coma. Khalil talks out all the stories of the book to his friend, including the story of Yunes himself, in the hope that his voice will bring Yunes back to consciousness. The Galilee hospital where they sit is a mostly empty, shabby building meant to cater to the Palestinian refugees living in the nearby Lebanese camp of Shatila, which one of the characters describes as “a grouping of villages piled one on top of another.” The point is to show the poverty, death, loss, homelessness, and occasional madness forced upon Palestinians by their Israeli occupiers, and the fighting spirit of those determined to love, live, and carry on in spite of it all.

A Feather on the Water by Lindsay Jayne Ashford

To turn from the wandering fates of displaced Palestinians to the same fate of Jews, Poles and others persecuted by the Nazis, British writer Lindsay Ashford has set her novel, A Feather on the Water, in a displaced persons camp in Bavaria in 1945, right after the defeat of the Nazis, when millions of people were left homeless in Europe. The story centers around three women who volunteer to work in the camp, each of whom has her own tragedy behind her, and eventually her own love story. Martha, an American, is escaping a violent husband in Brooklyn and her past as an orphan. Kitty, an Austrian Jew passing as British, is searching for her parents who disappeared in the war. And Delphine is a Frenchwoman whose husband and son were sent to the nearby Dachau concentration camp as political prisoners. Soon these women find themselves in charge of some 3,000 displaced people, all of whom are traumatized by the Nazis and awaiting an uncertain future.

So much about life in this 1945 camp is similar to refugee camps today, full of people the world doesn’t want, dehumanized by the officials who guard them, and treated as prisoners, even though they have broken no laws and been charged with no crimes. And yet, like the people I met on Samos and who populate my own novel, they are enterprising, resilient and determined, despite hunger, deprivation and unfathomable loss. Whether a Pole or a Jew in 1945 or a Syrian, Afghan or Palestinian today, loss and displacement feels much the same, as does the drive to love and survive.

The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri

Leaving the Holocaust and the founding of Israel that inform the novels above, this one takes us to Syria and the flight of nearly seven million citizens as a result of President Bashar al Assad’s brutal suppression of his people and the civil war that erupted in reaction to it in 2011. British writer Lefteri tells the tale of two such Syrians: a beekeeper named Nori and his painter wife Afra who live in Aleppo, the storied and beautiful city destroyed by Assad and Russian bombs.

After losing their house and their little son to one such bomb, the couple flees, throwing themselves on the mercy of one ruthless smuggler after another. Eventually, they end up in Moria, the notorious refugee camp on the island of Lesbos, just north of Samos. There, they struggle to adjust to the camp and the new distance between them, for Afra is now blind because of trauma and grief, while Nori is locked into himself for the same reasons, unable to express the love he feels for Afra or even the pain he feels over the loss of his son. Eventually, they travel to refugee housing in England, where they await the long, slow, irrational machinations of the asylum system to work before they can even begin to heal. The result is a tender portrait of what displacement does to two people in love as they try to cope with their new lives as strangers and regain a place in each other’s hearts.

The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine

This novel, too, is set in Lesbos, but in contrast to Lefteri’s approach, Alameddine, a Lebanese American author, tells the story of the refugee camp from the point of view of a volunteer who goes there to help, rather than that of the refugees themselves.

The novel’s narrator is Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor who is lesbian and trans, a fact that informs much of the novel. Mina arrives on the island more absorbed in her own story—her alienation from her family because of her sexual identity, her love story with her wife, her love for her brother—than in those of the refugees. Yet, even as she keeps spinning into her own memories in a jokey, somewhat cynical voice, oddly unaffected by the suffering around her, she is soon drawn into the drama of a Syrian family just off a boat, the brave matriarch secretly ill with cancer. In the course of trying to help the woman, Mina learns how much the refugees are suffering, and how inadequate and even clueless most volunteer help is. As many a do-gooder has said, no matter what you do, it is never enough.

Silence is My Mother Tongue by Sulaiman Addonia

Turning from Syrian to African refugees, this novel, unlike those above, was written by a man who is a refugee himself. Addonia is an Eritrean, a poetic writer of extraordinary sensitivity who set this stunning novel in a Sudanese refugee camp much like the one he spent time in as a boy, which is no doubt why everyday life in the camp is told with such authentic detail. (By coincidence, one of the protagonists in The Good Deed is a Sudanese refugee who fled to an Ethiopian camp—thus borders are crossed and recrossed.) In this beautiful story, which is told mainly through the eyes of a man named Jamal, the principal character is a young woman of courage, sensuality and bravado named Saba, who, with her mute brother Hagos, struggles to adjust to the camp and find substitutes for the schooling, future and hope that were stolen from her.

Saba and Hugas are very much young people of today, gender-bending, sexually fluid and ready to flout convention. Yet they must deal with the suffocating and often oppressive culture of the camp, with its lack of privacy, virulent gossip and punishments. Indeed, when the novel opens, Jamal, who is both smitten by and yet afraid of Saba, watches as she is put on trial for a crime that isn’t revealed for some time. Later, when he sees her waiting to marry in a hand-me-down wedding dress, he says, “Everything is recycled in our camp, happiness as well as despair.” In the end, however, this is not a story of defeat, but of triumph and love, reminding us that as bleak as life can be for a refugee, it does not always have to end in tragedy.

Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck

This novel, too, centers on African refugees, but in this case, their settlement is not a camp but first a shanty town on the streets of Berlin, which is set up as a protest, and then an anthill-like building in the city that was once an old people’s home. There, refugees from all over Africa—Niger, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria and more—live in stark, dorm-like conditions while awaiting either asylum or deportation.

Erpenbeck, a German author of some acclaim, writes feelingly from the point of view of a retired and widowed professor named Richard, who is at a loss over what to do with himself until he falls into a fascination with the refugees in his city and begins to visit them in their anthill of a building to give lessons in German. The story weaves between Richard’s perspective and that of the refugees themselves, bringing out Erpenbeck’s compassion and respect for her characters. Soon enough, as Richard gets to know certain men in the building, they emerge from the word “refugee” into fully realized human beings, each with his own story, needs, and claim on Richard’s conscience.

In essence, this thoughtful and elegantly-written novel is about how the privileged can actually help after all, if only with their money, shelter and sympathy; almost the opposite message to the much more cynical one in The Wrong End of the Telescope. And yet, Go, Went, Gone remains a condemnation of how the Western world, Europe in particular, pushes refugees around like so many sacks of refuse. As Erpenbeck has a character say near the end of the novel, “Where can a person go when he doesn’t know where to go?”

7 Books About Women Who Put Friendship at the Center of Their Lives

Posted on April 5, 2024April 4, 2024 by Intern Electric Lit

I have always found myself building extremely romantic friendships. Long hours lost to phone calls, text marathons, letters, no-reason gifts, the sharing of meals and secrets and small, tender intimacies.

For whatever reason, it has always seemed apparent that my friendships—if handled with devotion and care—will outlast my romantic relationships. Through adolescence and early adulthood I put as much work into these bonds, often prioritizing them over my actual romantic relationships, and finding myself equally brutalized when they occasionally ended.

Now that I am married, these same friendships provide additional outlets for the intimacy and joy that I’m also building at home with my partner, and I’ve spent countless coffee-fueled hours asking myself: why do we place so much pressure on spouses to fulfill all of our needs? Why not turn to a friend? This was the idea that inspired my novel Significant Others, which follows friends and roommates of twenty years as they grapple with change when one becomes pregnant following a one night stand. The women co-own a home, co-raise a dog, and so they ask themselves: why not co-mother this child? But before I was writing about unusually deep friendships, I was reading about them.

Below are seven of my favorite stories that remap the location of friendship in our lives, pulling it from the margins and placing it front and center.

We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman

Is it possible to write a book about the death of your most beloved person that manages to be as hilarious as it is devastating? Catherine Newman’s We All Want Impossible Things screams hard and clear: yes. Quite literally a celebration of life and friendship, the novel follows 45-year-old Ash as her closest friend Edi decides to move away from her husband and young son so that she can be near Ash in a hospice facility during the final days of her battle with cancer. Their lifelong friendship is the point from which their worlds pivot, and now Edi is choosing to come home to her best friend so that she can die. If that sounds depressing, please know it isn’t. The story is fresh, invigorating, and completely reconceptualized my understanding of what platonic devotion can look like; it remains one of my most recommended books from the last two years.

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

Autofiction, I am new here, and I opened this book unsure about the format and expecting an exploration of a young woman finding herself through her art. I was surprised to close it reeling, instead, from the story of a woman finding herself through friendship. Freshly divorced Sheila and her new friend Margaux share a bond that is as romantic as they come; they write each other letters and slip them beneath apartment doors, they traipse around the city talking for hours, they buy the same dress and then argue about it, they document their relationship and the impact it has on each other’s art and life, they search for and sometimes overstep each other’s boundaries, defining and redefining their love for one another again and again. Please know, the plot in this book is minimal, but the feelings its richly imagined characters inspire are maximal. More, please.

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Two young girls in West London bond over their shared love of dance; one is gifted, the other is not, yet each will inevitably make a life around the art, and each other. While much of the narrative actually takes place during a period of time the women aren’t speaking, even through silence (and some relatable internet stalking) the friendship continues to provide the frame for both the book’s narrative structure and the interiority for its nameless protagonist, impacting how they see themselves in each other, and therefor in the world.

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

Before Eileen there was Veronica. While this is not the moody psychosexual romp that Moshfegh gifted us, there is certainly something unnerving at the way Gaitskill’s narrative skips through a taught timeline as it follows the seemingly unlikely bond between young up-and-coming fashion model Alison and her friend Veronica, a disgruntled middle-aged proofreader dying of AIDS. Starting when Alison is in her forties and looking back on her friendship and its longstanding impact on her life, the narrative sweeps back and forth between past and present, uncovering a devotion as surprising to its narrator as it is to the reader. Gaitskill has long been a favorite of mine, and this incisive look at connection, time, memory and loyalty sunk deep into my bones and stayed there.

The Other Significant Others by Rhaina Cohen

A startling new addition to the friendship and found-family cannon, this nonfiction book explores the uncommon stories of people who have build their lives around a platonic partnership. The author, journalist Rhaina Cohen, has spent more than a decade deeply embedded in the social science of unusually devoted friendships, and the included vignettes offer a refreshing (and comforting) alternative to the marriage model we’ve all been raised. The friends interviewed are just as deeply committed to each other as a romantic pair might be. They buy homes, co-raise kids, and participate in long term care. In an era marked by alarming levels of self-reported loneliness, might this be an answer?

Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett

This gorgeous friendship memoir from the national treasure that is Ann Patchett spans twenty years in the shared lives of Patchett and her long-time friend, the writer Lucy Grealy, who passed away in 2002. It’s a gutting celebration of platonic chemistry and deep commitment in a uniquely—sometimes disastrously—close friendship. A quote: “Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn’t even realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.”

Warning: this book will most likely make you cry.

The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker

As a filmmaker I of course have a bias for a story about two filmmakers, but still, I haven’t seen anything that explores the intersection of friendship and creativity the way this story does. In many ways, Mel and Sharon’s deep relationship has the makings of a marriage — union, commitment, (creative) progeny — and therefore it has the complications of one too: communication, trust, honesty, devotion, doubt, jealousy.

A Trip to the Underworld is a Rite of Passage for Young Women

Posted on April 5, 2024April 4, 2024 by Intern Electric Lit

In Fruit of the Dead, Rachel Lyon sets “a snare for the bloom-like girl.” This novel is a searing, imaginative retelling of Persephone, both memory and warning for any reader raised as a daughter, or parent to one. Cory Ansel—18, aimless, judged beautiful by all but herself—is ferried to the private island owned by Rolo, the CEO to a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company. Good with children and fresh from summer camp, Cory is invited, ostensibly, to serve as nanny to Rolo’s two small children. Lyon creates a slick, disturbing portrait in Rolo, who is at turns magnetic and repulsive, “a substantial man, fleshly, vainly dressed.” We are reminded that Rolo, “a toy of a man” always grasping for his next toy, is merely one of many men who are exactly like him, that his is but one in a string of islands “owned by millionaires and billionaires… not one of them guiltless.” While Lyon might have easily vilified Rolo for his predatory and exploitative behavior, she chooses instead to humanize him, and to explore Cory’s own choice and free will. The young woman is seduced by glamor, desperation, fatherly tenderness and disapproval, and, ultimately, a drug called Granadone.

For the reader and for Cory, the sense of dread and panic rises chapter by chapter, as we see her become increasingly isolated on the remote island, cut off from Wifi and her sense of self. Interspliced with these sections, we get the perspective of Emer, Cory’s mother, who is frantically searching for her missing daughter and, in the process, is dismantling her own life. “If our relationship can be characterized in any one way,” Emer tells us of Cory, “it is this: I can’t keep up with her… When she was a preteen, dangerous moods began to overtake her. As a teen, she learned how to lie, to brush me off, affect false dignity, conceal her pain or shame, to disappear.” The prose, especially in the mouth of a desperate mother, is gorgeous and wrenching, and recalls for us the dark knowledge that women have always carried.

Fruit of the Dead, pulsing with life, is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time, and I was thrilled to talk with Lyon about it from my apartment in Philadelphia and her home in Massachusetts.

Annie Liontas: Why do we need the myth of Persephone in 2024, as told in this way? What does the myth remind or warn us about?

Rachel Lyon: When I first began Fruit of the Dead, I was envisioning it as a beach read—a little sexy, a little light, but maybe a bit sinister at the same time. It started as a romp about a young woman who becomes involved with her employer. This was the beginning of the “Me, Too” movement, and I was thinking a lot about power dynamics and relationships, especially between men and women. And then two years into the project, I was having this conversation with somebody about the project, and they were challenging me on it, asking what makes this story different from any other love story about power dynamics.

I noticed that the shape of my book, the shape of my work in progress, mirrored the shape of this myth. So I started incorporating the Persephone myth more consciously and pretty soon it became a contemporary retelling. I think we need to be reminded that some of these cycles that we find ourselves in today are ancient stories. As human beings, we are constantly telling and retelling the same narratives, and that’s worth examining.

AL: Let’s talk about the power differential between Cory and Rolo. She is young, impressionable, eager for money, freedom, luxury. He is lonely, wealthy, accustomed to having his world view acknowledged and perpetuated. How are you thinking about power vs. choice, free will vs. the narratives that that shape us?

RL: That was absolutely the heart of the project for me—examining these questions of freedom, power, choice, and youth. I think Cory has a different idea than her mother does about what freedom looks like and what free will looks like.

The differential between your worldliness and your eagerness for freedom can be a little destructive.

Rolo knows certain things about Cory that Cory can’t know about herself. There’s a window, I think, in the life of anyone who isn’t a cis-white man between the ages of 16 and 22 or so, where the feeling of freedom can be quite misleading and leads you into danger. The differential between your worldliness and your eagerness for freedom can be a little destructive. I wanted to examine this thorny space where Cory’s yearning for independence is actually in some ways the source of her foolishness. But she can’t know that, of course. She thinks this is a good choice, even though it leads her into some darkness.

AL: I love your description of this as a “thorny space.” I also appreciate how Cory is deeply ambivalent about Rolo. “Opposing thoughts nag at her simultaneously,” you write. “She wants Rolo to want her and she wishes he’d never look at her again.” This feels like a familiar narrative, one that Cory has inherited. How do you see it reflected in the larger world?

RL: We are told to be attractive and we are told we are not attractive enough. We’re created to be consumed, and then we worry we’re not consumable. I was very much writing my own experience as a young woman into Cory, and that ambivalence of, “Look at me/never look at me.” That’s the heart of a certain kind of young woman’s self-consciousness and experience in the world. It can be exquisitely painful to walk through the world feeling like your whole reason for being is to be consumed and to be delicious enough to be consumable, but that you’re never going to achieve that.

AL: Do you recall that viscerally from your own adolescent experiences?

RL: Yeah, I mean, I went through a period when I was maybe 19 where I really had a lot of trouble looking in the mirror. I was smoking a lot of pot, and that of course can change your sensory experience, your perception. I remember staring at my own face and my own body and being unsure what I objectively looked like. And for a long time—for years, actually—I avoided looking into mirrors for that reason. I just found it so upsetting, so confounding. I believe that’s more common than I realized at the time. The selfness of it all, the idea that we’re a container for these multitudes. That felt completely irreconcilable.

AL: Were those also irreconcilable with the world? Or do you think it was like really internal?

RL: I mean, both, right? Cory is an exaggerated proxy for me. She’s tall and she’s objectively beautiful, and she’s very bad in school and has made a lot of mistakes early on. I had that same, or perhaps similar experience, that she has of having completely fucked up before the age of 18 and having nowhere to go. Like me, she’s very gullible and seems to see the best in people to her detriment.

AL: What I love about Rolo is that, while he projects the role of Hades, he is far more man than villain. How were you able to preserve his humanity even as you revealed his flaws? Specifically, what versions of him did you have to cast aside to get at this complexity?

RL: I think it would have been harder for me to write Rollo as a true villain, a true antagonist. I can’t imagine what that would be like, to be someone like that. It just doesn’t feel believable. Add to that, for the sake of the book and the plot, I needed him to be seductive on some level. I needed him to feel human. I mean, I had models that are despicable in the world. I watched the Jeffrey Epstein documentary—it was a horrible experience—and I read a lot about Harvey Weinstein. But Rolo is not one of those guys, exactly. Rolo is in the gray area. He falls into that general category of powerful male predator or semi-predator, but my intention was always to make him human on the page. What feels more poisonous is a self-perception that is really positive or really self-forgiving. He thinks of himself as a victim of circumstance and as someone who’s worked really hard and tried really hard, and comes from humble beginnings, and essentially deserves what he has. Those to me are the scary poisonous parts of the brain.

AL: As part of the novel’s drive towards cultural criticism, you also call out class discrepancies and capitalist mythologies. Fraud is the most common crime among men like Rolo who own such remote, private islands. “Tax fraud, bank fraud, market manipulation, securities commodities—but there is also evasion, embezzlement, falsification, kickbacks, laundering, racketeering, sedition, insider trading.” What did you uncover in your research for this book?

RL: We all take for granted that the vast chasm between the wealthy and the rest of us in this country is based on a tremendous legal sleight of hand, particularly regarding fraud and “bloodless” crimes. In my research, I talked to someone who works as the personal assistant for a very powerful person whose name you would know—one of those big, big campaign donors. The things that he told me about his work, the people at the parties! This person had a story about Leonardo DiCaprio that—my jaw just dropped. It’s not news to anyone, though, right? The flying around in helicopters and private planes, the proliferation of NDAs. These people live in a world that’s above the law. They don’t have to answer to anyone most of the time, and they don’t live in one country. Their money is all over the place. They don’t live within the same frameworks that we do.

AL: Granadone, which is a fictional powerful addictive in the novel, emerges as its own mythological artifact. What did introducing it do for your understanding of the narrative and Cory?

It’s almost integral to youth itself to pay a visit to the underworld.

RL: When I started writing Cory, I was newly sober and thinking a lot about my own experiences of intoxication and the dark places that took me to when I was a young person—and then later on, too, for a while. In terms of making this specific fictional drug, I was looking at the story of the Sackler family. They’re a great epic contemporary mythological model for Rollo, but I didn’t want to comment directly on the opioid crisis, I didn’t want to write about opioids specifically. It just honestly felt more fun to me to toy with Cory’s perception in a more psychedelic register. Granadone is somewhere between the opioid family and the benzo family and the psychedelics family.

AL: What kind of world would have to exist for us to no longer need the story of Persephone? Is there another myth, a generation from now, that we might tell instead?

RL: One of the things that feels so appealing about the Persephone myth is that inherent descent-and-rise shape. The cyclical shape. If we were to revise the myth to save Persephone from that experience—ideally, she wouldn’t have to go down there, right? But for me, a descent into the underworld is necessary. It’s almost integral to youth itself to pay a visit to the underworld. It helps you become a more whole, more compassionate adult later on.

A Perfect Body Wasn’t the Right Shape For Me

Posted on April 4, 2024August 14, 2024 by EL Assistant2

Public Parts by Dayna Mahannah

For the first hour, I sat alone on a stool with my cheese slices, enclosed in a private corner nook of classroom A046, wearing pool sandals and a trench coat. I could overhear the students introducing themselves. For some, it was their first life drawing class; others were charcoal-cuticled vets. As the instructor’s voice expounded on the basics of sketching the naked human figure, I set the fromage aside. I found a shard of mirror on a shelf and jimmied it onto a spare easel. A plastic, legless skeleton gaped at me from the corner as I parted my trench coat and inspected my body, shard by shard.

Today’s focus, the instructor explained, would be on construction, creating the building blocks of a figure, perceiving the body as a collection of shapes—cones, cylinders, and spheres. To draw the figure as an outline, he warned, would produce a Picasso-esque rendering. “Break the body into as many shapes as you can.” A leg, for example, might be constructed as sphere, cylinder, sphere, cone. Hip, thigh, knee, lower leg.

Returning to my seat and my snack, I couldn’t help but imagine myself as a big heap of body parts; legs and arms tangled up with free-floating breasts, a foot lodged between my head and a butt cheek. Any sexuality that burdened my body de-materialized. Less form, more function. Generally, wholeness is a state of being I strive for, but this image of myself as a sexless pile of parts provided an odd relief, a strange feeling that would sustain me for the four hours to come, and bewilder me for much longer.

The murmur of the classroom faded to silence. The instructor stepped around the massive shelf serving as a makeshift wall and peered over his glasses at me. I sat there, surrounded by anatomical skeleton amputees and bins of fabric scraps, eating cheese. “We’re ready for you.”

My sandals slapped against the concrete floor as I trailed him, trench coat wrapped tight, to the center of the classroom. Two large wooden boxes draped in old white fabric served as a stage, flooded in fluorescent light, circled by easels. I waved like an idiot at the twelve pairs of eyes peeking over their giant pads of newsprint. “I overheard some of you mention in your introductions that this is your first time. It’s my first time, too. So we’re on the same page.” To the tune of a few perfunctory titters, I removed my trench coat, slipped off the sandals, and hoisted myself onstage, wearing exactly nothing. Well, except for a tampon, because of course I was on my period.

The instructor said a simple pose would work best for the first ten minutes, until the class got comfortable with construction. Tilting my chin toward the ventilation system, I tried to stand—to pose—like someone who’d done this before. Simple but not boring, like a Matisse cutout, maybe. Or a Schierbeek sculpture. I felt a little…grand. I was thirty-two and nude on a stage and yes, I felt a little grand. Graphite and charcoal whipped over newsprint on the crescent of easels around me.

I hung off the cart as Mom pushed. We trawled through the bulk section of a grocery store in British Columbia, in my small hometown of Westbank. I had Mom all to myself. I was twelve years old and wanted a giant bag of Chinese crackers, the same ones Grandpa mixed with peanuts. A woman kept staring at us across the bulk bins. She waved, motioning toward herself. “Who’s that?” I asked. Mom shrugged and walked over. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but Mom returned with a business card, brows high on her head. “That woman wants you to model.”

I knew what a model was. My favorite photo of Mom from her modeling days was tucked into a clear plastic sleeve in her old portfolio, stashed at the bottom of a drawer: a close-up of her face, eyes slicing right through the netting of her pillbox hat into the camera. Dad kept a different picture of her on his desk, framed. In it, she lay on her side, head propped in her palm, naked—save for a surreptitiously draped fur coat. In that photo, I saw an enigma. Mom reminded me of the cover models on the stack of Sports Illustrated magazines in the basement, but less beach, more Vogue. She held some intangible allure I didn’t understand, a secret. I couldn’t grasp the intersections between body and sexuality, between obscured and exposed—and I didn’t know how to connect those undefined concepts back to my mom or my dad. I just knew that one photo was public and one was private.

Mom signed me up for modeling classes. Every week, we drove downtown and back, just the two of us. The other modeling students were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. I was new; they were not. They reminded me of the Sports Illustrated girls too, but skinnier, taller. Tangible. In class, I learned how to walk with my torso tilted back, one foot in front of the other, as though on a balance beam. I learned to do it in heels. My face had to exude power and apathy, I was taught—impossible concerns for a twelve-year-old, but I mastered it. When a dark-haired girl asked me to teach her how to walk, I couldn’t believe it. She called me a natural. “You’re only twelve? You look so mature for your age.” Pride ran up my spine; I felt grateful for my height—five-foot-eleven, and taller still in heels—and my talent for exhibiting contradictory expressions. I stood tall and glowered when I walked.

Glossy editorial layouts plastered the walls of the agency featuring their most successful models in high-end fashion campaigns. Many of them had been discovered at an annual international modeling convention in Vancouver, where scouts from all over the world searched for fresh faces. For us models in Westbank, this was our chance. My agent wanted me to go, and Mom agreed.

At the end of classes prior to Thanksgiving, a month out from the convention, my agent knelt before me on the plywood runway with a measuring tape. I stretched my arms out as the yellow tape circled my chest, my waist, my butt. My agent smiled and said I could eat all the turkey I wanted. I caught the look on the dark-haired girl’s face. She looked mad. Jealous, my mom would say. I was excelling.

Faces appeared and disappeared behind easels. My skin burned as students analyzed the twist of my torso, the crook of my elbow. I settled my focus on a dent in the wall. Why in the hell was I here?

When a friend told me she worked as a life model, I’d been immediately impressed by her vulnerability. I was prone to tasking myself with challenges that destabilized my comfort. Nudity itself didn’t necessarily present a challenge; I regularly stripped down at Vancouver’s clothing-optional beach, but being the sole bare body at the center of a group’s focus would be a markedly different experience. To start, I had to submit a job application. I e-signed a contract. I was added to an institutional payroll. Langara College was a forty-minute bike ride from my house. On a Friday night, I could have picked up a serving shift at my restaurant job down the street and made more money. But I chose this, to stand naked on a box in a room full of strangers.

Did I hate serving that much? Was it the alt-artsy side hustle anecdote I was after? Was I an exhibitionist? Desperate to be a muse?

I told a colleague what I was doing. They confirmed it sounded quite literally like their worst nightmare.

The hallway circled the main ballroom like a moat. Inside a fancy hotel in downtown Vancouver, on the final day of the modeling convention, Mom and I readied ourselves to storm the castle: agent callbacks. I wore the uniform mandated by my agency: tall black pumps, black miniskirt, baby blue asymmetrical tank top stamped with the agency logo, and my number, 404, pinned to my torso. It had to be visible at all times—using the washroom, running to the hotel room, stepping outside for fresh air. You never knew when you might bump into a big-time agent. When you might have an opportunity to shine solo, apart from all the other teetering, languid models. When you might be seen.

I scoured the flurry of papers taped to the wall, listings of the models that each agency wanted to meet. An agent’s interest could lead to a secondary contract, a gig overseas, the start of an international career. My number appeared on six lists. Inside the ballroom, Mom diligently took notes of the agents’ comments:

Agent 1

Great, unique look
Too young for Milan
Wants to see her in a couple of years

Agent 2

Good body
Has editorial look
Too young for this market

Agent 3

Perfect measurements—she’ll need to keep on top of it
A little young

TOO YOUNG. My body was right. My age was wrong.

On the way to my next callback, I ran into 212, a model from my agency, and blushed. Owen, a whole five years older than me, glowed after landing a million callbacks and meeting with a big-deal New York-based agent (who had already signed a twelve-year-old that year) . The hollows of his cheeks punctuated his broad jaw like reverse parentheses. Muscles punched through his T-shirt. I was in love with him, but—as everyone seemed committed to reminding me—I was just a kid. And yet Owen talked to me like an adult. I swear he flirted. He hugged me and signed a headshot. You were the star of group runway and the dancing was awesome, you will be an international guest model next time I see you! See ya cutie. Flashes of us posing together for a Gucci campaign—love and fame—momentarily blinded me.

But I chose this, to stand naked on a box in a room full of strangers.

Mom and I settled into burgundy chairs at my next callback. The agent told me to get my teeth fixed. They were straight and had a natural gap between the two front incisors. “That’s ridiculous,” Mom huffed, as we walked away. “You’re not getting your teeth fixed. Lauren Hutton has a gap.” I clutched my white pleather-bound portfolio—my business card—to my chest. Yeah, I thought. Lauren Hutton.

“Twelve?” The next agent sighed. “That’s a little young.” Mom scribbled on her notepad as the agent flipped through my portfolio. “The pictures—the pictures are good though.” Her smooth nails pressed together as she pushed a card across the table. “Call me when you’re seventeen.”

“But … I can travel. In the summer.”

The agent’s mouth thinned into a smile. “You’re going to go through puberty and your body’s going to change.” Her laugh burned my ears. “Trust me, it will be very difficult to keep the same figure then.” She shut my portfolio. Her nails left little crescent indents in the fake white leather.

When the instructor announced a ten-minute break, I broke my pose and pulled on my street clothes. I had to pee. In the hallway, a student unwrapped his sandwich. “So, what’s it like to model?” he blurted. “Does it bother you?”

It probably wasn’t a trick question; he seemed earnest. Though poorly phrased, a similar question haunted me: what compelled me to stand naked before a group of strangers?

“I’ve been to life drawing classes before, but, like, to draw,” I offered lamely. My hands tucked into the pockets of my cargo pants.

“Oh right.” Bread bits cascaded down his shirt. “You’re in a room full of artists. The context matters, I suppose.” He dusted the crumbs away. “See you in there.”

All the stalls in the bathroom were empty. I tilted and turned in the mirror, lifting and lowering my clothes to inspect different parts of myself without undressing. The single mirror threw my body back at me; my legs were hairy, my weight and body measurements a mystery. Scars from my breast reduction snaked from below one armpit, across my ribcage to my sternum, and to the other armpit. I pulled down my shirt; it was impossible to really see my body like this. I strode back to the drawing room.

Soon after the Vancouver modeling convention, I gawked at photos of Owen splashed across fashion layouts. I saw him on a mega-ad, one hundred feet tall, frozen in place, on the side of a building downtown. The whole world saw him. His face looked different though, “chiseled.” His muscles sinewy. Owen-shaped, but not quite Owen. I thought he was beautiful before. His body perfect before. But perfect wasn’t quite the right shape.

I’d been honest with the tactless student; I’d enrolled in a handful of life drawing classes over the years, as an artist. As a kid, I spent hours drawing faces and animals. In my twenties, I became fascinated with naked bodies.

In the life drawing classes I attended, sessions were timed, but the models otherwise directed themselves on stage, flowing into new shapes of their choosing. I tried to capture it all with graphite, to somehow translate the energy of their gesture—a wave cresting from finger to shoulder to toe—onto paper, make fat and skin and muscle and bone move, push a current of blood through the tip of my pencil.

What did it feel like to be a form, a movement, rather than a body, with all its weight? I had spent so much time in front of a mirror, I’d forgotten I had depth. What was a body without a mirror to flatten it? How did it stand on stage, not as a singular, fixed shape, but as a figure constructed of many shapes, protean and mutable? How did it become parts that made up a whole, an arrangement that moved and gestured?

Eventually I was fourteen—older, finally—and though my parents couldn’t afford to let me attend the modeling convention in the fall, my agency announced a local model search in City Park, just over the bridge from Westbank. The prize was an all-expenses paid trip to the convention in Vancouver.

Mom was by my side whenever I wasn’t in front of the judges, but she never obscured my number. She held my portfolio and told me I was fantastic. I felt annoyed. It didn’t matter what she thought. It mattered what they thought. I knew I looked older—I wore a bra now—but it was the wrong kind of older. Boobs could really fuck with your measurements, exactly as that agent had warned. At least I was the tallest. Us models, we snagged glances at each other. They clomped around in their heels, but I’d been walking in those shoes since I was twelve.

I pounded the concrete runway in a skirt. In a swimsuit. My number flapped, my face exuded power and apathy. I met the judges, flipping my face into an easygoing smile. I stood taut and tall in my bikini as an agent whipped out a tape measure and cinched it around my bust-waist-hips. I knew the numbers but held my breath. “Thirty-four, twenty-four and a half, thirty-four. Almost perfect!”

I breathed out.

The models scattered off stage as the judges deliberated. While Mom and I waited, the edges of my vision went dark and I crouched at the base of a tree.

“Are you okay?” Mom’s forehead crinkled and I admitted that I needed to eat. It would be another few years before she knew about my eating disorder. Even then, I didn’t know that’s what it was, but I knew enough not to talk about it.

What was a body without a mirror to flatten it?

Ten minutes later, the other models and I posed homogeneously side by side. My agent stood to announce the results. A charged silence struck the crowd.

I won.

After a long, hungry summer, I attended the modeling convention in Vancouver for my second and last time, the shape of my body half an inch closer to perfect than it had been at the model search. But I was only fourteen. Still too young.

Mid axe swing. The class was now learning to capture movement of a figure—gesture—and I was posed as though chopping firewood.

“Draw what you see,” the instructor said, circling the room. “Not what you think you see.” The students were supposed to find the single line that flowed through the entire form, a line that mapped the course of energy. “Don’t worry about details right now. Just get the shape. The more shapes you can break the body down into, the more movement you will see.”

This made sense. To consider outer space is to be baffled. But to look up at the night sky and focus on each moving part—the moon, the sun, planets, stars, and celestial bodies, solar systems and galaxies—creates a lens through which to observe the cosmos more holistically.

In my peripheral vision, I sensed the artists breaking my body down into shapes, reconstructing the shapes onto newsprint. Building my body back up with charcoal. The timer rang, and I followed through with my swing, met gravity’s force with my own.

In high school, I dropped to 116 pounds. I was so exhausted, I could not hold my head up, let alone hold open the heavy doors of the school entrance. I slept through all my English blocks in high school, my favorite subject. I skipped most other classes, except drama, but sat in the back row because I couldn’t stay awake there, either. Eventually my teachers stopped reprimanding me and just let me sleep. My hands and feet turned purple, then white, then numb. A thousand layers of clothing couldn’t keep me warm. My lips were stained blue from an endless, bone-deep cold. When the principal’s office called because my record showed over a hundred truancies, I told Mom I always missed roll call because I was chronically late. She believed me; I was always late.

My body stopped menstruating, stalled in time on a biological level. An anxious feedback loop played in my head: when will I be warm again, when will I eat again, when will the day end? I no longer had hobbies. But I had stamina. I had integrity. I had the figure of a twelve-year-old.

Naked. The timer sounded. The scrape of conté on newsprint tapered into quiet, and I readied for a new pose. I shook out my wrists, billowed my trench coat over the stage, and sat down as though at the beach, legs out, leaning forward to admire my sandal tan. Long poses now, hold for fifteen minutes.

The stretch made my hamstrings burn. Stillness was not painless. I closed my eyes, focused on my breath. Tried to relax. But all I could see behind my eyelids was my reflection in the bathroom mirror.

What if the students were disgusted by the scars on my chest? My hairy legs? What if they fixated on my poor circulation, which turned my hands and feet a dappled purple? What if my breast looked like a home-grown zucchini from this angle?

I forced my attention to my breath. In, out. My hands were probably purple.

The year I finally turned seventeen, I didn’t return to the modeling convention in Vancouver to strut the runway, to show that agent I could keep my prepubescent figure, that I had kept it. Instead, I went to the bush.

A close friend called my parents, unbeknownst to me, and shared her concerns about my increasingly strange eating habits, long bathroom stints, and erratic social conduct. When they confronted me, upset and already devising a plan to fix my problem, I barely protested. In truth, I felt relieved. Secrets are lonely undertakings, and mine had demanded constant attention.

They sent me to a camp for girls with eating disorders, at a lodge nestled in the woods on a lake an hour outside Vancouver. The closest thing to a catwalk was the old dock, where I fell asleep during group yoga every morning. One afternoon, in the communal area of the lodge, we were each paired with another camper. Sunlight angled through the windows, landing on huge sheets of paper taped to the walls. The counselor passed out colored markers as she explained the activity. I stood against the papered wall, facing my partner, who smiled, a purple marker in hand. She traced my body all the way around, from one foot to the top of my head, from my head down to the other foot, tracking all the space in between. When she finished her drawing, I stepped away and turned around.

The counselor told us the exercise offered a more concrete way to see our bodies, a way to disrupt the thick film of judgment and expectation we were trapped behind.

I hoped for a stick figure but really expected more of a crime scene situation, a rudimentary outline like the tape around a cadaver on a TV cop drama. But the tracing on the wall looked like neither—it didn’t look like me whatsoever. It was just a line, after all, a two-dimensional contour on the wall. Still, I felt my defenses swing like a metronome. I should be smaller, I thought, wondering if my partner had held the marker at an unfair angle. But what if that rangy outline was really what I looked like? Because my name was attached to it, I felt an urge to take responsibility for that line, to place some kind of value on it.

I traced my partner, determined to capture her just as she was. We stepped back. And the contour didn’t look like her either. Glancing around the room at all the outlines of bodies on the wall, it became impossible to tell which belonged to whom. They were just shapes. Not people.

Two minutes into the pseudo-beach pose and I could not push away my concerns about the vegetable shape my boob had possibly morphed into, given the way my torso arched, given the pull of gravity. Every time I switched poses, all my body parts took on a slightly different shape, and I felt the urge to step outside my skin and do a 360° scan of myself to ensure everything looked as it should. Aside from presenting a logistical impossibility, I recognized the urge as one with incredible potential to spiral. In such a vortex, thirteen minutes would become a lifetime.

I took a breath. Pricked my ears to the constant erosion of charcoal. If my boob did look like a zucchini, at least the artists were building the zucchini out of spheres and cones, focusing on accuracy. My body was a collection of shapes. It wasn’t worth losing myself over.

At the timer, the students spun their easels to face inward. A dozen interpretations of myself surrounded me. As each artist described their technique, I faced my body, sketch by sketch.

The first easel conveyed a hunched figure, arms clutching the edge of the chair between her legs. The lines were choppy, the form rendered small. In another, exaggerated lines swelled into a wide, muscled arm and the breasts swooped away from the rib cage like birds in flight. One picture portrayed the figure on a stool. The edges of the conté had been dragged to create shadows that revealed her shape through the relief of light.

Seeing my body this way, deconstructed into shapes, arranged on paper into stacks of spheres and cylinders, calmed me. Strange relief. The way others perceived my body, I could see, had very little to do with me, and nothing to do with the anxieties that spiraled in my head. Each drawing revealed my body’s subjectivity, unveiled an alternative way to see. On the page, I wasn’t in good or bad shape, appealing or unappealing.

While the students packed up, the instructor offered a final pointer for their portfolio pieces. “As you draw, notice the contrast of the body and the background. Think about how the contrast of the negative space informs the shape.”

I recalled the conversation with the student in the hallway. The context mattered. I wasn’t twelve but thirty-two. This wasn’t a competition, but a drawing class. Here, I was not expected to scrape myself down to a razor-thin margin of acceptable measurements, draped in sample sizes. My body wasn’t up for debate; my body was the shape in question—positive space informed by the negative. Here, I had autonomy over my body’s expression; the interpretation of it was beside the point.

I dressed, packed my bag, and waved goodbye to the class. “It was nice to see you,” a student called out.

It was nice to be seen.

8 Novels Inspired by the Author’s Day Job

Posted on April 4, 2024April 4, 2024 by EL Assistant2

Like many authors, I don’t write alongside a “day job” but rather a portfolio career. For over a decade a key strand of my work has focused on human rights non-fiction editing. During the U.K.’s covid lockdown, the femicide rate spiked even as my clients (frontline workers, activists and academics) struggled to get support for those in far more danger stuck at home with a violent partner than from the pandemic.

The Best Way to Bury Your Husband was born of the sheer deluge and urgency of the work that followed. All authors draw from life, but this was the first time my “day job” shaped one of my novels so completely. It awakened an interest in how other writers explore the benefits and challenges of leaning heavily on experience, not just imagination.

Our work life is such a rich and inescapable source of material and inspiration, but sometimes that depth of knowledge can be just as daunting and complicated as having to invent everything from scratch. What should you put in to make the work authentic versus what should you leave out to avoid getting bogged down? How much can you borrow before you’re no longer writing fiction at all? Here are seven authors, with novels inspired by their day jobs, who are answering those questions.

Forensic Anthropologist: The Temperance Brennan series by Kathy Reichs

From Patricia Cornwell (who worked at a medical examiner’s office) to Kathy Reichs (a forensic anthropologist whose crime novels inspired long-running TV-series Bones), crime writers with a background in policing or the analysis of evidence have become increasingly common as an ever more sophisticated readership looks for greater authenticity. It’s not just the ‘telling details’ that matter—and which are easily enough seized upon—but the types of story that emerge organically from specific types of work, happening in specific contexts, within a specific professional culture.

Counterterrorism Communications: The Chase by Ava Glass

Christi Daugherty moved on from crime reporting in the U.S. to counterterrorism communications in London, and it was this that informed her new Alias Emma series, written under the pen-name Ava Glass. The Chase sees spy Emma Makepeace (not her real name) engaged in a fraught escape across London—the most heavily CCTV-surveilled city in the world—while The Traitor follows her across Europe on an oligarch’s superyacht as she hunts a possible government mole. A female-centric spin on Le Carré, The Traitor was shortlisted for the prestigious Crime Writers Association Steel Dagger Award for its grounded depiction of intelligence work. Hailed as a “‘female James Bond,” Glass, with her keen eye for both detail and fun, brings the action—and also a depth of insight into the damage this type of work wreaks on a person’s life and psyche.

Mental Health Worker: Girl Friends by Holly Bourne

It’s perhaps not a surprise that counselling and mental health work is another common author ‘day job’ given the novel’s unrivaled canvas for exploring character interiority. Holly Bourne worked as a teen mental health advisor. Her years of experience shine through in all her novels, from her alternatively hilarious and heartbreaking Am I Normal Yet? YA series to her nuanced examination of trauma in her adult novels, most recently Girl Friends. Bourne has an extraordinary ability to switch from laugh-out-loud comedy to peeling back the layers of what’s happening to reveal the tragedy beneath, from the lies we tell ourselves to the horrors so normalised in society we barely recognise it doesn’t have to be like this.

Teacher: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

A former classics teacher, Madeline Miller brought her love of Latin and Greek into her sublime The Song of Achilles, which effortlessly and accessibly renders the stories from The Odyssey into a living, breathing tale of love and devotion. It sings to the modern reader just as the original would have to listeners from thousands of years ago. Miller captures the magic of ancient rhythms and the beauty of language that has withstood the test of millennia. The swift, smooth flow, mimicking the tale’s origins in the oral tradition, saw me unable to stop turning the pages.

Journalist: The Many Lies of Veronica Hawkins by Kristina Pérez

Like her protagonist, Pérez moved from New York City to Hong Kong, where she worked as a journalist. A tightly-structured “book within a book”, it’s clear from the start that everyone in this twisty tale is lying—but what they’re lying about, and how this relates to the death of the eponymous Hong Kong socialite, is a tangled web indeed. The sense of a dynamic place at a profound moment of change is as much a character as any of the named players, adding depth and a disconcerting vividness that makes the levels of storytelling even more engrossing.

Playwright: The Appeal by Janice Hallett

Janice Hallett is another author with a background in journalism, but it’s her “day job” as a playwright (and her passion for amateur dramatics) that shines most brightly in The Appeal. Told through emails, texts and other documents, this is a modern spin on the epistolary novel. Hallett’s skill with capturing different voices—much like an actor—keeps the pages turning as you puzzle over the deeper meaning of a friendly sign-off versus a terse one, and whether concern over ethical and legal technicalities will prove a red herring or the key to unraveling the central mystery.

Lawyer: The Unseeing by Anna Mazzola

Lawyers are well-represented among authors, from Charles Perrault to John Buchan, and from John Grisham to Anna Mazzola. To date, Mazzola has focused on the intersection of her legal expertise with her passion for history. The Unseeing is a dual-narrative following a young lawyer sent to re-investigate a (real) 1830s case in which both a murderer and his common-law wife have been sentenced to death: the second narrator is the condemned “accomplice.” With a sharp eye to how gaps in evidence can be as revealing as the evidence itself, Mazzola turns her lens on the way power structures don’t just shape the law as written, but also how it affects the legal system in practice. Look out for her first contemporary legal mystery in 2025 under pen-name Anna Sharpe.

Babysitter: Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age was inspired partly by her own experiences as a babysitter. When a Black babysitter takes the young white girl she cares for to the supermarket, she finds herself accused of kidnapping. Her horrified employer wants to make things right, but from the micro- to the macro-level that is anything but simple. The book took the publishing world by storm, ending up on the longlist for The Booker Prize among other accolades for its nuanced exploration of race, class and power.

Installing Ourselves in the Memory Museum

Posted on April 3, 2024March 27, 2024 by Preety Sidhu

The Museum Was Built So No One Would Forget . . .

us, pottery fragments once  
dusted in warm sand—jagged,  

mismatched—today, preserved  
in glass. it began to rain while we  

walked from the bar, so we came  
here, listening to artifacts speak about  

their hieroglyphs, even after we learned
the paintings we wanted to see were  

switched out before morning arrived. yet
we wander through modernism and  

antiquity, stopping to see a vase or shield, the
faces of those bending down on the other  

side of the case. one of them reminds me
of him, you say, which is the complete  

antithesis of today’s adventure—it’s to forget,
you emphasized during our second round of  

drinks. come here, taking your hand, dull
blade of a jackknife. and we pause by a 

sculpture of a green balloon dog.  
there are no security guards lurking or  

barricades surrounding the mantle.  
push it. you’re crazy. imagine  

it’s from him, make it appear like an  
accident. you roll your eyes, but lift your  

hand, pausing by the nose, arm  
trembling, ready to spread  

god’s fingerprints with  
one small shove.

Desaparecidos (or, Memorializing Absence, Remembering the Disappeared)

installation: sculptures


see who’s next to be concealed in harsh  
twilight. stand behind statues, peephole  
through gaping exit wounds. yesterday’s  
papers flutter with mosquitos. go: crumple 

headlines together. deprived of liberty via  
a breeze and years of futile searching for the  
deafening muffle of a rooster crowing. let them 
call for those kissing palm leaves over  

mouths, the forcibly taken and disappeared, 
watch as the flecks of embers in a field of  
sampaguitas ablaze subsist through 
crush-glass rain. name, picture, remembrance. 

the disappeared are not dead, but immaterial with 
stiff heads, necks, limbs, ab- away, esse- to be 
in rigor mortis—the bodies’ event horizon—for 
absence remains: open wound, festering in 

hectares, eyes scalloped out, sockets blackened  
inkblots. watch them hold gifts, hands gripping 
golden frames which contain no archipelagoes or  
portraits, but recesses. think: deserted mirrors,  

barren caesarean, flesh turned nuclear winter. 
child wearing overalls, student in cap and  
gown, nun’s mouth calcified shut, old  
man, old woman, snuffed out by candlelight.

In “Women! In! Peril!,” Defying Societal Norms Is an Act of Reclamation

Posted on April 3, 2024January 29, 2024 by Jo Lou

Jessie Ren Marshall lives on an off-the-grid farm on Hawai’i Island. Women! In! Peril!, her irreverent stories are, as the title suggests, about women of various guises facing messy, precarious situations. This partial list of protagonists is a good indicator of Marshall’s amplitude: an Asian sex robot trying to outlast her return policy, a lesbian grappling with her wife’s “immaculate” pregnancy, a teacher lusting after a young student, a confused young American stripper in London, a Japanese freak show actress eager to escape her island. The formats vary too. She uses playscript, posts from social media accounts, and even journal updates from space.

While some stories are speculative and others realistic, each story plunges you into a deeply lived world where fucked up things—be it a toxic relationship, racial objectification, or climate doom—unravel in a way that is both bold and, often, hilarious. There is a guilty pleasure in reading these stories. You feel like you’re in the hands of someone who has a sharp eye for the strangeness of existing in today’s world and doesn’t have anything she is too afraid to say.

Marshall is an award-winning playwright and she spoke to me by phone from her farm about leaving New York to become a writer, claiming space, and the role of physical labor in her creative process.

Sasha Vasilyuk: There is a line in a story called Sister Fat that says “And you will be a perfect father. Being dead, you will not interfere.” What do you think is happening to women and feminism today?

Jessie Ren Marshall: Everybody should define feminism for themselves and think about what that means. I do think that this is a feminist book because unfortunately, at this stage of literature, it is still a radical act to show the point of view of characters who are not white men. Each story in this book explores a different woman’s point of view and within that, there is a lot of diversity because I think women aren’t just one thing and feminism isn’t just one thing. The act of claiming space and claiming your voice is going to be necessarily multitudinous and weird and unexpected.

In my writing in general, I am really drawn to women’s voices and women’s relationships. Part of that is because I can draw on my own experience and it’s just kind of a selfish thing to do. But at the same time, I do see it as an act of defiance against the norm. An act of inclusion. I really love stories about women’s relationships with women as well, not just their relationships with men or being defined by a romantic relationship because we’ve all seen that story a million times on Netflix. I’m really interested in exploring motherhood, particularly non-traditional kinds of mothering, or mother-child relationships. I myself am not a mother, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have an understanding of that relationship. And sisterhood is a huge one for me. And then of course, there are also queer relationships between women.

SV: The collection has both speculative stories (a sex bot, a woman traveling to populate Planet B) and realist ones—a woman getting divorced, a teacher flirting with a male student, a strip club dancer in London, a reluctant teen piano player—that reading those I often found myself wondering what of your own past experiences had found a place on the page? Or do you try to keep yourself entirely out of your fiction?

JRM: I kind of love the framing of this question because I think there’s a little bit of a reluctance to say this fiction is based on my life, because then readers will want to find the answer. And the answer is not this really happened, whereas this other thing didn’t happen. It’s not a puzzle in that sense. It’s more that I have experiences and obsessions that then work themselves out on the page because I think I’m always seeking to address questions and to write around questions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean answering questions on the page.

For example, one of the more speculative stories, which is told from the point of view of a sex bot, is very personal to me and I think is one of the stories that is based more on my own life experiences than perhaps something that seems more realistic. The divorce story for example, I wasn’t going through a divorce. I hadn’t even met anybody yet. I was a lot younger, but the Annie 2 story [the opening story about the sex bot] was written during the anti-Asian violence that was happening, particularly in New York City. And it was a response to that feeling of helplessness that I had, being so far away from where I felt like the crux of the violence was happening. At the same time, even though I wasn’t there, I understood that violence in a deep sense, because I had experienced it in a million different small ways. I think that’s what happens with micro aggressions: they pile up, but if you point to any one individually, they don’t seem like a big deal. But the accumulative nature of racism and sexism is a violence that I think many Asian American women would recognize. In that story, even though it’s told in a humorous way and the reader is distanced from the narrator because we are not robots, it’s that play of narrative distance that I think is so interesting to explore and to reflect what it means to be human. So I hope that a human reading that story feels the gravitas of sexism, racism, othering, even though the story itself is more speculative in nature.

SV: Have you ever dreamt of a man sweeping you off your feet or coming to your rescue? Is it a dangerous narrative for girls to grow up with?

JRM: It is absolutely the baseline of what I grew up with. I think it is my generation’s baseline narrative of what you hope for as a young girl, and it is hard to escape. Any expectation for your life is going to be problematic. Anything that’s done by society is probably not going to work perfectly for anyone. But it is more complicated than just trying to work against this narrative of someone sweeping me off my feet, Princess Bride-style. It’s more complicated because there’s also this feminist counter narrative which was also shoved down our throats of “You need to save yourself. You need to be your own hero. Women are badass.” That is also problematic because it makes you feel wrong when you want someone to sweep you off your feet. What is wrong with wanting to be supported and saved and loved and adored? All of those things are part of human existence and I don’t think we should push them away as a kind of weakness. It’s all about balance, isn’t it? This is what being an adult is: we are trying to find a balance between what others want us to be and what we need to be in order to get through another day.

SV: What was it like coming of age as a writer in New York?

I do think that this is a feminist book because unfortunately, it is still a radical act to show the point of view of characters who are not white men.

JRM: What I said before about having to navigate the trench between the way the outside world sees you and what you need in order to survive another day. That definitely applies to being a writer in New York. There was a lot of anxiety of influence that I felt when I was there, particularly in terms of the literary scene. At that time, which was a while ago, the literary world was so based in New York City, the American publishing world was not as diffuse as it is today. It felt like everyone in my MFA program was reading the same stories in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s. We were being fed the same books and we had similar goals because what you read is kind of what you end up wanting to write. I really enjoyed the social aspect of the MFA program, but at the same time, I don’t think it was the best place to develop as a writer because of that anxiety of influence that I felt. So I overcorrected and moved to Hawaii. And that became a really amazing place to settle into my voice more deeply, and figure out what I wanted to write about or what I was interested in. Because I didn’t think about what was being published in the New Yorker that week.

SV: You live with your dogs off the grid on a remote farm on Hawai’i Island. It’s a dream of many a writer, but the reality of very, very few. What does it do to your brain to be away from society?

JRM: You’re right in that it is a very romantic notion that in order to be an artist, one has to remove oneself from society and be alone. I mean, everyone from Thoreau to Andrew Bird has said that it is a helpful thing to do. Andrew Bird, the musician, I think it was one of his earlier albums, where he just went to a cabin in the middle of the woods and knocked it out himself. There is something about the idea of being totally in your own created world that is very appealing, especially for a fiction writer because you don’t need other people to create that world. It’s a self-sufficient space. I think also being in nature is incredibly helpful for the creative process. It allows me to remind myself that I am a part of something larger than myself. And since I’m not religious, I think I need to find that reminder somewhere else and it comes from the natural world for me. In terms of not being a part of society, that has been quite difficult. I am a hermit by nature, I enjoy being alone, I don’t often long for company. But society is more than people. There is an aspect of society that I really miss, which is cultural connection, going to the theater, going to a restaurant, seeing what new things other people who are creative are creating. It’s sad to be apart from that for most of my days. And at the same time I do think one of the most wonderful things about having a book published is that it connects you to so many people in your work in public.

When your work becomes public, it’s like you’ve debuted into society. That’s actually a wonderful side effect that I wasn’t aware of is that I’m connected to all these people that I might not have met if my work weren’t becoming public soon. It is hard to be not in a city. I think when your book comes out there’s some anxiety that I feel because I would prefer it if I could have that permanent sense of community around me, of literary community, of creative community, friends and family, but at the same time, that’s what writing retreats are for.

SV: You’re working both on your farm and on your novel, Alohaland. What role does physical labor play in your creative process?

Being an adult is trying to find a balance between what others want us to be and what we need to be in order to get through another day.

JRM: I try to spend a portion of every day doing something that is either working on the land or working on the house and both of those are definitely works in progress. I have a burgeoning garden, I build fences, I build furniture. I’m trying to make the world a little bit better, the world inside my space bubble. I’m trying to improve things and I think that that can be really useful as a writer because you spend so much time in your head creating a fake physical world. It’s nice to return to the actual physical world, where objects have permanence that you can touch and lift and move.

I think there are a lot of helpful parallels to when you look at the way that things grow and things decay and things die. There is a cycle of life to, particularly, the gardening and observing the land that keeps things in perspective. When you’re creating something like a book, which seems permanent, it seems like an object, but really everything is impermanent, because that’s just the cycle of time. So let’s not get too attached to the things that we make.

SV: Do you ever feel like a woman in peril?

JRM: I mean, I do get hurt sometimes, physically. So in those times, I think that I do curse the fact that I’m alone and trying to do things myself, but I also really like the self-sufficiency of knowing that I can lift really heavy things and, although it’s challenging, I can prevail. I think that has made the act of writing a book seem a little bit less daunting, because it is hard. It’s so fucking hard to write a book! It takes so much perseverance, it takes so much faith in yourself. And the way you build a fence is bit by bit. You don’t build it all in one day, especially when you’re doing it yourself without a lot of large tools to help you. But if you’re doing it with your own two hands, then it happens slowly and that’s the same way a book gets written.

Announcing the Winner of March Sadness

Posted on April 2, 2024April 1, 2024 by Jo Lou

We have a winner! There were many strong contenders, but there was one book that cleared every round with a trail of broken hearts and rose to the top on a tidal wave of tears.

But before we reveal the winner, here is some behind-the-scenes commentary on the competition:

While we’re really impressed with how the March Sadness bracket turned out, we can’t say it matched our expectations. The EL staff filled out our own brackets, and we failed abysmally. From nearly everyone guessing that A Little Life would sweep the left side of the bracket, to being (pessimistically) certain The Fault in Our Stars would be the runaway winner, our showings were frankly embarrassing. Out of a maximum 57 points, our winning bracket (belonging to former intern, Kyla Walker—congrats, Kyla!) scored a measly 26 points. And our lowest score, by our lovely Managing Editor, Wynter Miller (sorry to call you out, Wynter), was only 12. And I, the author of this article, who by all means should be the best at guessing given that I run our social media accounts, clocked in at a (frankly embarrassing) 17 points. I thought I knew you all well, dear followers, and I’m ashamed to say I clearly do not. My hubris got the better of me. Is this what fantasy sports feels like? If so, I don’t think I like it. But… I will be playing again next year anyway. Which kind of seems to be the entire vibe of sports? Maybe we’re onto something here.

Here is the winner of March Sadness:

For those following along at home, here’s how the bracket played out:

Thanks for playing and following along! Join us again next year for another (possibly also rhyming but definitely not sports-related) March Madness bracket.

8 Books about the Interdependence Between Humans and Animals

Posted on April 2, 2024April 1, 2024 by Intern Electric Lit

Animals are all around us; as I write this, stinkbugs are crawling on my office window, squirrels are busy in the white pines and poplar trees, and (though I can’t see them) deer and bobcats are roaming not far away. Culture usually trains us to draw sharp lines between ourselves and all other species. We also differentiate those species we choose to live with (cats, dogs, chickens) from those we term “wild.”

But I’m fascinated by the places where those categories break down. Are the mice who intrude on my cupboards wild? Is my cat wild when he hunts a songbird? Are the songbirds becoming domesticated if I feed them suet? What about the microorganisms that make up much of our body mass?

Writing my book, The Age of Deer, was a deep dive into those kinds of questions, prompted by the long and tangled history humans share with deer. We’ve influenced each other so profoundly—ecologically, biologically, culturally—that the more I researched our relationship, the more the conventional lines of division between us began to seem blurry at best. Here are eight other books that examine the interconnections among humans and some of the species—or “nations,” as they’re sometimes called—with whom we share the Earth.

Winter: Effulgences & Devotions by Sarah Vap

Centered on the Olympic Peninsula, Vap’s recursive, questing book-length poem charts a radical porousness between people and whales, salmon, microorganisms: all the species that are part of our world, that influence us and are influenced (and devastated) by us. But the dissolving boundaries in this book also include those between Vap and her children and husband—the “family animal,” in her phrase, a collective organism that sleeps, eats, nurses, plays, shares thought and speech, seeps in and out of the language of the writing. The project took years to write and contains many layers of personal history and political response, but it constantly circles back to the image of a mother who is as vulnerable to the beloved interruptions of her young sons as she is to the horrors of climate change, extinction and war. The body here becomes a hinge between human and animal existence, a reminder of our inescapable (and why would we want to?) creaturehood.

Milk Tongue by Irène Mathieu

Animal life is not the overt focus of this book, but in and amongst Mathieu’s explorations of history, family, and her work as a pediatrician, wildlife is a quiet and frequent presence, inviting itself into the human world. Thrush, an infection of the mouth, is also a bird that “lands on the windowsill” and becomes woven into a complex imagistic fabric. Deer tracks are the epicenter of “a kind of country… we drew.” Mathieu’s poetry finds slippages between body and landscape, brain and culture, and locates moments when the domesticated world collides with the feral (a moth, having strayed into a kitchen, cut down by a snapped dishtowel) and those when the human is drawn forward and outward by the more-than-human: “confused animal I am,” she writes, comparing herself to “the small miracle of organization” represented by a flock of geese.

When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice by Terry Tempest Williams

Birds in this book are messengers carrying mystical resonances, like the ruby-throated hummingbird who hovers in front of Williams as she kneels on the ground, grieving a friend. Or the owl who appears, seeming to warn her, as she follows a dangerous man into the wilderness, against her own better judgment. Her world is vibrant and full of signs, and she possesses deep recall of many moments from across her life, like a sunrise she watched with her grandmother in the Uinta Mountains of Utah, when they witnessed a golden eagle silence the dawn chorus of songbirds and grab a mouse. “Voice” here means authentic speech, speaking up or out, and birds are Williams’ guides through a life in art, activism, and family.

Yaqui Deer Songs / Maso Bwikam: A Native American Poetry by Larry Evers and Felipe S. Molina

Technically, this is an academic work of anthropology. From the first, though, it reads like a poem— fitting, since it brings forth the elegant, living body of literature created by Yaqui people in Arizona and Sonora. Yaqui deer dancers perform in order to invoke another world, the sea ania or flower world, from which deer emerge: mythic figures and key providers for humans. But it’s not as simple as calling forth the deer. The dances and music enter and honor the deer’s own perspective: the dancers wear antlers and imitate the movements of deer, while the lyrics are often cast in the deer’s voice. “With a cluster of flowers in my antlers, I walk.” A native Yaqui speaker and a white academic co-authored the book in 1987; they fill it with images, translations and anecdotes, like a personal tour of the Yaqui world.

The Radiant Lives of Animals by Linda Hogan

From her small house in rural Colorado, the Chickasaw poet Hogan charts a way of listening and co-habiting with wild animals that is often revelatory in its simple lack of dominance. Instead of spraying wasps who nest in her bedroom, she opens the window for them every morning so they can go in and out. “Not being a person… with insect hatred,” she demonstrates that animosity and fear of the wild are choices, just as easy not to harbor. In a lilting, dreamy voice, through the Yaqui deer dances and Hogan’s ties to horses and burros, this book of mostly essays explores the enchantment that brings humans into receptivity toward many species’ intelligence—ants, elk, wolves—“all citizens here.”

The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham

Through linked essays, Lanham becomes our guide to the landscape of his South Carolina childhood, where his forebears were farmers and pillars of Black community life. Birds and other wildlife captured Lanham’s attention early; he longed to fly, tempted vultures by playing dead, and gradually realized that his religious feelings were more centered on the outdoors than on church. As an adult, he became a birder and a professor of wildlife ecology—a rarity in both largely white realms. He expands our notion of who belongs in the outdoors and who loves wild places: “I also think about how other Black and Brown folks think about land,” he writes. He’s at his most convincing when he describes becoming a deer hunter, fully and consciously involved in the life and death dance of the land he loves.

The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication by Stephen Budiansky

Budiansky, a science writer and former Nature editor, makes a case here that domestication of animal species is not a process of enslavement but simply part of evolution. Both parties benefitted, he argues, when humans began to offer food, shelter and protection for species that in turn provided meat, milk, hides and labor. He traces the long, gradual process by which “loose associations” become codified, often hinging on the trait called neoteny — a tendency to retain some juvenile characteristics even in adulthood. Both domesticated animals and humans display neoteny, and collectively it has served our numbers very well: the total biomass of land species on Earth is becoming more and more weighted toward people and the animals we control. “Wild,” then, is a contested and precarious category.

Woman the Hunter by Mary Zeiss Stange

An academic and hunter, Stange investigates a string of questions animated by the presence of the female hunter—who, she points out, is not only a modern phenomenon: in hunter-gatherer societies, women have routinely killed small animals as part of what gets labeled “gathering.” Why does anyone hunt in the modern world? What can hunting tell us about the human presence on earth, and whether “wildness,” as we’ve imagined it, really exists? When the hunter is a woman, Stange argues, she awakens fertile contradictions lying deep beneath our culture: Artemis, for example, is both a death-dealer and a protector, a patron of animals who also embodies the fact that, in Stange’s words, “life feeds on life.”