Here are seven slim collections that do good work!
Kitchen Curse by Eka Kurniawan, translated by Annie Tucker, Benedict Anderson, Maggie Tiojakin and Tiffany Tsao
A ripe and rank collection, full of unspeakable excretions. Ruder and cruder than Beauty Is a Wound, these stories dare you to turn away in disgust, but always go to unexpected, revelatory places.
Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky
Sharp and dissonant stories that give voice to women from Ukraine’s Donbas region, whose daily lives and jobs have been upended by war. Belorusets elevates, in her own words, the “insignificant and the small, the accidental, the superfluous, the repressed” in her writing—things that avoid capture by the dominant historical narrative.
A collection of tales, philosophical inquiries, and nighttime ruminations from the Cairo-born, Berlin-based writer that reflect on the meaning of sleep—a potentially subversive activity, El-Wardany suggests, under the twin scourges of authoritarian government and 24/7 capitalism.
Thick City’s visceral, interconnected vignettes introduce us to a host of characters caught up in various entanglements and estrangements, absurd and weird and tender and sometimes gruesome, amounting to a queer city-symphony in miniature.
These voice-driven pieces, which depict an Antiguan childhood full of enveloping mystery, pain, and beauty, burrow deep into the subconscious. Kincaid’s singular style commingles the plainspoken with the rhetorical, the dream and spirit with the corporeal.
A compendium of both banal and horrific anecdotes concerning social life in post-war Austria, rendered in a deadpan, just-the-facts journalistic burlesque. For a brilliant contemporary riff on this book, check out Gabriel Blackwell’s Correction, which lays bare the American predicament with ruthless precision.
An awesome anthology (spanning 1923–1961) of the author’s dreams, offered without analysis or explanation, written with frightening intimacy and a wonderfully detached style.
I’ve always been fascinated by vampire tales, but for all the wrong reasons. Vampire stories are typically allegories about sex and suppressed desires. This is all well and good, and this angle has certainly had its moment in the sun (no pun intended). But I’ve always loved when vampires were used as a literary tool to probe relationships—specifically, relationships among family members.
The bonds of familial love are incredibly strong, much like the bond between a vampire and its maker. Family relationships can also become parasitic, like a vampire and its chosen human prey. I decided to make this the focus of my horror duology, Night’s EdgeandFirst Light, the story of a young girl whose mother gets infected with a vampiric illness.
As I was writing these grounded novels of toxic love and bloody sacrifice, I was scouring the internet for vampire books that also explored themes about family. There weren’t a lot of them, but the ones I did find are all incredibly unique, moving, and a must read for any horror fan looking to expand their vampiric palate.
This remarkable book, one of my favorites of 2023, uses vampire horror to lens deeply personal themes like postpartum depression, motherhood, living with a disability, and antisemitism. It’s a wild ride that touches on a lot of different concepts but remains character-driven and intimate throughout. Its main characters, Ana and Reid, are new parents who have recently won the New York City housing lottery and move into a stunning high-rise uptown. Little do they know that the fraying bonds holding their little family together are about to be tested in ways they can never imagine when they meet their very wealthy—and very old—bloodthirsty neighbors. When their baby daughter starts acting strangely and getting sick, Ana is the only one who thinks it’s an emergency. By the time her husband starts to believe her, it’s too late. I love what this book says about parenthood and all the ways we cannot predict what our children are meant to become. A modern classic for sure.
This book was written in 1995 for young adults, but somehow I missed it back then despite being its target audience. I only heard of it recently, and I think it’s one of those rare books that candidly explores the abusive lure of the mythic vampire and how he chooses his victims. In this book, a lonely teenage girl named Cynda goes to live with her father, his new wife, and their young son in Maine, where they own a charming bed and breakfast. Her new stepmother treats her more like a servant than a member of the family, and she feels misunderstood and neglected. But when an alluring new guest named Vincent checks into the hotel, all of that changes. Vincent is (as I’m sure you’ve predicted) not entirely human. And he’s got his sights set on sweet, lonely Cynda. A dark, secret crush quickly turns violent and terrifying, and Cynda has nowhere to turn because she’s distanced herself from her loved ones so much. Nobody believes her. Like any experienced abuser, Vincent has successfully isolated her from her family. When Vincent starts drinking from Cynda’s little brother too, she knows she has to take action and get this parasite out of their home at all costs. The writing is a little thin and juvenile, but it’s for teens so take that with a grain of salt. It’s an important work of YA horror that should be a prerequisite before any young reader is allowed to pick up Twilight.
This is a fantastic, gruesome jewel box of a novella that just came out in December of 2023. I read it over the course of 24 hours and it was one of those books that made me furious because I had to get up and do stupid stuff like eat and go to work and take a shower. In this world, a dystopian rural community lives and dies by the laws of their vampire “gods.” They sacrifice their children to their supreme leaders and rat each other out for trying to dodge the inevitable. None of them have ever known another way of life. When the story begins, a man named Walter is the last human alive in his community. We come to discover that he abandoned his daughter in the woods many years ago and left her as a sacrifice to the gods. But his daughter wasn’t consumed. She was turned. And all she wants is to be with her father again. She’s determined to lure Walter out of his house so they can be together. She’s still a little girl and has a hold on Walter’s tortured soul. But he knows what she’s become and what the consequences might be for submitting to her. This is a gorgeous, devastating, pitch-dark tale about how much it hurts to ignore the needs of our children if we know they will abuse our trust and do something monstrous. I couldn’t put it down.
I know you don’t need me to tell you about this book. It’s hugely popular, for a good reason. And it definitely qualifies as a complicated vampire family drama. For those who don’t know, the story revolves around Dracula’s first bride, Constanta, and the family/polycule he creates. There are deep familial bonds among the characters, but Dracula rules with an iron fist. This is toxic love at its most deadly. The immortal Constanta, Magdalena, and Alexi are all trapped in an eternal cycle of abuse with their maker. And because of what they are, they fear turning to the outside world for help. If they don’t stand up to their maker, they’ll be trapped under his thumb forever. It’s sexy and smart and queer and gorgeously written. Sure, it’s romance. But it’s got incredible substance and a resonant message.
This qualifies as a vampire family drama due to its lack of family and all the pain that causes our characters. It’s a sleek, modern noir that takes place in a fictional Mexico City that’s got a serious underground bloodsucker problem. Atl is descended from an ancient race of vampires who were once worshipped by the Aztecs, but her entire family has been murdered by a rival coven. She’s an orphan and she doesn’t know who she is without her close-knit immortal clan. She bonds with an orphaned teenage boy named Domingo, who offers his blood to help keep her alive. Both of them are living on the fringes and depend upon each other to survive. They’re not used to trusting others. And Atl is still reeling from the loss of all her loved ones. But found family is what it’s all about, and the two of them go on a dark, whirlwind adventure together, dodging villains both human and supernatural. It’s a really unique twist on the lone wolf vampire trope. Everyone needs someone to lean on—even a deadly, ancient princess.
My last two picks are not explicitly vampire books. But they do explore what it’s like to have a beloved family member with an uncontrollable taste for human flesh and blood. Both of them utilize traditional vampire tropes to incredible dramatic effect, and I think they deserve to be mentioned here.
The Book Eaters takes place in a complex and wholly unique fantasy world in which a secret society of people have survived for thousands of years by (literally) ingesting books. When a young woman gives birth to a baby who would rather consume human brains instead, she’s forced to make a series of dangerous, life-altering decisions that threaten to expose her world and the only family she’s ever known. It’s a creepy, tense, inventive tale about motherhood that asks us how far we will go to save our children from themselves. Devon, the young mother, lures unsuspecting victims to her home so that her son can consume the human flesh he requires. The world believes her child is dangerous—and while that may be true, he is also completely innocent. He didn’t ask for this. It’s a chilling, memorable dark fantasy that shares some common ground with vampire classic Let the Right One In.
Again, this is not explicitly a vampire book. This is about a monster made from grief, brought to life by his devastated mother’s pain. A couple named Magos and Joseph lose their young son Santiago to a tragic illness. After his death, Magos hears an old folktale that says if she keeps a piece of him and feeds it every day, it will grow into something that might fill her void. She keeps a sliver of his diseased lung, feeds it daily, and soon discovers that it’s growing into a sentient being with a ravenous, carnivorous appetite. The lung becomes a monster, who becomes a boy. And the bloodlust remains. He cannot outrun what he is. And as the years go by, his parents cover for his violence toward animals and, occasionally, human beings. Monstrilio, or “M,” is another character who cannot help his true nature and is completely innocent. His family must keep his secret and keep him satiated… or fall back into that abyss of grief and despair. My favorite, rather gruesome part of the book is when M grows up and starts meeting men on dating apps, and at one point he tells a potential match that he likes to bite. Hard. It’s a chilling moment as the reader realizes that this strange little boy has grown into a dangerous yet naïve adult. His parents will no longer be able to protect him. And in fact, we dare to wonder if they even should.
We’re thrilled to announce that Electric Literature is opening for submissions across all categories on Monday, April 1st. This includes our acclaimed literary magazines, Recommended Reading, and The Commuter, as well as the daily site. Below we’ve posted our handy flow chart to help you find the best fit for your writing. Get your submissions ready now, because the window will only be open for two weeks, or until each category hits its cap of 750 submissions. Good luck, and we’re excited to read your work! –Denne Michele Norris, Editor-in-Chief
“Impediments to unity are so common and copious,” write Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor, “they appear as an ordinary, even intractable, aspect of life.” But for the authors of the new book Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, division is not some spontaneous or natural thing. Rather, it requires the strategic and sustained pitting of one group against another. Or, as they see it, the division and animosity that defines our political and social landscape is a product of the active effort to sabotage solidarity.
The central mission of their bookis to find a way to overcome division by cultivating its opposite: solidarity. To do so, the authors look to the past, finding there a rich history of seeing solidarity as a political reflection of our absolute dependence on one another. They also look to the history of social movements to offer readers examples of moments when people from all walks of life have built power together. These examples are important because Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor do not want to overcome divisiveness simply for its own sake, nor do they want anything to do with erasing the differences among us. Rather, they believe that solidarity—the type that respects and retains our differences—can transform society. Their book leaves readers with a real sense that solidarity is the only way out of the mess we’re in. As they write, “Either solidarity forever or our time is up.”
We spoke by Zoom about the history of solidarity, how the right uses “reactionary solidarity” to divide people, how we can counter it, and whom they hope to reach with their book.
Lynne Feeley: You say in the introduction that we’ve entered a “new period of instability and change” and that “we sit at a moment of significant opportunity and threat.” I was wondering if you could say a bit about how you see solidarity as an answer to the threat and opportunity of the moment.
Leah Hunt-Hendrix: There are a number of reasons. On a really macro level, we’re writing this in the midst of feeling like neoliberalism is coming to a crisis point. Both of us started our activism work during the period of financialization, the global justice movement, Occupy Wall Street, economic inequality. So it feels like we’re at a moment of paradigm shift, and either it could become worse, or we could enter a new paradigm that is more just and equitable. The neoliberal era was created—we have the power to create the economic systems that we live in. So what is the intellectual history that we need to create new paradigms? If neoliberalism is really grounded in a concept of freedom and the individual—good things—but went to an extreme, can we bring back the idea of solidarity as we think about a next economic paradigm? So that’s like a macro level.
Then on a more visceral, current political level, obviously we are in the midst of a crisis of democracy, with the election of Trump once and maybe twice. We’ve been thinking about the crisis of democracy as a crisis of solidarity. We let ourselves get so fractured, and we’ve succumbed to these “divide and conquer” tactics and politics—it might mean the end of the American democratic experiment. So can we survive those forces of division by identifying and resisting them?
Then a third piece—even more micro—is on the left itself. The left itself has, since the 1800s and 1900s, always been caught up in sectarianism. We’ve seen that today, too. How do we, as progressives, think about our own coalition? How can we work together to create change and not let ourselves be divided from each other?
Astra Taylor: And how do we not let ourselves be divided without adopting a simplistic idea of unity, which is something we really belabor in the book. We’re not after unity for its own sake.
How can we work together to create change and not let ourselves be divided from each other?
—Leah Hunt-Hendrix
I think moments of breakdown can be moments of breakthrough, and it’s telling that right now, we speak of crises, or poly-crises, or intersecting crises, and nobody blinks an eye. But Leah and I take seriously the threats that are put upon us. We take seriously the threat of climate change. We take seriously the threat of intensifying white supremacy. We take seriously the threat of authoritarianism. But we’re also pretty adamant in the book that a kind of centrist liberalism won’t get us out of the mess we’re in and that you do need to have a kind of robust, progressive politics counter to that. And I think you build that progressive politics by speaking to people’s actual experiences of the crises, experiences of oppression, and turning that into solidarity.
So, that’s where it’s a moment of peril, but it’s a moment of possibility because through the alchemy that is organizing, we can turn a lot of this terrible shit into power for ordinary people.
LF: One of the things you are both making me think about is the point you make about solidarity having to be cultivated. On the one hand, you write about solidarity being a reflection of an inherent interdependence. Yet, on the other hand, you write about solidarity having to be actively cultivated through organizing. This duality is in relation to another duality, which you trace in the book, between cohesion and upheaval.
AT: There’s a strong tradition of thinking of solidarity as social cohesion. But we’re also very invested in and inspired by the vision and the fighting spirit of solidarity that you see all through the labor movement. So solidarity, in our definition, isn’t just about cohesion and keeping things how they are. It is very much about transformation. That’s why we felt compelled to name the kind of solidarity we’re after “transformative solidarity.”
As organizers, I think what we aim to do is to create that conflict and upheaval, that transformative energy to bring about a new consensus, a new cohesion. We don’t want to be debating whether trans people are people, or whether we should have a habitable environment. We just want that to be the new common sense, and then the process can go from there. So I think cohesion and upheaval for us are not at odds. They’re part of the inherent process of societal evolution.
LF: Could you define the difference between reactionary versus transformative solidarity? I do think the key intervention of the book is this idea that just as solidarity must be cultivated, division also has to be cultivated and mobilized and maintained and reinvented over again. So I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about reactionary solidarity, how you see it, how it’s different from transformative solidarity.
LHH: I think there is a notion that solidarity can just be sort of mundane and neutral. But on the other side of that, we see reactionary solidarity as exclusionary and really pitting outsiders against insiders to solidify the “we.” You just see that constantly in politics. Often there’s an external enemy—like China or Russia—but often it can be internal: immigrants, people of color.
We see transformative solidarity as an alternative to that. It’s like deciding that we have something in common, that we have a common fate, a need for each other, and deciding to stick together to overcome whatever obstacles are in the way. There is still a polarization, but it’s a much broader sense of the “we.” I think Occupy is a good example of the 99% versus the 1%. 99% of us have a lot in common, and the only people we don’t have a lot in common with are the people who are dividing us for their own profit and for their own benefit. But even they will benefit from a society where there is a stronger social safety net.
So transformative solidarity doesn’t say that these people are enemies that must be demolished or annihilated. It asks: how can we improve conditions for everyone, even the 1%, who right now have to build fortresses around themselves and have private security to fend off the pitchforks? I think the difference between reactive and transformative solidarity is, in part, how we relate to the concept of the other or the outside.
AT: Transformative solidarity is bridging out and trying to build a more inclusive “we” but with the aim of also changing the social structures. We are also channeling that fighting spirit of solidarity that you see historically in the labor movement. Reactionary solidarity is based more on a politics of scarcity and is more about splintering the coalition. But it offers people a real sense of belonging.
Through the alchemy that is organizing, we can turn a lot of this terrible shit into power for ordinary people.
—Astra Taylor
I’m tempted to say that in transformative solidarity, identity is a doorway, and in reactionary solidarity, identity is a destination. Reactionary solidarity is a white, male, working class that does not want to share its gains or a hyper-aggressive nationalism. We did wrestle a lot with where identity fits into all of this. Solidarity is not identity, but I think identity is often the portal through which we have or do not have solidarity with other people and groups. It’s something we couldn’t ignore because it’s so fundamental, but the question of whether it’s a doorway or a destination is key.
LF: I was really interested in the genre and intended audience of the book. I noticed that, in my reading, it moves around various rhetorical modes or even different kinds of study. We’ve been talking about the intellectual history piece, the social movement history, there’s some personal narrative there in how you came to the project and your work in different movements. There’s also organizer strategy. Could you talk a bit about how you were able to fold all of these approaches into the book, or why you did so?
AT: We genuinely wrestled with the theme and were learning as we wrote. We had to figure out: what do we think about solidarity? What is the intellectual schema that we’re going to use? And so, for me, one of my mottos as a writer is to take the reader along on that journey of discovery. And the book kind of does that–it is a document of our investigation and our learning.
I think the mix of different registers and voices is an attempt to hold the reader. Because if it’s all just dry intellectual history we’re gonna only reach a very select audience. And there’s a very select audience for a “how to organize” strategy guide–and Leah and I know those people very well, they’re our comrades, we organize with them. But wouldn’t it be neat to get some liberals reading an “how to organize” guide, who might otherwise never pick that up?
I think the personal elements are important because, as we say in the introduction, solidarity is always invested. It’s not an abstract concept. It’s messy, it’s rooted, it takes a stand, it’s positional. It felt like we had to name our positions and where we’re coming from.
Every writer wants to reach readers, but I think we really do want to put solidarity on the American agenda, as something that’s critical to getting us out of these intersecting crises but also as something that can be institutionalized. When we say we’d love to see someone running on a solidarity state platform, we mean it. Let’s create solidarist policy feedback loops instead of ones that demean and demoralize and divide people. We want to see these ideas taken up and not just put into practice but put into power structures.
LF: It seems like the book is really interested in moments where this almost happened–or these glimmers of the solidarity state. These moments seem to be seeded in the book as moments of real promise and possibility that can be recovered now as examples that we might take a lot from and model on. I’m thinking of, for example, the Community Action Programs and the Black Panthers, the National Welfare Rights Organization, and the citizens’ assemblies on abortion in Ireland.
AT: “Glimmers” is a really good word to describe them. How do you tell the stories of things that broke through but then were shut down? The assemblies in Ireland are ongoing, and I think are a really positive, interesting example of creating forums where citizens can debate across difference and create new kinds of alliances and new space to find common ground. So I find that example really interesting and engaging.
In terms of the Citizen Action Programs, the minute I heard about them, I was like what? The U.S. government was funding, at scale, these organizing initiatives as part of its War on Poverty? In fact, as its premier program. It’s such an interesting example of how the state can create space for citizen engagement and the kind of transformative solidarity we’re talking about. Transformative solidarity on both levels: holding space for people to start organizing but also enabling those folks to then pressure the state to create change.
Transformative solidarity is bridging out and trying to build a more inclusive ‘we’ but with the aim of also changing the social structures.
—Astra Taylor
One thing that we discussed was that we didn’t want all of the examples to be from Sweden and Finland and other Nordic democracies. It was really important to us that we really scoured American history because we don’t believe that it’s impossible here. We think it’s totally possible. The problem is there’s far more investment at the level of the state in reactionary solidarity and division. We wanted to hew close to American examples not out of parochialism but because Americans are so quick to be like, “Well, nothing good can happen here.”
LHH: We are interested in asking, how do we think of each other as citizens and agents and protagonists, and what policies would support that mindset? We can think of mundane things like Vista and AmeriCorp, where there’s much, much more demand to participate in these programs than there is money for them or positions in these programs. Imagine if we had a service program where, instead of going to the army, you did community service or a WPA-like program, working on trails and climate-related things. The state could fund these things, which could be productive, could be good for the economy, good for society, and also could create a feedback loop of educating each other about the different communities that make up America and our different responsibilities to each other.
AT: As imperfect and flawed as they are, and even though they’re factories of student debt, which I now spend my life fighting, public universities are kind of that, right? That’s part of why we’re seeing an intense attack on universities (especially since the war on Gaza started) and this insistence from the right that what universities are doing is dividing people by bringing up issues of race and diversity and equity and inclusion. They’re like, “Why are people going to these schools and turning out liberal?” Because that’s actually where young folks get out of their bubbles, are introduced to new ideas, encounter difference—and it is, imperfectly, state subsidized. So you see a little tiny thing that could be a critical building block of the solidarity state. And the right wing is going after it. I think we are of the position that it’s really important to protect what we have and build on it instead of acting like you could just create utopia ex nihilo. We have to protect what we have and gain new ground.
The Bible and fairytales are the oldest stories we have in the West. They serve as our culture’s myths, providing a familiar, guided path for centuries of writers.
Retellings can breathe a new life into what was once flat and staid. Characters from the Bible and fairytales can feel one-dimensional. With retellings, the writer has the opportunity to transform a pre-renaissance painting into a high-definition, digital photograph for the modern era. These writers want readers to feel a gnawing familiarity, something deep inside saying, “I know where this is heading,” before they’re surprised with a new interpretation. Retellings also allow room for writing detailed settings as well as including better causality concerning plot. Retellings insert key “what ifs,” changing the protagonist’s gender, age, race, or nationality, all the while making the point that the human condition is timeless and transcends circumstance.
I describe my novel, Daughter of a Promise, as a retelling. It draws from an ancient text, the Book of Samuel, and feels perfect for this moment, as we’re riding a cultural wave of recontextualized myths and legends that bring once muted voices to the fore. Think Hadestown, Circe, The Book of V.
More than a retelling, I’ve decided my book is “talking back.” Contrast that with genteel novels “in conversation” with a historical text, Daughter of a Promise’s point of view shift demands recognition. The legend of David and Bathsheba beckoned me in its brevity, its male perspective, its neglect of Bathsheba’s thoughts and feelings. It was practically waiting for a future writer to come along and fill in the gaps. To retell a foundational text may sound like heady stuff, but it gives the writing process an added dimension of fun. The rigor of adhering to critical plot points, while putting the spotlight on Bathsheba made the writing meaningful.
Despite the contemporary setting and revised point of view, these 7 novels based on the Bible that prove love, passion, and jealousy will always be universal.
The Book of Ruth won the 1989 Pen/Hemingway Award for best first novel. Set in the small town of Honey Creek, Illinois, Ruth is a young woman who has never left her rural environment. She experiences difficult family situations including a tense relationship with her mother May and an abusive marriage with her husband Ruby.
The novel borrows its title directly from a book in the Bible, however, is not a retelling in the strictest sense of the word. In the Bible, Ruth marries into a different tribe and instead of returning to her own people after the death of her husband, she stays with her mother-in-law. The novel expands on important themes in the original text including loyalty and family dynamics, struggles and overcoming adversity, as well as journey and redemption.
Weaving three story lines together, the novel follows 3 women across 300 years: Lily is living in 2016 Brooklyn and struggling with reconciling her role as wife and mother with her sexual desires and intellectual ambitions. Vivian is a senator’s wife in ‘70s D.C. who would do anything to advance her husband’s career, until a shocking request becomes the tipping point. In ancient Persia, Esther is a young woman living outside the palace. During Purim, she saves her people by marrying the King after he banishes his first wife Vashti. The Book of V takes the Book of Esther and makes it contemporary, exploring women’s agency and power throughout history.
East of Eden is a classic reimagining of Genesis, the fall from grace that led to the calamitous rivalry between Cain and Abel. Set in the agricultural region of the Salinas Valley in California, this magnum opus portrays the multigenerational dispute between two families, trapped together in a cursed cycle of vengeance and pain.
In the Bible, Exodus is the story of an enslaved people searching for a home for their community: a paradise. Weaving together multiple timelines, Toni Morrison’s Paradise follows former African American slaves who founded the town of Haven, and then Ruby, in Oklahoma as a refuge from racism. The allusion to the Garden of Eden is also obvious in the novel’s title, Paradise, which foreshadows the inevitability of tensions arising between members of the community. Convent, an all-female inhabited house, crops up on the outskirts of town in response to Ruby’s patriarchal governance. Convent becomes both a scapegoat and a threat to the male leaders of Ruby. The novel explores generational trauma, the women of Convent are haunted by their pasts as well as the collective history of the community.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this canon of American literature details a journey of redemption, forgiveness and love through the correspondence of two sisters, Celie and Nettie. The sisters address letters to God, the first clue that Walker intended the novel to be theological commentary. As with many novels depicting slavery, it evokes the story of Exodus, but it is also about a search for God, transcending what is universally “religious” to discovering personal spirituality.
The prophets in the book are references to Samuel and Isaiah, two major prophets in the Bible. A finalist for the National Book Award, this unflinching and painfully wrought tale describes the lives of two enslaved gay men, tending animals on a plantation in Mississippi. It is filled with lyrical interludes told from the perspective of what are presumed to be ancestors, grounding the plot in a broader history and lending it a biblical nature. A tender love story that blossoms, against all odds, in the harshest environment.
This Pulitzer Prize winner is told in the form of a letter from Reverend John Ames to his young son. Gilead is the name of the small town in Iowa in which the family settled many years before and John is a third-generation minister. A retelling of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, so much of this book is about the relationship between fathers and sons, but it is also filled with the theological rumination of an elderly minister who foresees impending death.
Well, well, well. Look at you, @teen-w00lf, back again. You’ve taken this quiz sixteen times. How many times can quiz creator @leavebritneyalone696969 tell you what you are? What are you so afraid of?
It’s up to you if you want to continue. Remember: These quizzes are just for entertainment.
Q: Do you ever buy clothes from the men’s section?
I want my body to be something it can’t be. I want it to be slim, rail-thin. I want the spindly body in so much lesbian media. It isn’t. I force myself into men’s clothing that fits me all wrong, that reminds me, you are not meant for this. I can put together femme outfits, in skirts and tank tops, in clothes that show my cleavage, the curve of my ass. This is what I am supposed to look like, a girl-shape. My body feels like it is something outside of me.
I go to Babeland to buy a strap-on. Next to the dildos is a section of packers, limp and harmless, and I have an immediate urge to buy one, wear tight jeans, make myself into someone between genders, impossible to discern, with all my girl-body and an idea of a penis packed tight in men’s jeans.
Your body, teen-w00lf, is the way you move through time, through sex, through queerness. What do you think it means that you feel so alienated from it? What body do you expect to have? Why do you blame this body?
Q: Have you ever had really short hair?
This is the body I will be living in, my teens, my twenties, my thirties, my forties, until my body moves to menopause.
My mom takes me to her hairstylist when I am eleven. This is a big deal, she tells me. She’s a great hairstylist. Up to this point, my mom cut my hair, scissors in the kitchen, straight across, straight bangs. She realizes that I am beginning to care about the way I look. I am an early bloomer, slouching in math class to hide the breasts that grew too soon, yanking at the hems of my skirts to hide a body I didn’t ask for, didn’t particularly want. I tower over everyone else in my class. I come from a tall family. My dad is so happy that I am a Tall Girl, for now, for now, for now, and he thinks I will still have another growth spurt. Instead, I get my period when I am still in elementary school, and no one tells me to expect it. This is the body I will be living in, my teens, my twenties, my thirties, my forties, until my body moves to menopause. I tell the hairstylist I want a bob, short, to my chin. I have what I don’t know yet is cystic acne, painful and rageful, that scars and blemishes my face. I don’t like how much of my face is visible when the hairstylist shows me the final cut. Even as I start hormonal birth control at twenty-two to assuage my cystic acne, even as I get older and my body and face become an adult’s, I am afraid to cut my hair again. I wear it like a mane. I wear it like a shield. For so much of my life, until I start Lexapro and Lamictal, I want to disappear.
I am twenty-six. I cut my own hair, kneeling in my bathroom in front of the full-length mirror.
This feels right, doesn’t it? Your body is not a fixed object. It is as mutable as you are.
Is sexuality mutable or fixed? How can my body show this in-between-ness? I want to be something fixed. I want to hold on to something, whatever that might be. Can my queerness be this, rise up in me as fierce as a religion?
Gender is part of this question. My body is feminine, soft, curved.
Sometimes I wish I were a man. No—not quite—something outside of it all. Neither man nor woman, something in-between and bigger and more nebulous and mine.
This question will take time to unspool, to learn that gender is a question that asks itself again and again. I walk through the world and I am “yes, girl”-ed and “hot girl”-ed and “yes ma’am”-ed and none of these are right and none of these are wrong and none of them are mine. My gender can be more than how I move through the world; a way of relating to the self. Nonbinary-ness allows for that flexibility, that movement. It takes time to get here.
What are you leaving behind? Who are you leaving behind?
Q: What have your friendships with other girls looked like?
My first best friend is a hockey player who has a GameCube in her basement. My parents are about to split up and I spend most weekends here, playing Mario Kart and Donkey Kong two-player games. She and I both have younger siblings and talk, with disdain, about being oldest sisters. Her mother picks both of us up from school on Wednesdays, and we share bags of grapes, pluck the fruit into our sweaty palms, burst them between our teeth. The two of us go ice skating for her eighth birthday. I slip, fall, and someone else skates over the side of my pinkie finger. I will always carry this scar. On field trips, the two of us curl together in the summer-sticky fake-leather school bus seats, reading from the same book. I read faster than she does, and when she reaches the end of a page, she says, turn, turn, turn. We go to different middle schools. She is an athlete, makes friends easily, and I am writing bad poems on the inside of my history notebooks, talk only over emails we send each other on family computers. I send her long messages about the boy I’ve decided to have a crush on. She responds, have all your brains fallen out?
I’ve decided on a boy to have a crush on and talk about him obsessively.
In my first middle school, I develop a tight, desperate friendship with four girls in my English class. We sit together at lunch and talk about what we’re not eating, how many calories are in bananas and apples. I have already learned this language of thinness, but here, I can speak it fluently, hear it repeated back to me. They teach me how to do makeup in the bathroom before class. I blink and smudge black eyeliner all over my face. They give me clothes that no longer fit them and barely fit me, squeezed over new breasts, and I feel like I am showing a body that hasn’t become mine yet. I go over to their houses for sleepovers and spread out my dad’s camping sleeping bag, feeling distinctly out of place. We talk about all the food we’re not eating, do each others’ makeup, play dress up, talk about the boys we like. I’ve decided on a boy to have a crush on and talk about him obsessively. My mother gets remarried; we move from the mountains to the suburbs. My friends grow older, find boyfriends. I am invited to their birthday parties, then I’m not.
I have a hard time finding footing in high school. My best friend is a Christian girl whose Facebook profile reads proud Jesus Freak <3 and hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner-s me when I come out. Another friend who plays the piccolo in marching band with me says she also thinks girls are pretty sometimes, shrugs, when I come out. One friend is out, queer and nonbinary, and we understand each other without question, playing ping-pong in their basement, volleying the ball back and forth, not talking about all the pain we’re carrying. I have other friends, but they are moments, they are just conversations between lockers, talking during science class, exchanging notes in world history, talking about our AP tests. I make friends easily, but have a hard time letting people in: door open, but kept at an arm’s length. These are years of sloppily undressing and redressing in bathrooms, in bedrooms at 2pm, in the backseats of cars, in church rec rooms, next to riverbeds. I don’t realize you’re supposed to like the people you sleep with until much later, so as a teenager, I offer up my body to anyone who says they think I’m pretty.
Q: What TV shows or movies have you watched obsessively?
16 years old, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer in bed. I fall asleep with the lights on, laptop humming, sweaty from what I haven’t realized yet is desire, what I excuse as only the Virginia heat panting through screened windows.
Rewatches of But I’m a Cheerleader, in dorm rooms and curled up on twin-sized beds, no shoes, in pajamas our mothers sent in care packages from suburban houses in other corners of Virginia, in Alabama, in Louisiana; trying on the stereotypes of a lesbian life because it’s the only blueprint we have. Smoking Marlboro reds, wearing used Docs, torn flannels. Each of us comes home with tattoos, simple line drawings, ears and noses pierced up and down cartilage. We come back together at the end of weeks of homework. Only one of us has a TV, and all of us, queer eighteen-year-olds, Tinker dorm, first floor, A Hall, congregate, lay our heads on each other.
I spend afternoons at home alone, my siblings at after school care, my dad at work, my mom at work. I guess the PIN he uses to lock channels (it’s my birth year, the year he became a father), and watch Tila Tequila’s Shot At Love, which is where I learn the word “bisexual,” and, a soda I stole from my dad’s Costco stash in the basement in hand – this is before he stops drinking soda, before he starts running eight miles a day, before he sticks to a diet of chicken caesar salads and yogurt – I realize, holy shit, I’m not the only one who ever feels like this.
This is when you first came to this quiz, isn’t it? The family computer in the living room, you, the only one home, before you learn what Incognito Mode is? Well, we can tell you that you like girls. That much seems obvious. But, here’s the catch: the difference between lesbian and bisexual? That’s all you to figure out, teen-w00lf. Come on. You’ve always been like this.
Why does this still feel so wrong? Forbidden? Like I’m stepping into someone else’s clothes?
Q: Do you feel confused about your sexual orientation?
How can this already difficult to define thing also encapsulate gender, which is fluid, too?
Am I a lesbian? Am I bisexual? Am I dealing with comphet? Why do I care so much about a box to fit myself in? Doesn’t that completely miss the point of sexual fluidity? What if I don’t want to be fluid? What if I want to be just one thing? How do I have the language for something as hard to define as sexuality? How can this already difficult to define thing also encapsulate gender, which is fluid, too? Why am I so uncomfortable with fluidity? Am I desperate for male attention? Do I want to be looked at and noticed so badly because of some trauma? Do I have daddy issues even though I have a loving, attentive father? Are step-daddy issues the same thing? Have I ever actually enjoyed straight sex? Have I ever even been present in straight sex? Do I remember having sex from the first person or third person? Does it mean anything that I remember having straight sex only in the third person? What does it mean that I’ve gotten through sex many, many times by imagining their body as someone else’s? What am I giving up by calling myself a lesbian? What am I afraid to lose? A life I don’t want anyway?
What would I gain?
Q: Have you ever kissed a woman? Have you liked it? Is this a gain, the pleasure of a body? Has it been a pleasure?
I left a man I loved to pursue a truer life, a lesbian life.
Kisses in dive bars, kisses on dares, kisses high in the back of nightclubs, kisses while dancing in lesbian bars, kisses immediately pulled back and said, wait, I’m straight, don’t tell my boyfriend, kisses good, kisses bad, kisses sloppy, kisses longing. First kiss with a girl: I am twelve, the summer between seventh and eighth grade, and I am about to move schools. My braces are off, teeth newly slick, and one of my friends wants to practice kissing and practice queerness all at once. We sit together in her attic, fans humming, watching a VHS of The Nightmare Before Christmas, and she tells me that I am the boy, to kiss her. Pecks on the lips, quick, a toe dipped into queerness. I am sweaty palms and greasy bangs and bras that squeeze and full of desire that aches on my tongue, somewhere in my stomach. Kisses in high school, girls who think they might be queer and know I’m a safe bet, that I can be an on-ramp, easy, eager to please. Kisses behind the gym, at the back of the bus after marching band competitions, in practice rooms, in bathrooms, in the unused showers of the locker rooms. Kisses quick, light pecks; kisses long, slippery; kisses that yearn; kisses that beg. In college, I call myself a kiss-slut, work the kissing booth at the drag king show, fifty cents for a kiss on the cheek, a dollar for a kiss on the lips, and I wear bright red lipstick that stains. At the end of the night, a sweaty room full of queer women who carry my kiss-print. At parties, I throw up my hands, drunk, and shout that I want someone to kiss me. Someone always does, femmes in pink and feathers, butches with undercuts and jean jackets. My straight friends are embarrassed by this at brunch the next morning, say I’m developing a reputation, but if my reputation is kissing happily, freely, I want it. I go to the lesbian bar down the street from my apartment, single for the first time, and kiss everyone I dance with. I’m drunk on strawberry dykeiris and loop my fingers in the pockets of a butch I ask to fuck me in the bathroom. The average person spends two weeks of their life kissing. I want so much more, kisses constant, kisses nonstop. I love when a kiss blossoms into a want.
You have a reputation, then, for kissing women, don’t you? Okay, fine. Proof of your queerness. What’s the point of trying to prove this?
I want someone to tell me that I am making the right choice. I want someone to tell me I am labeling myself correctly, that if I do, no one will be able to hurt me again. Does excluding cis men protect me, keep me safe?
What if you’re still just bisexual at the end of this? What if you get hurt in a lesbian relationship, anyway? What are the stakes here?
I left a man I loved to pursue a truer life, a lesbian life. Was this the wrong choice? Here I am again, looking for proof. Tell me I was right to do this. Tell me I was right. Tell me. Tell me.
Q: Do you have fantasies or dreams of having sex with a cis man?
I have been in relationships with a few men, but only fantasized about one.
It would have been kinder, teen-w00lf, to say no, when men asked you back to their apartments, asked you out on dates to share pizzas and bottles of wine. Why do you struggle so much with saying no?
Do I want to call myself a lesbian because it is a no without having to say “no,” in all its intents and implications?
I am twenty and living in Paris. I haven’t had much experience being attracted to men, so because I am, for the first time, I don’t know how to contain myself. He invites me to a threesome. He invites me to do a line off his dick and blow him. I am too scared to say yes and do neither. He comes from money and buys me all the drugs I want, and oh, I want. His French is terrible. We go on a date, kind of, where we both do coke in the bathroom and smoke cigarettes on the patio. He buys an expensive bottle of Bordeaux that we share. We are both so addled with substances, and when we go to the symphony together, I am still trying to be a classical musician, I coke-fast talk about my favorite composers and he tells me about his father, the pressure of growing up rich, while I think to myself that I grew up in the mountains in a house with bats in the attic and a one-bedroom apartment and a house with my stepfather where I was never never alone and whatever part of me that’s not spiraling into substances thinks something like, jesus, we have lived very different lives, but when we both get into the metro it’s crowded and our bodies are pressed together and god I can smell his cologne his soap and he lives in an apartment in Stalingrad and I live in an apartment way out in Porte de Champerret and oh I want to go home with him and he’s got an eighth of weed to share he says but I say no because I’m coming down and feel fucking awful and go home past midnight and walk up the empty rue Guillaume Tell unlock my door kick off my heels and masturbate unsuccessfully lying down in the shower. I never have sex with him. I follow him on Instagram. He becomes a model, marries another model. When I see his posts, I think, well, lesson learned, take the opportunity to be a slut when it presents itself.
Proof, then, in heterosexuality. I can’t be a lesbian if I feel like this for a man, just desire, nothing else clouding judgment.
Right?
Do you think that’s lesbian behavior?
Q: When have you lied during straight sex? What scares you about lesbian sex?
I imagine a woman sitting on my face, pressing my tongue into her. I imagine running my hands over breasts, taking a nipple in my mouth, another between my fingers, rolled like a stack of quarters. In all sorts of settings: my sunny studio, a bedroom in a shared house dark from blackout curtains, in the lesbian bar bathroom, in tents in national parks. Want, heavy. In my dreams, I have a penis.
It’s easy to be a receptacle for straight men; what am I supposed to do, when someone wants all of me?
Can I tell you a secret? Can I trust you? It scares me, the idea of being bad at sex. It’s easy to be a receptacle for straight men; what am I supposed to do, when someone wants all of me?
Think: what are your kinks telling you?
I want to be fucked by a group of women, the center of pleasure. Easy: I want attention. This is all I’ve ever wanted. I was a child smiling for the camera in every home video. I talk to strangers, I make friends everywhere I go. I want to be paid attention to. I want to feel real.
Here’s what scares me: what if these fantasies are only good as fantasies? What if my sexuality is only good in the abstract, and if I admit it, if I know it, if it becomes concrete and real, what if I am wrong?
You want everyone to like you, so much, you want everyone to like you. This isn’t a lesbian thing. This is a you thing.
I want to perform my sexuality in front of a group of people, the exhibition, the voyeured. I want to take my clothes off. I want to go to the sex club on Femme Dominion night, stand on stage in tall, heeled boots, sweating off thick winged eyeliner. Tell me that my body is pleasure, even to look at it is something inviting, that it has worth. I want someone to fuck me in front of an audience, or do it myself. Pay attention to me, please. Tell me I’m beautiful and wantable. Tell me I am worth attention. Tell me I am worth being heard.
No, teen-w00lf. It’s more than being liked. You just, simply, want what every person wants, to be loved, to be seen.
Q: Imagine a hot femme is flirting with you. What is your reaction?
I go to the lesbian bar after the DJ starts, dance close to the front, drink strawberry dykeiris, flirt with absolutely everyone. When people dance with me, stand close, make eye contact, tell me their names, I flirt back, smile soft, curve my body toward theirs. I am electric and hungry.
I know you, teen-w00lf. I know you’re scared of wanting this. How much easier would it be to negate this, erase this? How much easier would it be to push away femme flirtation, to slip into heterosexuality? You could do it. You know you could. It would be so easy. Wanting never goes away, but you are an expert at restriction.
She is as beautiful and longed-for as springtime. I can’t tell her this, it’s too honest.
The artist I’m dating leaves me compliments, buys us lunch, comes with me to art installations and poetry readings, meets me when we both have connections coming back to Seattle through O’Hare, share green smoothies while sitting on the airport tile floor. She stretches out with me on my couch, my cat curled between us, plays Stardew Valley with me. She tells me about queer Appalachian ceramics and I tell her about my opinions on Red Dead Redemption II. She is as beautiful and longed-for as springtime. I can’t tell her this, it’s too honest. The words get all caught up in my throat before I can spit them out. I am only good at flirting and fucking.
She will leave you, you know this. What will you do when femmes disappoint you, too? What will you do when you can’t blame your loneliness on anything other than your own flaws and faults?
Q: Have you ever fallen in love? With whom?
a boy, a saxophonist | a girl, an ice skater | a girl, a fellow tumblr blogger | a woman, the communist next door |a nonbinary person, the poet with a david bowie tattoo across the hall | a woman, the environmental science major in philosophy of art | a woman, the poet I drive home from workshop | the poet, again, when we are in the same city | my longest lover, a man, with rough, tender hands
Did you really love all these people? Or was the only person you really loved the lover you left? Isn’t it proof that you’re not a lesbian at all, that you loved this man so much, that you still worry you made the wrong choice in leaving?
Q: Have you had lesbian sex?
bedrooms // bathrooms // under blankets in basements // dorm hall showers // dorm hall tubs // library bathrooms // bedrooms with a lizard in a cage looking on // bedrooms where one of us bleeds on the comforter // strap-ons from the sex toy store down the street // $120 vibrators // pierced nipples // what do you like? let me tell you exactly what I like // I’ll do you, then we can have a water break, and you can do me (repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat) // do you like this? is this good for you? // sex where I come six times in a night, I tell my friends, and they say that can’t be healthy (they are straight-girl jealous, I say to my lover) // can I take this off? can we cuddle for a little bit? I have to pee first. //
Q: Have you had straight sex?
in bedrooms, unwashed twin sized sheets // backseats of cars // mall family bathrooms // dorm rooms // nightclubs // sex where we simultaneously orgasm // sex where I don’t finish at all // sex where I fake an orgasm just to get him away from me // sweat // come on my toes // come on my tits // come on my ass // please don’t come on my face (comes on my face anyway, I have to wash it out of my hair and eyelashes) // keep your glasses on, keep your skirt on, keep your dress on, keep your heels on //
My het friends talk about their body counts. One goes down the list of names she keeps in her notes app; another friend asks, how many of them did you have real sex with?
I interject, hey, wait a second, what do you mean by “real sex?”
You know. P-in-V.
That’s like, one kind of sex. There are lots of kinds of sex.
Come on. You know what we mean.
They’re telling you exactly how they see you, teen-w00lf. This is exactly how they’ve seen you since you dated your first queer college partner, asking how two people with vaginas even have sex, and you were walking back to your dorm room, just barely eighteen, and thinking – if that’s the only sex you can think of, shit, you sure are missing out.
I have the capacity to love men, love women, people who are both and neither. But, as I undressed for a shower, age 25, sharing an apartment with a man I loved, a realization as clear and bright as lightning: I really thought I’d be living my life with a woman.
I can imagine full, bright, happy lives without loving men. I cannot imagine a life where I do not love women.
Result: You are a lesbian.
The score indicates a high probability that you are homosexual. If needed, you could consult with a relevant sex specialist for further clarification. But you’re not going to do that, are you? No one can clarify this for you but you. How ‘bout that, teen-w00lf, Probably a homosexual.
You’ll be back in a year and a half or so. It’s okay, you know, to just be. To just be a lesbian. To just be queer. This is the life you’re building for yourself, isn’t it? You know leavebritneyalone696969 isn’t the arbiter of queerness. It’s just you.
You left your lover because it was the right thing to do. Being a lesbian can be the reason, if that’s easier. It’s more complicated than that, of course it is, of course all of it is, but this is a life you get to build on purpose. Lovers come and go. It comes down to you, all you, just you.
Just me. Here in front of my computer, I am a lesbian, I am a lesbian. A life building community in book clubs, at the lesbian bar, through lovers and friends. A lesbian life at supper clubs, sharing writing. A lesbian life gardening. A lesbian life with fulfilling, intimate sex. Imagining a life. There is freedom in this imaging. Queer love, too, the love of friends, the love of partners, moves in prisms.
Short stories can do things novels cannot because they’re short. They’re limber and can dart in and out of close-fitting places. They can be weird and daring in ways that novels cannot always sustain. Joy Williams writes in, “8 Essential Attributes of the Short Story (and one way it differs from a novel), “A novel wants to befriend you, a short story almost never.” Between the pages I’m not looking for another friend; I’m seeking an experience of bewitchment. To be possessed by language in full-bodied immersion.
Full-bodied, because… emotion. Emotions as experienced physically in the body. In a woman’s body. My body. As in Dar Williams’ song, “When I was a Boy” I was a kid that you would like/Just a small boy on her bike, until a week after I turned 13, when I got off my bike and discovered a rust-colored stain on the seat announcing that I’d “become a woman.” Fuck! I thought. I was not pleased or proud or relieved or excited to get my first period. To the contrary. What I had outrun until that afternoon had finally caught up to me.
How did I come to terms with growing a woman’s body? I did what I do when faced with something I don’t understand: I read into it, and then I wrote into it; and through this, I found my material. Women’s bodies are all over my collection, Half-Lives—performing, misbehaving, seducing, challenging. All the stories feature women as protagonists. In one, a woman lists her vagina on Airbnb. She uploads her listing, fields inquiries, accepts her first guests… all the while musing on what it means to have a vagina—everything from the makeup marketed to it to the staff it requires. A deeply problematic renter appears, and what she does about it causes the welcome end of the hot dry summer. Another story is a contemporary retelling of “Sleeping Beauty” where Beauty is a yoga instructor in a coma (you’ll just have to read the story). In the title story, a middle school teacher chaperones a trip to a nuclear power plant secretly carrying inside her the unformed body of her identical twin.
To be a woman in the world today is to have a body that is appraised, despised, endangered, and idealized. Medicalized and misdiagnosed, restricted and performed, colonized and commodified. Gendered, dominated, threatened, shamed and all the while, lived.
Here then, are some recommendations of short story collections that complicate the conversation about women’s bodies.
No list of story collections about women’s bodies would be complete without Machado’s dazzling, multi-prizewinning Her Body and Other Parties. Flowing between horror, fantasy and satire, these eight stories examine women’s bodies and psyches in contemporary society. In “The Husband Stitch” a wife’s head is held in place by the green ribbon around her neck; in “Mothers” a protagonist contends with her abusive lover Bad and their alleged daughter. There are ghosts of murdered women, doppelgangers and rapes. Women who slowly lose their bodies are sewn into the dresses sold at a fashionable boutique, and a fat old body lives as a specter in the house of the woman who surgically reduced it. Machado puts women’s bodies front and center tackling deeply rooted issues of sex, trauma, autonomy, and power.
In Svoboda’s latest collection of stories, women’s bodies, especially mothers, upend everything. From the female fetus directing the mother in “Mexican Honeymoon,” to the daughter rubbing lipstick over Mom’s lips at the morgue in “Decorum Stinks.” In between, there are all the missing bodies of women who have disappeared in “The Haight” during its hippy heyday, the bodies of orphans gyrating inside a vending machine trying to attract adopters in “The Orphan Shop,” the nipple fiercely repossessed in “The Last Night,” the abused body of the nude woman seeking sanctuary in “London Boy,” what’s leftover of the woman’s body in “Loose Lion,” the naked woman appearing to convince Mom that it’s her lover visiting in “Rex Rhymes with It,” and the title story of the mothers who applaud the turtles who don’t show up to lay their eggs.
The Black women in Scodellaro’s collection of 35 brilliantly condensed stories experience dislocation in sensual detail. In “A Triangle” as water rises to her thighs in a surreal rainstorm, a woman watches another through a fourth-floor window after following her home because of her hair: “It was the curl of it on her neck and on her forehead, the way it looked like a question mark, circuitous and pleading.” In “The Ethics of Piracy” a woman walks naked through the Holland Tunnel. The stories, some as short as only a paragraph, are cinematic, absurdist and enigmatic, and one emerges from them grateful for the opportunity to enter this author’s hypnogogic world.
In Lima’s debut story collection, a woman sleeps with the Devil at a party in her 20s and is visited by him over the years as she ages and lives her life as a writer. The experience is formative but unrepeatable as her body is completely overcome, and she is lost to lust if their skin ever touches. In the stories Lima writes, women’s bodies are central: an immigrant, reflecting on how her body remakes itself through cell renewal, realizes her whole body has become American; a woman ingests her own body (a miniature version dispensed from a sinister vending machine); another imagines her adult body comforting the memory of herself as a child, running her fingers through her hair. Even the writer within the book is not immune to the embodiment of her own creations as when she attempts to inhabit a ghost she’s writing and experiences her own body losing its shape.
Dragon Palace by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Ted Goosen
Kawakami is one of Japan’s most popular contemporary fiction writers, and in her latest collection, translated by Ted Goosen, she explores transfigurations and cohabitations in eight otherworldly stories. Bodies in Dragon Palace are regularly freed of the conventions of their forms, and people, animals and spirits come and go with the ease of folk tales. In “Fox’s Den,” a romance between a female caregiver and an elderly man who is sometimes a very small fox, she remarks that her naked body is nothing like those of the women in his pornographic magazines and his response is, “Both are necessary.” Older women parade around naked, a goddess controls her followers with sex, a woman is handed from husband to husband until she can return at last to the sea, and in the titular story a great-grandmother returns in the body of a shrunken teenager that the narrator tosses across the room like a doll.
The twenty formally inventive, poetically charged stories in Double-Check for Sleeping Children record the consciousness and embodiment of women. In “Ambush,” a former dancer finds herself in unfamiliar territory, middle-aged maiden-prey. In “Naiad,” a mother stares up at a lurid, suggestive stain in the cracks in the ceiling above the bed as her young daughter confesses with seething hostility that she’s lost her virginity. In “Stand of the Tide” a woman crouches outside her own bathroom window to watch her sister-in-law bathe. At the end, the narrator says, “I reversed course, backed carefully away from the window of my own house, letting my sister-in-law’s body be.”
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto’s debut collection uses magical realism to center the lives of contemporary Hawaiian women of color in a landscape rich with cultural wisdom and haunted by colonization. In Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare, sexuality intertwines with mythology, and generational memory speaks to identity. A woman’s fears around her pregnant body are set into motion from a long-ago encounter with a wild pig; a widow sees her deceased lover in a giant flower, a 12-year-old grapples with her first period while learning about precolonial Hawaiian history, a mother of six finds a Menehune (mythical forest-creature) in her clothes dryer, a woman visits a salon where pubic hair is waxed and then paid for by a “trait exchange.” Kakimoto’s collection is rich, wrenching, and visceral.
Marshall, a playwright, makes her prose debut in Women! In! Peril! a collection of twelve stories that slide slyly between realism and surrealism. In one story a woman must contend with her wife’s mysteriously pregnant body, another is told from the perspective of Annie, a determined sex bot, and yet another illustrates the racialization of an Asian American girl. These stories are darkly funny explorations of queerness, parenting, sex, race, gender, divorce and the state of humanity.
Hill’s debut collection explores the private lives of 16 Black women living in Appalachia and the Deep South. The women in these stories are shown in their multitudes—hungering, escaping, observing, and making sense of their lives. In darkly funny stories women wrestle with weight and pregnancy, as well as parents, police, and evangelism. Hill pairs sex scenes with the frustrations and disappointments and violences that make them all too true. These are stories of Black women’s bodies and interiors seen and witnessed.
“When you say ‘departure,’ what does that mean?” Marie-Helene Bertino asks me.
This question launches our conversation about her new novel, Beautyland. Given that the story opens with spaceship Voyager 1 leaving planet earth, it makes sense that the author is attentive to the semantics of “departure.” I’d used the word as I referenced Bertino’s previous works, specifically the novels Parakeet and 2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas. The dustings of magic, the uncanny, and the absurd in these works came from the fanciful imaginations of human characters. Beautyland follows the life of Adina, an alien. Adina is born to her mother Térèseas Voyager 1 fires its jets, and this simultaneity is significant. Voyager 1 carried the golden record, a gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth to any being who found it. Similarly, while Adina presents as human, it’s her duty to observe human behavior and report back to extraterrestrial beings. “In a way,” says Bertino, “Voyager 1 became Adina’s sibling.”
Adina’s reports are filed via a fax machine she and her mother find discarded on their street in Northeast Philadelphia. This pocket of Northeast Philadelphia; Adina’s mother, a single parent and a steely Italian-American; Adina’s eventual rise to literary fame and public controversy: These aren’t standard ingredients for a work of speculative fiction, the genre term Bertino uses to describe this work. The thing is, Bertino has always had a knack for cracking blunt reality to reveal its wonderous strangeness, for capturing the possibility of resolution and joy beyond hardship.
About halfway through the novel, Adina writes in a fax to her superiors:
“There’s a reason it’s called alien-ated. Because I’m an alien, I am alone.… When you’re alone, you are in the right place to watch sadness approach like storm clouds over an open field. You can sit in your chair and get ready for it…. When it passes and you can drink coffee again you even miss it because it has been loyal to you like a boyfriend.”
Genre and categorization don’t really have a place in the context of a work like Beautyland, which might be part of the reason it was Dakota Johnson’s first choice for her new and vanguard book club, Tea Time. To paraphrase one of Adina’s faxes, Beautyland is a beautyland that magnifies Bertino’s philosophical acuity, her lyrical charm, and her syntactical skill. Over the course of a conversation that ranged from writing alienation to turning towards fear, I realized that rather than a departure for Bertino, Beautyland is an author’s homecoming.
Lucie Shelly: The premise of Beautyland is a remarkable: A bildungswoman narrative of an alien in Northeast Philadelphia who sends fax reports about human behavior. Can you talk about the origin of your idea for the novel? How did you start thinking about Beautyland?
Marie-Helene Bertino: The story originated many years ago, 2010, 2011, when I wrote the short story that Beautyland is based on for my first collection, which was called Sometimes You Break Their Hearts, Sometimes They Break Yours. It was about an unnamed woman who believed that she was an alien taking notes on human beings. It was first person, it was very voice-y, and it was very short.
The reason I wrote that story is because I’ve always had a hard time understanding why people do what they do. I’ve always had a really hard time understanding casual cruelty and indifference, the rituals of human life. I grew up Roman Catholic, and the rituals and beliefs in Roman Catholicism always confounded me. That story came about because, eventually, I began keeping notes on human beings.
I put them into a folder, these little things that I’ve just never been able to understand. And that folder grew and grew. Even after that original short story was published, I was like, I wonder if I could write a novel from this. That idea thrilled me because it was from the deepest chamber of my heart, and it was the most fun I could think of having. To do it, I had to think of the character who would be writing these notes. But this is closest to my own life that I’ve ever written. And I think that was kind of necessary because Adina’s voice is so singular and so specific. I don’t think I could have given her to a totally fictional person.
I feel, especially in this moment, very on the inside of the experience. For this book, specifically, I feel less and more aware of how it’s coming across. And maybe that just means that it’s more connected to my actual veins and blood.
LS:I think writing alienation requires almost conflicting mindsets. On the one hand, an author must preserve that sense of distance and disconnection in order to capture it. On the other, you have to connect deeply with the protagonist, the heart, that you’re portraying. In a recent conversation, the screenwriter Andrew Haigh (All of Us Strangers) suggested that a sense of alienation is actually necessary to being a writer. How do you resolve the work of writing alienation with the state of it?
MHB: For me, being at a distance has always been necessary for writing. But it was the cause, not the effect: I was already at a distance, and then I realized that distance was necessary. I keep thinking of this quote, that used to mean a lot to me from Archimedes, the philosopher. He says, “Give me a long enough lever and enough distance, and I can move the world.”
He meant it literally. But what I got from it was that you had to be at a distance to be able to evoke true emotional movement. And I think a writer does. At least for me, that’s the way it has always been.
LS: As we’re talking about alienation, we’re also talking about the compulsion to observe others. I came across this idea from Einstein that “experience without observation is at best conjecture.” And when we read an alienated character, we the reader are observing them. I wonder if that’s another task of a writer, to kind of validate atomized experiences—perhaps even the life of the reader—by observing and writing them.
MHB: One thing I will say is that you can absolutely never know if anyone will be interested in what you write, let alone moved by it. You don’t know whether it will emotionally resonate for anyone. This question of, how do you offer up an experience or offer up a piece of work and attract readers? has powered a lot of academic classes, a lot of marketing meetings, a lot of book club discussions, I’m sure.
I have never been led by or engaged with that idea, I think because of the nature of my work. That said, one of the questions I was thinking about when I was writing Beautyland was, if you triple down on the song that only you can sing, if you get as specific as you can get, could it be more universal?
Adina takes her name from a friend I lost in 2017. Adina Talve-Goodman was one of my dearest friends and she died when she was 31 from cancer.
For example, I’ve always been very hesitant to write about being Italian American, and to write about Northeast Philadelphia, all for the same reason: Because they’re not the terrain of “high literature”. I think some of that has to do with the Italian American in the American imagination and the popular renderings of Italian Americans. But a lot of it has to do with my own fear. When I realized that fear was a driving force, I decided I had to turn towards the fear and get as specific as I could about everything. I allowed Adina to be Italian American. I made her friend Toni Italian American. A friend of mine read the first draft I did where the characters were Italian. I’d written, “Be Italian,” at the top. She said, “So, this is what it’s about.” And I said, “I’m just working through something.”
LS: When talking drafts, I love hearing what writers choose to leave in, take out, and add. I feel like this novel’s kernel was captured in a very early line, a sentence Adina faxes to her superiors: “I am an Adina.” How did you refine what needed to be “explained” about Adina and her nature, and what needed to be left out?
MHB: I don’t leave a lot out. I write from short to long, I think it’s because I spent my first 25 years trying to be a poet. The first draft of Beautyland was practically a haiku. Then it was, like, 50 pages. I was changing the person from first to third, it was growing little by little. I thought I was proceeding apace, like everyone else does, but apparently most people write, write, write and cull later.
But you’re hitting on a really important aspect of speculative fiction—how much do you explain, and when? I had to carefully place where and when she was activated, and when she was able to know for herself what she was there to do. I decided to plant the first point in a moment of domestic violence because of what I’ve always wanted to say about trauma—about the way we’re formed in some of our worst moments. Those moments can open up understandings that hopefully make us better humans.
I only ever had to know as much as Adina would know, at any given time, and I wasn’t trying to hold anything back from the reader. Toward the second half of the novel, her superiors go silent and that is devastating for her. That’s when the subjective nature of her reality becomes an undeniable question. Like, is she really here to report on human beings? Are the superiors real? Are these messages real? Her faith in them was tested just like anything you believe in without seeing is tested, like religion. Or vocation, or love for a partner. Belief in marriage, belief in friendship. Ultimately, I just stuck with her.
LS: You spoke about wanting to foreground Italian Americans in Northeast Philadelphia, a milieu that hasn’t frequently appeared in literary fiction. In a way, you were establishing new precedents. How did you approach writing the queer characters and narratives from this background and setting?
I’ve been so lucky because I have toiled in obscurity, and that obscurity has protected me.
MHB: It was massively important to me to have three queer characters at the helm of this book: Adina, Toni, and Dominic. Not only to reflectthe world where I grew up but also to reflect my own experience. I identify as bisexual, and Adina is still figuring herself out in many ways. She’s leading a life that is not conventional.She, Toni, and Dominic are leading queer lifestyles but that word probably would not have come into the general parlance until the end of her life.Growing up, like me, she would have heard the word “gay,” and that would have been something she would have been encouraged to keep hidden. Adina’s authentic self, the fact that she is an extraterrestrial, that’s a reflection of the kind of lifestyle where you have to keep a giant part of yourself hidden. When Adina reveals her authentic self—three times in the novel—I very much wrote those scenes with the understanding that they were scenes of coming out to people she loved. And when Toni comes out to Adina, she says, “I knew but I didn’t know that I knew.” It just wasn’t a big deal between friends. Like the way Dominic comes out to Adina [reads]:
Adina asks if he’s dating anyone in New York and he tells her no one special. A boy he liked in his Life Drawing class turned out to be too in love with drugs. This is Dominic coming out to her. He says a boy in his class loves drugs and Adina says, “That’s too bad.”
This is the way a lot of my guy friends came out to me. I knew the moment for what it was, and that they were asking me to hold that for them—but not to broadcast it in a way that would make life any harder for them. So, it was important for me to have Dominic hold so many of the personalities and experiences of men in my life.
LS:We started this conversation on the idea of departure, but that says nothing of how deeply personal this work is for you. It’s a story about Adina’s pursuit of self-understanding, and I wonder if it’s also an answer to the question, how can I be true to myself as a writer?
MHB: Absolutely. I’ve been so lucky because I have toiled in obscurity, and that obscurity has protected me. I had the space to be as strange as I wanted, and that’s all I ever really wanted.
I tell my students, the role of the first book is essentially to prove to yourself that you can write a book. After that, you will never have to prove to yourself that you can write a book again. And that’s an enormous weight off. That’s an enormous relief. And because that anxiety is off, I’ve been able to settle in and go easy on myself in in important ways. I understand that writing is so much broader than the actual act.
I’m 46 and I’m so grateful that this is my fourth book, and that people seem to be relating to Adina. It feels like a gift. Adina takes her name from a friend I lost in 2017, Adina Talve-Goodman. Adina was one of my dearest friends and she died when she was 31 from cancer. So, it means so much to me if readers find that this book resonates with them. I’ve experienced some pretty intense loss that has utterly prioritized an understanding: The only thing that matters is the connection we have with each other.
Does anything really
begin. The house, clinking
window frame in the last
of canyon wind. Does
anything begin.
*
The day a room becomes a field.
The day a field fills with water.
The day you fall through yourself—
this is how you say it— and how to respond to responses—
I’m sorry you capsized inside your body.
That must’ve been terrible—
*
Your left hand starts
swelling nightly. The body
now filled with unfamiliar and inflammatory substance.
You scratch until
skin scabs at three
lined-up points.
Orion’s belt. Pinpoint self.
You’re comforted by the symmetry
of your smallest wounds, how
you can keep scratching them open
and have a little composition
to keep you company.
This is only the surface of
the skin. Under moon,
the season’s first monsoon
sequences the sky. Flash of rose.
Then begin the drenchings:
pain salvage sink caveat absence–
they open and plunge into the depths of your body,
that system of caves.
*
It was so fast for you. How
did you catch your breath—
one after another you lost the people you loved as if they occupied
a single vessel and entered
the destructive radius of a storm.
Now nothing holds its water.
Nor its salt. Nor such heart.
Nothing has weight but everything
is an aspect of an unmovable weight.
*
There are parts of the ocean no natural
sunlight penetrates. In the basin
of grief you receive a dream where you try to distract the dead with inane conversation, holding them but not long enough for them to realize they aren’t meant to be anymore.
In the basin of grief these dreams
are the hanging light of an anglerfish.
Behind the contained, luminous target:
A waking trap, and teeth.
*
You gather the memory-shatterings, the regret
you caught wandering your interior, the flakes
of scab that fill your selfsame
shipwrecked body. There are days you are the only
person who remembers there was ever ocean
in this desert, where the dampening
of fossils under rain becomes the only reminder
that everything lost was once alive.
Gray crests over a hill. Clouds in
thinning sheets, mountains black.
You become a field. Then
the air above the field.
Integration of wound and dark.
And one stone dislodges from
its burial sands.
Sonnet to Sleep Paralysis
after John Keats
It began for us, hushed, that year. You and I insisted
on seeing each other then sat slack with the unsayable.
Retreat to separate apartments, mirror our way across
rooms, night birds singing as the world folded itself
and stained us like two halves of a Rorschach. When
we woke we were not butterflies, not people. Only
the center of a cleaving. Mine was an old woman in
the corner: Bisabuela, I was sure. Would she leave me
alone, please, out of love? Knitting dread, yours against
your chest, a saddled demon barreling black. This is the
language our minds create when we hold everything
back. Identical vaults. You need each other, the
phantom says. Que no se les olvide, says Bisabuela
through the transparency of her head.
Birdsongs
Entonces, desde la torre más alta de la ausencia
su canto resonó en la opacidad de lo ocultado
en la extensión silenciosa
llena de oquedades movedizas como las palabras que escribo.
— Alejandra Pizarnik, “Poema para el padre”
You were born with song in your mouth, a mastery of birds. Inevitable migratory life. Arrive at the day you told me stories of your migration and the terrible thing is I already forget, the fabric stretched and broken. A luxury high rise across from the Habana Libre. Contracts with Lufthansa airlines. Your father at the national bank with Che, your father’s miniature Minolta camera, your father, you.
We found letters between the two of you, written when you were brackets on either side of water. Elaborate puns woven into language. The father organizes the escape, cannot tell his son the details. The son, when he becomes a father, can only relay half-details while sitting in an art gallery with his daughter.
Your father. You. My father.
The gallery sells a spherical ceramic jar and a bird-shaped pipe holder and cans of beer. I forget the details. I remember I remember and I don’t. Only the jar because we took it home, only the bird because we chose to leave it behind. I remember thinking the gallery was a beginning, that in the parting between branches you would start to speak until everything spilled out, a whole history unbraided. We would be whole.
If I rip open the bird, what happens. We recognize it’s a pipe holder. We do nothing, elegantly. I hold the day when I cannot hold the detail. I am past and present tense when they resist clear delineation, there and here, sells and sold. I’m walking you back to the car you parked illegally. I rip the ticket off the windshield before you notice. The need for something to stay so perfect a twelve-dollar intrusion isn’t allowed. Beginnings we don’t know are denouement.
*
We make imaginary plans for Havana. Dream of meeting Leonardo Padura on a terrace somewhere. At home you point out the architecture of Havana schools in a Padura TV adaptation and show me walkthrough videos of the city on Youtube. Mauve balconies, juts of houses into the street, then someone turns a corner you remember. You pause, the image blurs. You say, this is where I walked with my dad.
*
Pipe tobacco, one of your smells. In my dreams I kiss your aftershave cheek and am I still the child who worried about your smoking after anti-smoking day at school or am I the adult who cradled the plastic bin of your pipe collection after you died and ran a thumb over the concavity of ash that still held something of you?
I know that you are you and sometimes you aren’t. Sometimes you are the father, the son, the migrant, the archetype. I am walking a thin line of smoke. Parts of you so within me that I feel them radiating in my chest. Parts of you so far from me that I can only conceptualize them as a half-understood, half-literary history.
*
Daily isolations. You didn’t always understand our need to be not-alone. Family would go out for dinner, you’d head back early to be with the dog. How I had to drag you to that gallery. How talk of Cuba felt far because it was hard enough to get you to walk past the school grounds across the street. To remove you from your sphere of context. Retreat, retreat to where there is quiet and books and the story of a house.
*
My friend from Havana says all Cubans have this quality, como un sass, un humor, tu sabes. I ask if I have it. He laughs. He, at least, thinks I’m enough.
My understanding of an entire country came from a single person: you were Cuba to me. Watching the show, you’d say, that’s it exactly, that’s how everyone talks in Havana. That rhythm constituted a new language, like puns on typewritten paper.
I am you, sometimes you are you. This is all I know of collective identity.
*
First daughter, blue cap, impatient to exist. You were astonished by her smallness, held her in two hands the way you would hold and funnel birdseed. Curved detail of your head in hers.
Second daughter, I was almost born in the car. You could not have kept calm for that. When anything rose in you, terror, anger, panic, you would arrive at the same pitch, yelling at nurses, at the front desk, your tight command of language unraveling, those branches parting.
These are the partings that lead to spillage. An ink-dark fountain breaks, its water non-potable, something can’t remain in the brain, can’t remain in the mouth. Claws its way up the throat. The baby bird eats what emerges.
Third daughter shared your bird obsession. The two of you would stand outside in sunlight dappled by lilacs, pushing suet blocks behind little green rejas.
*
You would yell, we would leave. Distortion of tears. You would yell, we’d yell back, escalation until the space between us became electrical fire. You yelled. We were quiet.
*
But always we returned to each other, our collie between us in the backyard or laying his head on our feet in the kitchen. Arguments as unintended journeys: you’d travel into yourself, into your hurts, and in a vein of quiet you traveled back out. When you did, we were there to accept whatever book you placed in our hands.
*
You and I once translated a poem together. You were proud of an invention: yawning pits for extensión silenciosa. It referred to grief carved out, an emptiness left behind by a father who died too soon. You said the poem reminded you of your dad. One day it would remind me of you.
The father in the poem could never sing the song he was meant to, a song too symphonic for the containment of a life. Your father. You.
The song arrived to us braided from figures of speech. In the leftover story-pits, song. The song doesn’t fit inside of a life but fits in the skull of a sparrow, sitting on a shelf in the gallery on our perfect day. A breakable thing, lacking its body, is still capable of sound. The slightness of air, threading through the gaps.
I was balancing a plate of honeydew in the green room of a book festival when I walked by a white man bemoaning the state of the publishing industry. The man wore a suit, and he spoke to a white woman; both of them looked to be in their 40s. As the man speared a clump of melon, he explained his frustration that editors kept buying memoirs. At this point, as a memoir-y writer, I had no choice but to sit down at the nearest table. To hear something like this, amidst casual eavesdropping, was like finding $20 on the sidewalk. I sipped my coffee, took out my phone, and pretended to gaze at the screen.
Why are memoirs still being published, the man asked. It was beyond him. It fed a nonsense cycle. Why do people keep reading them? Worse of all: Why are they being written at all? He leaned back, smug, as if he had just landed a well-placed punch against Big Memoir. The woman nodded politely, burrowing into her yogurt with a silver spoon. People are publishing them too young, continued the man. They are publishing too many. He paused, throat puffed with conviction: There’s no reason for that, unless you’re an admiral or something. He stabbed a strawberry. Eyes on the city skyline, he shook his head.
At that moment, the open tab on my phone was the Rachel Cusk profile of Nobel-prize winning memoirist Annie Ernaux. “Her art bears no relation to a privileging of personal experience,” writes Cusk. “What Annie Ernaux understood was that as a female child of the regional laboring classes, her self was her only authentic possession in this world, and thus the sole basis for the legitimacy of her art.” I was thinking about how the life we live determines our perceived authority around what we can write about, or rather, what we are allowed to be experts on, which is to say published experts on.
I became convinced that every ghost who haunted my writing desk would, one day, appear in human form.
When I heard his line about the admiral, I stopped looking at my phone. I became very fixated on carving the melon from the rind. I needed a knife in my palm. I needed to separate that which was sweet from that which would lodge in my throat.
I am not going to tell you who this author was. Not out of any sense of protection, but because I realize I was not meeting him as an individual. I was meeting him as the vessel of a voice that had, until that moment, been only in my head. His was the voice that tripped me when I sat down to type, that hissed at me whenever someone (usually a man) asked “So you’re a journalist?” and I said “Well, not exactly,” then went on to explain, his face pinched into a pitying smile, that my nonfiction reliably included myself, too. When I heard this man at the festival, I became convinced that every ghost who haunted my writing desk would, one day, appear in human form. That they might be friendly in the elevator. That when I dropped my fork, they’d hand me another.
I stayed silent that morning on the roof. I did not, if you can believe it, ask the man about his favorite memoirs by admirals. And yet I have spent the months since talking to him. Thinking about what I might have said: about how witnessing a memoirist’s vulnerability on the page makes space for interrogating our own, or about the political imperative of a writing that swivels between self and world, not as a means of dwelling on the self, but as a mode of almost diluting it, contextualizing it, tracing its wires back to their environmental, sociopolitical, and cultural roots. I would guess this book festival man saw himself as an objective observer of our world.
The first-person writing that I love refutes—critically—this myth of neutral narrator.
A few months later, I was traveling for the book in a different corner of the United States when, on a morning jog, I came across a historic waterfront sign about “naval stories.” I immediately thought of admirals. And then I thought of my belly.
When I say I am omnivorous, I mean I am hungry to read and write about everything.
To think of the belly-button is to think of navel-gazing, which is to think of the charges brought against those of us who write about ourselves, a kind of writing allegedly so myopically focused on the self that it does not see the world beyond it. Ted Kooser defines a poet as someone who stands before a window, controlling the strength of the sun outside, but the metaphor extends to creative nonfiction as well: Your silhouette can fade when you make the world outside brighter, just as your reflection can sharpen when that world darkens. Every time I sit down to write, I find myself in front of this window, fiddling with the lights. Who, or what, do I want the reader to see most clearly?
It is true that a first-person author turns their own narrative presence up or down, but I have come to resent the idea that I must choose between seeing my navel or seeing the world. When I say I am omnivorous, I mean I am hungry to read and write about everything. I do not want to pick between writing about another subject—as my training in academia and journalism taught me—and writing about myself. I look at the world to understand my life even as I mine my experiences to learn about the larger world.
Writing is the act of making one’s thoughts visible to other people. My pencil scrawlings are, very literally, the bridge between my interior and exterior world. Writing is an art form that lends itself, then, to complicating—to detonating—the binaries between self and other; inner thought and outer action.
Let us think literally about the alleged insult of “navel-gazing.” Imagine writing about your belly-button, a puckered lint-specked innie that nobody else, ostensibly, should care about. Then consider how looking at one’s belly button is not only to consider the bridge to one’s mother, but the body’s first interaction with civic infrastructure.
We live in a world of interconnection, but we exist in a society that often tries to silo us into our factions.
I look at my navel and see the brown brick hospital whose windows overlooked the soccer fields where I later got kicked in the shin. I see my mother in the operating room, gritting her teeth, while Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is on trial for sexual harassment on the corner TV. I see the silhouette of her doctor, dulled to the choreography of conjuring life, discussing an upcoming fishing trip from behind a sheet as he cuts my mother’s belly open and pulls me out. I look at my navel and I see the hanging question mark of whether I, one day, will try to carry a child into this world, too.
Can you see that each navel has a different story? That to tell a navel story is to tell a story of labor, not just of your own mother’s, but of a system around you? Can you see how this story might be as important as a story about the life of a naval admiral?
To imagine that writing about oneself is not also writing about these larger systemic inheritances is utterly wrong. The writer’s job is to make visible the structures which might otherwise be unseen. We live in a world of interconnection, but we exist in a society that often tries to silo us into our factions, our nations, our species, our careers. To make us forget, for example, that the money our government spends on war is money they don’t spend on education. It is the writers’ imperative to illuminate the linkages between us, and to the histories we all carry. Not as a mode of teaching the reader facts, but as a way of helping them see their own body in union with the world.
I write to make interconnection visible. There is a selfishness to my method. It keeps the world oiled with wonder. When I think about grief, now, I think about how scattered human ashes are changing the soil chemistry atop some mountains, and then about how the griefs that I carry have changed my chemistry too. Or take the seedlings of northern oak trees, so quick to grow back, ecologists now think, because they evolved when elephants trampled them. We are not so far from extinct prehistoric creatures as we would think. To imagine these elephants when I now walk through the woods is to restore a glaze of awe to an act that can, on my worst days, feel like dragging a skeleton through a burning planet.
As a young journalist, I was taught that experts held authority. I would approach stories with a to-do list of ‘expert archetypes’ in my mind. When I was working on my first book, Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, I would slot interviews in with the environmental conservationist, the rancher, the biologist. What I found, of course, is that ranchers are not just experts on their cows being predated on, they are experts on the habitat they steward, and where wolves like to walk. Just as I could talk to ranchers about cows, I could talk to them about the changing grasslands, or their experiences walking alone in the forest and being afraid. We each wear more hats of knowledge than are immediately visible. Considering my own first-person authority has trained me to think about other people’s authority in more capacious, generous ways too.
I had a similar revelation when talking to my agent about what sources I could look to as I wrote about how fear shaped a prey animal’s body. You too are an animal, she told me one day over the phone. You have the authority to write about what happened in your own body, you don’t just have to quote biologists. At that point, I was hesitating to put my own experiences with fear—with symbolic wolves—into the text. I felt my own experiences with fear were unexceptional. I did not want to subject the reader to my navel.
That was when I remembered a scene I had written years earlier, about something that happened on a college dance floor. This might not be necessary to include, a professor had written in the margins. It’s a fairly standard assault. At the time, I blushed. How embarrassing. I had presented something mundane as worthy of space. Only later did the comment lodge inside me, catalyzing the simple truth that writing about a “standard assault” is to write about a world that decides what sorts of assaults are standard.
How embarrassing. I had presented something mundane as worthy of space.
To accept the phrase “fairly standard assault” is to normalize both violation and violence. In college, in Sociology 101, I was taught that the job of the sociologist is to “make the familiar strange.”In many ways this is my goal as a writer too. I include mentions of my own life not because I think it is superlative, but because it is familiar. I want to challenge that which I—and which the reader—think they know.
Today, when I see a new memoir hit the bestseller chart, I think of the man at the book festival. I imagine him rolling his eyes, shaking his head. And then, because he is a passing character and not the narrator in my head, I tell him to hush. I look at the world—I look away.
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