I’ll give you a plot and you tell me which 2023 film I’m referring to: A wide-eyed waif who lives in a technicolor world gains sentience and leaves on an existential odyssey that exposes her to the inequalities of a modern society.
If you answered Poor Things, you’re right. If you answered Barbie, you’re also right.
Both films have been applauded as expert examples of empowering parables about the adversities of being a woman. However, their critiques of capitalism and patriarchy —packaged in delicious pastels and tightly wrapped with a coquettish bow, and delivered with a cutesy wink—are ultimately shallow. Hailing either film as a feminist triumph would be like saying “WAP” solved misogyny in hip-hop or that Lean In eliminated systemic sexism.
I couldn’t help but lament the misguided nature of calling either film a ‘feminist masterpiece.’
Don’t get me wrong, I loved both movies. Mark Ruffalo gave one of his best performances as the delightfully louthe Duncan Wedderburn in Poor Things, while Barbie perfected the cotton candy landscape of my dreams. But despite the enchantment of watching them on the big screen, I couldn’t help but lament the misguided nature of calling either film a “feminist masterpiece.”
In Poor Things, a sexy and pregnant Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is revived from a suicide attempt by a maimed surgeon (Willem Dafoe), who transplants her baby’s brain into her skull to revive her, essentially rendering her both mother and child.
Let’s dissect that: A man neglects an unconscious woman’s bodily autonomy by cutting her open and further violates her by sticking her unborn child’s brain in her head. And he’s supposed to be one of the sympathetic ones! There’s also the fact that for most of the film, she calls him God.
The film starts in black and white and transforms into opulent vibrancy with Bella’s first orgasm. There are interesting threads to pull on: How would a woman without shame, a hedonist who follows pleasure and indulgence—eating pasteis de nata until she pukes orange sludge, rubbing her clitoris at the breakfast table—perform in polite society? How does shame get instilled throughout our upbringings and reinforced via social disdain? In what I consider one of the film’s biggest missed opportunities, Poor Things avoids delving into these provocations, instead focusing on the transformation of her obsession with sex from pure pleasure to labor.
Barbie exults: The world would be a utopia if women were in charge!
During one extended vignette, Bella works at a brothel in what is supposed to be a celebration of her cavalier attitude toward sex and a symbol of her increasing agency. It’s the oldest profession, why shouldn’t she engage in the simple demand/supply of it all? “We are our own means of production!” Bella shouts at Duncan, in what is supposed to be an empowered cry of agency. However, the film shies away from actually analyzing the circumstances that often force women into sex work, as well as the dangers that often befall women in the industry; her foray at the brothel is depicted as without consequence, frivolous, played for shock value alongside the repeated gag of Bella’s bored face during a male client’s furious humping.
Barbie is the sanitized sibling of the often-crude Poor Things, and suffers from a similar depthlessness. While behind-the-scenes female involvement incorporated more interiority (Poor Things was written and directed by men, based on a book by a man), Barbie is at its core a feature-length commercial proselytizing Barbie’s official slogan: You can be anything! But what this hackneyed message airbrushes is the lack of agency millions of women face due to inequitable social systems. The women who don’t have the privilege of choice.
Instead, Barbie exults: The world would be a utopia if women were in charge! Yes, capitalism is bad, but not if we had more female millionaires! The system isn’t broken but only cracked around the edges; gender equality is the caulk to seal the world back together.
Of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, the prolific cultural critic bell hooks wrote: “It is as though Sandberg believes a subculture of powerful elite women will emerge in the workplace, powerful enough to silence male dominators. Her optimism is so affably intense, it encourages readers to bypass the difficulties involved in challenging and changing patriarchy so that a just moral and ethical foundation for gender equality would become the norm.” hooks may as well have been talking about Barbie.
I want films that paint the whole messy mural of feminine spectra.
Much like Barbie, Bella is treated as a doll—an object to be played with and rendered silent. When the impolitely candid Bella makes a scene at dinner with her displeasure for the food and her desire to sock a crying baby at a neighboring table (honestly, relatable!), Duncan pushes her against a wall: “You will rejoin the table and will confine yourself to the following three phrases: ‘how marvelous,’ ‘delighted,’ and ‘how do they get the pastry so crisp?’” Once Barbie’s Ken learns of patriarchy in the Real World, he returns to Barbieland, evicts Barbie, and transforms her Dreamhouse to a preposterously hyperbolic bachelor pad known as the “Mojo Dojo Casa House.” Men in these films are so cartoonishly villainous that the best ones are seen in a compassionate light simply because they are not as bad as the others. Ramy Yousseff’s character—God’s protege and Bella’s betrothed—is a “good guy” simply because he does not condemn Bella’s sex work. The standards we have for men are so low!
Both films portray patriarchy as simple, straightforward—all wolf whistles and ass groping—as if the daily fear of men that women live with in the real world is not insidious, textured, and often times subtle. Although not without its flaws, the 2020 film Promising Young Woman deftly shows how sometimes the most dangerous men are the self-proclaimed “nice guys” who own koozies embroidered with feminist slogans. Or “Cat Person,”the viral New Yorker short story turned film, which catalogs the dark psyche of a man who does not get what he feels entitled to.
Poor Things is supercilious yet silly, cramming in a bunch of sociopolitical topics without dedicated dissection. The frivolity makes the 2.5 hour run-time feel like a slap in the face. As Bella becomes progressively progressive, she donates to the poor, attends socialist meetings, and blithely comments on the fragility of hysterical men. All this evolution gets undermined when the film ends with her sipping a cocktail with her queer lover while commanding a zombie Bella 2.0 to fetch more drinks in her cloistered, opulent mansion.
Similarly, Barbie ends with the titular character’s voluntary transformation into a real girl. The evil Mattel executives agree to produce a “regular Barbie,” a doll that eschews beauty standards because the concept will make the company boatloads of money. Barbie apologizes to Ken, men are included in Barbieland, and everyone kumbayas that cooperation is the antidote to an unjust society.
That both films end with the enlightened dolls recreating and upholding the same systems that they spend the entire plots undermining is a convenient absolution. Are Mattel executives forgiven for the damage they’ve caused through endless endorsements of unrealistic beauty standards because it cheekily pokes fun at itself through the film’s depiction and recognition of their boardroom sausage fest? Does the male gaze in Poor Things get a pass because the woman in question is a libertine exhibitionist, unashamed and unabashed? These happy, Hollywood endings promote the feeling of victory without asking who the true winners are.
While I thoroughly enjoyed both movies and would happily consume their cotton candy fluff again, upholding either as the zenith of feminist commentary disallows a future where truly nuanced films don’t get their due credit. For all of its preoccupation on Bella’s vagina, not once do we hear of her ability for menstruation or motherhood; there’s a singular shot where she lingers on the cesarean scar that birthed her but that introspection is not deepened beyond the discovery of her origin. And despite Barbieland’s representation of plus-sized, Black, Brown, Asian and disabled women, it is important to remember that diversity (especially when most of them are silent and perfunctory) does not equal inclusion. I want a Poor Things where Bella discovers the horrors and joys of menstruation for the first time! I want a Barbie where two Barbies kiss! Namely, I want films that paint the whole messy mural of feminine spectra. To settle for anything less would be a disservice to whichever plastic dream—or real—world we exist in.
In the Biblical parable of the prodigal son, a son asks his father for an early inheritance, leaves home, and quickly spends it all on “riotous living.” Destitute, the son resolves to return home, where he figures he might beg his father for a job. Instead, much to his surprise, the prodigal son is met with joy and abundance. “Let us celebrate with a feast,” the son’s father says, “because this son of mine was dead and has come to life again.”
For Sarah Beth Childers, author of memoir-in-essays, Prodigals: A Sister’s Memoir of Appalachia and Loss, this parable wasn’t as much a lesson as it was a reflection of her reality; her brother, Joshua, who died by suicide at the age of twenty-two, was, in life, the embodiment of a prodigal son. The symptoms of Joshua’s severe mental illness meant that he often left home, leaving his family to wonder when—or if—he would return, and what state of mind he might be in when he did.
In Prodigals, Childers captures an angle of the prodigal son story that is undertold: what it is like to be the one waiting for a return. As Joshua grows older and begins to make decisions for himself about his well being, Childers raises important points about agency when seeking or refusing medical intervention and about the ways that historic beliefs about mental illness have seeped shame into the present. She writes movingly about the difficulties of obtaining meaningful and compassionate care for mental health in the U.S., a thread complicated by her family’s generations-long tenure in Appalachia, a place where distrust in modern medicine runs deep.
Childers and I talked by Zoom about writing out of stereotypes, intersections between faith and healing, and what it looks like to seek closure for an impossible grief.
Jacqueline Alnes: You write about how you don’t want to feed harmful stereotypes about Appalachia but that you also felt pulled to tell your story of your upbringing there, which, in some ways, does intersect with those stereotypes. What was navigating that tension like?
Sarah Beth Childers: That tension was everywhere. I had to have the freedom to tell my story, so I had to just say out loud that I have a fear it reinforces stereotypes but also know that there are ways it doesn’t fit. I talked a few days ago to a writer named Kami Ahrens who edited The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Women. She wrote about trying to move past the stereotype of “poor, white, and stubborn,” and I was like, well, that’s me and my family. I had to think about what is Appalachian that you would think of my family, like that desire to leave twinned with the desire to stay. And then I had to think about things that are inevitably Appalachian in a sad way, like not having access to medical care because we were in the middle of nowhere, a resistance to medical care because of historical trauma around medicine and also not having access to it, and intense religious faith.
Human beings themselves, though, defy stereotypes. My mom was a fundamentalist but also a feminist —she’s absolutely for women’s rights and for women’s role in the church and marriages. If you were just to think of a stereotype of a fundamentalist, intense, Christian mother, that would not be what you think. There are some little things that were me pushing back against stereotypes. Both of my parents had college degrees, we were lower-middle class but we were hyper-aware of class stratification.
JA: Appalachia feels like a difficult place to write about because there is such a charged expectation around it, it seems.
Every day was a prodigal son day; it was like he left us and would come back and we never knew how fully he would come back.
SBC: It is. I have a student, who’s a really great student, who’s now in a PhD program, and she’s an Appalachian writer who grew up queer, and upper-middle class with professor parents and someone on her thesis committee was like “add more broken down cars and dirt and bring in the stereotypes” and she just had this look on her face, like that would be fake. It would be like someone from Michigan trying to write about it. There is this expectation, and this Appalachian aesthetic, which I remember learning about through photography. It’s the landscape in the background and a zoomed in emphasis on dirt, which I realize I totally do. It’s an Appalachian way of looking, which is interesting.
JA: You were raised attending a fundamentalist Christian school. In ways, this upbringing seems like it meant you felt isolated at times, but in that isolation you drew near to your siblings. And clearly, from the beautiful way you interpret the story of the prodigal son—as a metaphor for your own relationship with your brother, in the riotous joy that you think the son must have felt at times—religion might have also offered a way for you to narrativize really complex relationships. How did the story of the prodigal son help you to reckon with loss?
SBC: I went to church with my mother-in-law and the pastor was preaching about the prodigal son and I took it personally, as if he was talking about my brother. It felt too close to home. My mom had always talked about Joshua as the prodigal son and that’s literally the way my family coped. It seems like it’s a metaphor, but it really isn’t. “My brother has gone to the feet of the Father” was said in a literal way. The metaphor was thinking about the prodigal son at home and thinking about riotous living in different ways, both with “riotous” as in terrible and as in happy. That definitely helped me cope and helped me process.
The elder son in the parable ends in this very grumpy, unsettled way, I adore that. There are so many Bible stories or parables that end this way, like Jonah, sitting on a hill, raging at God and being grumpy about this dead plant. I love how angry people often are. It’s not this joy feeling at the end of stories. You don’t know, for example, if the prodigal son’s older brother is ever going to talk to his father again or his brother; it seems like he might just leave. It helped capture the grumpiness I felt in my grief and the very collective grieving I felt with my family, but also this isolation in that I was grieving in a slightly different way.
A thing that was also helpful was looking at mental illness portrayed in the Bible, like the demon possession. Of course, it is literal demon possession in the Bible, but the way they describe the people sounds so much like severe mental health disorders. It was interesting to read medieval accounts of mental illness and how they were treated as demon possessions, probably because of how it was portrayed in the Bible, and then thinking about these stereotypes around invisible disabilities. Every day was a prodigal son day when my brother was having trouble; it was like he left us and would come back, leave us and come back, and we never knew how fully he would come back. Having that cultural language to map that onto was really helpful.
JA: When I think about the story of the prodigal son, I so often only really consider the titular character. But, in your essays, you ask us to think more closely about who is left behind waiting for the son to return, and what it looks like to be among those hoping for the son’s safe return. When your brother was young, you wanted to be there to fill his every need, but as you got older you realized you had to separate yourself in some ways, while still wanting to care for him.
To me, there are things that feel like higher forms of grief.
SBC: That was really painful. I would have moments where I would try to step in and fix things for him before realizing it wasn’t possible. When Joshua was in college, he had this roommate who stole from him, so Joshua called me and told me how awful it was. I told him I’d call the RA, because changing rooms is something that happens all the time. We can fix this. But he was like, Sarah Beth, I think he’s starting to like me. I realized that sometimes there’s nothing you can do, especially when people are growing up and getting their own agency. There were cultural forces that he couldn’t do anything about but there were things he did choose. Like he was living in Huntington and decided to smoke weed instead of talking to people about his mental health. I mean, he was a kid; you can’t blame him for it—I don’t blame him for it. There’s a grief of people growing up, like your little sibling who you’ve infantilized becoming a complex human being, and realizing there are problems you can’t fix.
JA: Mental health and the stigma around receiving help can be fraught in any situation, in any place, and in any family, but you write so movingly about how your home in Appalachia, in particular, meant that options felt limited. Would you mind sharing a little bit of your perception of how place—and the history of place—intersects with beliefs about healing?
SBC: In a shorter term way, I was thinking about how, like probably every family, the generations of mine tend to repeat what happened. My great grandmother was given up for adoption at three years old and taken as a farmhand. She had to make biscuits for farmers at three years old. It’s difficult for me to think about that life for her. My Granny, even though they had left that situation, felt from a very young age that she had to take care of herself, so she got married at thirteen to get out of the house. My Granny had paranoid schizophrenia. The way that ended up being best to cope with her was to give her space. She didn’t want to take medicine and the only option was to institutionalize her, which was not going to be a good situation. My mom fought to keep her out of there and take care of her at home. My mom had to be a committee for her so she could get signed up for disability and get to take her ex-husband’s retirement money so she could live comfortably in this little house. What was most comfortable for everyone was for her to live alone in a little house; she would have been miserable around other people. She needed her routine—waking up at 4am, reading romance novels, making clothes for us, and smoking her cigarettes. She just needed groceries brought to her and her bills paid. There was that. We grew up with this grandmother who might, when we showed up, literally push us out the door or scream at us, or greet us really warmly. She was so funny—funny in a way that nobody else was funny. She would talk about anything and she had whiskey and a gun. She would have us watch a dirty movie to learn about life. If she was happy, every line was a joke. We had seen how mental illness could be coped with: hide it, give the person space, and hope it will get better.
With Joshua, especially because of the stigma, for my mom, it was a lot of these things: hoping if he got closer to God it would go away, and thinking, what if he outgrows this and gets better? Obviously it did not get better. We had so many fears: What if he goes to prison? What if he kills someone? Him going to the Father was better than that, in some ways. No one was happy he died by suicide, but it was such a hard situation that there were worse alternatives, almost.
JA: It’s a story that highlights the impossibility of being mentally ill in this country. It’s so difficult to find a space where someone would want to go live and be and be treated. The lack of care in Appalachia and the way you highlight the heightened rates of suicide in Appalachia in your book, mental illness or not, was really sobering to read.
SBC: Something that was healing to realize is how pervasive it is in the culture and almost how inevitable almost that he would die that way, especially with the particular illness he had, where the suicide rate is so high. And then, being in Appalachia where the suicide rate is even higher, it just felt like, what else could have occurred? Is there a point in feeling guilt or figuring this out? I feel like part of my book was figuring out that thereis truly no one to blame—certainly not him, certainly not my family. It’s just so hard. It feels like it’s so much bigger than us. Hundreds of years of culture contributed.
JA: With grief, so often you want this idea of ending or closure that never comes. In the Prodigal Son parable, there is this sense of jubilance when he returns and everyone is whole, for at least a little while. Reading your story, it seems like you’ve arrived in a different place than you were years ago, but there’s not a real sense of closure, which makes sense. What advice would you offer to people searching for that closure or seeking to understand who they are now?
SBC: In terms of suicide, specifically, it is definitely about letting go of the guilt, which is a hard part of the process. There are these immediate things, right after you lose the person unexpectedly, especially someone who chose to leave you, that happen, like a movie would come out or a song would come out and I would be like, if only he had known about this coming, would he have stayed for a week? Fortunately, your brain quits doing that, because it’s so exhausting.
Talking to other people and seeing that you can make it past it is meaningful. There was this kid who only knew Joshua a little bit, but his brother had died in a horrible car wreck five years before that and he came to the funeral just basically to say, look at me, I am alive. It was such a gift, and I remember thinking that. My sister had seen him years later, randomly, through a window while walking to school, and he was dancing while cooking. She realized: he’s okay.
To me, there are things that feel like higher forms of grief: you can lose much more of your family, there are wars, and there are worse things that can happen to you. For my parents, losing a child is worse. I hate to rank grief. I think about in War and Peacewhen Pierre thinks about having painful shoes when he was rich was almost as bad as the real things happening to him now, just because of how much he changed as a person. You can never judge people on what they’re going through and how bad it is for him.
JA: The grief you were in prompted you to seek care for yourself, where you accepted medication while still holding onto your faith.
We had seen how mental illness could be coped with: hide it, give it space, and hope it will get better.
SBC: I had this very specific kind of depression when my brother died. It was severe. It wasn’t the first time I experienced it. I talked about, in my first book, being in love with this man on the internet, which happens to a humiliating number of people. It was such a source of shame. I had written him these long emails and broken myself over him, but had never met him. He only lived fifteen minutes away and I remember reading Sense and Sensibilityand reading about how Willoughby is always hiding in shop windows, trying to get away from Marianne. I thought he must have been doing that to me. I had a severe bout of mental health issues at that time, and had I taken Prozac or something I probably would have bounced back from it faster. Like I did when my brother died, I got super thin, lashed out at people, and hurt my relationships with people. I had this particular trauma-induced depression, where it’s not something I cope with on a daily basis, but a bout of it was induced. When my brother died, it triggered it. The shock of it drains all of your serotonin, and learning about the science behind grief helped me. I really had to build my stores back up with the medication. I did think at the time, maybe if my brother had tried medication, maybe it would have helped something. And I thought: I have to try. I want to live. I couldn’t live and I want to live. I developed the tools to deal with my own grief-induced depression and now I know there are things I have to do personally to survive, and I know that I will.
JA: What did you take from writing this book or what do you hope others take from reading it?
SBC: In books about suicide, I find that there’s often a little blame-iness, which I think comes from a similar feeling to what I had at first, which was that I had to figure this out. There is no one factor. It’s so much bigger than that. You have to go back to history, to place. Was healthcare available? Would they have been stigmatized if they said they needed care? You have to go back to deep that blaming yourself and other people is not useful. Experiencing the freedom of that is something I hope people can take away.
When I began writing my unborn son a letter in 2018, a book was the furthest thing from my mind. I wasn’t trying to unpack the countless ways in which the words “all men are created equal” have failed us in this country. Instead, I was thinking that I would write a letter, something that I had not done in some years. Not an email or a collection of social media posts, but an honest to goodness old-fashioned letter, the kind I used to enjoy writing and dreamed of receiving, but never did, when I was a kid.
I had planned to tell him that I was re-reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and savoring Ellison’s Invisible Man for the first time. I had planned to tell him about my students, and New Jersey, and most of all, how much I missed his sister, his mama, and him, even though he wasn’t born yet. But then I began to worry the racism and hate I was encountering daily would consume me, figuratively and literally, and the writing took on a life of its own, fueled by the worry and fear of a forty-something Mexican American becoming a father for the first time.
Suddenly, I was calculating time differently. How old would I be when he could speak? When he began to shave? When he graduated high school? College? When he became a parent himself? Where Are You Frombecame my attempt to give my child all the guidance I could on how to use his imagination to survive all the wretched ways that America has devised to deprive him of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The titles of some of the probing letters Ghobash writes to his two sons speak to the courage of this book: “What is True Islam?,” “The Gray Area,” “The Challenge of Freedom,” “The Muslim Individual.” The wisdom of this book is matched only by its tenderness. Ghobash puts on full display his skills as a diplomat to show that celebrating our shared humanity begins with the individual who centers not fear but love, not anger but kindness.
Chariandy’s letter to his daughter opens by recounting a moment of bigotry he experienced in his native Canada when she was three years old. A decade later, he examines that moment in light of the wave of bigotry and hate stoked by newly elected U.S. president Donald Trump. This book is a powerful meditation on the ways in which the effects of slavery and immigration ripple forward through history when they go unexamined.
In this letter to her sons, Imani Perry assembles a team of luminaries (Morrison, Emerson, DuBois, et al.) to support her thoughts on the power of resilience and how to cultivate it in our children. Rather than allow our youth to become victims of generational trauma, Perry’s letter encourages them to tap into the generational endurance found in their traditions.
The engine that drives Coates’s letter to his teenage son is interrogation, in particular how does one live with, and within, a black body that has been treated as disposable since the founding of America. Coates offers no answers to the questions he poses; rather, he places his bets on the value of knowing what is at stake when we lull ourselves into believing the American Dream was ever meant for us.
When a friend asked Adichie for advice on how to raise her new daughter as a feminist, the book Dear Ijeawele was born. Gender equality is the bedrock of this book that sees the moment of birth as the crucial point of intervention when the shackles that have kept girls and women from realizing their full potential can begin to be undone. This is a wise and fierce book that urges us to celebrate difference and independence.
This is the sole letter on the list written to a parent by their child and not the other way around. And what a letter it is. Heavy is an urgent and powerful meditation on love, and the ways in which American racism works to convince us that we are not worthy of loving ourselves or of being loved by others. It is a testament to the healing power of love and forgiveness.
This book is the primogenitor, the forebear, the OG, the Elder in the room with a capital E. Had writers penned letters to their family members before The Fire Next Time tore through the bestseller lists in 1963? Of course, but I couldn’t name any off the top of my head. In these two letters, Baldwin took a scalpel to American racism and laid its insides bare for all to see. The edge of his scalpel was not honed on the sharpening stone of hate, but rather love. The decades have not diminished the courage and power of this book.
Amy Lin’s debut memoir, Here After, is a taut, poetic, and intimate exploration of heartbreaking loss, devasting grief, and its unfathomable aftermath. In potent, swift, and artful prose, she details the love, and loss, of her husband, Kurtis, a vibrant human and skillful architect, who died suddenly, and without distinguishable cause, while running a virtual half-marathon.
Craftily moving between depictions before and after the soul-shattering tragedy—celebratory wedding reception vodka-waters to a necessary, life-saving stent—Lin lays bare the beauty of their relationship and the emotional and physical toll of her grief.
At the beginning of 2024, Amy Lin and I caught up over Zoom and discussed the present tense of grief, the inadequacy of language, the gift of both seeing and been seen.
Jared Jackson: Though the structure of the memoir is nonlinear, the entire book is written in the present tense. Why did you make this decision? Did it have anything to do with the way you experienced grief?
Amy Lin: The thing about grief, for me, certainly, was that when I entered into it, I fell out of time. Which is to say, the ways in which we tend to quantify established time—past, present, future—completely eroded for me. And my life as it had been, my life with Kurtis, it felt as real, if not more real, than my life after he died.
That’s what grief does, it completely deflates these realms. I, temporally, was completely lost, and the memories of our life, the memories of who I was—a wife, married, the choices that I had made—none of them brought me to my present. Even when I was burying Kurtis, right? I truly was like, no, I am a wife. But I wasn’t married and I wasn’t a wife—not anymore—and it’s really disorienting when what is no longer feels more real than what is present. Biologically, what the brain can’t process is that what is real neurologically is not actually real anymore. So, for me, everything in grief is present tense.
JJ: Can we stay there for second? You mentioned the biological aspect, and there are moments in the book I referred to in my notes as the “science of grief.” For example, you search the term “young windows” and read a report that lists mortality rates—cardiac arrests, cancer, suicide—of widows compared to those still married. In fact, soon after Kurtis’ death, you ended up in the hospital with life-threatening blood clots. To me, typically, grief is talked about as an emotional state, not a physical response. Was learning these facts helpful—to have an explanation for what you were feeling not just emotionally, but physically?
AL: I will say until I was in acute grief, I thought of grief as an emotional state. But in Calgary, where I live, we have the Bob Glasgow Grief Centre, which is the only provincially and publicly funded grief counseling center in all of Canada. And so, I was really lucky because I live here and started it within a month of Kurtis dying.
It’s really disorienting when what is no longer feels more real than what is present… for me, everything in grief is present tense.
The first session was just an hour with a slideshow where the grief counselor talked about was the ways in which grief affects the body. She said grief completely shutters the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that does communication and memory and scheduling and emotional regulation. The blood is being poured from that part of your brain into the base of your brain, which deals with fight or flight, with survival, and with “am I going to stay alive?” That whole part of your brain, the front, at a blood level, has gone dark. She said I was in clinical shock.
JJ: Actual clinical shock?
AL: Yeah, and she also explained neurologically, your brain has not caught up to your reality. She explained that when we meet somebody, we code neural pathways in our mind. We have a neural pathway for ourselves, the person we think ourselves to be. And then the brain codes a “you” that is separate from the “you” that is real. Let’s call that second “you,” Kurtis. But then as you continue to live with that, the brain starts to encode a third entity. Which is the “you” in combination with Kurtis, the “we.” She said, obviously, Kurtis has died, but the neural pathways that you have for him are still being used. And the brain is not just trying to cope with permanently shutting down the neural pathways connected to the “you” that is Kurtis. It’s dealing with the entanglement of the two yous, the “we,” and the brain has no idea how to shut that down because the real you” isn’t dead. And because the brain is trying to shut it down, a lot of people have a feeling of “I’m dying.” And she said that’s actually true biologically, because the brain is trying to kill the neurological you.
Also, how much capital the brain is using biologically is massive. She said that’s why grief, biologically, is actual work, and extremely tiring. This is what creates the “widow effect.” It’s not that you’re cursed. It’s that you’ve been exposed to intense levels of stress hormones over such a long time that you are more vulnerable to disease, more vulnerable generally. With your prefrontal cortex down, you tend to take more risks. And so that’s what creates this trackable data about people who are widowed, especially young, who tend to have health problems, or accidents happen to them, because they really take more risks. Like, this is how you get hit by a car, because you’re not actually evaluating, “Oh, is that car traveling too fast? I’m going to dash across the street.”
After I understood what was happening in my body, when something would happen, or I’d feel a certain way, I was able to know I wasn’t crazy, this was my brain working. So, I had that, and I felt lucky. But also, we’re failing people in that they don’t have access to this information. Where is this in the health curriculum?
JJ: You clearly, at least now, have a way to speak about grief. And I wanted to talk about the language of grief. Do you think grief has its own language? Is our language around grief limited?
AL: I do. And I think, yes, our language around grief is limited. One way is by this desire to make people feel better. Culturally, I think, humanly, we do not want to see our fellow people in pain. We want to make them feel better. And this is where I think, with most people, because of their good intentions, the language that they use is always forced towards healing, towards “cheer up,” towards the “bright and shiny.” The language we have for grief is about either distracting people from it, or helping them feel better generally. And while that comes from a really human and understandable place, grief studies show it’s harmful to people who are grieving because grief is chronic pain. It doesn’t go away.
The North American narrative of resilience puts a griever in a place where there’s no space for them, and nobody feels strong or resilient.
Saying to someone, “I’m going to distract you from the fact that your husband died,” is kind of like saying, “I’m going to ask you to hold your breath.” And then asking, “Don’t you feel better?” And you’re like, no, that’s actually really hard for me. Because something that is essential and omnipresent in my life, you’re now asking me to forego. And it becomes really harmful for people who are grieving to have to perform that they’re not sad. Or to perform that you’ve made them feel better. But it’s also hard to educate gently, especially when you just want to say, “If you want to help me, please just sit with me in my sadness.”
And then the second part where I see us limiting language around grief comes from, I think, a North American narrative of resilience, the bootstraps mentality, the “you’re so strong.” I think people see it as kind of cheerleading, truthfully. But again, it really just puts a griever in a place where there’s no space for them, and nobody feels strong or resilient. They feel afraid. That’s how they feel, and I think we linguistically really harm people.
JJ: I want to switch tones because I want readers to know the book isn’t all sad. There are beautiful and tender snapshots that depict the love you and Kurtis shared while he was alive. Moments where I found myself both laughing and simply admiring the wonder of your relationship. And you write that Kurtis once said that you think “sadness has a kind of beauty.” So, my question: Did you also experience moments of joy in the remembering, in particular the good? And if not joy, something else? In a book that centers grief, how did you approach infusing the book with these moments?
AL: I love this question. The real answer is that I did not experience joy writing this book. I found it extremely painful to live in. I didn’t come to this book to write about grief. I realized that it was a way of processing grief, but I didn’t intend to do that. But you grieve with the thing that you have, and the thing that I have is writing. Something beautiful about writing is that it creates a legacy, even if that legacy is small. Even if that book is read by very few people. It’s still its own kind of legacy. And this was a legacy I could offer Kurtis—to write who he was or who I knew him to be. And so, I came to it to write about him and to write about our life.
I am extremely private, a lot of the inner texture of our love and of our life was private. But I wanted to open the doors that I had kept closed when we were together. We shared something that was so rare and so beautiful to me that I fiercely protected it in the world when he was alive. And then when he died, I wanted to connect people to the person and the love that he shared and who he was. And writing it felt like one of the things I could do for him. I think the strange thing for me, and is probably, neurologically, entwined with the idea of Kurtis, is that I can do this ghostly math of how Kurtis would feel in certain situations. I knew him so well that I knew how he felt when I wrote those sections you mention.
So, while I did not experience joy, Kurtis was somebody who led with joy, and who led with levity. And so, the reason that those sections, I think, flare brightly in the text, is because I’m writing from the piece of myself that loved him. Because I’m not bright like that. I’m quite serious and pretty anxious, you know? But Kurtis had his own sun, his own gravitational pull. And when I wrote in that mode, I really tapped into that. And that is what I tried to bring to the page. That’s where the moments of the joy in the book come from. The lens of that was him.
JJ: Speaking of writing, on your first date with Kurtis, you introduced yourself as a substitute teacher. Later, after discovering and reading your blog posts, Kurtis basically says that introduction was wrong, and calls you a writer, says you are a writer, which you hesitate to accept. A lot of writers get asked the question, “When did you first call yourself a writer?” But not many get asked what it’s like for someone, especially someone they love, to call them a writer first, to see it in them and claim it for them, even before they claim it themselves. Can you tell me what that felt like—to be identified as a writer by Kurtis—especially now that you have a book?
AL: I think maybe one of the greatest things that we can do for the people we love is to endeavor to see them. And I don’t mean see the best parts of them or the parts of them that we would like to highlight or the parts of them that we would like to encourage in them. I mean, to actually see who they are in the fullness of the person that they are. And when you see something in someone that is so core to who they are, and you see it before them—and also before that person is able to accept it themselves—that’s one of the greatest things, to live in the abundance of somebody’s sight like that.
Kurtis loved me in that way. Loved me enough to see immediately that I was a writer and say that to me. Our first date was very long, six hours. And later, when he found those blog posts, he said, “You were charming and open and engaging on the date, but you were not like this. You were not open like this. I met you on these pages in a way I didn’t meet you in person.” He certainly saw something in me and that remains, probably, the most radical reality of my life. That Kurtis saw me and, in doing so, excavated a knowledge about something that I am before I did, and then held it to the day that he died.
JJ: That’s beautiful. You also write fiction, and there’s a scene in the memoir where you describe publishing you first short story in a journal and imagine how Kurtis would have celebrated were he still alive. If you believe in the After, how do you imagine he’s celebrating the publication of your debut book?
AL: I think what’s so amazing is even if you don’t believe in an After, which truthfully, I’m not sure that I do, what do I believe in is Kurtis. There is this beautiful thing about our loved ones, and our ancestors, whoever that is for us, and it’s that they show us “the way.” And often the way is into a more tender or expansive way of living, which is certainly true for me of Kurtis. He showed me the way into a more light-filled, joyous way of living. He really was a man who loved living. And it’s crazy to me that he got so little time to do it. And so, despite my ambivalence about the After, I, because I knew Kurtis for as long as I did, can so fully feel that if there is one, then he’s going crazy in it. When I turned 30, he filled his car so full of balloons he got into a car accident because he couldn’t see out of it. So, if there’s an After, and there’s finite space he could fill, then it’s filled. And I know that that would be true, if it can be true. And if it is true, then Kurtis will show me the way.
We’d been driving for two days, unsure where we were in this land of grass and hard dirt, the world made liminal by the blur of the road, by the pleasant haze of our cigarettes. Inside the car, with me and Mark and a dash full of snacks, all was fusty, dusty, happy, and warm. We slept by the roadside, pissed where we pleased, honked the horn into the moonless night. Mark had heard about Guthrie Farm from his forum friends, strangers with names like Doggerel and Scumboy and Less, who were big on enthusiasm but light on geography. We were in what could only be described as a county, somewhere north of where we’d previously been. When other cars passed us, they drew their windows up despite the heat.
It was getting on for evening when we found the place, and the whitewash farmhouse glowed like candlewax. The barn to its side was thin and unpleasant, hardly bigger than a school bus.
“How many hogs could you fit in there?” I said to Mark. He never said pig, talked only in hog, in swine, in cutter and pork. He looked pleased with me, handed me the tobacco pouch like it was a bag of jellybeans.
“Not too many. That’s what makes them so special.”
“Artisanal,” I said.
“Oh yeah.”
“Artisanal hogs.”
The Guthries didn’t have a car in their driveway, only the skeleton of a quadbike, a few cannibalized engine blocks, layers of tarp weighed down by stones. There wasn’t any wind this far north, or possibly west—nothing stirred. No lights on in the house either, but I wasn’t worried—things had a way of working out for Mark, and he and I were fast becoming one and the same. I had even started walking on my tippy toes like he did, prancing like a gazelle around the car when we needed to stretch our legs. It was his idea to come out here, and then it was our idea together, and then we didn’t care whose idea it was, were both just happy to be doing something cool together. We were on the road. We were free and happy. We ate burgers for breakfast and instant noodles for dinner. We had sex in a roadside bathroom and bruised ourselves on the cistern doing something funky with our legs. Outside, someone knocked, occasionally cleared their throat.
Mark honked the horn and flashed the beams.
“Emissaries at the gates!” he said out of the window. I leaned over him and turned the indicators on, then the hazards.
“Yeah!” I said.
“Yeah!” he said.
We got out of the car, leaving the engine running and the lights streaming in through the Guthries’ curtains. Mark knocked twice, perfunctorily, and we made out like teenagers while we waited.
“Do you think they’re home?”
“Oh, they’re home,” said Mark. “Where else could they be?”
A light came on in the hallway. We nudged each other, held our breath, waited for something else to happen.
“Oh, they’re home alright.”
After another five minutes, the door opened, and Tom Guthrie appeared before us, old and smelling of dish soap. The corner of his beard was stained yellow from some mean tobacco.
“A pleasure,” said Mark, doing a little bow.
“You’re with them,” said Tom, looking at his feet. “From those message boards?”
From what little we could see through the hallway, the house wore its age well, the wallpaper peeling in tasteful strips. A lamp to Tom’s left was dented and tarnished in a way that indie coffee chains would die for. Mark stepped forward and shook Tom’s hand, pulling it up from where it hung limply at his waist.
“You’re an absolute celebrity there,” said Mark. “This is wild! Like meeting Sting or Cash!”
“Like meeting Bowie,” I said.
“Yes! Exactly! The Bowie of Swine.”
“David Bowie’s dead,” said Tom Guthrie, as if he still wasn’t quite over it. “This isn’t a good time. We weren’t expecting visitors.”
“It’s a great time,” said Mark.
“It’s our birthday, you see,” said Tom.
“Happy birthday!”
“My wife and I, it’s our birthday. It’s our day, you see.”
“Then you’ll let us cook for you,” said Mark, who still hadn’t let go of Tom’s hand, its veins standing out in milky blues. “You’ll prepare us a range of cuts, and we’ll have a slap-up meal and celebrate together.”
He led Tom into his own home, an arm around his shoulder, pulling his shoes off and leaving them by the sill. I followed at a distance, shutting the door to the loamy dark outside, the tin-can clatter of insects. I placed my shoes next to Mark’s.
The house was one story, every room branching off from the central hallway with the kitchen at its terminus. The light was buttercup warm, the bulbs the kind they don’t let you buy anymore, running so hot they scorched the ceiling. Everything smelled like cooked dust, like a radiator turned on for the first time in years. Little side tables had pictures of a younger Tom and his wife—swimming by a creek, standing in front of the house, holding a freshly dressed deer by its antlers—always posed the same, their hands barely touching. A phone rang from the living room, but nobody went to answer it.
We seated ourselves around the breakfast table. Outside, a security light came on that hadn’t when we arrived.
“Are you going to keep your car running out there?” said Tom, but Mark just waved his hand in a way I knew well, which made me smile into my hands.
“How about a coffee? A cup of joe for the birthday boy! Will Mrs. Guthrie want one too?”
“She’s resting. She doesn’t drink coffee,” said Tom, looking at me for perhaps the first time. His eyes were remarkably clear, those of a man much younger and in control. “Who are you?”
“I’m Mark Swain. It’s such a pleasure.”
“Is that a joke? Like a play on words?”
“No,” said Mark, placing down three black coffees. Tom pushed his away a few inches, pinching his nose. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to meet you. The guys on the board just can’t stop talking about your meat.”
“How much did they tell you?”
“Not much. Just that you’re the man, you know? You’re the guy.”
“And who’s this? Mrs Swain?” said Tom, waving a hand not so much at me as at my aura, the general idea of me.
“I’m with Mark,” I said.
“She’s with me,” said Mark, planting a fat kiss on my forehead, his stubble like the stroke of a doormat. “So, how about some food? Anything in the fridge?”
He opened it up, but there was only a furry slab of butter, a receipt for an air fryer.
“We don’t keep much in,” said Tom. Mark and I looked at him for a long moment as he rapped his knuckles on the table.
“Hm,” said Mark.
“So,” I said.
‘I . . . can get some cuts from the barn?” said Tom.
“That would be best,” said Mark. “That would be just great, Mr. Guthrie.”
“It’s our birthday, is all. My wife and I.”
“And we’re just thrilled to be spending it with you. Babe, aren’t we just so psyched to be here for Mr. and Mrs. Guthrie’s birthday?”
“Thrilled!” I said.
Tom Guthrie closed his eyes, crossed himself, and made for the back door.
“Please don’t touch anything,” he said before leaving.
Mark settled into a chair with a worn pattern of butterflies, rolled us each a cigarette and smiled.
“Is he going to slaughter one? Just for us?” I said.
Mark waved his hand again, blew smoke up into the busted alarm, as if daring it to sound.
“He doesn’t seem happy to see us.”
“Trust me, he’s just fine,” said Mark. “The guys on the forum said it would be like this. This is pretty normal. It’s kosher.”
“Well,” I said.
“Well,” he said, springing up and dragging me along. We walked through the house, following grooves in the carpet from Tom’s slippers. Mark touched a phone book, a porcelain dog with no eyes. I took one of the picture frames and turned it facedown, without having any idea why. The living room looked as you’d expect it to, only with a distinctly modern flatscreen TV in the corner, swept clean of dust. They had a bookshelf, but the titles didn’t stick in the mind, their browning covers forcing the eye away—A Walk in the . . . Songs for Rainy . . . Keeping Up With . . . This and That. A daguerreotype on the wall showed an old man standing in front of the freshly painted barn. He could have been Tom’s father, maybe the wife’s—he was a father to someone, that was for sure. He oozed dad.
“He can’t sell much. With the barn so small.”
“He doesn’t sell the meat,” said Mark. “That’s not how it works here.”
“Did they say on the forum how they found this place?”
Mark took me in his arms and kissed me four times, like a bird pecking seed.
“Good things have a way of being found,” he said.
Good things have a way of being found, he said.
Outside, something sounded. A long squeal, pitching higher and higher until we couldn’t hear it anymore, somewhere between animal and shearing metal. The buckling of damp wood, faintly spongy. Mark held me tight and looked me in the eyes—he was waiting for me to ask a question, but then it felt like the time for questions had passed without my noticing.
Tom Guthrie entered the living room with a tray wrapped in cling film, the meat glistening beneath like polished marble. He held it at arm’s length, waiting for Mark to take it.
“Oh,” said Mark, stepping closer and sniffing deeply, prodding it through the film. “Still warm.”
“Can you take it? I need to check on my wife. It’s her birthday, after all,” said Tom.
“Babe, take this to the kitchen, would you? There’s something in the car I need to get. You’re going to love it, Mr. Guthrie. You’re going to go just wild for what I have to show you!”
Tom passed me the plate, only letting go when he was sure I had a good grip on it.
I sat with it a while in the kitchen, trying to admire its color, to tell the difference between this and the other cuts of pork Mark had shown me. I lifted the cling film, but all I could smell was the blood, a light tang of manure. There was movement behind the Guthries’ bedroom door, a scratching and a fidgeting. Somebody sighed, cleared their throat, sighed again. My coffee was already cold, though it was fresh only minutes ago. Mark honked the horn outside, revved the engine a few times.
Tom stepped into the hallway, opening the door just wide enough to squeeze through before shutting it again. He saw me in his kitchen and jumped.
“You’re still here,” he said.
“Sure am!”
He took the cups and tipped them into the sink, rinsing the basin with cold water until it ran clear.
“Is your wife okay? Will she be joining us?”
“She needs her rest. Things have been hard. The weather, maybe.”
“It’s been a hot one,” I said, and he looked at me suspiciously, as if I might be pulling his leg.
“It’s crazy that you share the same birthday. What are the odds? The curveballs life throws at us.” I had a feeling that my birthday must be coming up in the next few weeks, but I couldn’t quite recall.
“They’ve been coming here for years, people like Mark,” he said, looking out of the window, at the barn hunched in shadow. “Before the forum was a forum. I want you to know that, so you can measure your options. They’ve been coming for a long time, to the farm.”
“It must get lonely out here, you two on your own. You must enjoy the company when it comes.”
“I just needed you to know.”
He looked as if he might be about to cry, but instead he burped, a hint of acid on his breath. Mark returned to the kitchen holding four party hats.
“I’ve had these in the car for years!” he said, placing one on my head, then Tom’s, then his own. “What are the chances? Like it was fate, Mr. Guthrie! Now it’s a real celebration. I’ve even got one for Mrs. Guthrie here.”
He set the fourth on an empty chair, as if she might spring from it at any moment, like a rabbit from a top hat. In the living room, the phone rang again.
“Are you going to answer that?” I said, but the two of them started unpacking the meat into different groups instead—loin, hock, tongue, and back. Together we set up the grill, an old George Foreman, and heated a pan for the bacon.
“Do you cure it yourself?” said Mark.
“I’m not sure,” said Tom, scratching the elastic band at his chin, an ugly red mark already forming. “I’d need to check that.”
“There’s no oil,” I said, opening cupboards to inspect the dust and crumbs, the occasional yellowed receipt. “No salt and pepper even.”
“Oh, baby,” said Mark, taking me in his arms and kissing me the tender way, the rare and slow way, the little-too-drunk-for-sex way. “We don’t need any of that. We’ve got everything we need right here, with you and me and these folks here on their birthday. My God, isn’t she just great, Mr. Guthrie? Isn’t she the best you’ve ever seen?”
“You seem like a nice girl,” said Tom. “Truly. I wish you would leave.”
“Mr. Guthrie,” said Mark. “We are so blessed to be here. We are so thankful. We wouldn’t dream of leaving, what with dinner half-cooked and with it being such a special day for you both. Please, just enjoy yourself!”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Exactly,” said Mark.
The room filled with the smell of cooking meat—earthy, bloody, lovely, lovely. The loin, hock, and tongue sizzled on the grill, spitting fat onto the splashboard. The bacon gave off just enough moisture to cook itself in the pan, going an even red and brown with no char, no fuss at all. My vegetarian days, when I was with Stig or possibly Andrew, seemed like a thing of the distant past. Even before then, I never much liked pork, could have lived quite happily without it. But being with Mark was like being stripped of all my ragged years, like damn brand-new skin.
Tom pretended to fall asleep in his chair, but his eyes shot open every now and then, checking our progress.
“Okay, time to plate up,” said Mark. “‘Mr. Guthrie, would you go and get your wife for us so we can sing Happy Birthday?”
“She’s resting. The weather.”
Mark smacked the spatula onto the skillet with a big old clang. There was that look in his eyes I didn’t so much like, the one I saw him sometimes give to strangers when he thought my back was turned.
“Mr. Guthrie, I’m tired of all this naysaying. You both need to keep your strength up. My forum friends said that Mrs. Guthrie always joined them for dinner. It’s important for her to be here, with us, and for things to be fair and balanced.”
“They lied to you,” said Tom, energized by Mark’s look rather than cowed into silence. He looked for a moment like the man in the daguerreotype, made of stronger stuff.
“Forum friends don’t lie! We don’t lie, do we, babe?”
“They don’t lie,” I said. “They made a pact. It’s part of the rules.”
“That’s right. Now come on, Mr. Guthrie, we’ve gone through all this effort. We’ve got all this food right here that we made just for you, and frankly I’m yet to hear a word of ‘thank you, Mark,’ ‘you didn’t have to, Mark.’ Go and get her. I insist.”
While we portioned everything up, Tom went into the bedroom. We could see his feet beneath the door, unmoving.
“Can you believe that? The thing he said about lying?” said Mark, playing with his knife and fork. “Can you imagine Doggerel ever telling a lie? Or Blisstime?”
“Let’s not let it ruin our day,” I said, pinching the gristle between his index and thumb.
“You’re right,” he said. “God, you’re always so right. You always know the right thing to say. I’m a lucky guy. I’m such a lucky man.”
“Mark,” I said, and all sorts of words about the way he made me feel tried to force their way up, in all kinds of ways, like a scream. A question came out instead. “Is it my birthday soon?”
“It’s whenever you want it to be,” said Mark, and he stroked my inner thigh.
When Tom returned, he’d sweated whatever strength he’d mustered out into his shirt.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Swain,” he said. “She’s just not well enough. She sends her apologies.”
Mark got up from the table and embraced Tom, breathing deep into his neck and making man-hug noises, the noises men make when they hug.
“Tom, I forgive you unconditionally. My lady here showed me the error of my ways, and I feel just awful for snapping at you like that. On your birthday, no less! I think we’ll all feel so much better after we’ve eaten something.”
“I don’t want any trouble.”
“We’re not in the business of causing trouble, Tom. That’s not what we’re about.”
They talked for a moment about the forum, but it slid away from me like those book covers, left me bored and a little antsy—where we go . . . star-falling . . . no greater . . . passively drowning. I had a prodigious sense that the words were simply not for me. Once, when we started dating, I asked Mark what the forum was about.
“We really like a good ham,” he said, and that was good enough for me, good enough for a long, long time.
Instead of listening, I watched the barn as a band of moonlight stretched over it, revealing its gnarls and twists, its patchwork charm.
Instead of listening, I watched the barn as a band of moonlight stretched over it, revealing its gnarls and twists, its patchwork charm. It looked like it had been there forever, as natural as the shrub grass and dumb gray rocks beside it, shedding its skin every century or so to keep with the fashion, its business its own. There was something marvelous in that, in something so entirely untouched.
They were seated at the table again, party hats on, each with their plate of unseasoned, sizzling meat. Mark took our hands, closing his eyes and breathing long.
“In this, the King bears his bloody snout,” he said. “In this, our covenant is known.”
We paused, unsure when to break the chain of our hands.
“Okay,” said Tom.
“Good job, babe,” I said.
“Dig in!” said Mark.
And Tom did, with little fanfare, cutting his meat into cubes and ingesting them like a machine—five chews on the left, five on the right, swallow, repeat. I waited for Mark, who kept his mouth open, edging the bite closer and then back like foreplay.
“Are you ready?” he said but didn’t wait for an answer. He took a bite of the loin, sinking back in his chair. I opted for the hock, because it is important to keep your own inner life, separate from those you love, no matter how dearly you love them. Stig told me that, or possibly Andrew. It was dry, a little overcooked, I thought. It tasted brown, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It wasn’t necessarily anything.
“Oh wow,” said Mark. “Oh, babe, wow.”
“I know, right?” I said, and I did kind of know, in the sense that it was pork, and I was eating it, and if Mark thought it was good, then it truly had to be. He brought the mouthful out onto his tongue, gray and fibrous from all the chewing, as if to let it breathe with him. I did the same, and it did maybe taste a little better when I sucked it back in.
“This is next level,” said Mark, gripping Mr. Guthrie by the shoulder. “Thank you, brother.”
“Please don’t call me that.”
“Thank you, Tom.”
We moved on to the tongue, which I had never tried before, and which went down with only a touch of gagging. It had the consistency of leather, but hadn’t the pioneers eaten their leather boots when they were starving out on the plains? And didn’t only some of them go insane and kill their brothers and/or wives?
“Holy shit,” said Mark. “Excuse my language, Tom, but holy and holier shit!”
Next, the bacon, its rind of fat as thick as an orange peel. No matter how much I chewed, it found the gaps between my teeth, managed to keep itself whole.
“Oh man, oh man,” said Mark. “Babe, are you feeling this?”
“I’m feeling it!” I said, taking his greasy mitt in mine. I closed my eyes, felt the warmth between our palms like one continuous rope of fat, unbothered by teeth. I could feel in that touch a future unburdened, in which this was the best meal I’d ever had, in which we sat on the hood of Mark’s car, remembering this table, this touch, our hands down each other’s pants as we ate a pack of thin-slice ham we picked up at the service station. When I tried the loin, I could feel what it would one day be to me, and the future was almost the present, was the past.
“From this does convergence bloom,” said Tom.
“What’s that, Mr. Guthrie?”
“I said would anyone like a drink of water?” He threw his empty plate into the sink.
All our plates were empty, actually, though it seemed we’d hardly begun.
“Nothing for us!” said Mark. “I don’t want anything else in my system. I just want to let that settle a while. Honestly, Tom, I could eat that every day and never get bored.”
Tom’s back tensed, bringing his neck low into his shoulders—I got the sense that this was his usual posture, that he had been putting on a good show for us all this time. He smothered what could have been a sob, or another burp.
“Now, Tom,” said Mark, taking our plates and waving his hand at me as if to say, no bother, though I hadn’t moved to stop him. “I think it’s time for us to see where the magic happens.”
“I really don’t think that’s necessary,” said Tom.
“It sure is! It’s very important to see how your food is made. Don’t I always say that, babe?”
“They all do. It’s like their motto,” I said, really wishing I could have that glass of water.
“It’s not pleasant in there, not after . . . you know,” said Tom. “I don’t think Mrs. Swain would appreciate having to see that.”
“She can wait outside. Right, Mrs. Swain?” said Mark, winking at me.
“Whatever works best for you,” I said. It didn’t seem right to disagree, and besides, I quite liked the ring of it. It sounded like something you might find at a county fair—Mrs. Swain’s Homely Marmalade. Mrs. Swain’s Famous Homely Pecan Pies.
Together, half-dragging Tom Guthrie between us, we exited through the back door towards the barn. The security light didn’t come on, leaving us sinking occasionally into puddles of muck or tripping over machinery. The barn stood out by its absence, by the black lack of starlight it cut away. Before we reached its closed double doors, Mark took me to one side.
“Babe, I just want to check you aren’t feeling excluded,” he said. He sniffed my hair, and though I hadn’t washed it in a while, I knew that I liked his funk and he liked mine, that it was more of a collective, convergent funk from all our time on the road.
“No! You’re so sweet for asking, though. I’m fine just hanging out.”
“You don’t mind?”
“I really, truly don’t,” I said, and it was wonderful not to lie, to mean it unconditionally. We kissed in the dark and knew just where to place our lips.
“You know, we should do something like this for our birthday,” he said. “It’ll be in just a couple of weeks, won’t it?”
“Something like that,” I said.
“I know I’ve said it before, but what are the chances? Us being born on the same day? The world sure does throw some curveballs, that’s the truth. Okay, Tom,” said Mark, strolling back over to the barn, “show time!”
They each took a door and heaved. From the side, my view was blocked; I could only see the light glancing off them after Tom flicked a switch. He looked so frail. If his photo was taken at that moment, I’m not sure a camera would even pick him up. He was more like a smudge, one of those tricks of the light that people used to call ghosts, which they now call imperfections, which is somehow so much worse. Mark had never looked more handsome.
“Jesus,” he said, trying to hide his smile and keep an air of measured awe.
“So now you see,” said Tom.
“It’s so much more than I ever imagined.”
“It’s a lot to take in.”
“She’s beautiful, Tom. She’s a marvel.”
“I do the best I can.”
“You could have something so much larger, there could be so much more. I know a guy, lots of guys, actually, who could help. It’d be no bother.”
“I’m not interested,” Tom said.
“And if you let her out, let her go free range?”
“That’s not an option.”
“So it’s just her.”
“She’s all we need.”
“And how long does it take?”
“For what?”
“For it to grow back.”
“Not long. Not long at all.”
Deeper in the barn, something made the same high pitching note as before. In the distance, a dog yelped, though there were no houses for miles.
“Can I approach her?”
“Can I stop you?”
Mark laughed, and Tom showed maybe the barest hint of a smile. They walked together into the barn, and something shifted, weight settling into the walls, the note of that cry a ringing in my ears, just beyond perception. I sat looking at the light streaming out, shadows moving hugely, obscurely.
The phone was ringing again.
I returned through the kitchen, our plates stacked in the sink, the air pleasantly greasy. Past the Guthries’ bedroom, past the turned-down picture frame. In the living room, the daguerreotype glowered, and I reached for the telephone.
“Hello? Grace?” said a voice.
“No. Are you looking for Mrs. Guthrie?”
“What? Jesus, Grace, is that you?”
“I think you might have the wrong number.”
“Hello? Just stay on the line and tell me where you are. We can sort this all out. Is Grace there? Or maybe Helen?”
The line hummed a moment, something rustling on the other end.
“Helen, are you there?”
“Who is this?” I said.
“It’s Carol. Carol . . . Flank.” The voice was a woman’s, faintly southern.
“Carol Flank?”
“Or Garstang. Helen Garstang. Grace, just listen to me. There’s some kind of group. Some grouping.”
“Look, I don’t think I can help you. My name is Mrs. Swain,’ I said, placing a hand over my mouth to stifle a laugh. “I’m here on a visit. My husband and his friend are outside, in the barn.”
“Helen! Helen, who is in the barn?”
“Mark. Mark and Mr. Guthrie.”
“Is Carol in the barn? Oh God, is that what happens when they—”
The line went dead. I looked around the room for pictures of daughters in overalls and white smocks, but couldn’t see a trace, just the old man, just the Guthries with their hands almost touching. I twirled around the room, touching things as I pleased.
Back in the kitchen, Mrs. Guthrie’s plate remained on the counter, the food still hot enough to give off steam. The security light came on, washing away the shadows pouring from the barn door. There could be anyone in there, or no one.
“Did the phone ring?” said Tom from the back door, giving me a start.
“Yes. Wrong number.”
He nodded, unconvinced.
“Do you judge me? For what I’ve done?” he said, reaching down beside me to pick something up.
“What? No! I think you’re just great. And Mark really likes you.”
He looked at me like I was a hand grenade.
“You should consider it,” he said, and made his way back out to the barn, taking the fourth party hat with him.
I took the plate of meat to the bedroom, knocked, and waited the amount of time they wait in movies before opening (which is to say, not as long as I should have). The light was on in the room, the bed empty and unmade. No wind came through the open window, the curtains unmoving. Just broiling heat. Nobody home. I put the plate down on the bedside table and climbed into the bed, pulling a thin sheet around my thighs. With the heat, with the smell of cooked hog, I felt that the future was just around the corner, waiting to shed its skin. I think I dozed a while until I heard the back door open, heard Mark speaking low and excited. I wondered how long it would be before he found me, tucked up in this stranger’s bed, but I wasn’t worried. He was talking about the weather, about how unseasonably cold it had been, and I felt the truth of that in my bones, creeping in through the window.
According to CEO and psychologist Jessica Pryce-Jones, people spend 90,000 hours of their lifetimes at their jobs. Whatever form that profession takes, it’s inevitable that it will coincide with significant individual change. Work forces people to confront obstacles like office politics, autocratic managers, flaky colleagues, and productivity quotas, the tackling of which teaches them about who they are. Women must also confront persistent gendered challenges around how they are permitted to behave and what they are allowed to achieve in the workplace. These lessons invariably overflow into other areas of their life. This creates fertile ground for a hybrid genre of storytelling, what I would like to call the woman coming-of-age work narrative.
Lily Michaels, the protagonist of my debut novel Ellipses, is a member of this cohort. A 32-year-old magazine writer, she is watching her dream print career slowly succumb to the rise of social media. She is at a standstill, too, in her long-term relationship with her girlfriend, Alison. Lily also grapples with all the attendant pressures of early thirties womanhood, marriage, children, corporate advancement, and must decide whether they are things that fit her idea of success. When she meets a powerful beauty executive, Billie Aston, and enters into an increasingly toxic and consuming mentorship with her, Lily reckons with the meaning of true agency, at the office and in the rest of her life.
The eight books, below, also feature women protagonists coming-of-age through and against the backdrop of their work. Their professions range from nannying to pizza delivery to technological app development. The unifying force is the inevitable shift that will come after many hours spent on the job.
Sneha, the protagonist of Mathews’s novel, moves to Milwaukee for a corporate consulting job. She is fresh out of college. America is enveloped in a recession. Her parents have returned to India. Sneha is exploring her queer identity for the first time in the local dating pool. At first her traditional gig seems to provide her with the kind of cushy stability of which many a recent graduate might dream. That security proves a mirage as a mix of work troubles, housing insecurity, romantic turmoil, and family secrets threaten Sneha’s burgeoning adulthood. Interrogating the promise of a capitalist American Dream, this novel explores the role of community and human connection vs. individualistic success in personal happiness.
Like Sneha, Willa in Win Me Something is a twenty-something woman testing the waters of adulthood. Willa works for and eventually moves in with the Adriens, a wealthy white Tribeca family, as a nanny to their young daughter, Bijou. Biracial Chinese American and the daughter of divorced parents, Willa feels on the periphery of society, more generally, and of her parents’ lives, more specifically. Willa’s employment with the Adriens and her enmeshment in their household rhythms prompts her to reflect on her own upbringing—and the sense of alienation that lingers into her grown up life.
Reid’s novel also features a protagonist employed as a nanny. In her mid-twenties, Emira is the caretaker of Briar, the daughter of a wealthy white family in Philadelphia. One evening, Emira, who is Black, is accused of kidnapping Briar while out with her at a grocery store. In her guilt, Briar’s blogger mother, Alix, tries to befriend Emira. Their employment relationship becomes further complicated when Emira begins dating Kelley, a white former classmate of Alix’s who stirs up uncomfortable history. As we watch Emira navigate the dueling white savior overtures of Alix and Kelley, we also see her envy of close friends, who are making strides in their careers while Emira feels left behind.
Jane, the narrator of Pizza Girl, isn’t so much left behind as she is conflicted over what she wants. Unhappily pregnant and 18 years old, Jane works as a pizza delivery person in Los Angeles, a gig that gives her passing windows into customers’ lives. She lives at home with her Korean mother and white boyfriend, Billy. At night, she sneaks into the shed of her deceased alcoholic father and drinks beers. One day at work, a woman named Jenny requests a pepperoni pizza with pickles for her unhappy son. The encounter with Jenny sparks an obsession in Jane, one fueled by more deliveries and by Jane’s loneliness. Frazier’s novel juxtaposes the fleeting, peripatetic nature of food delivery with the impending permanence of a young woman about to become a parent.
Food is a backdrop, a character, and a mechanism for change in Zhang’s novel set in an unspecified, dystopianesque near future. The world is blanketed in smog pollution that has decimated global food supplies and species. A young Chinese American chef accepts a mysterious offer to cook and live at a secretive community in the Italian Alps, where her rich employer has funded a research endeavor that grows extinct plants and animals. As she immerses herself in a long-lost realm of culinary delights like strawberries, butter, and veal and as she becomes entangled with the employer’s fierce biracial Korean daughter, the young chef’s latent ambition and bodily appetites awaken.
Casey, the narrator of Writers & Lovers, juggles ambition, too, alongside grief, romance, and financial precarity in this portrait of an artist. A thirty-something aspiring writer, Casey is trying to finish a novel between shifts at a fine-dining server gig, all while reeling from the recent loss of her mother and the pervasive anxiety that won’t leave her alone. At her restaurant job, Casey navigates hierarchical office politics and harassment. She waits on one of her two love interests there, too, the older widower Oscar who is with his two young sons. Where many of her friends have long since given up on publishing for more stable work, Casey persists with the grueling balancing act of service work and writing in her pursuit of creative success.
Set in Hudson, New York, Big Swiss follows Greta, a 45-year-old who works as a transcriptionist for a local sex therapist, a job that gives her access to the most intimate secrets of her town’s residents. Through her transcribing, she falls for Flavia, a younger, married gynecologist who has never had an orgasm and who was also the victim of a violent crime years ago. When Greta recognizes Flavia’s voice IRL one day in town, she introduces herself with a false identity. She and Flavia begin a torrid affair. The vulnerability and candor of the patients in Greta’s transcripts contrasts with the fraught deception in her relationship with Flavia—and with Greta’s reluctance to confront the effects of her mother’s death by suicide on her adult mindset.
Connection, alienation, and ambivalence are at the heart of Happy for You. Evelyn, the book’s narrator, is a philosophy PhD student who takes a break from toiling on her dissertation to work for a tech company creating an app that delivers happiness. Part of a research team, Evelyn is asked to help quantify this joyful emotion. In her personal life, she is struggling with decisions about marriage to and motherhood with her white boyfriend, Jamie. Her biracial background and the childhood loss of her mother contribute further to her sense of dislocation. Evelyn’s work underscores just how nuanced and complicated the achievement of genuine happiness can be.
Now more than ever, literary magazines by and for artists are prioritizing community and spotlighting the work of LGBTQIA+ writers and writers of color. I’m a lesbian writer whose identity is the crux of my work, but for many years I was told in writing workshops that queer love stories aren’t “believable, “realistic,” or even sympathetic. As a result, I’m constantly seeking literary magazines that champion work by those with marginalized identities. I’m a Staff Editor at HerStry, an online literary magazine for non-binary and women-identified writers. Last year, I was a Prose Editor at the Lumiere Review, an online literary magazine that published JUSTICE, an initiative for BIPOC “to fight against all ‘-isms’ & ‘-phobias.’”
Marías at Sampaguitas is a literary magazine established in 2019 by Editor-in-Chief Keana Aguila Labra, Co-Founder of Sampaguita Press, an independent “micropress” publishing zines and chapbooks by BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ writers. Meaning “girls and flowers” in Tagalog, Marías at Sampaguitas strives to create a “safe literary and linguistic space” for BIPOC. “Beyond the Sea,” a moving story by Nathalie De Los Santos from its second issue, conveys the complexity of the Filipino experience with the story of a young boy named Vidal who flies to New York with his parents for the first time—experiencing the awe of the city and its skyscrapers, as well as the immediate discrimination his family faces—and returns as an exchange student years later. The piece, like the magazine, offers reflections on the loss of identity and culture, and the importance of connection.
Described as a “hub for education and wellness,” The Soul In Space offers outreach to Black and Indigenous communities through workshops, a wellness program, and a literary magazine. Created in 2019 by CEO Sen Kathleen—writer, yoga instructor, and reiki practitioner—the magazine explores “conversations surrounding Decolonization, Black Liberation, and Indigenous Sovereignty” and was created to cultivate community and carve out space for Black and Indigenous writers. In “How to Backslide,” a poem from issue three, Samantha Williams writes, “You had to relearn it but / you got a whole riot inside you. / Labored it and had it slapped out of you. / The myth entered and left you meek. / How to replace what is stolen?”
An imprint of Sundress Publications, beestung is a quarterly online “micro-magazine” established in 2019 by Editor-in-Chief Sarah Clark that centers non-binary, genderqueer, and two-spirit writers. Clark is also the Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, the Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA, and a Board Member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. Stirring ruminations on androgyny, a writer mourning their late grandparent and uncovering his true gender identity after death, and the personification of unbridled rage encapsulate beestung’s fourteenth issue.
Established in 2020, Queerlings is a U.K.-based biannual online magazine of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction that aims to “uplift the LGBTQIA+ community and explore the depths of the queer experience.” Founder and Editor-in-Chief Scott Aaron Tait also founded Powders Press, an online literary journal of queer short fiction and poetry focusing on sexuality, gender, and working-class identity. In an editorial letter from its seventh issue, Queerlings recognizes the need to celebrate queerness and foster community in the midst of targeted violence and a lack of legislation protecting trans and non-binary individuals’ right to receive gender-affirming care. In the poem “Self-Portrait as a Queer Slasher,” Stephen S. Mills writes, “as in we bend truths into truth telling truths about this America / as in queer sex doesn’t end / with knife through chest (sorry Kevin Bacon) / but rather an eruption of queer joy.”
Both a bimonthly journal and publishing company, Fahmidan Publishing & Co. was founded in 2020 by Editor-in-Chief A.R. Arthur (Review Editor at Full House Literary and Poetry Editor at Chestnut Review) and Ranna Kisswani. Fahmidan Journal—Farsi for “to understand”—publishes writing by women and writers of color. Pieces that seek out magic, observe the fallout of TikTok, reflect on white mediocrity in the corporate world, and convey the overwhelming nausea of grief can be found in its pages.
A biannual arts and literary magazine about queer fashion and aesthetics, just femme & dandy was established in 2021 by Co-Editor-in-Chief Addie Tsai, who was emboldened to create the magazine after publishing a folio on queer fashion in 2019 for ANMLY. Centering survival, the fourth issue includes a photo shoot highlighting mobility devices, nonfiction on the liberation of gender-affirming haircuts, and poetry rejoicing in “the altar of Black femininity.” Embracing the importance of queer identity within the context of queer fashion, just femme & dandy works to support the LGBTQIA+ community, “who have long since coded ourselves with how we adorn and dress our bodies when it has been dangerous to identify solely with words.”
Established in 2021 by Editor-in-Chief Aleksandra Hill, an MFA candidate in fiction at the New School, khōréō is a quarterly speculative writing magazine that examines the act of migration: something “voluntary or forced” and resulting in the “recalibration of self-identity.” With this theme in mind, khōréō specifically centers immigrant and diaspora writers. In “Bride of the Gulf,” a fiction piece in issue 2.4 by Danai Christopoulou, a barista named Niki meets a man with golden hair at a Greek cafe who looks eerily similar to her missing brother. That night, she sinks into the sea and emerges as a siren goddess desperate to find him again. In the heartwarming reunion between the goddess and her brother, Alexander the Great, her memories flood back to her. The re-assuming of identity built on the necessity of connection is evident throughout this magazine.
The newest of the online magazines featured here and published in December 2022, the t4t project, is a zine created by and for trans artists and writers of color. Described in a letter from its inaugural issue as “part offering, part love letter for our kindred,” the zine is a means for the creators to directly uplift their community through impassioned art, unconditional love, and unwavering support. The poem “Amphibious” describes being born of water and the pride of descending from raindrops and clouds, but seeking something new and transformative by breaking through the water’s surface. Kobe Taylor Natachu writes, “I wish for mobility beyond the confines of water beginning to recede / I know the world of water can no longer support my budding self as / Metamorphosis has begun.” Like the zine suggests, this poem is both a love letter to one’s lineage—the home built by community—an ode to the freedom of transformation.
Matt Gallagher, a U.S. Army veteran and author of the novels Youngblood and Empire City, first traveled to Ukraine in February 2022 to train civil volunteers how to defend themselves against Russia’s invasion. He had joined fellow veterans and scribes Adrian Bonenberger and Benjamin Busch, flying “there on our own dime and volition,” he later wrote for Esquire, “because we saw a sovereign democracy under assault and believe that is wrong.” He returned to Ukraine a year later with Benjamin Busch for Esquire to interview foreign fighters—many of them veterans—who had left the safety of their homes and were risking their lives for the “core belief that this is a fight worth fighting, that Ukraine is worth defending.” Toward the end of 2023 he was back in Ukraine, again for Esquire, this time traveling “the country to pose a fundamental question to the Ukrainians I met: How does this end?”
Those three trips inform Gallagher’s newest novel Daybreak, which follows U.S. Army veterans Luke Paxton and Han Lee’s arrival in the weeks after Russia’s invasion.
When we first meet the pair, they are on a bus, pitching “east through midnight black…rumbling into an alien unknown.” Paxton (Pax to all who know him) was persuaded to trade his job as a mechanic at an AutoZone in Tulsa for war in Ukraine by Lee, whose brash, unwavering confidence could crumple the front slope of any Russian tank. “Something worth fighting for,” Lee says of the war. “You know how fucking rare that is?”
Pax, on the other hand, is much less certain. One Ukrainian after another scratches their chin at his being in their country while it is under attack. “Why are you here?” The question comes at him from all sides, as ceaseless as machine gun fire. Each time you sense the emphasis on a different word. “This is not normal behavior,” his would-be military recruiter tells him.
Part of Pax’s motivation is Svitlana Dovbush, a Ukrainian he once loved and lost during his time in the military and who he hopes to now locate. However, he is also searching for the sort of purpose and meaning that he had only found before in the military. War is a force that gives us meaning. “It baited those,” Gallagher writes, “who survived it, seduced them, deluded them, trailing like an old loyal dog until of course you turned around and said, Come on, boy.”
Gallagher has created a fully formed character in Pax, but one sees a lot of America in him—spiritually and morally wounded by our Forever Wars, causeless, adrift, desperate to be of some help. “I might be broken,” Pax says, “but I’m not useless.” This desire to be of service is the novel’s beating heart. That impulse which led him to volunteer for the American armed forces may have resulted in his brokenness, but in Ukraine, with the world’s attention on it, he is given another chance. “It was thrill. It was fear. More than anything, Pax felt like himself again.”
In Daybreak, Gallagher provides readers with a nuanced, polyphonic, tender, and violent portrait of a country and its people rallying together to repel one of the world’s bullies for the sake of democracy, normalcy, and their very existences—ideals that Americans have historically gone to the mat for.
However, since those early months of the war, our attention and support for Ukraine has waned. In the age of polarization and calcification, Ukraine’s existential fight against a tyrannical aggressor has become yet another wedge issue in America. But in Daybreak, through multiple points of view, Gallagher puts into human drama what the stakes are for the free world. “This fight belongs to us all,” one of the novel’s Ukrainian characters says. “It will find us all.”
Julian Zabalbeascoa: Since Russia’s invasion, you have traveled to Ukraine three times, as both a journalist and a volunteer. How was it that Luke Paxton’s story came to be the one you’d tell in fiction about those experiences?
Matt Gallagher: I think that with each trip to Ukraine I became aware that there were interesting stories there I couldn’t necessarily source, interesting people I was meeting who wouldn’t go on the record, maybe just anecdotes being told that were second or third hand, that all carried the right ingredients for good fiction. So into the notebook they went for further contemplation and complication.
Luke Paxton and Han Lee in Daybreak are troubled men in some ways. They haven’t been able to shake Afghanistan. They haven’t been great at being contributing members to society in the States. But they still want to do some good, right? They still want to help people in a meaningful way. And you know, that’s most people in everyday life. Not necessarily literary life, where a lot of folks are afraid to go outside and get their hands dirty, but real, everyday life. They’re messed up in some ways. But they’re not bad. They’re not evil. They’ve done decent things and they’ve made mistakes, too. They regret them. They’re going to continue to make mistakes and have regrets. They possess emotional and moral nuance that’s very much not easy, nor tidy.
So I think the fashioning of these characters was deeply rooted in encountering their real-world counterparts, especially during that first trip into Ukraine when we went as volunteers. We arrived in late February 2022, alongside the first wave of international legionnaires. Many were rough and tumble personalities. Once we got [to Lviv] we kind of went off and did our own thing, working with Ukrainian civilians, were kind of in our own little silo, but even as we were busy with that I couldn’t help but think of the Americans and Brits we met on the bus ride in, wondering what they were doing, how quickly they were getting to Kyiv to participate in the fight there. I’m sure you’ve read many of those early dispatches of the international fighters. It was chaos. They were handed a rifle, maybe pointed in a direction with a team of five or six, and told to go kill Russians. The organization that we see now from the international fighters and units was a long way away.
I did not go to Ukraine with the intent to write a novel, I went to help some people in a small but hopefully direct and meaningful way. At the same time, I’m a writer. It’s what I do, how I think about and experience the world. Everything I saw or did, every conversation, notes were being taken in my head, whether I was conscious of them or not.
JZ: Throughout the book, though, Paxton is pummeled with the question by locals: “Why are you here?” Maybe I’m not alone. Maybe a lot of Americans would think, like me, that the answer would be an easy one. “To fight for democracy. To fight against one of the world’s big bullies.” And that Ukrainians would be congratulating him for having made the sacrifice. But instead they eye his decision with a lot of suspicion and skepticism. You’ve written about this for Esquire, but can you talk a little about that suspicion, about that skepticism that people like Paxton would face in Ukraine?
MG: In the book there’s both a kind of internal and external awareness of America’s role in the world, and that big, heavy question of “Why are you here?” is being experienced by Pax on the ground level. Lee is able to give a very clean, firm answer to that which is, “I’m here to fight. I’m here to kill Russians,” and that is exactly what the Ukrainian recruiter wants to hear, and that’s frankly probably what a lot of Ukrainian people want to hear, too. That’s what Zelensky asked for. Pax isn’t able to give that kind of full, clean answer, and it’s almost to his detriment that he’s honest about that.
Getting there as early as we did, we arrived with some true believers and idealists, but we also came in with the shady business types that feed off the fringes of any war. Also some pretenders and lost souls who would only get in the way in the months to come. So the “Why are you here?” skepticism was more than warranted. We were able to answer, “Hey, we’re here to train civilians on basic self-defense. We’re not playing. We want to stay as long as we can. But we’re going back to our families.”
That was a direct answer that also happened to be an honest answer, and it generally passed the sniff test for most of the Ukrainians who asked. Putting this question into the fiction and having these characters wrestle with it in divergent ways… was just very natural. I think it’s related somewhat to your earlier question about including Ukrainian perspectives, and how the world’s changed. Through many blunders and failures, America has earned people’s skepticism. Simultaneously, though, we can—and do—contribute and help in very real, meaningful, substantive ways. It’s not black or white. It’s very, very gray. And I love the messy grays of existence, both as a writer and as a human.
JZ: And it seems you’re drawn to these sorts of conflicts that require one to throw their body and soul into. In your novel Empire City, Mia attends a baseball game. She finds professional sports bizarre. “It was tribalism without purpose. Expression for the sake of nothing but itself…Why devote so much,” she wonders, “to something you couldn’t impact?” You see this in your characters throughout your three novels and your non-fiction, possibly even your tweets, the desire to make a difference. If you care about a thing, contribute to it.
MG: I think you’re onto something there. I’m going to generalize now, but I did live in Brooklyn for a decade and swam in those literary waters, so I’m not talking out of my neck or anything: to a lot of people in contemporary American literary culture, the literati or whatever, they want military vets to be victims. Or dumb, simple-brained monsters. Or losers, just really old stereotypes that fulfill easy preconceived notions. But of course it’s more complicated.
That was just not my experience in uniform. By and large, both on the enlisted and officer side, I saw a lot of hard-working, pragmatic people whose faith in their country was constantly tested by the wars we were sent to, if not outright broken. But they sought to contribute to something bigger than themselves with everything they had. After we got back, people arrived at various answers to what it is we did, what our wars meant. There’re people that I spent every day with in Iraq for fifteen months who came out of it with different politics and a very different worldview than mine, but you know, fuck it, they earned it. And I think in my small way, with my writing, I’m trying to push back against those easy, lazy stereotypes that I see spread by smart people who should know better, who claim to believe in emotional nuance and use all the right buzzwords about complexity, but for whatever reason, find themselves unwilling or unable to apply that kind of generosity and nuance to military vets. Or maybe it’s just not for people in general found to be the wrong type of different.
I don’t know. I’m 40 years old now. I’m less compelled to play nice for the sake of it, have become more comfortable letting fly my cantankerous flag. I don’t want to be part of that club anymore, and regret ever trying to be part of that club. With my work, if I can push back against some of that and defy it… then good. Though of course I must be careful. I can’t be too on the nose with my frustrations, because then I start preaching too much, and it gets in the way of the story and characters and the messy, beautiful contradictions I mentioned earlier. But I’m being honest, that kind of stuff makes me angry, and anger can be good for writing. It gets you out of bed in the morning and puts you to work.
JZ: Sticking with that and with Empire City for a moment longer. In Empire City, citizens pay the war tax to not have to think about war. In Daybreak, Lee tells Paxton, “It’s all part of the social contract. We put our bodies and lives on the line when no one else would. Fucking civilians pay the tax man so they can ignore what’s done in their name.” It reminds me of something in Phil Klay’s collection of essays Uncertain Ground, “Our military is a major part of who we are as a country; it is the force that has undergirded the post-World War II international order.” Yet, as he writes later on, “though we’re still mobilized for war, [we are] in a manner perfectly designed to ensure we don’t think about it too much.” Read our military veterans, and one encounters on the page this determination by you and the others to wake the rest of us up to, in Lee’s words, “the whole puppet show.” Why do you think this is so critical for not only America but, perhaps, what it means to be an American? And how might this tie to our waning support for Ukraine.
MG: It’s a hell of a question. I think if there’s one thing that unites post-9/11 writers, whatever our style or genre or perspective, whether we’re a veteran or civilian, it’s a kind of desperate howl to get people to pay attention and care.
The [American] war literature that came before didn’t face this challenge. Crane, Hemingway, Gellhorn, Heller, Vonnegut, Tim O’Brien … all incredible writers, transformative writers, but they could correctly assume that their subject already mattered to readers. The foreign wars that made up their worlds were so impactful on American society. They could focus on the story and created timeless literature, as a result. Whereas I do think that that our generation has an additional hurdle which is to get people to even engage with the subject to begin with, then engage with the story and engage with the writing.
Whether this is all by design or an unhappy accident of the all-volunteer force, that’s a separate question. But it’s the reality. And I don’t think it’s surprising to anybody who served in Iraq or Afghanistan and wrote about it that many Americans can’t be bothered to pay attention and care about Ukraine only two years into this thing. Outside of occasional humanitarian volunteers and occasional legionnaires, Americans are not dying there. It feels very intangible because we’re sending weapons and money and munitions that 98% of Americans will never see, never touch. It’s all very vague and ethereal.
And as frustrating as that is to me, because I would view us turning our backs to Ukraine as a deep, ugly betrayal, I can’t help but also understand that this is a byproduct of the American defense complex boxing out the American people’s attention spans and focus on war and foreign policy. People’s priorities aren’t a faucet to be turned on and off. And after years in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria, too, when the powers that be in the defense complex decided it was easier and smoother to not wrestle with these hard questions that Phil is so excellent at posing to us, and then trying to get us all to engage with, well, it’s no surprise that people switched off from Ukraine. We’ve all been conditioned to do exactly that.
JZ: To that, a recent Gallup poll has 43% of Americans thinking the U.S. should help end the war early, even if this means ceding territory to the vicious aggressor. Which is interesting because, as you say, the war isn’t impacting us in any material way. Money isn’t being taken out of our wallets, money that could be put to work here in America, to support Ukraine. This is deficit spending. Do you think that lack of support is as simple as political identity? 55% of Republicans and 49% of independents feel this way, while only 19% of Democrats do. What else might contribute to it?
People in American literary culture want military vets to be victims or simple-brained monsters. But of course it’s more complicated.
MG: I think that’s a huge aspect of it. When we first came back in March 2022, there was a rare kind of bipartisan support. People that I’ve had a real hard time talking politics with over the past couple of years reached out and were very supportive. That didn’t last, maybe couldn’t last. Political tribalism is real and potent right now.
It’s strange, because here’s a conflict where America’s doing something right by and large, in my estimation, and a lot of Americans seem to not know how to handle that. On one hand, I get it. I’ve held a rifle in an Iraqi living room apologizing for raiding the wrong house. I know what wrong looks like. I’ve been part of it. This, though? It requires some intellectual humility to accept that this is completely different. And also just listening to actual Ukrainians.
Being there in the east as a journalist, and having native Russian speakers come out of their houses to thank us for being there, even thanking our translator, because he’s from western Ukraine … it was fundamentally different than my experience in Iraq, where the only people genuinely glad for our presence tended to be the wealthy tribal sheiks cashing in on the nation-building contracts. So much of my journalism is trying to convey the human experience of life over there for people back here. And I’m pretty good at it, I think. Yet there’s just such a reflexive anti-Americanism ingrained in aspects of our culture and society, I can tell that sometimes even my best efforts are absolutely futile.
Life is more complicated than blanket reflexes. Interventionism isn’t inherently good or bad. Isolationism isn’t inherently good or bad. We have to take things on a case-by-case basis, because the world is too complicated to do anything else.
JZ: I’m going to quote Phil Klay again. This past November, being interviewed by TheNew York Times, he said, “Ukraine represents not a good war—because the closer you get to war, the more obvious it is that a phrase like ‘a good war’ has no valid meaning—but rather a necessary war. The clear moral case for Ukraine is about as straightforward a case of a just defense against a vicious aggressor as you could find.”
MG: Here’s an anecdote I keep returning to. Our second trip, October 2022, we ended up outside of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, driving through a village that had been liberated maybe a couple months prior. It’s about ten miles from the Russian border, we could hear artillery in the near-distance, and people are just—the whole village has been absolutely trashed. People are rebuilding their roofs, rebuilding their lives, best they can. We came across this family. We ended up talking to the wife’s mother, as well. She was an old woman, maybe 75 or so, and kept on insisting on speaking in Ukrainian.
Even to my ears, it was clear she was not comfortable in it. But with our Lviv-born translator there, she knew it was a way to practice. She was from this area, had spent her whole life here, had always spoken Russian. She admitted that most of her life, she thought Ukrainian was a language for peasants or troublemakers from the west. But now, she was trying to learn it, trying to rely on it, because it was the best way she could think of to honor her grandson, who’d been killed fighting in the border guard early in the invasion.
One person’s small act of change, of courage, even of patriotism, perhaps, that’s no small thing at all. She’s absolutely the type of Ukrainian that Putin says wants to be Russian, wants to belong to Russia, and maybe at one point in her life, she did. Definitely not now.
She’s just one person, sure. But she’s indicative, I think, of something that’s happening across the country. It’s something I put in at the dinner party scene in Daybreak. One of the characters says, “If we weren’t a real country before, we are now.” That’s very real.
JZ: I see it as a great act of defiance and resistance, too. You put it in Daybreak so well, with Svitlana saying of her son, “An entire generation of children will forever have [Russians] as the enemy, and they’ll be right to. This war will not be a short one. He will grow up in it. They all will.” Should Putin get his way with Ukraine, there will be no peace. You see it today in the occupied territories.
War for us [Americans] is always something that is over there, something that we can come and go to as we please.
MG: These people are going to keep fighting. So what can we do as an American to actually support these people who are living the ideals that we claim ownership of, that we claim inspire and motivate us? These are innovative, freedom-loving people. Nobody should support them more than flag-waving Texans, but for domestic political reasons, that doesn’t always seem to be the case. And yeah, you know that section you read from Svitlana, it’s very true. Based off of conversations I’ve had with young Ukrainian parents, friends that I’ve made over there who have kids about the same age as mine, this concerns them greatly. And, to be honest, I intended it as a stick in the eye for American readers. We’re so comfortable. We’re so spoiled. War for us is always something that is over there, something that we can come and go to as we please. If fiction can do anything, it’s to maybe get you to consider what it would be like to be living as somebody else, some other place, and I hope, when readers come to that section that they don’t have to agree with Svitlana’s decision, but I hope they at least understand her calculus behind it.
JZ: Putin has unified Ukraine in a way that it never was before. You have some wonderful moments throughout the novel that illustrate this. It’s also in your reports from Ukraine. In many respects, they are a far more unified country than the United States is these days. Yet, you also show, despite this unity, that there are various factions with various interests, some of whom get in the way of this grand effort to repel Putin’s forces. Why was it important to include this aspect?
MG: I’m glad that resonated, because these are real people. This is a real society. Of course there’s friction. Of course there are factions. Of course there’s internal politics at play. Take Pax’s encounter with the Nationalist leader, Dog. I was very intentionally showing that some bad people are, in fact, fighting on the side of good, because that’s real life. We sometimes have very simplistic views of war. Is this a battle of democracy versus autocracy? Yes. But also, there’s more. The reality is soldiers are oftentimes very gruff people with ugly worldviews. They’re rough men willing to do violence on our behalf, to paraphrase Orwell back in the day. They’re not always going to be people you want to take home to your mom to have dinner with. So what does that make you feel, you know? Dog is an extreme example of that. But even Lee is a version. I think he’s a fun character. I think he’s an engaging character. But he makes people uncomfortable, and he’s kind of proud of that, and I know a lot of soldiers like that. They have a purpose in this world, are proud of it, and it’s not to talk in neat little platitudes at cocktail parties. So giving Ukraine the country and Ukrainian society the respect it deserves, to show it in its various flavors, in various hues, was vital, because otherwise I’m not writing seriously about a real war. I’d be writing kind of hollow fairy tales. Which, hey, would probably sell more copies. But then I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.
JZ: Elon Musk receives an uncritical and unironic shout-out here, for how his Starlink satellites have allowed Ukraine to repel Russian forces. “Maximum cool” is how a Ukrainian describes him. It’s also what a Ukrainian volunteer said of you and Adrian and Benjamin to Anderson Cooper. Explain yourself.
MG: It’s kind of a funny little time capsule, because during the early part of the war, because of Starlink, he was viewed as a hero [in Ukraine.] And now he’s kind of viewed more as a traitor, due to some of his choices since then, some of the things he’s said. I wrote it to add some cultural flavor and it ended up becoming darkly ironic because, history being history, another layer revealed itself with the passage of time.
I do know that Ukrainians will keep fighting with or without international support, even if they’re losing ground.
As for the “maximum cool” line—I will absolutely cop to lifting that from the CNN piece. When he said it, I was standing right there, and it was awesome, you know. Anderson laughed at it, and of course, it made the final cut. You just have to be careful sometimes with broken English, because God knows these people’s English is way better than my Ukrainian. So you don’t want to be making fun of it. At least I don’t. I don’t wanna be doing the thing that Jonathan Safran Foer did years ago with Everything is Illuminated, kind of turning the translator into a joke because of the broken English and all the pop culture references. On the other hand, it can be a very real part of modern eastern Europe, right? So splashes of it here and there seemed okay. But I didn’t want to make it a crutch, and I didn’t want to have it done by the more prominent Ukrainian characters. Either they speak no English or they’re fairly fluent, like Svitlana and Bogdan are.
JZ: Where do you see things going in Ukraine in the near future?
MG: A lot hinges on if our Congress in the next couple of weeks can shake itself out of this funk. I do know that Ukrainians will keep fighting with or without international support. They’ll keep fighting, even if they’re losing ground. I am beginning to suspect that some kind of fake peace treaty is going to be forced upon them by the international body. And then both Ukraine and Russia will prepare for the next phase of the war … but when they say Crimea is Ukraine, they mean it. When they say Donbas belongs to us, even if it’s been in Russian hands since 2014, they mean it. I understand the Western instincts to want peace, to want this to go away, to get off our news. It’s not our land, it’s not our history. But I do think that a temporary ceasefire, and I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I do think a temporary ceasefire is something we’re barreling toward, even as both major players know it’s temporary.
An older woman protagonist launched into a story of substance isn’t all that easy to find. An older woman protagonist who upends our expectations about aging in gripping and unforgettable ways is truly rare. When I find one, I give an inward bow to the author and want to share the good news.
I’m aware that many readers will turn away from a novel with a prominent older character. Something unpleasant or difficult might be brought into view, something best shut out for the time being—as if old happens in another country you know you’re destined to visit, but you don’t want to get there too early.
Writers, especially American writers, seem sensitive to this aversion and don’t often choose older people, particularly women, to build a story around. When they do, they may rely on tropes that, if not palatable, at least don’t startle anyone. The old lady is feisty, cranky, or amusing—maybe even all of the above. She’s up to something in the story, but she rocks no boats, ultimately makes no difference.
Some older characters are created with compassion and skill: Agnes and Polly in Fellowship Point by Alice Elliot Dark, Olive in Olive Kitteridge and Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout, Addie in Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf, to name a few. But most of us can sniff out the ones that show up as not really representative. We might enjoy the read while at the same time sensing we’re being handed sophisticated versions of stereotypes given in stories from childhood: the witch, the kindly grandmother, the sage, the wacky aunt or neighbor, the eccentric other. Lack of a clear vision around aging is a loss for all of us. When writers give readers what they think is easily digestible, even in secondary older characters, they shortchange the old especially, but in the long run they deprive us all of truth.
When I was writing There Was an Old Woman: Reflections on These Strange, Surprising, Shining Years,I devoted a chapter to the old woman in literature. While researching this subject, I rejoiced whenever I found an older character who thumbed her nose at expectations of who she could or couldn’t be, one who didn’t spend every minute musing about her past—a trite, not to mention unrealistic, choice for representing how anyone over 60 occupies herself. A character’s past may be interesting or helpful in our understanding, but I think it’s important to show how an older woman deals with what’s right in front of her. In this way, we can deepen our understanding of what it means to live a long time.
What is it like to find her, the ripened being who isn’t using her age in order to maintain the status quo or impart wisdom to everyone she meets? It’s damn refreshing, especially if you’re an older woman yourself. But she’s there to surprise and enliven all of us. In addition to those American novels already mentioned, here are some books by writers in other locations and cultures who have felt perfectly free to shine a light on her.
Although several voices are sprinkled throughout this novella, all center around their connection to Morayo Da Silva, who speaks for herself. As she is about to turn 75, Morayo remains a voracious reader, a life enthusiast, a friend to many, regardless of their generation, class or gender, a bit of a philosopher. A former literature professor, she shelves her books so they can be “in conversation with one another.” She’s curious about these imaginary meetings. She’s brilliant, playful, self-accepting, and delighted by her own eroticism at every age, including this one.
From the way she dresses to the way she moves through her San Francisco world and her former life in Nigeria, Morayo commands the reader to follow her. The challenges that come to her in this story are common to many who are older: a fall that brings the threat of immobility, dependence, losing driving privileges. Freedom of thought, movement, and connection with others are Morayo’s passions, and she uses all of her resources to try to meet what confronts her.
Um Qasem is somewhere near 60, widowed, a grandmother. At a glance, she’s neither a threat nor much of a boon to anyone. At the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980 to 1988, her husband dies after the family is evacuated from a targeted area that includes their village. Um Qasem settles in to her new location. Her sons and their families quickly adjust and expect her to do the same. But resistance rises in her after a long time of feeling displaced.
With her donkey, Good Omen (a beautifully drawn character in his own right), Um Qasem sneaks away and travels across miles of military presence to return to her village, despite its off-limits status. Once there, she finds military-ordered dams have killed off much of the plant and amphibious animal life. The streams and ponds that once nourished the entire area are nearly dried up. Trees and flowers in the abandoned yards are dying.
When soldiers discover Um Qasem, they see her as little more than a widow who needs protection; she must be removed from the area. But she has other ideas about what needs protecting A resourceful woman with a vision, she takes risks to free the water from the dams and restore life to her village, pushing herself beyond traditional expectations in the process.
A literary mystery set in wintry Poland among a group of mostly deserted houses, this novel touches on not only crime, alarm, and bizarre events but slowly reveals a deeper mystery: what lives in the heart of a singular old woman. Janina is our guide through the strange happenings that unfold. Witty, quietly charming in her way, and darkly smart, she is an astrologer, an observer, an animal lover and caretaker of the houses abandoned for the season by wealthier neighbors. Her telling of what happens in this remote area is reminiscent more of a fairy tale than a mystery, the sort where children are lost in a forest and stalked by something coldly threatening.
The original mystery may not turn out to be the reader’s ultimate reason for wandering deeper and deeper into the marrow of this novel, but it’s a hard book to describe without ruining that element of it. Like Um Qasem, Janina sees that the world we naively sum up and set apart as “nature” entwines with out of control human desires and ambitions. She must confront the perceived imbalances that threaten what she cares about. Her telling of shadowy events may be riveting, but not as riveting as she is.
I don’t think I really knew what “brutal honesty” meant until I met Emerence, an 80-year-old woman in this novel set in postwar Hungary. A house cleaner and cook, she will interview anyone who wants to hire her; once hired, she will take over completely, even usurping the love of the family dog. Although she is not a woman of wealth or privilege, the village and its residents are her domain.
Magdushka narrates the story (a stand in for Szabo herself). A young writer in need of a housekeeper so that she and her academic husband can work, she’s taken aback by Emerence’s stark manner. The old woman’s insistence on privacy (her door is always shut to everyone in the village) as well as her occasional jaw-dropping ruthlessness are disturbing also. But she bears witness to Emerence’s devotion to the village. And so, like her, we worry for this old woman, especially as bits of her past bleed into the present of the story.
While the writer works her way toward literary stardom, Emerence gradually becomes not only housekeeper but prickly, secretive, admired and confounding friend. The younger woman, intellectual and ambitious, feels at times almost victimized by Emerence’s wild nature and determined self reliance. The tension in this story, though, is not old versus young. If not for the friendship, which feels real, it could be described by some as a class struggle. But that friendship gives it a different dimension. It revolves around the ache to be authentic as oneself and heed the call our humanity makes on us to try to feel another’s reality as well as our own, especially when the other has suffered much greater hardships and losses. To step away and teeter on the edge of a conviction that artistic achievement carries more value than friendship will invite betrayal and tragedy into the story. Emerence is an unforgettable character who allows no one to pass through without self examination.
This quiet and beautiful story of a grandmother and granddaughter exploring their world, a tiny island off the coast of Finland, is a classic. As the two go forth to converse, play together, appreciate and protect their island world, a tender closeness grows. But flares of tension ignite on these pages, too. The child’s mother has recently died.
Tove Jansson was in her late 50s when she wrote this novel in which no real plot emerges and little happens: a miniature Venice gets created by the two companions, a couple of cats show up, each presenting challenges regarding the meaning of love, a friend visits and quickly becomes a problem; there’s weather and the sea and bobbing about in boats, and some other people doing things, too. But the real story that threads throughout this quiet and often funny book is one of connection and transition. This is not a children’s story.
It’s a surprise that the six-year old granddaughter is as much a caretaker of the grandmother’s life as the other way around. The grandmother can be as curious and mischievous as any child might be, while at the same time teaching tolerance of others’ beliefs and care for the natural world. She’s not the stereotypically accepting or sage grandmother, but a woman who realizes her life is coming to a close and she’s clear that’s her business.
Both the grandmother and granddaughter own themselves. Each has a memorable personality, and they are determined to freely express that personality with one another because here on the island and together, their love and their surroundings allow for great freedom. This is an honest book about a pair of unique individuals, mutually devoted.
In post-apartheid Capetown,two next door neighbors in an upscale residential area are at odds. Both are old and widowed. Both have been successful in their careers. Marion (white) was an architect, and Hortensia (black) was a textile designer. They’ve felt antagonism toward one another for years. Marion has a history of racism and little self awareness. She has benefitted from all that apartheid offered its white residents. Hortensia moved to Capetown after marrying a white man, Peter, who betrayed her with another woman. Both Hortensia and Marion have been hurt by husbands who failed them.
Even if you know nothing much at all about apartheid in South Africa, these two old women serve as guides into the chasm. Marion and Hortensia are alone and lonely; each judges the other and feels she must keep her distance going forward. But then fate hands each one a burden she cannot carry alone. They are next door neighbors. What can they do but look one another’s way for help?
The novel seems to threaten to swerve into a pleasing connection as an outcome, but Omotoso is too smart for this and doesn’t cheat. Instead, she works to take personalities, pain, ignorance and the reality of the past into account. She directs the intersection of their need for one another and their history with a firm hand as these women begin to stretch themselves into the possibility of building something new together.
During a time of famine, an Alaskan tribe decides to abandon two women when winter comes, even though they know this means the women, who are in their seventies, will starve. The rationale is that these two don’t contribute any longer in a meaningful way, eat too much of what little food is available, and complain a lot. The women may be missed by some who love them but, given the day to day struggle, this fact cannot take precedence. Survival of the rest of the tribe is considered paramount.
Left behind, the two women are certain they won’t last long, and it looks as if the time they have left will be endured with resentment. But old age is full of surprises, and the surprise they find in themselves is determination. They will strike out to survive and hope to succeed. If not, at least they will have abandoned their own sense of uselessness in favor of doing what they could to save themselves. The rest of the story is all that they face, what they do and what they encounter that will eventually bring them full circle back to their own wholeness and to forgiveness of the people who abandoned them. Velma Wallis based this story of two outcasts on an Athabascan legend. It’s a moving short novel that’s part cautionary tale, part revelation, part edge of your seat adventure. The way through isn’t easy, but it’s often beautiful, and I can’t imagine any reader will finish Two Old Women without expanding whatever truths they think they know about being human. As if that isn’t enough, it allows us to dwell for a time in the spirit and resourcefulness possible in old age.That’s a story rarely told.
Placenta, Polenta, a Piece of Onion by Kirby Chen Mages
It was the winter that Ryan and I were squatting in the building on North Avenue in the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago. Actually, we weren’t squatting—we were squatting before, then we were evicted, and now we were paying $240 a month to rent an art studio on Francisco Avenue in a basement that didn’t have a kitchen or a shower. Our landlord lived in the house behind us, so this decision to illegally live in the basement was especially fraught.
To us, the risk of facing yet another eviction was better than the alternative, which was to live with my parents in their South Loop apartment while we figured out our next moves. This was something they had offered and we had refused. My mom is a hoarder and my dad is clinically depressed. I love them, but to live with them would have been to live within their chaos. I had already done this for the first 18 years of my life, thank you very much. They live in a two-bedroom apartment where one bedroom is technically the “guest bedroom/office,” but since my dad tends to work horizontally from his bed or the sofa, and my parents rarely host any guests besides me, the spare room has taken on the role of hoarder’s den. To have lived in that room would have meant living amongst impenetrable walls of stuff. To have lived in that room would have meant caving in.
On the first night we intended to illegally sleep in the art studio, Ryan had a shift at the Second City bar. I was alone and kept hearing the landlord’s footsteps as she passed by our “garden” windows. I imagined her trying to peer inside, wondering what we might be working on so late into the night. If she were able to see inside, she’d see that I was cooking rice and beans on a hot plate. At the end of our block, there was a Burger King that had a breakfast special—two croissant sandwiches for $3. We ate a lot of those.
We hadn’t lived there for very long before I took the pregnancy tests. I felt the need to do so after noticing my breasts were tender; I was hypersensitive to strong smells like cigarette smoke and scrambled eggs; and I had missed my period by several days.
I imagined her trying to peer inside, wondering what we might be working on so late into the night.
In the daytime, the basement’s bathroom was filled with the most enchanting light. I would often sit on the toilet, watching the prisms dance through the brick glass window, which further obscured the outside world. I was always curious what the source of their movement was. Bare branches bouncing, caught in a breeze? Sometimes I’d record this phenomenon with my cellphone camera. I was sitting in that mesmerizing light as I waited for my pregnancy test results. Like they do in the movies, I took two tests to be sure.
We slept on a futon on the floor. Each morning we would roll up the mattress and hide it in the studio closet. The mattress was still unrolled, and we were sitting in bed, when I called a clinic to schedule my abortion. I was given two choices—take pills at home for a self-induced abortion, which they suggested I have a bathtub for—I didn’t even have a shower—or come in for the procedure. Over the phone, the receptionist asked me if I remembered the date of the last time I had sex. I did. She wanted to make sure the abortion was scheduled with enough time between conception and the surgical procedure.
Ryan came with me to the clinic on North & LaSalle, which was also in a basement. In the waiting room, there were two middle-aged women sitting across from us. They looked very Midwestern. Milky white, big-boned, and blond. They sat still, their faces hidden behind magazines. Both of them had large duffel bags stowed underneath their chairs. I found myself becoming paranoid that they could be Christian zealots with bombs in their bags. There was no rationale for me to be suspicious of them, which made me feel guilty for imposing my own fear onto bystanders. Or not even bystanders—two women sitting in a clinic, probably wishing, same as me, that they could be anywhere else. A much more likely scenario was that they had duffel bags with them because they had to travel from another state or town to get an abortion—either for themselves or a loved one who might have been in the operation room at the very moment that I sat there judging them.
To prepare for a surgical abortion, one is advised not to eat for six hours prior to the procedure. In the waiting room, a male companion to a female patient arrived with a plastic bag in hand. He sat down beside her, fumbled around in the bag, then pulled out a paper-wrapped submarine sandwich. As he unwrapped the sub, the odor of marinara sauce and meatballs filled the confined, windowless space. A waiting room full of starving patients staring at this man’s meatball sub. I inhaled and felt my stomach gurgle and growl. A receptionist came out into the room and told the man, “No food allowed.” He begrudgingly wrapped up his sandwich. After she departed, he unwrapped it again and took another bite.
I was called into a room for the procedure. Two nurses, who seemed much younger than me, informed me that first they were going to examine my uterus with an ultrasound. They told me I could choose whether to look at the screen. I chose not to look. There was silence as one nurse inserted the probe into my vagina and moved it around, while the other nurse monitored the screen. I looked at the nurses. They both seemed concerned. With hesitancy and downcast eyes, one of the nurses told me, “Based on what we see on the screen, it’s too early for the procedure. You’ll need to reschedule and come back, but you’ll still need to pay for today’s appointment.”
I found myself becoming paranoid that they could be Christian zealots with bombs in their bags.
The cost of the appointment was $150. Earlier that week, Ryan and I had to scrounge up the $500 for the abortion—and by scrounge up, I mean we paid off enough of our credit card debt to make room for another charge on the card. This additional $150 would put us over our limit and ruin everything.
I stood in a closet-sized office space with one dim lamplight as a receptionist tried to explain to me why I had to pay for that day’s visit, as I complained to her that the clinic was the one who had scheduled my appointment for this date. I tried to argue that I shouldn’t have to pay for their error, even though the last thing I really wanted to do was make an underfunded clinic pay for anything. She was apologetic but adamant that I pay, and so eventually I did, and we rescheduled.
I sometimes wonder if what the nurses saw on the screen was a deformed fetus. The truth is, prior to my appointment, I had already been trying to kill the embryo. I suppose I was angry at it, and to take revenge I’d been drinking glasses of cheap red wine each night and punching my stomach with my fists until my belly and my hands were sore. Ryan knew that this was going on, but since he was working at the bar, and I was pretty drunk by the time he came home, I’d tell him about it like it was a joke. Like I thought what I was doing was funny. And since I told it like it was some kind of “dead baby joke”—laughing—he laughed too.
In retrospect, I know that it wasn’t very funny. More recently, I grieve.
Between the time I didn’t have the abortion and the upcoming date of my newly scheduled abortion, I started to bleed. A lot. I was frightened as the blood kept flowing and my uterus wouldn’t cease cramping. As I laid on my side in a fetal position, I realized that I must be having a miscarriage and googled the symptoms to be sure. What I could have done at that moment was ask for help, but I didn’t. This was all happening in that aforementioned hoarder’s den within my parents’ apartment, where Ryan and I had succumbed to staying one especially cold winter night. I laid there bleeding uncontrollably, while my mom was in the other room. We were only separated by a wall. In the morning, the cramping and bleeding persisted but had lessened. Freshly bathed and fed, Ryan and I headed back to our studio.
Ryan and I had to scrounge up the $500 for the abortion.
In the following days, I wore diaper-like pads, took ibuprofen, and went about my routine: laying low in the basement studio, trying to stay warm with a space heater in a Chicago winter.
Since our studio didn’t have internet, Ryan and I would often use the wifi at Atomix Cafe—a coffee shop frequented by people who needed a place to linger. We’d buy a bottomless mug of coffee for $4 and stay for hours. While sitting in the cafe during the days of my miscarriage, I experienced some sudden cramping and the onset of a diarrheal emergency. I rushed to the bathroom to release my bowels and vaginal canal. When I looked down into the toilet bowl, I was surprised to see what at first I thought to be a very large piece of onion. It was only as I flushed that I realized what I had actually just seen. It was not a piece of onion. It was my placenta.
I exited the bathroom and approached Ryan.
“What’s wrong?” He asked.
“I think I just flushed the baby down the toilet.”
Five years later, Ryan and I get married. We don’t intend to have children. We never discuss the miscarriage directly, but occasionally we make jokes when we’re cooking with onions. Ryan will say, “You thought our baby was a piece of onion!” And then we laugh. He never gets to know how scared I was, because I never tell him. And he never asks, because he never asks.
I was frightened as the blood kept flowing and my uterus wouldn’t cease cramping.
A few months after our wedding, I’m visiting my friend Marisa at her home in Tucson. She’s cooking us dinner—Marcella Hazan’s cult classic tomato sauce, served over a creamy bowl of polenta. The secret to Marcella’s sauce is an onion. You slice a whole onion in half and let the halves simmer with two cups of canned tomatoes, five tablespoons of butter, and a pinch of salt. After simmering for an hour, you’re supposed to remove the two onion halves from the sauce and discard them, which always seems like a waste as they’ve become so delectably softened in the simmering process. When I make the sauce at home, I usually blend the onion into the sauce until it disappears, or I put it in a container to save for later use.
When Marisa invites me to the dining table, she’s plated two bowls of polenta with Marcella’s sauce on top, along with a garnish of one translucent piece of onion per bowl.
I sit there staring at my bowl as Marisa giggles. She prods at the piece of onion with her fork.
“It kind of looks like a placenta!” she remarks.
She continues to giggle and prod before exclaiming, “Placenta polenta!”
Looking down at the piece of onion in the shallow pasta bowl, I thought I might vomit. I kept this nausea to myself. I felt alone, trapped in a tunnel that transported me back to the Atomix Cafe. From pasta bowl to toilet bowl. A red mess. In that moment, I felt both deeply rooted in my body and far, far away. Speechless and immobile. What I wish is that I had used Marisa’s joke as an opening into a conversation about my experience rather than keeping it held inside. I’ve often wondered why I didn’t tell Marisa. Why I felt the need to navigate the troubling memory on my own.
Somehow, I was trained for silence. When I started menstruating, I couldn’t even verbalize it to my mom. I wrote it out on a piece of paper: “I got my period.” Then slid the message to her across the kitchen counter. This moment with Marisa felt similar. Containment and an internalization. A going inwards.
I felt both deeply rooted in my body and far, far away.
Imagine if I had told Marisa in the moment of her placenta joke, “You know, it’s funny you say that, because I can tell you from actual experience that the placenta does in fact look like a piece of onion once expelled from the body.” Imagine I’m able to tell her why I know this. And then, imagine she says, “I’m sorry. I had no idea. I wish you could have told me.” And I say, “Me too.”
Imagine if I had told my mom I was having a miscarriage while in her presence, on that winter night when I was sleeping over because it was too cold to stay at the studio. Imagine if I had told my mom and she surprised me with understanding. Surprised me with care. Surprised me with the knowledge I didn’t have on my own. The knowledge she possessed because she herself had a miscarriage (something I would only find out later). Imagine if I had told her and she said that I need to see a doctor. Just to be safe. Imagine that I could feel safe going to a doctor. Imagine that we didn’t need health insurance to receive affordable healthcare. Imagine that barrier is non-existent. And so, I, uninsured, go to the doctor and this gives me assurance.
It feels safe to keep this story to myself, but now more than ever, I want to share it openly—with my mom, with Marisa, with everyone. It’s a story that feels neither monumental nor minimal—just very much a part of my life. My lived experience of briefly carrying another potential life. My experience of that potential life leaving my body.
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