Every Lunar New Year, Chinese astrology welcomes a new animal into our lives, representing a new year, a new character, a new set of opportunities and challenges for art, writing, and life.
This year Lunar New Year is February 10, ringing in the Year of the Wood Dragon.
While the other eleven animals of the Chinese Zodiac are real creatures, the Dragon alone is extraordinary, a creature of the imagination, unbound from reality. An idea in its purest form, the Dragon can represent, be, and do almost anything.
Dreams loom large under the Dragon, and our visions for “what might be” take hold of us. Our imagined worlds become more vital, more urgent perhaps even than reality. Art takes on a life of its own that can energize or overwhelm.
Wood too, is an artist’s element. The first of the five Chinese elements, Wood represents new beginnings, a child’s mind. It is receptivity, curiosity, and an inexorable thrust towards being. When united with the Dragon it represents propulsive force, endless possibility, an explosive spring after a long winter. With the Wood Dragon our lives may seem to rush ahead of us, our minds not catching up until the Wood Snake arrives next year to contemplate how far we’ve come.
Here is a look into the kind of fortune the Dragon might portend for writers of every zodiac.
This year is a deluge of possibilities. Even as countless projects demand your attention, it is important to slow down and appreciate the little things. Indulge journal entries, pet projects, scenes that make you smile, and little treats.
With both the North Triangle and your Canopy Star (or Arts Star) coming into focus for you this year, you are at the height of your artistic powers. Dream big, and then split those dreams into concrete, manageable steps. It’s a year to move mountains, but the biggest gains start small.
This is a year diligence pays off. The ideas that have been percolating inside you are ready to come to fruition. All it takes is showing up each day. Consider setting a timer for the work you want to get done. Start small and manageable. The first fifteen minutes are the hardest, so start there. Once you complete them you may find yourself ready to tackle more.
When you find your stride don’t be afraid to take risks with your work. Make bold choices, take big swings, shoot for the moon. Cut scenes, upend storylines, push to publish. If you miss you can always pick yourself back up and keep on running.
Wood is the Tiger’s native element, particularly the bold variety expressed this year. When things are going well you will feel unstoppable, eager to make everything perfect. But being too inflexible can make minor setbacks feel like earth-shaking disasters.
It is okay for things to go wrong. When a problem feels unsolvable, consider this may be because the problem is bound to something central to your project. What may seem at first like a problem may actually be an extension of what makes your work unique. Perfection is an illusion, but texture gives you something to say.
As the year of the Water Rabbit ends and your Age Star passes, you are entering a new stage in your life. As we enter the Rabbit’s native element, it is a good time to clear out the old and make way for the new. A sense of curiosity and play is a good guide. What excites you? What do you want to learn, about a character, project, or genre? Follow those you trust. Teachers, friends, favorite authors, favorite books.
The Dragon and Rabbit are often said to clash, as the Rabbit’s tender heart is upset by the Dragon’s bluster. When you feel the world’s edges fit uneven against your own, pay attention to the discomfort. What does it say about the world, or about yourself? There is catharsis and genius alike in naming the little frictions that others overlook.
When a Zodiac reaches their own year, they are said to meet their Age Star again, and enter a new phase of their lives. It is a time of delicate transition, and yet Dragons have little desire to be delicate. Something big is on the horizon. Perhaps you are chasing a new idea, starting a new project, or are about to make a major breakthrough. Consolidate your gains as you make them. Back up your work and then make dramatic cuts and revisions without fear.
The Dragon is also their own Canopy Star. This year it may become easy to lose yourself in your work. Ride the momentum when it feels right, but don’t forget to check in with yourself. Do you need a rest? Food? Water? A friend? The body feeds the mind, and you’d be surprised how some inspiration strikes only when away from your desk.
A Wood year feeds the Snake’s hidden Fire element, and a curious mind can feed your passions. Take stock of all you have achieved. What in your life and process do you really value? Chasing a distant goal can be exciting, but it is how you live from day to day where sustainable happiness lies.
Decide what parts of your process make you feel whole and live by them. Is it working a specific amount, in a specific way, or in a certain location? Is it about an act of play, or justice, or discovery, or expression? How can you feed that which speaks to you? You cannot guarantee your destination, but you can make sure you approve of the journey.
High highs and low lows are the year’s theme. Don’t kick yourself for exhaustion, burnout, or slowing down. Writer’s block is not failure, it is process. Set clear boundaries between work and rest. Perhaps you only write before five pm, or never write on weekends. Setting these restrictions enshrines a time where you can be away from the desk without guilt, and incentivizes making the most of work hours when they arrive.
Don’t be afraid to have fun, waste time, see friends, watch a movie. Cultivating life away from the desk is necessary for life at the desk to be sustainable.
This year you may feel pressure from the people around you. Perhaps they are flourishing, achieving great things, and making you feel doubtful about your own decisions. Or perhaps they are struggling, and leaning on you for support. Remember that your first obligation is to yourself. Take stock of what relationships bring you joy, and which ones make you unhappy. You can decide what you feed, and what you let fall away.
People also make good inspiration if you pay attention. What little joys, little difficulties surround them. What makes these interactions potent? Unique? Universal? These nuances give writing the bite of the real.
As the Monkey and Dragon make two points of the Northern Triad, the Water element is potent for you this year. You may find yourself prepared to let things go. What paragraphs, scenes, character can you cut? Like pruning apples, cutting some lines will let those that remain grow sweeter. When in doubt cut, that way you can see what you miss.
The Northern Triad is also associated with the mind and the hidden. Take this time to trust your subconscious. Let your writing get weird, follow impulses, explore “vibes,” magical realism, scenes or symbols that feel right even if you couldn’t at first explain why. You might surprise yourself.
As the Rooster leaves behind a troublesome Rabbit year, they come into their own in the year of the Dragon.
When paired with the Dragon, the Rooster becomes the Phoenix, symbolic of royalty, femininity, and the sky. With the Dragon’s support the Rooster also creates an abundance of the Metal element. Fourth of the five Chinese elements, Metal is symbolic of division, definitions, boundaries, and management. You can chase this energy with attention to concept and detail. Do line edits. Do revision. Ask yourself, what is this scene, this chapter, this project, really about? You don’t have to answer right away – you might not know until a first draft is done, and maybe not even then. But If you can find the central question of your work, a second draft can be honed with a sharper cutting intent.
The Dragon and Dog stand on opposite ends of the Zodiac wheel in fierce opposition. The Dog is humble while the Dragon is grandiose. The Dog defends boundaries while the Dragon ignores them. In a Dragon year, the Dog’s interests in keeping the world comfortable, secure, and known will come under fire. Your writing may turn messy, spill over its boundaries, or go to raucous, uncomfortable places. Vulnerability and shame may be sources of worry.
Opposition years are a challenge by nature, but they are not inherently bad. Opposing animals have the most to gain if reconciled, representing a full spectrum of experience. If you can allow yourself to write work that embarrasses you, you free yourself from self-imposed shackles. Lean into it, and you might be surprised how many possibilities you did not allow yourself.
You’ve worked hard to arrive where you are today. Let that knowledge carry you forwards, that you’ve earned this, that you have achieved something. You may feel new ambitions stirring this year, desires for accolades or success that didn’t move you before. Hunger in moderation can be good. It is a thrill that can feed passion. Just don’t get so caught up in your goals you lose touch with the work itself and why it is meaningful to you.
If you feel yourself giving in to pressure or despair, take some time to unplug. Forget about the world, and remember what is for you. Write only for yourself. The world will still be there when you get back.
Cultural alienation is the feeling of being disconnected or estranged from one’s own culture or the culture in which one lives. While these stories traverse continents and cultures painting vivid portraits of characters grappling with displacement, loss, and the yearning to belong, each is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. From navigating societal pressures to confronting historical wounds, generational trauma, or their own identity, these characters defy obstacles and forge their own paths to connection, self-discovery and acceptance.
In my novel The Things We Didn’t Know, I portray the journey of Andrea, a young girl from Puerto Rico who moves to the United States. Andrea struggles to reconcile expectations coming from the diverse circles that shape our lives, ranging from school to the dynamics of a traditional Hispanic family living in the midst of an American community. Andrea walks an emotional tightrope—never feeling quite rooted, always adapting to ever-shifting social landscapes. These conflicts are not confined solely to the realm of cultural disparities. They resonate universally with anyone grappling with the displacement that requires us to form multiple layers of identity.
Here are 8 distinct voices explore cultural alienation and the search for belonging:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah is a compelling odyssey portraying the experience of Ifemelu, a Nigerian woman who migrates to the United States in pursuit of education and opportunities. Through her blogging, she addresses pressing issues such as cultural appropriation and the new set of racial dynamics she confronts. But when she returns to Nigeria, Ifemelu feels Americanized and questions her Nigerian identity. As Ifemelu navigates her own sense of self, Adichie offers a striking commentary on the struggles faced by immigrants, the complex nature of personal identity and the evolving landscape of race in today’s interconnected world.
Adichie explores the psychological and emotional burdens that come with alienation while confronting the persistent challenges posed by social expectations. Adichie’s narrative invites readers to reflect on the burden imposed by migration on the individual. This story is a testament to the quest for belonging in more than one place.
Between the lines of the romantic plot outlining T.J. Alexander’s Second Chances in New Port Stephen lies an exploration of overcoming alienation. Eli, a trans man returning to his hometown after a career downturn, faces double-sided estrangement. Not only does he grapple with the societal pressures and internalized doubts surrounding his identity, but he confronts the ghosts of his past in a family that still sees him through the lens of childhood photos lining the walls. This constant reminder of his pre-transition self leaves him feeling invisible.
When Eli runs into his high school sweetheart, Nick, now divorced and with a child, a new bond develops. While Nick grapples with his own societal expectations as an Asian man in a predominantly white community, the couple explore their shared history and a love that bridges the isolation caused by racism and transphobia. This story is a celebration of the power of human connection in the face of alienation. Eli and Nick’s journey leaves you with a renewed sense of hope and the belief that second chances, both personal and romantic, can lead to a brighter tomorrow.
Armando Lucas Correa’s The Night Travelers weaves together the intricate lives of its characters across time and continents, exploring the theme of overcoming generational alienation. The narrative unfolds with Ally’s clandestine interracial romance with Marcus in 1931 Berlin, amid the looming dangers of Nazi ideology. As Ally protects Lilith, her biracial daughter, the novel transforms the fear imposed by a hostile, racist society into a heartfelt narrative of motherhood and survival.
Decades later in Havana, Cuba, Lilith, who escaped Germany as the daughter of a Jewish couple, grapples with the loss of her mother and the shadows of her German heritage. This portrayal of her now even more complex identity accentuates the persistent challenges of alienation. The novel’s trajectory unfolds further when her daughter Nadine reveals a web of familial secrets in New York. Nadine’s journey becomes an example of breaking free from generational trauma and offers a glimmer of hope for future generations through education and self-identification.
In Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light, the delicate balance of beauty and heartache unfolds through the narrative of a seven-year-old girl, Claire Limyè Lanmè, who is aware that her father is trying to give her away. The story explores the alienation experienced by Claire until her disappearance, as her father seeks a better life for his daughter, after his wife’s death.
Danticat’s prose paints a beautiful shimmering coastal setting in Haiti in contrast to the vast distances that separate individuals within a community, capturing both the beauty of the landscape and the profound loneliness that can exist, even in a close-knit community. The novel portrays alienation as both an individual and collective reality and emphasizes the characters’ shared sense of being adrift in search of belonging in a country devastated by poverty and loss.
Reyna Grande’s memoir The Distance Between Us explores what happens when familial bonds are strained by physical and emotional distances. Against the backdrop of the Mexican American border, the narrative reveals the consequences of separation on Grande and her siblings after their parents’ migration to the United States. In Grande’s story, the estranging force of physical distance reduces the essence of familial ties to immeasurable alienation, yearning for connection, acceptance, and understanding amidst adversity. Cultural and linguistic disparities and a relentless struggle for belonging contribute to a heartbreaking sense of isolation throughout the narrative. Grande’s attempts to bridge the emotional chasm within her family becomes a central focus and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. This memoir stands as a moving portrait of the hardships endured by immigrant families that explores separation, belonging, and the negative impact of distance on the human experience.
Xochitl Gonzalez’s Olga Dies Dreaming weaves a narrative that delves into the complexities of defining identity and belonging, family, and the liberation of Puerto Rico from colonialism with Olga Acevedo as its central figure. As Olga maneuvers the duality of her Puerto Rican heritage amidst the setting of New York City, she confronts the weight of familial and societal expectations.
Her mother Blanca, a radical who abandoned Olga and her brother Prieto to liberate Puerto Rico, only communicates through letters. Meanwhile, Prieto struggles to reconcile his homosexuality and political aspirations with the expectations of his family and community. When both Olga and Prieto reconsider their mother’s stance about Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States, they examine their own identity and acknowledge a sense of belonging in the New York Puerto Rican community, dismantling the walls of alienation.
The novel transcends family drama as a social commentary exposing the hidden burdens of shame behind the lack of self-acceptance and the pervasive inequalities within American society. It stands as a testament to the resilience found in discovering one’s voice, breaking free from societal expectations, and embracing the beauty of living one’s unique identity and life.
Okwiri Oduor’s novel Things They Lost is a genre-defying journey that blends magical realism, family history, and the coming-of-age experience. Set in the fictional African town of Mapeli, the story follows twelve-year-old Ayosa as she unravels the haunting threads of her family’s legacy while she longs for her mother Nabumbo, who comes and goes leaving Ayosa alone in a generational home and extreme poverty.
The narrative intertwines beauty and generational trauma when, in her loneliness, Ayosa experiences memories of her ancestors, some of which are unbearably tortuous. Entrapped and lonely, Ayosa’s ability to communicate with spirits living in her attic becomes a bridge to understanding the profound influence of the past on her present. Through her experience we witness strong ancestral connections, female bonds, tortures, disappearances, and massacres that reveal a generational history of oppression and loss. The inclusion of magical realist elements portraying Ayosa’s ability makes this a compelling tale of self-discovery, finding one’s voice and offers the reader an unforgettable portrait of generational trauma.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong delves into the layers of identity resulting after war trauma, and the Vietnamese immigrant experience. Little Dog, the resilient protagonist from Saigon, confronts bullying and rejection in the United States while navigating a life of poverty and the enduring impact the Vietnam War has on his family’s mental well-being. His tenacity to overcome obstacles and gain a positive sense of self radiates through the story. When his family is unable to communicate with the community around them, he takes on the role of family translator forging a connection between both cultures and generations. From then on, his decision to communicate through writing serves as an instrument for self-discovery, leading him to become the first in his family to break societal expectations and attend college, thereby disrupting their cycle of hardship.
Vuong’s poetic narrative interlaces the transformative power of love, underscoring the significance of being acknowledged and accepted. A pivotal moment in Little Dog’s life occurs during his coming out to his mother, where he not only asserts ownership over his life but embarks on a profound exploration of self. The novel portrays an unwavering spirit to persevere while keeping in mind the beauty and brevity of the human experience.
Of all the lies contemporary society runs on, the fiction of the meritocracy may be the most insidious and inescapable. Even those cynical about its promises have no choice but to place their trust in its precepts. If you’re born with the odds stacked against you—whether because of your class, race, gender, or place of origin—what can you do but hope that with enough studying, hard work, networking, and sheer optimism you’ll one day achieve deliverance? And what do you do when you realize the most may not be enough? What new story must you tell yourself then?
My debut novel, Ways and Means, centers on a lower-middle-class finance student who becomes embroiled in a nefarious scheme after he fails to land his dream job in investment banking, and as I was writing it I took inspiration from novels that take a skeptical view of our meritocratic fantasies. In each of these books, characters invariably come to one of two crushing realizations: 1) no matter what they do, they’ll never achieve the success they dreamed of, or 2) even if they do, it won’t bring them the happiness they expected. How these characters respond to that realization varies: some find alternate sources of sustenance and faith, others meet ruin, others simply truck on. But what unites these novels—and what makes them surprising—is that they manage to forge from this disappointment works of startling beauty.
Kapoor’s 2023 novel is billed as an Indian version of TheGodfather, and it offers much to support that comparison: corrupt clans and cronies, indomitable fathers and wayward sons, gruesome bloodshed. But the most trenchant of the novel’s multiple interwoven narratives is that of Ajay, an impoverished young man who becomes the chief servant to the scion of a wealthy crime family. Ajay is rewarded for his reliability and attentiveness with money and access to glamour he never dreamed of. But he soon discovers that the quality that makes him an ideal servant—his loyalty—also makes him an ideal candidate for another role: the fall guy for a wealthier person’s crime.
The End of Eddyby Édouard Louis, translated by Michael Lucey
Those who most ferociously latch on to the promises of the meritocracy are often those most desperate to leave home. That’s the case for the hero of Louis’s autobiographical debut novel, a queer coming-of-age novel set in rural France. Alienated from his community, with its traditional gender roles and idolatry of masculinity, the protagonist, Eddy, works to distinguish himself intellectually in hopes of fleeing to a more welcoming place. And though Eddy succeeds, Louis takes care to illustrate one of the crueler ironies of meritocratic salvation: no matter how far Eddy goes, he’ll never shake off his perverse longing for home, and no matter how much he might have earned his place in a new milieu, he’ll never feel entirely at home there either.
Smith’s novel follows four characters from a lower-middle-class neighborhood in northwest London as they make their way, romantically and professionally, through early adulthood. But it’s the character of Keisha (later she’ll go by Natalie) who occupies the largest portion of the story, inspires Smith’s most daring formal experiments, and illustrates most clearly the crushing alienations of meritocratic yearning. Trained as a lawyer, Natalie builds a life centered on following rules, impressing teachers and colleagues, and adhering to the rigid path of upward mobility: she believes, as Smith puts it, “life was a problem that could be solved by means of professionalization.” But the hollowness of this life eventually eats away at Natalie, driving her to seek out meaning and satisfaction in an increasingly desperate manner.
Millie, the protagonist of Halle Butler’s second novel, is an office temp in Chicago languishing just outside what in corporate America passes for the promised land: permanent, salaried employment. Her resentment—toward her circumstances, toward her colleagues, toward herself—fuels much of the novel’s lacerating inner monologue and telegraphs the hopelessness that even intelligent, capable people feel in our increasingly precarious economy. As Jia Tolentino wrote of the book’s narrator in the New Yorker: “Despite Millie’s acknowledgment that she might strive all her life without ever being happy or doing anything meaningful, striving nonetheless provides the entire grammar of her life.”
At the beginning of Rahman’s 2014 novel the unnamed narrator finds his old university friend, Zafar, in a shocking state. Zafar, once a banker and human rights lawyer, is now emaciated, bedraggled, and apparently broke. From there the book proceeds to tell the story of Zafar’s stunning rise—from poverty in rural Bangladesh to Oxbridge to Wall Street—and even more stunning fall. That story is one of enchantment followed by growing resentment and finally rage: at the ethical horrors of geopolitics and high finance, at the intransigency of a class and racial hierarchy that will never fully accommodate those perceived as outsiders, at the inability of intelligence and success to compensate for the traumas of early deprivation. “Childhood poverty,” Zafar says, “looms over one’s whole life.”
Buying into the promises of the meritocracy also means, for many, taking on a lot of debt. One such indentured dreamer is Jonathan Abernathy, the protagonist of McGhee’s debut novel. In hopes of paying off his staggering loans, Abernathy accepts a job auditing the dreams of American workers and scrubbing the ones liable to produce feelings—anxiety, sadness, longing—that will make them less productive. In this way Abernathy finds himself abetting the very capitalist system that has ground him down. McGhee’s book points to a brutal irony of our contemporary work culture: alleviating our own burdens often entails burdening those who, in another world, might be our class comrades-in-arms.
John Grisham’s 1991 novel may be the classic tale of meritocratic striving. It follows Mitch McDeere, a freshly graduated law student from inauspicious circumstances, as he joins a law firm in Memphis and slowly uncovers its dark secrets. Grisham lavishes attention on the glamorous perks of McDeere’s job to underscore a larger point: the people who lack a safety net, who desire success most desperately, are often the people who find it hardest to challenge wrongdoings in the institutions to which they’ve attached themselves. That McDeere does challenge them—and that he pilfers a vengeful fortune in the process—is part of what makes him an enduring hero.
1998. Lido Cineplex. Cold air, soft seats, the smell of popcorn. My friend Alice and I are both 17 years old and this is the quietest we’ve ever been together.
The audience too has been silent for the last ninety minutes. No whispers, no beeping pagers, no awkward laughter at inappropriate moments. The air is thick with tension. Even the walls are afraid to breathe.
On-screen, a man’s television set switches itself on. Static-ridden footage of an old brick well appears. A woman slowly emerges from it, her waist-length hair black, wet, and shrouding her face. Her long white dress hangs off her disjointed frame. She pulls herself out of the well and makes her way towards the camera. She moves slowly, painfully, hobbling from so many broken bones. Her movements seem unnatural, wrong. The closer she gets to the inside of the screen, the more we’re unsure of how this will end. And then, when she is as close as she can get, she pushes herself through the television screen, into his living room.
It is clear he is going to die. The cinema erupts into screams.
That was the first time I met Sadako Yamamura. The day she found her way into that man’s living room, she found her way into my flesh. The movie ended at 1:00 a.m. Alice came out of the cinema shaking. During the film’s climax, she had rolled herself into a ball and used God’s name in vain a thousand different ways. My own terror, more silent, haunted me persistently for weeks after.
It’s not like I have no tolerance for horror. By the time I met Sadako, I’d gorged my fill of Freddy Kruegers and Chucky dolls—anything Hollywood had to offer that friends could sneak past Singapore censors. Horror, to me, was a subset of comedy—funny, but for all the wrong reasons: the blood that looked inevitably fake, the groan-inducing jump scares, the stop-motion effects that always felt a step out of sync. In fact, we’d ended up watching Hideo Nakata’s Ringu that night precisely because the comedy we’d been planning on seeing was sold out. Internet booking didn’t exist yet and as fate had it, all that was available was some obscure Japanese film that neither of us had heard of.
What I had anticipated when we booked those tickets were jump scares, over-the-top effects, and cheesy music. What I got instead were long silences, vague segues, and lots of unanswered questions. Like Sadako herself, this film did not care for lengthy explanations or audience expectations. The only thing left unambiguous was Sadako’s rage—murderous, indiscriminate, everlasting.
That night, Alice begged me to stay over at her house, as I’d done so many times before. There was a television in her bedroom and she needed company.
I would have, except the first person to die in this movie was a girl at a sleepover.
Sadako taught me that there are limits even to friendship.
A woman slowly emerges, her waist-length hair black, wet, and shrouding her face. She pulls herself out of the well and makes her way towards the camera.
The week after my first encounter with Sadako, I returned to the cinema to watch Ringu again, thinking it would alleviate my fear. In actuality, the only thing this second viewing did was bring my attention to all the terrifying details I’d missed before. Thinking that perhaps the third time would make it better, I returned yet again. With everything I’d missed now magnified, I was high on terror and had to live with the side effects of my bad decisions. Back home, I jumped every time the phone rang. I prickled at every sound that even vaguely resembled static. I avoided looking at reflective surfaces.
It should have been clear to me that there was something besides being a sucker for pain that kept drawing me back into the cinema. Some strange kinship I felt with Sadako. I’d understand in years to come that I’d been investigating my own fear, wanting to know what it was about her that filled me with terror in a way no other movie villain ever had. Even later in life, I would understand that this is where my fascination with monsters—how we create them, why we create them, how what we fear says something about who we are—surfaced into consciousness.
But it would take many a horror movie more for me to make that leap. For the time being, all I knew was that I was swearing off television.
Over two decades since its first release, Ringu arguably remains the film that launched Japanese horror cinema into the international spotlight, spawning one Hollywood remake after another. By the mid- 2000s, South Korean horror and Thai horror had followed suit, and it was through these films that I eventually found my way back to Sadako.
You see, Sadako was a trendsetter. In almost every Asian horror film that made it big after Ringu there lingered a female ghost with long black hair and a long white dress, lurking in some celluloid corner. But watch enough horror from across Asia and you’ll see an even deeper pattern emerge:
In Japan’s Ju-On, Kayako haunts the house in which she and her child were murdered by her husband. In South Korea’s Phone, a woman is haunted by the ghost of the mistress her husband has killed. In Singapore’s The Maid, a domestic worker murdered by her employers returns to avenge her death.
Women being killed. Women refusing to die.
Something kept drawing me back into the cinema. Some strange kinship I felt with Sadako.
I could not bring myself to watch Ringu again, but I plowed through many other films, looking for language for my obsession. And finally, it was Natre, the ghost from Thailand’s Shutter, that taught me why Sadako kept calling me back.
In Shutter, Natre, who disappeared from her college many years before, returns to haunt her ex-boyfriend, Tun, through his photography. She appears in his prints. She materializes in developing solution. She rises from his darkroom sink, which overflows with water. At this point, I have already sworn off television, and as I sit through Shutter, I am pretty sure I am never taking another photograph again.
However, towards the end of the film, something inside me shifts. It is revealed through a flashback that Natre died by suicide. She had been raped by a schoolmate while Tun stood by, watched, and took a photo of the ordeal with the camera she had given him for his birthday. The scene is merciless and I find myself sobbing, brutalized by the sheer reality of it. By the time this information is revealed to us, Natre’s ghost has already driven all the men involved to suicide, while Tun awaits the same fate.
In the film’s climax, Tun stands alone in his apartment, yelling at the air, demanding Natre reveal herself. He takes multiple photos of his empty room with a Polaroid camera, hoping she will appear in the photographs. He does it manically, ridden with anxiety, finally throwing the camera to the floor in frustration when she does not oblige.
It is then that we hear the click of the shutter. A photo emerges. He walks towards the camera, pulls out the picture, and alongside him, we watch it develop. In it, we see him standing. And on his shoulders, like the weight of guilt, sits Natre. Her arms engulf him in a lover’s embrace. He throws the camera to the floor again and struggles to get her off him. But she is persistent and won’t let go. The last we see of him, she is covering his eyes as he stumbles blind through the apartment, eventually tumbling off the ledge of his balcony.
This is where my fascination with monsters—how and why we create them, how what we fear says something about who we are—surfaced into consciousness.The audience screams, and I scream too. Except I find that I am screaming “Yes!” I realize immediately that I’ve changed sides. To me, this is not a plot twist—it is an exercise in victory. Natre, Sadako, all these women—they were victims, not villains. And they’d found a way to survive.
These stories weren’t about seeking revenge. They were about dispensing justice.
Watch enough horror from across Asia and you’ll see an even deeper pattern emerge: Women being killed. Women refusing to die.
Sadako, like her avenging counterparts, treads a thin line between agency and oppression. On the one hand, she is a powerful figure seeking justice on her own terms. On the other, she is only allowed agency in death. The narrative may not have been intended as commentary, but like all film and television, once it is out in the world, it is subject to the context of the world. Sadako is a woman, but also a monster—a heightened version of us dishing out punishment upon a world in which violence against women and people of all marginalized genders often goes unpunished.
This is how Sadako comes into her own: born with psychic powers that her family does not know how to handle. Her father pushes her into a well, leaving her there to die. She remains alive for seven days, hopeless, scared, angry enough for her rage to manifest as a curse, inscribing itself onto a videotape housed in a cabin nearby. The tape sits unmarked, waiting for someone to watch it. Watch it, and you will receive a phone call filled with static, and in seven days, you will die too. She will rise before you, wherever you are, and look upon you from between locks of matted hair. Her mere gaze will cause your heart to stop.
Sadako’s is a story of feminine rage but also a testimony to how that rage has withstood the test of time. Sadako may have crawled her way onscreen in the nineties, but in truth, she is a contemporary expression of a much older archetype. While Hideo Nakata’s Ringu is based on Koji Suzuki’s 1991 novel of the same name, the film’s visual portrayal of Sadako is a clear homage to Oiwa, the vengeful spirit from Yotsuya Kaiden, a famous Japanese ghost story. Written in 1825 as a Kabuki play, it has been restaged across decades, and adapted into film and puppetry numerous times over.
The most obvious allusions to Oiwa are found in two of Ringu’s key scenes. The first is the climax, in which Sadako crawls out of the television set. In Yotsuya Kaidan, Oiwa emerges from a lantern—another object illuminated from within—in a moment so iconic to Japanese storytelling, it has been immortalized in woodblock prints now considered indispensable to Japan’s cultural history.
The second is found in Sadako’s iconic murderous glare, characterized by the camera closing in on a single, bloodshot eye. This references the poison that Oiwa was given by her husband, which injured her left eye, causing it to droop.
These stories weren’t about seeking revenge. They were about dispensing justice.
I’ve always loved how Sadako took the source of Oiwa’s impairment and turned it into the center of her power—the bloodshot eye, still drooping, that can kill with a single glance.
There is always so much talk about the male gaze. Imagine if this was what happened every time the rest of us gazed back.
Like Sadako and all her on-screen sisters, the ghost of Oiwa is not alone in her mythology. Asia, despite its myriad diversity, is fraught, across borders, with feminine monstrosity.
In Indonesia, the Sundel Bolong’s sexual appetites in life result in her perpetual appetite in death. No matter what she eats, it falls out of her stomach through a hole in her back so that she is never full, always hungry, always wanting.
In Japan, the Ubume stands in the pouring rain, infant in arms. She asks you to help her carry her baby. Gallant, you take it, and she disappears. The baby gets heavier and heavier, until you are eventually crushed under its weight.
In India, the Churel tricks you into her lair. You don’t realize that her feet are turned backwards. So when you see her footprints, you run in the opposite direction. Eventually you see her, waiting for you, her teeth sharp, your life short.
In Singapore, we grew up with the Pontianak—the ghost of a woman who dies in childbirth and seeks out revenge in the afterlife. While she originates in Malaysia (and her sister, the Kuntilanak, in Indonesia), versions of her exist in numerous countries across the continent. These women all have different names, but share a broad origin story that is remarkably similar—death in childbirth. In the original folklore, the Pontianak is said to seek out pregnant women or virgin girls whose bodily fluids she consumes. Today, she seeks out men, walking the streets at night by herself. Her pale skin and long dark hair are the epitome of Asian beauty standards, and she seduces these men with ease before transforming into a long-clawed monster who digs into their stomachs and feasts on their insides.
Sadako treads a thin line between agency and oppression. She is a powerful figure seeking justice on her own terms, but she is only allowed agency in death.
I can’t help but notice that in the older stories, written by men, she comes across as a cautionary tale for women, but in newer permutations, written by women, she issues warnings for men to heed: This body is not yours. This flesh is not yours. Beauty not as invitation, but as warning.
Sadako’s cursed videotape comprises several images. These include distorted figures crawling from sea to shore, text that dances across the screen, a strange hooded, pointing figure.
But the image that lingers most in collective imagination is the scene of Sadako’s young mother, looking into a mirror and slowly combing her hair. As you watch her, she notices you. Her mouth curls into a slow, deliberate smile, and she turns to meet your gaze.
Hair—usually long, black, and unruly—is a common motif in Asian horror. It pours out of faucets in deep, dark waves. It descends from the ceiling like a noose. It clogs drains and pipes, blankets children in their sleep, floats limp in cups of tea.
Historically, and as in many other cultures, hair functioned as a mark of status in Japan. The higher in status you were, the more elaborately structured and adorned your hair was likely to be.
For women in particular, hair held additional meaning; it spoke of moral purity. While long and luxurious hair was the epitome of beauty, women seen in public with their hair down were perceived to have “loose” morals or to be “mentally unsound.” In her essay “It’s Alive: Disorderly and Dangerous Hair in Japanese Horror Cinema,” academic Colette Balmain mentions how in households where wives and mistresses lived together, it was believed that jealousy between women took shape in their hair at night, turning strands into serpents that attacked one another while the women themselves slept. Consequently, we might conclude that keeping one’s hair pinned meant keeping the peace. The only time it was culturally acceptable for a woman to have her hair down in front of others was during burial rituals, when she was dead.
Natre, Sadako, all these women—they were victims, not villains. And they’d found a way to survive.
The scene of hair being brushed in Sadako’s video is no accident. In Kabuki theater, extended scenes of hair brushing were once erotically charged. It was in fact an adaptation of Yotsuya Kaidan that became the first piece of Kabuki theater to interrogate this trope.
In the adaptation, Oiwa sits onstage, brushing her hair. But because she has been poisoned, it falls out as she brushes it. Beneath the stage, stagehands pile prop hair onto the floor in front of her from a trapdoor on the stage. Bit by bit, the pile grows thick and grotesque—an abject mass that appears seemingly out of nowhere.
In Ringu, Sadako’s hair too is iconic. It covers her face for most of the film, and is pushed back only when her remains are dug up from the well. When we see her bones emerge, a thick swelling of hair slips off the wet surface of her skull, and sinks into the sludge. Like the well water, it is perfect black—night, coal, sleep, expired stars.
One of Japan’s most famous wells is located on the periphery of Himeji Castle, where a young servant girl named Okiku is said to have lived and worked. In one version of the story, a samurai who was both besotted with and rejected by her, decided to get revenge for her lack of reciprocity. He hid one of the king’s plates, knowing she would be accused of theft and thrown into the dungeon.
Frantic with fear, she looked everywhere for that plate, never finding it. Seeing that she was ripe with desperation, the samurai offered to rescue her from her fate in exchange for her hand in marriage. Despite her despair, she rejected him again. Enraged, he stabbed her with his sword, and threw her body into the castle well.
The well, named after Okiku, still exists. Whether Okiku herself really did is a whole other story. What is tangibly undeniable though, is the hard mesh wire bound tight over the mouth of the well, preventing anyone from falling in.
And preventing anyone from crawling out.
This may come as a surprise, but while 1998’s Sadako pays homage to 1825’s Oiwa, Oiwa herself was based on a real woman of the same name who lived in the 1600s. She was not murdered, not killed by a man, and lived happily into old age her with loving samurai husband. How she inspired centuries of ghost stories about vengeful women remains unclear, but I decided I wanted to meet her anyway.
Oiwa has two homes—both are in Tokyo. One is her grave, where her body lays, housed in Myoko-ji temple. The other is a shrine where she is said to reside—it is built into the garden of an old house in Yotsuya.
I decide to make a pilgrimage to the latter. I’ve read that film and theater directors who remake Yotsuya Kaidan come here to ask permission first. The house-shrine sits amidst residential property, flanked by vibrant red and white banners, concrete sculptures, and welcoming signage. I pay the necessary respects—entering from the left and washing my hands—and approach the heart of the shrine. I place a coin in the offering box, and pull the rope that sounds the heavy brass bell three times.
Oiwa is not the first woman to be killed in a story, then worshipped in real life. And certainly not the first ghost provided with a house to occupy. Spirit houses such as these exist in Japan, Korea, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Malaysia. They straddle various cultures and religions but are all created for the same purpose—to appease spirits that might otherwise cause trouble to the living.
I’m not sure what this says about the relationship between reverence and fear, demonization and deification. What it says about us as people, about how everything we destroy, we eventually worship. But as the deep thrum of the brass bell reverberates through the quiet neighborhood, I call into communion something larger than myself.
Maybe it is Oiwa. Maybe it is Sadako. Maybe it is every woman who has ever been beaten down, and emerged victorious. Maybe I am talking to all of these women. Maybe I am just talking to myself.
It’s been 25 years since Sadako and I first met, and our relationship has gone from strength to strength. I’ve rewatched the original Ringu, along with every sequel, prequel, spin-off, and remake. I’ve read the novel multiple times. I’ve dedicated poems, lectures, entire days to her. I believe I’ve also inherited a little bit of her attitude.
Alice never warmed up to her. Alice and I are no longer friends.
Sadako herself has gone through some changes. Since the demise of VHS, sequels find her emerging from laptop screens and airplane TVs—she refuses to be trapped in time. For a while, I worried that digital technology would submerge her into obsolescence, but she has proved time and again that she cannot be killed.
To survive, you must transform from victim to villain just like she did, and in doing so, must understand her pain.
I realize, of course, that I’ve yet to detail what happens after Sadako crawls out of that man’s television set. How she pours out of it like water from some leaking nightmare, limbs, dress, hair spread across living room floor. How the camera does close-ups on what it knows will repel you—the jagged movements of her broken body, the clumps of hair clinging to her face, the beds of her fingers where her nails used to be before she lost them clawing her way out of a well that became her tomb.
As the man trips over himself trying to escape, she straightens her body, rises above him, and with her famous glare, meets his gaze. Beneath her gaze, her eye the threshold to a grudge dark and unyielding, his heart stops. And when his body is found, his face is frozen in a perpetual scream—a message from beyond that cannot be wiped clean.
Unlike many of her contemporaries, Sadako does not target her revenge specifically at those who’ve wronged her. It is not limited to the small seaside town from which she came. Her wrath is indiscriminate, accusatory. It speaks of our complicity as silent witnesses to her death.
But more important, there is one way to escape her wrath. Even if you chance upon that video. Even if you happen to watch it.
In the twist that ends Ringu, we learn the caveat to Sadako’s curse. If you want to live, you must make a copy of the tape, pass it on to someone else, and make sure they watch it. One life for another, and you will be spared.
This is the loophole that Sadako gives freely. To survive, you must transform from victim to villain just like she did, and in doing so, must understand her pain.
Into a well of your own you go: Who’s the monster now?
An excerpt from Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan
While Carmel was falling in love with Derek O’Toole, Richie was twenty-one and ready to begin his life. Somehow three years had passed since he had left school and to his surprise nobody had made him do anything since the day he walked out of his final exam. He hadn’t made a plan because he wanted to take the summer off to have a good time. When the summer ended he felt no more inclination to do anything than he had before it, so he allowed himself another year to decide on the next move.
In the interim he signed on to the dole and worked cash-in-hand in a few pubs around town when they needed someone for busy periods, and rented a box room in Ballybeg on an informal basis from the older brother of a girl he was seeing. After the girl broke up with him the brother threw him out, sick of his prodigious vomiting and foul-smelling 3 a.m. meals left hardening on the counter, leaving the single box of possessions on the front door step. Following this inconvenience he took the same approach to accommodation as he took to working, taking it up whenever it surfaced but not seeking it with any urgency. In between situations there was always Mayor’s Walk, which was tolerable so long as he used it only for sleep and stayed out of his father’s way as much as possible.
He didn’t know why he had expected an intervention, except that it seemed most everyone else he went to school with had one. Either they had made up their minds to study or train or become an apprentice or their parents had proposed a certain kind of job, in some cases even arranged the interview for them. A few moved far away which was a definitive enough action on its own without also needing a career. The ones who couldn’t find anything and went on the dole like him were making plans to try Dublin and London.
It was so tense in Mayor’s Walk in the final few years of school that all his focus was on the day he could leave and not be under anyone’s control any more, he had never seen beyond that. Nor had anyone broached the subject with him. After a substantial amount of time had passed, Rose would occasionally ask if he had any plans when he called in to the house. She always asked while making the tea or cooking, said it casually as though it was nothing to her either way.
The casualness was not unpleasant, or intended to convey indifference, but because of a natural gulf—an awkward absence of natural authority—that existed between she and Richie because they were not related by blood. This gulf varied in its depth over the years, sometimes feeling hardly present at all, but as he had reached his late teenage years it had shifted into a permanent state of significance, separating the two of them. This estrangement was prodded at and worsened by his father, who would call attention to it at any opportunity. If Rose gave some passing bit of advice, John would reflexively say, What would you know, you’re not his mother, and both Rose and Richie would be embarrassed into silence.
So Rose had not guided him as she surely would Carmel when she graduated. And his father had never brought the subject up except to remind him that when school ended he would be expected to pay rent if he stayed in the house.
His father had, to be fair, assumed a general, blanket stance of apathy toward employment as a concept, ever since he had been forcibly removed from the workforce by a catastrophic injury suffered in the factory before Richie was born. One arm had been crushed to near uselessness, and a network of damaged nerves caused him tolerable but constant discomfort. Perhaps it was because of this he could not bring himself to feign enthusiasm for Richie beginning his years as an employable man. Perhaps he liked to know that his son was of as little material value as he felt himself to be.
The year elapsed and still nothing happened to suggest a course of action. He was surprised that no event had had occurred to shape the future, but not unduly alarmed.
He had always drank with the resourceful enthusiasm of someone afraid it would be taken away at any moment, and he began to realize that was exactly what he had expected to happen—that a plan or circumstance would announce itself in his life to make the way he drank impossible.
He felt a sense of indignance when he began to notice slight physical signs of his abuse—around his nostrils threaded veins were becoming apparent, and the skin around his eyelids was often swollen and a livid corpse-like purple.
How was this possible, when he was only twenty?
His stomach, too, was suffering inordinately for what seemed to him only usual behavior. He shifted restlessly in his bed, the feeling of trapped air migrating around his guts and sometimes suddenly changing tack so that it felt as though it had settled dangerously in his chest.
He wondered could you have a heart attack from constipation and diarrhea, the tension creeping over his heart and around the back of his shoulders, a jagged and precarious net of pain which worsened with every breath he took, so that he could only take small shallow ones which did not move his body at all and he felt that he might lose consciousness.
It did sound worrying, he knew that, but he struggled to feel worried. He was with people every night of the week who drank the same way he did, what made him so different that he was going to die of it? When there was nobody obvious to hand, he walked down to the new clubhouse the bikers had started in a shed off Paddy Brown’s Road, calling themselves the Freewheelers. Of course he did not think yet about the fact that the rotation of people alternated through his own evenings which remained the same, their once-a-week sprees fitting in seamlessly to his full-time pursuit.
But still. Not to worry. Something would make itself known, he assumed, and he would make the most of the leisure now, seeing his friends as much as he liked, long hilarious nights around kitchen tables, the burst of euphoria that came with true, painful laughter was so extreme and powerful that it felt obviously to be the real point of life.
One afternoon in town when he was walking around with a bottle of Lucozade waiting for one of the lads to finish work and meet him, he passed a little store front being renovated in the Apple Market and asked the fellow painting the sign what was coming in.
An Italian restaurant, he said looking pleased. The man who bought it is moving down from Dublin, but he’s from Rome originally he told me.
Richie felt a rare stir of decisiveness and desire and asked if he knew were they looking for staff.
I’d say they must be, come back on Saturday when I’m finishing up and I’ll write down his phone number for you.
He thanked the fellow and walked on feeling warm, wonderful, the glow of volition inside him and rendering the evening ahead rich and meaningful.
Richie had his first shift at Mario’s three weeks later, the day before the grand opening.
Who’s Mario? he asked Bella, the daughter of the owner who was explaining the menu and feeding the new staff little samples in dinky paper cups then demanding they give her three adjectives to describe what they tasted.
Mario is nobody, she sighed, My father thought people would like that name better than any of ours. He’s been called Phil his whole life, which doesn’t exactly sing with Italian glamour.
Why not Bella’s? Richie asked her, this harried, pretty woman in her thirties not wearing a ring.
She laughed. Let’s just say I wasn’t the favored child until very recently, when I was the only one who would move down here to do this, she gestured around at the dangling fairy lights and fake plants they had just festooned the low ceiling with.
Do your brothers and sisters not have any interest in restaurants?
No. My sister is married and has young children to look after and my brothers are interested in having a lot of money and people knowing who they are. Maybe they would have wanted it if it was in Dublin or London or Rome but not down here, she said, and he felt mildly cut.
He didn’t like when people spoke about Waterford as though it wasn’t a real place. It made his lack of momentum feel darker than it usually did. She noticed him turn away and end his curiosity and touched him lightly on his shoulder.
I don’t mean to offend you. I like it just fine here. I think it suits me, and he smiled back at her, wanting to make her like it even more than she did, wanting for things to be a success and her to become the golden child of the family.
The waiters were all given white shirts and waistcoats and green aprons to wear because that was the usual get-up in Italy and he felt pleasure trying it on that evening. He had a room let for eight weeks in Merchant’s Quay and he thought after that he would have enough wages saved to find somewhere more settled, longer-term.
The menu was deliberately crowd-pleasing, almost everyone ordered pizzas and spaghetti bolognese and lasagne, but there was a slightly more challenging special every day which Richie enjoyed hearing about from Bella and tasting. He repeated with fondness her enthusiastic advocation for each one even to families who expressed their forceful disinterest toward him as he spoke, the ravioli filled with squash puree and walnut sauce, the squid and roasted red peppers, the gnocchi made with spinach and goat’s cheese.
Bella had a friend of hers come and help her paint a big mural on one wall of a bountiful table full of food and wine, surrounded by laughing friends touching glasses. Bella wasn’t as good a painter as her friend but Richie could see it was meaningful to her to be a part of it, and he enjoyed seeing the small sliver of tongue poking out of her mouth while she concentrated.
After the first week, having survived his first minor disasters, he began to feel that he was good at what he was doing and that it made sense of him as a person somehow. Bella appreciated him. One evening she came into the kitchen white-faced and said she had accidentally served meat to a man who claimed he was a lifelong vegetarian who had never endured the passing of flesh over his lips before.
Which one? asked Richie, immediately suspicious. She described him, Kevin, a pretentious and pretty boy Richie had gone to school with whose current passion was cultivating an air of long-haired mysticism. He scoffed. Tell him I saw him with his face in a bag of sausage and chips every Saturday night for five years, he told her.
She didn’t, but the knowledge made her laugh, and calmed her down.
Every night was like the beginning of a new play in which he held a peripheral but crucial role.
He was at ease moving around, fluid and intuitive. It was because it felt like a performance, he thought. Every night was like the beginning of a new play in which he held a peripheral but crucial role. There was something extremely soothing in the way he was simultaneously on show and necessarily discreet. It was a situation which addressed the discomfort of his life to this point, the dread of ever being a burden on others and the dread of nobody ever paying attention to him. His fear of other people receded in this specificity, where he had a role to fulfill and information to impart and receive and because he was playing a role he was able to respect himself more than he did at other times, straightening his back and making eye contact and smiling boldly.
Six weeks in, on a Friday evening after service ended he drank three large glasses of leftover wine with Bella and Luke, the nicest chef. He was a gregarious Frenchman who made up for being from the wrong romantic European country with the extravagant smacking sounds of enjoyment he made as he cooked, and a general enthusiasm for bringing new food to this place he had moved to for love and where he had been routinely appalled ever since by the sullenly ugly, limp meals on offer. The three of them gossiped about the other two waiting staff, Deirdre and Thomas, teenagers whom they suspected of recently beginning an affair.
Deirdre is always smiling now, have you noticed that? asked Bella, and it’s ever since we had the night out and the two of them went off together at the end of it.
Maybe she’s just smiling because she loves pasta so much, said Richie, and they laughed and he was pleased.
You love pasta so much, said Luke fondly, reaching over and pinching his cheek, you’re getting nice and fat now.
Hey! said Richie, but he had always enjoyed being teased with obvious affection and he didn’t mind it at all.
No, man, it’s a good thing, said Luke. You looked bad when you first started. Not joking, I asked her if she was sure you were going to keep turning up. But you’re doing so great. My best waiter, no mistakes.
Bella smiled at the two of them dopily, her low tolerance for alcohol sated by her share of the now-empty bottle.
I’m tired. Can you open up in the morning, Rich? Remember we have a birthday lunch booking at midday so get here by half-nine to set up, please. I’ll be here at eleven, and she slid the second set of keys over to him.
When Richie left it was only a little after midnight, and he was exultant in the fine weather and the warmth of his new friendships. He walked down onto the quay and felt his body to be stronger and more useful than before, and a dreamy liquidity beginning in his limbs from what he had drank. It was so lovely to be able to drink only a little bit, he thought. Working at the restaurant had been good for him in that way. He was busy trying to get it right and be present for Bella and the rest of them and hadn’t seen much of his usual crowd, hadn’t drank in that way for a few weeks now. This didn’t feel like a sacrifice because he had a drink with the restaurant staff most nights.
These evenings tended to end with one or more of them yawning compellingly, reminding the rest that they were gathered together because they had worked hard for a long time and that they would do so again tomorrow. There was drunkenness, but not the sort which caused physical intrusions the like of which had troubled him before he started to work there. All of this he reflected upon on his languid stroll, glad and surprised that something so significant could change without any enormous will or effort on his part. He had been right, perhaps, that it hadn’t been himself but only his circumstances which needed shifting. He was so pleased, in fact, so proud of the departure from his old way of being, that it occurred to him he could go and see the usual crowd right that moment, and have some more to drink with them.
He was, as it happened, passing the building where his friend Gary Clancy lived and had hosted drinking sessions every Friday night for the past year, and he stopped and stood outside of the door. He thought for a moment, doing a quick calculation and figured if he got to sleep by three he would be absolutely fine to get to the restaurant for half-nine. Young man, full of health, life, light. He could do anything, do it all.
He was buzzed upstairs and received with a rousing round of whooping and shouts of Here he is, the man himself!, a welcome phrase which had always struck Richie as almost unbearably cheering, that feeling of everyone being happy to see you, telling you the night had been lacking something before your arrival. Sitting around the kitchen table were Clancy and four other fellows he knew to varying degrees, boys he had been to school with, and one older man whom he knew only to see. The man was exotically named Lucien though he was a lifelong local and suspected of giving himself the title. He was also, Richie recalled vaguely, suspected of being gay because he lived alone with two cats and put care into his appearance. This suspicion was overlooked or forgiven though because the appearance he took care with was one of great ferocity, safety pins stuck into all manner of surfaces, and hair spiked into enormous threatening towers. In Camden maybe Lucien would have been nothing remarkable but here the dedication to an image as singular and unusual as this was regarded with a twisted respect. To stand out was so abhorrent and insane that someone who did it fully on purpose was accepted as a mad genius. Richie, who had always despaired of his every variance, could see that it almost didn’t matter what you were—so long as you swore yourself to it with total arrogant pride there was little anyone could do to use it against you.
Two yellow-blonde girls he didn’t know sat on an armchair, spilling limbs over each other and whispering privately, almost primly despite the bottles of sticky cider they were huddled round and the fags with dangling long ash in their hands, occasionally hooting with laughter. One of them looked up at him when he scraped out a chair to join the table, he nodded hello and in response she crossed her eyes very quickly and fully before returning to her conversation, which made him smile. He apologized for not having brought anything to drink.
Not at all, Richie boy, admonished Clancy, and drew out a new bottle of vodka and a two-liter of red lemonade, You probably left this here another time, anyway. Drink up. Where have you been the last while, we missed you.
He enjoyed hearing this, of course he did. He told them about the new job and that he’d been busy settling in, but he’d missed them too. He said this bashfully, but he liked that they were saying these things to each other, it made his being there alright. These were his friends. He tipped his cup toward the other lads and said, Nice to meet you, to Lucien, who winked his approval back as Richie downed his drink in one. They all cheered and a spark of celebration entered the room. Mark—a nice introspective guy who had been derisively nicknamed Dark Mark in school because of his thoughtfulness which sometimes appeared to be moodiness but really wasn’t, not in any bad way—Mark was having a baby with the girl he’d been with since third year in school. He had just found out a week before. They cheers-ed to that again, and Clancy asked him, How does that feel, are you shitting it?
Gary, said one of the girls sharply, so that Richie assumed she was Gary’s girlfriend and did not appreciate the implication that lifelong commitments were something to be avoided.
No, it’s grand, said Mark. It is scary, like, yeah, but I think it will be good craic. I’m one of four and I always thought I’d want the same as that, none of us were ever alone for five minutes but in a nice way, you know, feeling part of the gang.
And Richie thought no, he did not know, couldn’t imagine a feeling like that. He drank again, draining the second cup, feeling it burn into his chest cavity and the bubble of levity and pleasure travel further into his brain.
I’m proud of you Mark, I think you’ll be a smashing dad, said Lucien quietly. He stood up and put on a record, something loud and indecipherable and modern-sounding, exciting.
I don’t know, said Paul, one of the other lads from their year. Wasn’t it Mark who rang Mr Hutchinson that time and told him his son was dead?
There was a moment of quiet while they sorted through the past to clarify the memory and once they had they began to laugh, really, really laugh, until it felt like coming up on drugs and there was no way to escape it. Oh, oh, they cried, wiping tears from their eyes and throwing their heads back, shaking themselves to try and recover.
They had been eleven and it was April Fool’s Day. Their teacher Mr Hutchinson was a friend of one of their fathers, and it was decided for the prank that year they would get his phone number from the father’s address book and call him. Mark was the calmest of them and one of the funniest, so he was chosen, and they pooled their coins at the phone box and dialed the number. It was only as Mr Hutchinson answered that Mark realized they hadn’t actually planned for what to say if he answered, there was no script to follow. Desperately grasping in his mind for anything to fix on, he recalled that Mr Hutchinson had an adult son in Dublin.
Hello? Hello? said Mr Hutchinson.
Hello, sir, said Mark in a gruff disguise voice, and all the rest of them listening instantly dissolved into silent giggles, Mr Hutchinson?
Yes that’s me.
Mr Hutchinson . . . . Panic setting in now, needing to do something, make a big splash, impress everyone, Mr Hutchinson, I’m very sorry to tell you this but your son is dead. Up in Dublin. Your son died.
There was silence on the other end of the phone and surrounding him amongst the gawping faces of his friends. Then he heard a gasp down the line, and weak murmuring sound.
Oh, no, oh, Danny, no, no, please, no.
Mark’s eyes widened and he said in his ordinary voice, No, no, don’t worry Mr Hutchinson, it’s only an April Fool, don’t worry at all, please don’t worry, and slammed the phone down.
He spun round to look at the others, begging them with his eyes to tell him it was going to be okay and he was alright. Richie had his hand over his mouth and was shaking his head side to side involuntarily, trying to go back in time. There was a general sense of appalled shock. Then Paul and another boy had let out a few shrill sniggers, and then the whole lot of them had collapsed with hysterical disbelieving laughter, even Richie. He remembered how it had come flying out of him, out of the depths of his chest like a cough would, hacking and unstoppable. They laughed and laughed at the disgraceful absurdity of it, at how amazingly far Mark had overshot. They knew that it was a dreadful thing, and that they would soon pay for how bad it was, but for the moment they banged and thumped the phone box in their perverse glee, and it was a beautiful thing as well as an ugly one.
They laughed the same way now, ten years later and most of the same lads sitting around that kitchen table. When Richie met the eyes of another of them he started all over again. They reached out blindly for one another’s arms to squeeze for emphasis, and the physical sensation of happiness was so immense that Richie could hardly believe he had almost not come here tonight.
Near 4 a.m. there was an awareness that the drink would be gone before long, Clancy shaking the near-empty bottle as he poured from it.
We’re almost out, boys and girls, he said with a sigh. The room was dense with smoke and good feeling. Richie, could you get a bottle of something from the restaurant do you think?
Richie, vibrantly red in the face already, flushed further and exhaled in a conciliatory way. Ahh, he said, Ahh, I don’t think so. They take the stock all the time.
Clancy put his hand on his heart in a swooning gesture of offence. Of course they do, I’m not suggesting we rob the place, who do you take me for? We’ll get it back to them later today, I’m good for it. It might not be too often we’re all together like this, Mark about to reproduce and all.
It’s only because of this uncivilized country, said Lucien languidly, reclining on the armchair with one of the sleeping girls curled around his shoulders like an enormous drunk cat. When I was in Paris we went out to get bread when the bakeries opened at dawn and bought wine to drink while we queued for it. Only in Ireland do the government treat its people as too incompetent to decide what to do with their bodies.
Richie nodded forcefully despite thinking to himself that this was surely not a quite accurate summary of world politics.
All the same he had to admit that eating a lot of bread and drinking wine sounded an extremely appealing concept in this moment. Maybe there would be bread handy to take at Mario’s as well as wine. The inside of his chest felt hollow and acrid and he wanted to push something soft down his esophagus. He thought also of how good it would feel to have a whole bottle of cool white wine before him. Like vodka, white wine had a quality of bottomless enjoyment. Not only did he have infinite tolerance for consuming them, they also had the capacity to endlessly promise good cheer. So long as there was more of them there was more pleasure to be had. This promise was not exactly a false one. It was true that whatever way they interacted with his brain he could feel no worry or sadness so long as they kept him company. Enough beer made him full and grumpy and red wine made him fall asleep, but there had never so far in his life been a time when he had tired willingly of drinking vodka or white wine, stopping only because he couldn’t get any more.
Before long they had persuaded him that it wasn’t such a big production as he was making it, and they would have the bottles replaced by the end of the day. He did notice that they were bottles plural now rather than singular but this was to be expected. One bottle between them would be gone in a few minutes, if he was going to go all the way there he may as well pick up a few. They were good for it, they weren’t mean lads. For the most part they weren’t short of a few quid. He was only doing this because they couldn’t get it anywhere else.
I’ll come with you, said Lucien, standing and stretching. I need the walk.
A brief absurd flare of alarm as Richie thought of the rumors of him being gay or otherwise odd, then he scolded himself for being judgmental. The streets were empty but strewn with recently abandoned junk food which made him feel a moment of worry as he understood that the things they were doing had ended for the rest of the city.
The night is young, said Lucien, catching his eye and wriggling his brows enigmatically. He was quite handsome beneath the ghostly make-up, a strong big nose and a mouth which stretched so wide it made Richie think of the tragedy and comedy theatre masks.
Is it still night? Richie asked, and began doing the latest and what would turn out to be final set of calculations: If we get back by five I’ll stop drinking at seven and have a shower and then I’ll be fine to get back in to open up. He had stopped kidding himself about sleep now.
There’s no special rule that says it has to be dark when you have a drink, or light when you start work.
Who cares? said Lucien, You decide. All of the things you believe are fixed are just a matter of words. Call them something different and they change. It’s night if we want it to be, because whatever it is, it’s our own to spend. My old man used to obsess over the hours between 8 and 10 p.m., none of us or even my mam were allowed to talk to him then because he said it was the only part of his life that belonged to him. For years I had that too, I believed there was something special and sacred about night-time. And then I grew up a bit, got to see a few things, and I realized it was all a con and a trick to keep people like him in their place. In reality it can be night-time whenever you like—those things we like about night-time, we can have them whenever we like if we just decide to have them. There’s no special rule that says it has to be dark when you have a drink, or light when you start work. Good morning, goodnight, happy Christmas—who cares? Live how you want to, when you want to. That’s the trick.
He had linked Richie’s arm loosely as he spoke which made him feel nervous and luxurious with novelty. They arrived to the restaurant, Lucien singing Christmas songs beneath his breath, light irresistible mania. Richie opened the door and led them toward the storeroom where he picked up two bottles of white wine, feeling relieved by their slender familiar weight. Lucien was picking up more, turning something out of a bag and filling it with red wine.
I don’t think we should take that much, Richie said, mildly.
Relax, kid. It’s only because I don’t drink white wine, said Lucien and shrugged at the perfect and irrefutable logic he had employed.
Richie would not in the future remember a full narrative trajectory from this time onward, only moments and images and the feeling of time dipping in and out haphazardly. When he tried to recall the anxiety he must surely have felt, there was nothing, only smooth absence. For a while, later, this was the focus of his agony: that he couldn’t recall feeling even slightly bothered about what would in a matter of hours fill him with a degree and quantity of shame which he had never withstood before. The mystery of his missing anxiety plagued him in the aftermath, as though there was some moment of transition he could identify if he looked long enough, between the unfeeling person and the feeling one which followed. How could it be, he thought frantically, how could it be that the same situation hours apart could affect him with such wild difference?
But it was true, and there was no mystery to solve. There was no key moment, no switch flipped. He was not repressing a memory of secret panic which he had hidden from Lucien. Lucien had not threatened him with violence, or even with dislike. It was only that the time had come where feelings had ceased and mere sensation remained, and even sensation only at a remove, tickling some phantom limb. He had stood there while Lucien loaded up, and then wandered into the fridge and then the freezer for some reason, wanting something to eat, putting things on the ground, forgetting about them, rifling. One image he retained was of Lucien absurdly leaving the walk-in fridge with a large salami under each arm.
Then it was Lucien with two laden clanking bags of wine on the ground before him, but going back for one more he had seen in the fridge because, he said, it was already open so it would go to waste anyway if they didn’t have it. Out in the dining room as Richie groped for, dropped, and tried to find the keys, Lucien had stood before the mural which Bella and her friends had painted and laughed at it. He said something mildly disparaging, Richie remembered, though he did not remember exactly what—was it that it was bourgeois? Or boring? Or simply bad, badly rendered? The words were lost but he did remember Lucien uncorking the open bottle of red and pouring it into his hands and flicking it and throwing it at the mural, making some joke, Richie laughing at it, there being a feeling of harmless hyperactive fun. He could just about see the image of the mural with splatters of red wine splayed across it.
There was then an image of being back at Clancy’s kitchen table and drawing deeply on the bottle of white wine, which was not even cool as it had been in his thirsty imagination, ash everywhere, the burn in his lungs combined with the acid of the wine deeply satisfying. The girls had gone, he thought. Lucien was putting on more exciting music and was dancing, strutting around the room. Still a feeling of fun, of fuck-what-may-come. There was little concrete after that. Hanging over a toilet, almost-clear vomit. Reaching over and running the shower at full blast to mask the noise. Once he had got it all out, having a ridiculous thought that if they heard the shower run, they would wonder why he hadn’t had a shower. Putting his head under the shower to wet it and make sense of the fact the shower was running. Once he had done that, taking a tube of toothpaste and squirting it into his mouth, putting his mouth to the tap and mixing the two. Collapsing down beside the bath, brain blood pulsing. That for a few minutes and then running the cold tap and shoving his face beneath it. Roaring into the drain to clear his throat. Slapping his face with more water. Going back to the table feeling he had got one over on everyone there, as though they’d never have known what he was doing. Sensation of being annoying, sensation of being pushed into a corner, people laughing. And then nothing until the next day.
In the moment before waking his body was already laden with expansive dread, knowing more than he did. The top part of his chest was so heavy and dense with fright and sorrow that he felt sure he would scream. His pulse thumped disturbingly, erratically, and he put his hand to his throat to touch it, push it back inside of himself. There were too many bad things to think of and he told himself to be calm and slow but it was no use and he sat up on the couch where he lay and put his head in his hands and cried for a few moments. There were two bodies on the other side of the room but they were still and he didn’t wake them with his noises.
He needed to know what time it was but he also badly did not want to know. He would have chosen to remain in his brief suspension if it held any comfort at all or the possibility of returning to oblivious sleep but there was no way to move but forward now, the ignorance as excruciating as the truth would be. He turned on the radio to a low volume and waited until he heard what time it was, just after midday. Some of the worst of the alarm had left his body as soon as he knew how bad it was and that nothing could now be salvaged. The lunch party would be arriving, he thought. He hoped that when Bella had come in it had not been so bad that she would have to close for the whole day. He thought of her having to clean up after him. He thought about how much money it might be that he now owed to her. At least the others would help with that. They weren’t the worst, it wasn’t their fault. It was him. He was the one with the key, the one with that responsibility. She hadn’t given a key to Lucien, had she, only to him. He cringed to think of Lucien and their conversation, their chummy familiarity in the dead night. He wondered about the parts he didn’t remember.
He rubbed his thumb under his eyes and over his cheeks which he felt to be hot and with the small raised bumps beneath the surface which sometimes came. He knew there was no choice but to go there to the restaurant before he sobered up completely and lost his nerve and would hide from it forever. There were the keys to return and he would have to do that or else she would be frightened he would come back again that night and would need to get the locks changed. The idea of himself as a person to be frightened of was so wrong and obscene, and yet he had to credit it. He could imagine how she would feel after this, because it was how he felt too. He had never felt scared of himself before, that he was a suspect person who couldn’t be predicted. He had been sick in the gardens of his friends’ parents’ houses, and kissed girls he had wished he hadn’t, he had been embarrassed plenty, but he had never experienced this depth of shame and total bewilderment at his own actions. He couldn’t think about that now.
Around the corner from Mario’s he hesitated, and took the keys out of his pocket to hold them in his hand like a white flag, so that when she saw him she would know he wasn’t there to make any further trouble. Outside he winced at the window and shaded his eyes, lingering back in the gutter so as not to cause a scene. Elaine and Thomas were near the front by the pizza oven, the two teenage romantics he had been laughing about with Bella not that long ago. They stared at him, not with disgust exactly but with frank and indiscreet interest. Is that what sort of person you are?, their expressions seemed to say. Is that what people can be like?
Luke the chef crossed past them and came out of the door, shutting it firmly behind him.
You get out of here now, man, he told Richie.
No I know, I came because I still had the keys. Is Bella here, can you send her out so I can tell her how sorry I am? And that I’ll pay her for everything? He looked into the window again and saw that there were customers sitting down which gave him a small sense of relief, and he thought he saw Bella’s figure moving in the back.
She won’t want to see you. I’ll take the keys and I’ll make up the bill and make sure you get it. You spoiled a lot of produce too, so it will be a big bill.
Yes, said Richie, almost enjoying the feeling of endless self-loathing reverberating in his chest, glad to have some concrete unpayable debt to focus it on.
Why did you do that? Was it worth it for some party? We had something good between us here and you totally fucked it. There’s no point in begging her for your job by the way, I’ll quit before I let you work here again.
No, no, of course not. No, it wasn’t worth it, and, no, I wouldn’t ask for it back. I understand what I’ve done.
Do you? You really hurt her. This isn’t like some corporation where it doesn’t matter and what you do doesn’t affect anyone. It’s her family, and she decided to trust you. To them, it will be like she did this, like she lost the money.
I’ll pay the money back, said Richie.
Yeah, yeah, a quid a week for a hundred years? With what will you pay it back? How? He sneered, I’ll tell you something now, and it will be the last thing I ever say to you. You want to knock this on the head right now. Today. You don’t want to get into habits. You don’t want to be the old guys you see with piss dried into their pants sitting at the bar every day of their lives who people don’t want to sit near. You’re not cut out for it. Some people are, they can handle it and they can stop when they like to. I can tell by the look of you, you don’t have the energy to live and to keep behaving like this. It will be one or the other, and you don’t have too long to decide which it will be. You’re weak. Weak, weak, weak.
As he repeated this he touched Richie’s shoulder in a way that indicated solace, but then he turned back around and left him alone and that was as far as the comfort would extend, an appeal for Richie to see how weak he really was.
Before I immersed myself in the world of Mt. Everest’s climbers by writing a novel about them,Dixon, Descending, I was full of more judgment than understanding. When I asked friends their thoughts on what could compel someone to climb the world’s highest peak, we often came to the same conclusion: ego. It was a holier-than-thou kind of judgment, one too often echoed on blogs—“Who does this?”—or in newspapers—“Are mountain climbers selfish?” (New York Times, Opinion, April 27, 2019).
Perhaps we dismiss mountaineering’s dangers the way I always dismiss the danger of being eaten by a shark: I don’t swim. I particularly don’t swim in the ocean. That’s how I avoid being eaten by a shark. That’s how I avoid taking seriously the idea of being eaten by a shark. But I’ll never know what it is to rise on a wave, knowing my own graceful strokes can return me safely to shore. I’ll always be a bystander. Once, I stood at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean with a guy who said that when he looked out at the dark sea at night all he saw was death. I knew it would be our last date. Because the ocean’s unknowable vastness filled me with such awe.
I’ve come to feel that way about mountains. Rather, I’ve come to open myself to the enigma of mountain climbing. The idea terrified me, I’ll admit, and I found myself initially viewing the subject the way my long-ago date did: as a tale of the dying. In fact, mountain climbers face the thin veil between life and death. But how many of us live so fully as to skirt that edge? Mountain climbers do it willingly. Not because they want to die, I’ve been told, but because they are alive.
Through books and movies, we gain a close-up view of mountaineering in all its elation and harrowing detail without actually risking death. The best of these books delve into the “why” questions to give us more nuanced accounts of the triumphs and tragedies that so often go hand in hand in the mountains and in the lives of climbers.
Mountains of the Mind: The History of a Fascination by Robert MacFarlane
Mountains of the Mind: The History of a Fascination dives right into the “why” of climbing. Macfarlane excavates society’s attraction to mountains while telling both the historical story of the mountains’ pull and his own personal story of climbing. How, he posits, can the “the beauty and strangeness” of mountains supercede their dangers?
Four Against Everest by Woodrow Wilson Sayre
Woodrow Wilson Sayre, the grandson of President Woodrow Wilson, wrote of his near-fatal 1962 journey on Mt. Everest in Four Against Everest. Sayre said afterwards that he made the trip to show that mountain climbing could be achieved without high-priced expeditions and that success depends only on one’s own abilities, not on social standing or family reputation. Readers will decide whether his journey—during which he faced hunger, abandonment by porters, and a fall into a crevasse—proves his point.
The Mammoth Book of Eyewitness Everest edited by Jon E. Lewis
The Mammoth Book of Eyewitness Everest offers a compelling compendium of climbers’ detailed and often intimate stories, starting with a 1913 account of the first notions that Everest could be climbed, through the 1996 discovery of the remains of George Mallory, who had been lost in the first recognized summit attempt in 1924. Along the way, climbers from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s relate their experiences on the mountain.
In Fragile Edge: A Personal Portrait of Loss on Everest, Maria Coffey shares her perspective as the partner of mountaineer Joe Tasker. From her, we learn what it’s like to be left behind each time a partner leaves on a journey from which he may not return. Even when he does return, he is often changed by the mountain, left brooding and restless. When Joe’s dream of climbing Everest turns deadly, Maria must seek the path forward from regret and grief.
Everest: Reflections from the Top edited by Christine Gee, Garry Weare, and Margaret Gee
Everest: Reflections from the Top, a compilation of stories created to mark the 50th anniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s successful first summit of Everest, offers short but highly personal accounts by climbers. They note their motivations, triumphs, and moments of reckoning—Skip Horner writes, “We suffer alone up there.” This slim book more than any other contributed to my understanding of the “why” of Everest. Climber Doug Scott tells us that “by the time we were above Camp VI, Dougal Haston and I had climbed beyond ego… for a time, I was lifted up above my usual state, being more aware of all and everything.”
An integral part of the climbing experience for Western climbers involves their relationships with the Sherpas. In Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering, anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner lays bare the conundrums presented by Western dependence on Sherpa support in climbing Everest, and on the difficult choices facing the Sherpas who work for them. For instance, many Sherpas believe the mountain to be sacred and the very idea of climbing it violates their beliefs, yet they can earn nearly a year’s wages from one expedition. Are Sherpas ultimately exploited, or is the economic benefit to Sherpa families worth the risk? Can either Westerners or Sherpas fully “cross the cultural divide to form a mutually beneficial working relationship?”
Finally, you can find illumination about the drive to climb mountains and the dilemmas caused for those who must rescue them in a story much closer to home. Andy Hall’s Denali’s Howl is a page-turner with a unique perspective. It follows a 1969 expedition to North America’s highest peak: Denali to locals, Mt. McKinley to much of the country. The writer was the five-year-old son of the head of the park service charged with overseeing the climb as well as the search and rescue mission that ensued. Hall manages to give us fact and perspective without outright judgment. Still, he doesn’t shy away from entertaining questions about the responsibilities of the climbers as well as what can or should be done if they are in need of rescue.
In Saltburn, the backdrops are as mesmerizing and as essential to the plot as the delicate portrayal of the central relationship between Oliver and Felix. The settings are both tight and enclosed, the campus and the country house. These are my favorite settings for novels—discrete locations with groups defined by their relationship to the space: Benefactor, son, heir, student, guest, imposter. In Saltburn, Oliver’s relationship to the house and to the inhabitants keeps shifting as he stays longer.
Saltburn is overtly in conversation with amazing books that feature similarly shifting relationships and refined settings, including Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. The referential nods in the movie are subtle or satisfying—the dinner table scene, the fountains, the teddy bear in the long gallery with “dead rellies.”
But these books below offer a reading experience similar to watching Saltburn: brief glimpses into an obsessive relationship, lush scenes of rich people behaving terribly, and stress as the claustrophobic tension increases over time. These novels explore lengths outsiders will go to survive in worlds of wealth and excess, capture intense and immediate connections forged in desire, and tease out precarious power dynamics that threaten ruin with one misstep, one unfortunate shift.
Alex is staying with the much older Simon at his summer house for weeks before she makes a mistake that lands her a trip to the train station and a one-way ticket back to New York City, where she’s facing eviction. She is determined to stay until Simon’s Labor Day party, where Alex is convinced they will reconcile, and somehow she does. Alex passes as a member of a group of friends renting a house, slips into a country club, and more to grift her way through the wealthy Long Island community. This grift, however, is trying, and makes for propulsive reading.
As college students, Stella and Violet’s different backgrounds were easier to ignore. Violet received a scholarship; Stella’s family name and wealth helped secure her spot, as they would anywhere. But after graduation, when they both move to New York City, Stella remains impulsive and untouchable, while Violet focuses on working hard and climbing the ladder at her news station job. Violet is ambitious and frustrated with Stella’s easy success, particularly her transition on camera. Their friendship suffers as Violet’s resentment mounts, and with this imbalance, she and Stella struggle to remain friends. This book, like Saltburn, begins as a story of an obsessive friendship—before taking a dark turn.
In this novel, Louisa Arceneaux is a scholarship student at the prestigious Wrynn College of Art rooming with Karina Piontek, the daughter of famous art collectors. After a tentative start, Louisa and Karina’s connection deepens through friendship, artwork, and sexual attraction. Then, after an elaborate hoax forces them out of school, Louisa and Karina’s relationship falters and threatens to end completely in the New York City art world. If the nostalgia-filled soundtrack and wardrobe of Saltburn’s mid-aughts setting appealed to you, then this is a must. Angress captures the early 2010s on the elite campus, complete with an ill-conceived Occupy Wall Street protest.
Hal Lancaster is heir to 1,000 acres, a private estate, and a title. But he is adrift in London in his early twenties, conflicted about his privilege and his family. Hal’s friends, lovers, and nights out highlight both the access and excess of the upper-class—London homes and country estates, endless connections to other rich or famous people, and even Hal’s ability to remain in one of the most expensive cities in the world without direction or cash. When his father insists Hal return home for his latest wedding, the lavish celebrations, like the London parties, ring hollow for Hal. Until Hal winds up in the hospital after a shooting incident, which sparks a consuming romance that prompts Hal to consider the root of his discomfort about his privilege and his distance from his family.
Louise has three jobs and a rent-stabilized studio she can barely afford when she meets Lavinia. Although the two become fast friends, the relationship is unbalanced. Lavinia is wealthy and flighty, and Louise can’t resist this entry into a world of excess and privilege and parties. As their relationship intensifies, Louise becomes more entwined in Lavinia’s life and loses track of her own friends, family, and jobs. Burton imbues the novel with a low, persistent threat of violence and ruin throughout that is very similar to the dark undertones of the movie.
After Lena drops out of med school and moves back to her family’s home outside of Boston, she gets a job assisting a wealthy family’s private doctor. Her job mainly involves working out of the family’s Back Bay home and caring for their adult son, Jonathan, but soon Lena begins working the family’s trippy, drug-fueled parties in their mansion in Western Massachusetts home called Arrow’s Edge. These parties, which rival the lush debauchery of Saltburn’s,present Lena with the opportunity to get closer to Audrey, the family’s mysterious and impulsive daughter. They also make Lena reconsider the motives of her employers, suspicious of the physician, and question her role in all of it.
After graduating from Oxford, Luca moves to New York City for a prestigious position at a famous literary magazine that resembles a fictionalized version of The Paris Review. Through the magazine, Luca strikes up an unexpected friendship with a much older couple, Paula and Jason, an artist and a filmmaker. After dinners and days together in New York, Paula and Jason invite Luca to their family’s second home in Maine for the summer. In Maine, Luca becomes further enmeshed in the couple’s complicated relationship until the arrangement comes to a head. This isn’t a thriller, like many of the others on the list. But desire is at the root of the novel, and the allure of Paula, Jason, and their world threatens to upend the life Luca is just beginning to create for himself.
This thriller follows Lyla, her husband Graham, and his mother Margo, who live in mansions next door to each other in the Hollywood hills. This obscenely rich family indulges in ruining the lives of the tenants, as well as lots and lots of Moet. After she causes the game to end in disaster with the last one, Lyla is up. She is tasked with ruining Demi, the latest renter. But Demi, it turns out, isn’t easily manipulated. As the game evolves—or, maybe, devolves—Lyla and Demi scheme and strive to come out on top.
After her best friend from home is murdered, art student Zoe Beech studies abroad in Berlin for an escape and a fresh start. Zoe lives with Hailey, another art student at her school who comes from a well-off family and is determined to find commercial success with her art. When Hailey finds a sublet of a famous thriller writer’s apartment, it seems like it’s too good to be true—or it’s a sign that the term abroad will be the transformative experience for their art and their lives that they’re hoping for. Determined to have an experience worth commemorating, Zoe and Hailey host decadent parties, skip classes, and break the apartment rules. But soon it’s unclear whether the author has really left Berlin, and whether she has really left Zoe and Hailey in the apartment alone. The novel unravels slowly and then all at once, leaving you ready to start over again and follow all the signs you might have missed.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the novel The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones,which will be published by Riverhead on Sep 24, 2024. Preorder the book here.
The newest masterwork from the Nobel Prize winner takes place in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probing the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas.
In September 1913, Mieczysław, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior? Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the surrounding highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds. Someone—or something—seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczysław realize, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.
A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore, and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.
Here is the cover, designed by Lauren Peters-Collaer.
Author Olga Tokarczuk: “My story is clad in the conventions of horror while taking the culture of misogyny to task. But I hope my readers will enjoy its humor, and will have fun getting to the bottom a certain mystery. And that at least once they’ll feel shivers down their spines.”
Designer Lauren Peters-Collaer: “The Empusium is full of incredibly rich imagery, so a great deal of the design process in this case involved pulling images from the text and then combining, juxtaposing, and being inspired by them in a way that might speak to the book and its genre-bending nature. This cover hopes to be both macabre and humorous, and hints at ‘the horrors that lie beneath.’”
Translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones: “Translating this book was a delight—an exotic setting, an intriguing płot, some bizarrely compelling characters, magic mushrooms, mystery, danger and death, all described in exquisite style.”
Across her three books, Donna Hemans’ characters range from Jamaica to America and back again, often in the same story; the men and women who populate her novels, taking children with them or leaving them behind, are immigrants simply trying to make a better life. But there’s always a cost, and many make mistakes along the way.
In River Woman, her first novel, a mother leaves her child behind when she moves to New York; when she returns to Jamaica years later, she doesn’t know whether to trust her own daughter, accused of drowning her own child by jealous villagers. In Hemans’ next book, Tea by the Sea, a father steals away with his infant on some notion that he’s giving the young mother a second chance, instead of leaving her desperate and longing even fifteen years later.
In The House of Plain Truth, Hemans goes back into family history even further. Pearline, its protagonist, leaves New York to retire to Jamaica, both to care for her ailing father and, finally, to return home. Instead, she discovers she needs to go as far back as Cuba, where long-lost siblings may still be living, to unearth family secrets she hadn’t known existed in the first place.
In this way, Hemans, in her third novel, deepens her investigations into the roots of the Jamaican immigrant story—or actually, given the similarities in the immigrant experience among any group not already wealthy, the immigrant story.
Pearline’s father, Rupert, was desperate to make a better life for himself and his family when he moved them to Cuba in 1917. Instead, he returns to Jamaica penniless, and is forced to leave half their children behind.
The book also clarifies a theme that lies beneath all her stories. The House of Plain Truth demonstrates most boldly how blatant capitalism is to blame for the troubles her characters grapple with and sometimes—too often—aren’t able to overcome.
I talked to Hemans about how the personal and political intertwines in fiction in our Zoom interview about this third novel, The House of Plain Truth.
Carole Burns: A key part of this novel comes from your own family history: two of your grandparents moved to Cuba at around the same time Pearline’s father, Rupert, does the same. What made you want to write this novel, and retell your grandparents’ story in some way?
Donna Hemans: On my father’s side of the family, my grandparents both went to Cuba in 1919 to work. They didn’t know each other at that point, but they met and got married there and had several of their children in Cuba before coming back to Jamaica in 1931. As a child, I just knew that they had gone to Cuba. I didn’t know any of the details, any of the history, what their experiences were like. My grandmother died when I was 16 and my grandfather when I was about 19 or 20—at an age when I wasn’t ready to ask the kinds of questions that I would ask now as an adult, and as a writer. And so I wanted to try to understand their experiences and their story.
CB: One of the tragedies in this novel is that the main character Pearline’s parents are forced to leave half their children behind in Cuba because they don’t have the money for everyone to return. Did something like that happen to your family?
DH: No, but there’s a second part of the story: I had also heard that one of my grandmother’s brothers went to Cuba, and never came back to Jamaica. And so I was thinking about what that felt like, just completely losing touch with a family member and especially a sibling without knowing whether they were alive or dead or what their circumstances were. So I wanted to put those two things together and try to build a story around those two ideas.
CB: And then you intensified the story by changing the circumstances from a brother left behind, to three children.
DG: And I needed to figure out why my character wanted to go back to find her siblings. That really was the driving force of the story.
CB: This is your third novel. Why do you suppose you are telling this story now?
DH: Well, I started this story in 2006 or 2007. Throughout the years, I was just trying to find the right way to tell the story. As I started researching and looking at what the experience of Jamaican migrants in Cuba was like, I was really surprised, I had not learned any of that in school. I began to see that people were shipped back, some of them to countries they didn’t originate from. People who were invited in to come and work were then made to feel they were unwanted and they were sent back home. And then the story became clearer. One, why my grandparents left. And also, what could possibly have happened to my grandmother’s brother. He could have gotten caught up in so many things. It’s possible he was killed early on. I don’t know.
CB: It’s a vastly complicated history, of which I was also unaware – some 100,000 Jamaicans migrated to Cuba in the decade starting 1914, and they’re really at the mercy of capitalistic forces. It makes your story completely relevant to today.
DH: Exactly. The funny thing about it is that I had set this book aside and come back to it so many times, but when I picked it up again it was around 2016, right after the election.
CB: After Trump won.
DH: Yes. And this anti-immigrant rhetoric was coming up. What was very clear to me was that every argument being made around 2016 about immigrants and the jobs that they were stealing, certain language being used about the immigrants and the countries that they come from—it was exactly the same as I was seeing in the research from 100 years before. There was nothing any different, nothing original about the arguments that you’re hearing today. It really brings home the point that there are certain groups of people who are always, always trying to find a home in the world. They are moving from one place to another to try to find that place where they belong. And so that’s what I really wanted to hone in on in this story.
CB: That comes across powerfully. And it feels to me that fiction often can tell that story in a much more human way than nonfiction does.
DH: Absolutely. I think the best books are the books that talk about politics or social issues without talking about them—the ones that don’t hit you over the head with it, that undermine the story. You have to do it through the characters.
CB: At the same time, though, I thought that you did editorialize in certain sections of the story — but quite effectively. So, for example, you have Rupert, Pearline’s father, remembering his younger self leaving for Cuba in 1917: “The young man he describes doesn’t understand American economic imperialism, the vast ways in which the United States expands its territories, or how American companies come to dominate the sugar cane estates to the northern coast of Oriente Province. But he knows the companies are advertising for labor, black men from Jamaica and Haiti and Barbados and the small Antillean islands who can cut cane. What Rupert knows is simple. There is work and money.” It’s masterful.
There are certain groups of people who are always, always trying to find a home in the world.
DH: There are things that I knew that Rupert would not have known and even Pearline herself would not have known. And I needed to find a way to say that kind of stuff and to hint at it without it coming directly from them. Though I don’t think of it as editorializing.
CB: It’s providing context.
DH: Right.
CB: Can I ask you about the title? It comes from the name of the Jamaican house that Pauline is hoping to save in Spanish, La Casa de la Pura Verdad. Obviously, she’s trying to uncover the pure truth. But I kept kind of wondering, is there such a thing as plain truth?
DH: I hope so.
CB: Yet the truth is complicated. So what did you mean by “plain truth”?
DH: The unvarnished truth. In probably all of my books so far is this question of, What is truth? There are multiple perspectives to any story, but at the heart of each, there is some kernel of truth. And there is a certain truth at the heart of this story that the children don’t know, that Pearline doesn’t know, and that Rupert just absolutely doesn’t or didn’t want anybody to know. The children grew up with this idea that when they came back to Jamaica, their parents bought this land and built this house.
CB: The House of Plain Truth.
In probably all of my books so far is this question of, What is truth?
DH: Yes. Whereas there is a completely different side to the story. What Pearline has to do is to uncover what is the actual truth of her family’s history in Jamaica. And then, what do you preserve of your history and your heritage? Do you preserve what is the true story? Are you preserving the story that makes you as a family look better or sound better? Do you know? What are the stories that we tell ourselves? And do we always tell the truth, the true story? Or do we tell the stories that will make us look good to our friends and our family? So that’s a part of what I wanted to do here, was get at what do we tell and what do we show. What do we keep to ourselves? And are we really, indeed, telling the truth?
CB: I suppose an important reason Rupert hid the “plain truth” of that family story for so long had to do with his pride. His pride is a really interesting element to the novel. Almost a fatal flaw in a way.
DH: Somewhere in the book, either Pauline or one of her siblings says he was a hard man. And I think that that kind of sums up exactly what he was. He was trying to do his best for his family, but there is doing your best, and then there is taking a stance that doesn’t help everybody else and refusing to budge from that. He’s stubborn. Yet at the very end, he makes the decision to reach out to his children left in Cuba—to find them. That suggests that there was some regret there all along.
CB: Though Rupert dies in the first chapter…
DH: Yeah, I would like to write a book where nobody dies. I haven’t quite gotten there yet.
CB:Yes! And yet the book is infused with him. Rupert haunts the book—both literally, as a guppie, but also through his history. It’s a very sneaky third person. It’s limited to Pearline’s point of view, but you have her imagine Rupert’s memories. We get a lot more of his story than she could technically know.
DH: That was a tricky part. In the initial draft the story was told partly from his perspective after he was dead. Whereas in this version in just Pearline’s point of view, I still wanted to tell a lot of that back story, Pearline was three years old when they left Cuba. This felt like the easiest way to do it, where it was both in and through this haunting where her father is just simply not going to rest until she does what he wants her to do. To her, it’s like she is reliving his experience because her father is so present in her life. And what she knows she has to do is also present in her mind.
CB: Did you look to any particular authors or books as inspiration for that?
DH: Beloved is the closest. That’s one of the things that Toni Morrison did, where the ghost of a child is present throughout the entire book.
CB: That fabulous first line: “124 was spiteful.”
DH: You’re reading Beloved and it’s like this child is living with this family and in this family. You don’t make any distinction between the fact that she is a ghost and the real people.
CB: Can you talk about other influences?
DH: The biggest influence on my career in general is Zora Neale Hurston. As an undergrad, I took an independent study class and a professor had me read Their Eyes Were Watching God. One of the things that I pulled from that book was the way in which she described community and the way she used dialect. Growing up in Jamaica, we were always encouraged not to talk in dialect. You grew up with the sense that, if you used dialect, you were not speaking proper English—it’s tied up with class and education. But here I was reading this book where the dialect just sounded so familiar to me—I felt like I was home. It was a different country, a different place, but it just felt like home. I loved what she had done in that book, the way she had built the community, explained a community. And I hadn’t really been thinking about being a fiction writer, but then, that’s what I wanted to do.
CB: The dialect in your book is terrific. It gives us the characters, it gives us the flavor of the place. And the language itself — the phrases unfamiliar to my ear, but how specifically and imaginatively they capture the world.
DH: One of the things that I keep trying to do when I refer to places in Jamaica is to build that sense of community in the way Hurston does. The places I write about are either the community I grew up in, or communities around that community. In this book, Mount Pleasant, where the House of Plain Truth is located, is maybe four or five miles away from where I grew up. So I keep coming back to that home, to that sense of this community and place that that I knew.
CB: This is your third novel set at least partly in Jamaica. Do you think you’ll ever write a book that isn’t somehow about Jamaica, even if it’s not set there?
One of the things I want to do is write about either the people who were left behind, or the people who returned home.
DH: I don’t know. I’ve thought about that. Some years ago I read that it’s easier to write about a place after you have left it.
CB: A la James Joyce.
DH: I think if I write a story that is set primarily outside of Jamaica, then it probably means that I have left that place. I have tried and every book comes back to Jamaica.
CB: I live in the U.K., but I can’t imagine not setting a novel in America.
DH: Also,so many of the novels from a certain period of time about the Caribbean were about the Caribbean immigrant in another country. One of the things I want to do is write about either the people who were left behind, or the people who returned home. And so with this particular book, I have written about the aspect of returning home. And my first book really was about the child who was left behind. I want to tell a different story, not just talk about immigration from the perspective of the new immigrant in the new country. Who are the people who are left behind? What happens when you return to a country? Can you really go back home?
CB: I also find Rupert and his family are haunted by what you describe as a “legacy of failure.” The family, Pearline especially, is trying to overcome that. And yet I feel frustrated for them, too — it wasn’t Rupert’s fault that he failed, but the fault of the capitalistic system.
DH: I think it’s just a part of the immigrant story. When you go off somewhere to a new country or a new place, you are you’re expected to do well and you’re expected to come back and lift up the next generation. And so Rupert was looking at the men who went to Panama and came back to Jamaica with gold and silk shirts. And he came back to Jamaica from Cuba with not even enough money to book their passage back home and to take all the children. So it wasn’t his fault at all. But it really marked him and he carried with him throughout his entire life this sense of failure. How do they see you back home? Have you achieved something? Have you taken this opportunity and done something with it or have you come to America and failed? I think even today for many immigrants, that’s what it really is about.
I was a reader in a family of runners. With pre-teen grumbles, I reluctantly participated in summer track leagues, always bringing up the rear, always slowing things down, until one day under the blazing Tennessee sun I got my legs moving and earned my first ribbon. My dad puffed me up saying, “You were so fast out there, you could have been a Tigerbelle.”
In my family, the Tigerbelles were legends. Being compared to the elite team made me feel like a winner, even with my 3rd-place yellow ribbon. In that moment, I was a Tigerbelle and I was invincible! There is power in knowing who came before us, whose shoulders we stand on, and how what they did makes our lives better. A seed had been planted, and the Tigerbelles book eventually grew.
The Tigerbelles: Olympic Legends of Tennessee State is the origin story of the team that dominated women’s track for nearly 40 years. Follow each woman as she earns her way to the team and discovers the depths of what she is capable of. Together the Tigerbelles battle Jim Crow laws, racism, poverty, and sexism, and prove to the world that women can run.
Sports stories are the ultimate vehicle for inspiration. By following the athlete’s journey through early morning practices, and powering through the doubts of others, we race with them to the moment when the hours, days, months, and years of dedication pay off with glory. Track programs for girls flourished in the ’80s and ’90s, and women everywhere laced up their sneakers never realizing that the Tigerbelles blazed the trail first. Women’s sports stories do exist, but they are harder to find. Women and girls deserve to see themselves reflected in stories that give them the overwhelming conviction that yes, they can accomplish triumphs in their own lives.
Here are 7 books that will make you laugh, cry, raise your arms high to celebrate hard-earned victories, and make you believe that overcoming the odds is possible. These books look back to the women who dared to defy expectations, and forward to the signs that leveling the playing field in sports and in life is an attainable goal.
The draw of our bodies to movement is often inspired by nature, and this evocative collection of profiles illustrates how profoundly the historical leaders of our country from all races were affected by access, or the lack of, to outdoor spaces and argues why that same access is so critical today. Miles writes, “By thinking and acting outside, these girls who matured into women bent the future of the country toward freedom—for the enslaved, for the colonized, the dispossessed, the sequestered, the suppressed, and the subjugated.”
Track and Basketball were both considered sports that were “for the boys” but New York Timesbestselling author Andrew Maraniss spins a narrative of how wrong that assumption was. Telling the story of Pat Head, Nancy Lieberman, Ann Meyers, and Lusia Harris, this team of underdogs gathered from small colleges throughout the country started US Olympic Basketball for women in 1976, then went on to legendary careers. Coach Billie Moore told her team to “Win this game, and it will change women’s sports in this country for the next twenty-five years.” The only thing she got wrong was the length of time that legacy would last. Over forty-five years and counting later, the WNBA is still charging forward.
Soccer is the dominant sport the world over, but in rural South Africa, women were boxed out of the action. “Mama Beka” pushed against these norms and started a women’s soccer league that is known as the Soccer Grannies. The Grannies became celebrated internationally proving that there is no age limitation to following your dreams and moving your body. Told by soccer-playing mom, Jean Duffy, this story drives home the impact of sports on every level in all parts of the world.
Abandoned as a child with severe physical challenges developed by radiation exposure from Chernobyl, Oksana Masters spent the first seven years of her life traumatized in a Ukrainian orphanage before being adopted by Gay Masters, an American professor. The two spent years in hospitals with corrective surgeries and treatment before Oksana turned her steel determination to survive into fuel to become America’s most decorated Winter Paralympian, medaling in four sports, powered in no small part by her mother’s love.
Shut out of the locker rooms, young Wellesley grad and Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke was constantly missing the quotes that she needed to get the story. Locker Room Talk is the gripping first-hand report of how she took on Major League Baseball and with a ruling by Judge Constance Baker Motley, the nation’s first Black woman on the federal bench, changed the future of sports journalism for women.
Lauren Fleshman grew up with sports, and was an elite runner sponsored by Nike before she shook up the industry, determined to create positive change in the world that she knew so well. Exposing the contradiction of empowerment and exploitation in women’s athletics through her personal experience, Fleshman offers a “rallying cry for reform of a sports landscape that is failing young female athletes.”
Billie Jean King famously fought the Battle of the Sexes in 1973. It was a battle that women had been fighting and continue to fight to this day. Macaela MacKenzie gives that fight the much-needed power of information, leaving no more room for excuses. Interviews with Billie Jean King, Allyson Felix, and Megan Rapinoe illuminate the reality of the sports industry for women. “For every dollar that the NBA’s highest-paid player brings home, the WNBA’s highest-paid player earns just half a cent.” MacKenzie’s sharp journalistic eye draws the necessary parallels between sports and society and proves that women are equal to their male counterparts in skill and the ability to generate revenue, and it’s the industry itself that is leaving billions of dollars in unearned potential on the table.
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