Growing up in Caracas in the ‘90s, I remember seeing a series of posters advertising Venezuela’s most important tourist destinations, such as El Salto Ángel, Canaima National Park, and the Los Roques archipelago. The caption “Venezuela, el secreto mejor guardado del Caribe”—“the best kept secret of the Caribbean”—was written beneath each picture. The message was clear: Despite its breathtaking and diverse landscapes, our country wasn’t as well known or appreciated as other Caribbean destinations. Somehow, we were invisible. Undiscovered.
Perhaps the same holds true for Venezuelan literature today. Although Venezuela was once one of the biggest publishing hubs in Latin America, ours remains one of the least-recognized voices within the region’s rich literary tradition. The reasons for this invisibility are difficult to pinpoint, but they may stem from our country’s long-standing role as an international importer. With oil exports as its main source of income, Venezuela positioned itself as an avid consumer of foreign goods and culture.
In a famous interview, Venezuelan playwright and journalist José Ignacio Cabrujas argued that our internationally oriented tastes made us into global citizens avant la lettre, as we experienced the world’s diversity as if it were our own. However, Cabrujas overlooked the downside: our tendency to neglect our own cultural production. In a sense, Chavismo emerged as a response to this phenomenon—a tragic and catastrophic response.
Now, with more than eight million people—out of a population of roughly thirty million—having fled the country, including many of our writers, we Venezuelans are finally looking inward, albeit from abroad. Most of the short stories that make up The Irreparable, which has just been translated into English for the first time, were written during my first years in Buenos Aires. The following reading list features nine Venezuelan books from the diaspora that are available in English. Each book is devoted to what Honoré de Balzac once called “the intimate history of nations.”
—This list was translated from Spanish to English by Paul Filev
This novel, which won the prestigious Herralde Prize in 2006, before its author permanently left Venezuela for Mexico, explores the metaphor linking an ailing individual with the moral and social decay of the country. Two narratives intertwine within its pages: One follows Javier Miranda, a doctor whose father is suddenly diagnosed with terminal cancer, forcing Miranda to deal with his own profession from the patient’s perspective; the other centers on Ernesto Durán, a local incarnation of Molière’s imaginary invalid, who is tormented by the persistent feeling of being gravely ill. In retrospect, The Sickness can be read as a literary premonition of the long, painful decay of Chavismo—a process that began, ironically, around 2013, with Comandante Hugo Chávez’s own illness and death.
A natural disaster ravages Portugal, destroying the city of Lisbon, and signaling that humanity has entered a dangerous and challenging era. While the world confronts its seemingly imminent doom, Venezuela remains trapped in an endless cycle of poverty, corruption, social unrest, and brutal military repression. Against this backdrop—of a dystopian Portugal and a tragically realistic Venezuela—a literature teacher struggles with his crumbling marriage and an ever-deepening sense of futility. His only hope lies in guiding his young students towards beauty, meaning, and transcendence. Paradoxically, the Portuguese literary tradition becomes his greatest ally in this endeavor. This tradition is embodied by Mr. Moreira, an elderly Portuguese immigrant who fled Salazar’s regime in the mid-20th century and settled in Caracas. Written in Spain, where Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles has lived since 2007, this novel is a meditation on loss, melancholy, and hope.
“Write with strength and clarity / now that no one will read you,” Venezuelan poet Eleonora Requena commands herself in this book of poetry written in Argentina. Her verses—presented in both Spanish and English in this edition, thanks to the work of American-Venezuelan translator Guillermo Parra—grapple with the overwhelming silence that sometimes accompanies emigrant poets to their new homes. For whom shall I write now? Who will read me? What possibility is there for literary dialogue? These are the underlying questions in Requena’s book, to which she seeks answers in Venezuelan and global literary traditions: Alejandro Oliveros, Reinaldo Arenas, and Cesare Pavese respond to her call. The result is an intense and moving collection of short poems from the Venezuelan diaspora.
Alejandra Banca is the youngest author in this reading list. She moved to Spain in 2016 and wrote and published her first short story collection there. From Savagery portrays the feeling of dissatisfaction and bleak prospects faced by Venezuela’s youth. Her characters are trapped in a double bind: poverty and chaos in Venezuela, and false promises of opportunity elsewhere. Written mostly in the first person, this vibrant and ferocious collection of stories explores the tension between what is gained and lost through emigration; precarious work, prostitution, and marginality are juxtaposed with hope, sexual freedom, and the opportunity to honor their painful obligations towards those left behind.
In a very well-known poem by Venezuelan author Eugenio Montejo, the poet dreams of folding the world map like a piece of paper, to bring Iceland and Venezuela together and allow palm trees to spread across Nordic fjords. Decades later, poet, teacher and translator Gina Saraceni makes a similar gesture in her fifth poetry collection, in which the Caribbean and Adriatic Seas converge around the image of her aging parents. A descendant of Italian immigrants to Venezuela—now once again living in Europe—Saraceni’s work remains faithful to Venezuela’s diverse cultural identity, weaving together two traditions in her verses. Venezuelan poet Margara Russotto and European poets Amos Oz and Eugenio Montale find their place in Adriatic. Language, memory, longing, and the role poetry plays in the poet’s life emerge as central themes in this luminous book, written from Saraceni’s new home in Colombia.
Based in New York City since 2011, Venezuelan writer and anthropologist Keila Vall de la Ville explores a universal truth in her first novel: that travel allows for the discovery of unsuspected parts of oneself. She takes this idea to an extreme with Julia, a tenacious mountain climber who journeys across three different continents, pursuing not only mountain summits, but also her own personal transformation. Ultimately, Julia seeks self-acceptance, serenity, and clarity enough to break free from the toxic patterns of her relationships. Within the context of this reading list, however, Keila’s novel offers an entirely different perspective on foreignness: the world becomes the stage for a personal adventure and provides the protagonist with refuge from her family and its burdensome dynamics. An undertone of profound, almost mystical optimism runs through Julia’s realization that “Everything is always beginning.”
Since leaving Venezuela, poet, essayist, and translator Adalber Salas Hernández has lived in the United States, Spain, and now Mexico. His experience abroad may explain why themes of exile, loss, and migration recur throughout his work, and make The Science of Departure a natural exploration for him. Composed of raw, sometimes cacophonous verses, the book attempts to map the transience of human existence from antiquity to present-day Venezuela. The title is a nod to Russian poet Osip Mandelstam—a symbol of artistic resistance to totalitarianism who died in a Soviet gulag—while various poems invoke other persecuted figures, including Federico García Lorca. The book also pays homage to Roman citizens who perished in Pompeii, and even to Salas’ own late father. As the poet writes, “distance is measured not in meters but in vanishings.”
In 2007, Argentine custom officials in Buenos Aires confiscated a briefcase containing nearly $800,000 in undeclared cash belonging to Venezuelan businessman Guido Antonini Wilson. When questioned, Antonini Wilson admitted that the money, drawn from Venezuelan state oil revenues, was intended to finance Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s campaign. The incident quickly became one of the most scandalous international corruption cases linked to Hugo Chávez’s government. Inspired by this real-life story, Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez—a prominent Venezuelan writer who has lived in Spain since the 1990s—wrote a novel blending elements of an international political thriller and a detective story. Briefcases from Caracas serves as evidence of his sharp narrative instincts and provides a meticulous portrayal of Venezuela’s moral decay during the oil prices boom of the early years of Chavismo.
Igor Barreto is the only author on this list that still lives in Venezuela. Nevertheless, his powerful poetry deserves a place in any exploration of contemporary Venezuelan literature. This is particularly evident in this book, in which the poet ponders the essence of exile through a blend of verse and prose. Barreto considers exile’s ties to landscapes and places, to what has vanished and survives only in memory, and to the idea that exile is not limited to physical distance from home. It also encompasses those who feel estranged within their own country, a condition often described as “inner exile” or “insile.” For Barreto, exile is ultimately a spiritual category. His “insile” unfolds in Venezuela’s inland plains, a place that nineteenth-century Venezuelan poet Enriqueta Arvelo Larriva once described as being “blind”—that is, barren, desolate—in her correspondence. Hence the title of the book. Barreto reflects on poetry, painting, and humanity’s alienation from nature, while striving to understand “ . . . the nature of exile, / a river of nothing.”
From ride-hailing to door-to-door delivery apps, labor platforms have created a shining new way for millions across the globe to make a living, offering flexibility, autonomy, and low-entry barriers. These forms of gig work have experienced rapid growth while raising questions around worker protections, job security, loneliness, and the role of technology.
Gig work can be understood as a significant shift away from a standard form of employment, while also being lonelier, riskier, and oftentimes more dangerous—but while the platform economy has only recently taken off, gig work itself isn’t new. The novels below grapple with various forms of gig work across time, spanning from a novel as old as 1890 to 2025’s Booker winning Flesh. These novels give a prismatic view into the everyday lives of gig workers. The authors on this list raise existential, psychological questions, while often staying cool and detached.
Writing about the economics of work is an entangled affair. These books show us the varied relationships people have with money, who gets to make it, and at what cost to themselves.
When Margo discovers she’s pregnant with her English professor’s child, she finds herself needing to drop out of college to bring up the child by herself. Her professor refuses to acknowledge the baby, leaving her with only a small adjustment amount and an NDA. This is when she decides to open an OnlyFans account—it makes sense domestically, logistically, and financially. She works her own hours while making a healthy sum that helps her finance her and her child’s life. Told in a funny, light tone, Margo’s life and pathos come out beautifully in Thorpe’s pen. She is interested in how money works and how the moneyed class behaves with their access to it. Margo is often left in precarious situations, but Thorpe asks more of her character, making her strong and inviolable.
Hungerby Knut Hamsun (1890, translated by George Egerton)
A story from another century about a freelance writer between projects, Hunger brought literary fame to Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun who would go on to win the Nobel in 1920. Written in a stream of consciousness style, Hunger is a wild, manic read that takes us deep into the psychology of the protagonist. He is without money, living from assignment to assignment, and yet lends money to those in need, going hungry himself. He is creative and talented but oftentimes his ideas don’t materialize, leaving him with existential angst. He walks through the city of Oslo in harsh winters, with nothing but a few scraps of clothes on him, a pencil his closest companion. When an editor greenlights an idea or he gets paid for an article, the protagonist is overpowered by delusions of grandeur. On other occasions, hungry, in need of money or shelter, he physically chases after strangers he encounters on the street. Through all of this, he remains in conversation with god, believing that he has been chosen to go through these turmoils.
“There is nothing more personal than doing your job.” This mantra guides the unnamed protagonist of Temporary, who is currently between 23 temp gigs while chasing the ultimate dream of a steady, permanent job. She trusts the temp agency to “knead my résumé into a series of paychecks that constitute a life.” She delivers mail, shines shoes at Grand Central, does high-level window cleaning, stands in place of mannequins in stores, and fills in for the Chairman of the Board of a corporation. In the hands of a lesser writer, these exaggerated, absurdist scenarios might fall flat. But Leichter’s deadpan delivery seethes and stings. Temporary questions the way we work now and how a certain sense of depravity in work has been normalized. Is it even possible to stop working?
The protagonist is Edie, a Black woman in her 20s holding an admin job in a publishing firm. She is poorly paid, watches porn at work, and sleeps with coworkers. She shares her roach infested Bushwick apartment and gets into a relationship with an older, white, married man, Eric, who is in an open relationship. Frustrated with her living condition, Edie writes to her 23-year-old landlord who sells tea on Instagram: “We are all trying to eat.” When Edie loses her job, she starts working for a food delivery startup and finally, unable to afford city rent, moves in with Eric and his family in their suburban house. The novel tells the story about the grind young women have to go through to survive a low-paying job in a city like New York through the lens of race, class, and art, making it a poignant pick that remains fresh.
Ride-share driver Damani is Tamil, queer, and straining to make ends meet in an unnamed North American city. She drives by protests of all kinds throughout the day (and night), unable to attend them, feeling smaller all the same. She endures low wages, lack of inspiration, and endless tiredness in Priya Guns’ debut novel, inspired by Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Rent is always due and electricity bill hardly ever paid on time as Damani drives through these travails aiming to secure more tips, more five-star ratings, more cash. The grind is relentless. For Damani, driving this ride-share, inviting people into a hyper-personal space, and having to deal with passengers is a way of getting a full serving of life experience. That’s when she meets Joelene, an encounter that changes things for good. Your Driver Is Waiting tackles racism, classism, work, and life beyond it—all while satirizing the everyday trials and tribulations that come with her daily work.
Convenience Store Woman was celebrated Japanese writer Sayaka Murata’s first novel to be translated to English. A strange 36-year-old woman, Keiko Furukura, works a rather strange job as a convenience store worker in Japan. She is alienated from the world, friendless and uninterested in dating or having sex. Murata herself worked at a convenience store for nearly eighteen years and brings a matter-of-fact, blithe straightforwardness to her fiction. Refreshing in its insight into work, femininity, and the everyday rigmarole, and told in an elegant, terse, deadpan delivery, the novel perfectly captures the brokenness of convenience store jobs and the way they make or break their workers’ psyche. Keiko eats at the store, wears a uniform, talks in clipped responses, and conducts herself according to the guidelines laid out in the store’s manual. “This is the only way I can be a normal person,” she thinks. This should tell us enough about the place of work in her life and how it shapes her.
Istavan, Flesh’s shy, reticent protagonist, moves through life in search of nothing much. He’s introverted but never not working, often in conversations with others, but never speaks much himself. Instead of looking for his next assignment, work finds him and delivers him to the next stage in life. Through a series of jobs starting from a drug delivery agent to a war soldier to a pub bouncer to a driver to a business owner and back to being a pub bouncer again, Istavan’s life is shown through vignettes of various jobs he holds in different stages of life and how it impacts him. No matter what the life situation, he is forever that lonesome outsider trying to make ends meet. Szalay’s portrait of Istavan’s rags-to-riches life is singular in the way it is told. Szalay often skips the more intense parts of Istavan’s experiences, leaving them to the reader’s imagination. The resultant book is racy, remote, and roiling, capturing the way work dominates the lives of those of us who have nothing to lose because we come from nothing.
“Go West, young man!”—a phrase that looms large in the United States’s history of westward expansion. It’s a history dominated by the displacement of Indigenous peoples, the exploitation and destruction of land, and a drive to claim more, more, always more: more resources, more gold, and more land, but also more control of the stories we tell. Kathleen Boland’s debut novel Scavengers is a funny, sharp joyride that plays within the tropes of the stereotypical Western in order to hold up a mirror to both characters and readers and ask them: Are you so sure about that?
The novel follows buttoned-up Bea, who has just been fired from her job as a junior weather analyst on a commodities trading desk, as she escapes to Salt Lake City. That’s where her mother Christy, who has been “going with the flow” for most of her life, has been living (in an apartment Bea pays for) and, unbeknownst to Bea, participating in an online forum dedicated to a $1 million treasure hunt. Christy is pretty sure she’s close to finding the treasure, and as the hunt comes to a head and takes Bea and Christy to the small town of Mercy, the two find themselves deep in the wilderness, confronting the harshness and beauty of the landscape, and of the choices they’ve made to lead them to this point.
Scavengers has all of the elements you could hope for from a mother-daughter take on the Western adventure: It’s full of vibrant and eccentric characters, madcap hijinks, sizzling suspense, and laugh-out-loud humor. But dig a little deeper and it is, above all else, a deeply thoughtful meditation on the stories we tell ourselves and each other, about the things we value, and about our place in the vast, mysterious, and capricious world we live in. What happens, Scavengers asks, when we start to push at the edges of the stories we’ve always believed? What happens when we’re forced to consider that another story might have been happening this whole time? What sort of reinvention might we experience if we let go of what we thought we knew?
I had the pleasure to talk to Kathleen over Zoom about the West, reinvention, what wilderness is and what it means to us, and how we are always rewriting our stories.
Mary Pappalardo: One thing I loved about this book is that it is unequivocally a story about adventure and more than that, a “go West” adventure that follows two women. This is a genre historically dominated by male perspectives, so I’m curious how you see this book fitting into the history and lineage of that genre?
Kathleen Boland: I think one of the major impetuses for me to write the book, actually, was that—in terms of Utah in particular—I was reading so much incredible nonfiction and poetry about the state, but in terms of fiction, it was kind of just Edward Abbey. I think there’s a lot more to say about it. I was a young woman going to southern Utah and having all these adventures and falling in love with this landscape. And I wanted to know more about what other women thought and felt when they went to this place. I couldn’t find that really, in fiction in particular, so I decided to try to write it myself. I think also—especially in terms of a mother and daughter going West—there’s something to be said about the reinvention . . . that all Westerns kind of stand on. Reinvention happens all the time in terms of being a daughter and in terms of being a mother, and that’s also something I wanted to explore with Bea and Christy. Putting them in this landscape, taking them out of the Northeast and into the desert, it kind of felt like a how else are you going to really stare at yourselves and figure it out kind of thing.
MP: Could you say more about what made you want to write about mothers and daughters? What is so rich about that kind of a relationship that you were drawn to?
Reinvention happens all the time in terms of being a daughter and in terms of being a mother.
KB: As I was going through my twenties I had this experience, which hopefully is common . . . you start realizing that your parents are people too, and they’re not just Mom and Dad, but they have had full lives and full experiences before you were ever born. They have their foibles and idiosyncrasies. I think it’s a process of maturity. Suddenly you’re like, Wow, my mom/my dad is this full person and makes mistakes and wrong choices just as much as I do. And how that impacts not just your view of them, but your relationship with them . . . that was something I was exploring when I first started writing this book. And then I became a mother while editing this book, and that really informed a lot of the backward glance and editing in terms of Christy and how you view your child as they get older. Putting them out in Utah, I think for me, Christy typifies this personality of the adventurer and the explorer. Whereas Bea is very committed to a much more square, stayed, stereotypical life. So what would happen if she is forced to reinvent herself because of her own mistakes? And then they have to go out together. And doing that all in Utah made sense to me because Utah is a fascinating, weird place, but it’s a place where people have always gone seeking for things.
MP: You seem to have a real relationship with that landscape. Could you talk about your relationship to southern Utah, and the West in general?
KB: Like Bea and Christy, I grew up in suburban Connecticut. I left and moved to Colorado after college. Around the same time, my parents, who also grew up in suburban Connecticut, moved to Utah. I would go visit them in Utah, and then I would go and solo hike and backpack around the Escalante Grand Staircase area. That was very formative for me because it was so unlike where I grew up. It was so open and wild and full of possibility, and I was completely enamored in the very stereotypical American West grand heritage. I just wanted to learn everything about this place. As I kept reading and going back there, I wanted to know more and more. I started realizing how weird Utah is. Other places get a lot of attention for being weird (Florida, for instance), but I think there’s a lot to be said for Utah. I think it’s a strange, wonderful place. It’s also a place that has a deep and fraught relationship with wilderness. I just could keep going back there and keep writing about it. You know, I’ve gotten the advice of write about your obsessions, and it was an obsession of mine.
MP: How do you feel about publishing this at a time when we’re seeing attempts to control land enacted as literal policy at local, state, and federal levels? When you started this book, did you think you would be writing a novel that intersects with the political as much as it does?
KB: Utah is really an epicenter for a lot of these conversations about national lands, wilderness, and what does “wild lands” even mean. Interestingly, when I was out there in the 2010s, locally there was a lot going on, especially with the Grand Staircase Escalante area. People were upset about government overreach. They were upset about the designation of it as a national monument. And now you have full senators and the Secretary of the Interior thinking these same things. I think the politics of the place were always of the mind.
Before I got my MFA, I worked on a commodities trading desk, a lot like Bea did. And while I was doing that work, I was always thinking about land use, about extractive industry. That’s what all of my research was about: The impact these things have on these lands and what that can mean. But at the end of the day, any attempts to control the land are just hubris. We can permanently change the land, absolutely. But can you control it? I don’t think so. I think that’s another reason why I talk so much about the weather in the novel, because I see it as on par with trying to control the weather. We can pretend that we do, but at the end of the day, there’s nothing humans can do about the weather. They can change it and influence it—right, climate change—but they can’t predict what will happen. And I am reminded over and over again, whenever I go out into the wilderness, that you can sit in your air conditioned home, have everything climate controlled, have all the food you want. But then if you go out there and you leave that behind, you are very quickly reminded that you are an animal in the world. There’s a lot more going on and forces that you’ll never be able to control once you leave that behind. So, I think the politics were always there. We’re obviously in a time where these things are now of a power and a scale that I don’t think I could have ever anticipated. But these debates were happening back when I was alone hiking through the slot canyons, so I was always thinking about them.
MP: These ideas of wilderness remind me of some of my favorite formal elements of the book: the interludes peppered throughout the novel that drape geological time or non-human perspectives over the narrative that propels the novel. Why did you include those?
KB: A big part is . . . What does it mean to value the land? Who gets to decide what’s valuable?Christy believes the land is only valuable to her to go find this treasure. Bea works on a commodities desk where everything she does is about estimating, projecting, and determining what the land gives in terms of value. Any time I’ve gone out to these spaces in southern Utah, I am immediately reminded that there are so many other ways to live and so many other perspectives in and from these places. I wanted to be sure that throughout this mother-daughter romp, [I showed that] there are real people and beings who live there, and that the desert isn’t the middle of nowhere, it’s not a wasteland. There’s so much life, and life is not only human life, right? I wanted to remind the reader of this and to have that perspective, because at the end of the book, every character is reminded that there is so much going on in this place that has nothing to do with them, has no care for them, and they could only hope extends mercy. There’s so much weirdness and wonderfulness about this part of the country that many people don’t realize or don’t think about or underestimate. And I wanted to do them justice.
MP: You open the book with this meditation on bullshit. You write, “Look, people make shit up all the time. We’re all a bunch of filthy liars. We can lie about everything and we do.” What might authenticity mean in the context of this book, of literature in general, and maybe even just in the cultural moment that this is being published?
KB: I first started writing this book in 2016 and things were definitely changing, but maybe not on the level that they are now. I started the book there as a nod to: It’s fiction. All of this is made up. It was also a nod towards my feelings about the financial industry. Having worked in it . . . there’s so much bullshit that goes on in finance, and a lot of it is wrapped up in jargon and real material power, of course, but it’s still bullshit. It is a real job, what Bea did, to be a weather analyst for a commodities desk. And people are putting sometimes millions of dollars on the line by trying to guess what the weather’s going to be like in a couple of years, which is comedically insane. And that’s something I was thinking about, Do people really realize just how wild and bullshit these things are?
What does it mean to value the land? Who gets to decide what’s valuable?
I was also interested in poking holes in a lot of the presumptions I had about the West when I first went out there, and about what success means. You have Bea on one hand who thinks a way that, for me in suburban Connecticut, a lot of people I knew and even I adhered to. Where this is what success looks like and it’s the only way to do life. And then you have Christy who’s like, Well that’s bullshit. But is her way the right way too?
And then lastly, like I mentioned, the bullshit about the West, the bullshit about places like southern Utah, again, like “middle of nowhere,” or “the desert is a wasteland,” or “nothing lives there or grows there, it’s only good for coal and oil extraction.” These are all bullshit things that we create narratives from and then big decisions. I was always motivated by being like, Are you sure? Is that real?
MP: Can you talk a little about online message boards and the culture of forums that is so essential to this book? This felt like an earlier internet culture that you tapped into. What about that felt right for this?
KB: It’s a part of the internet that I don’t think fully exists anymore. One, it was me riffing off the inspiration of the Forrest Fenn treasure hunt; I knew that there’s this dedicated online community about it. But what I loved is that it was a way to show how many people there are all over the place hoping and wanting the same things. And no matter what, human nature is to find your fellow weirdos, in any way possible. I also wanted to have an homage to all these various forums that I discovered when I was in my late teens and early twenties. But also—and this was true with the Forrest Fenn treasure, three people died looking for that treasure, which is wild and tragic—how you can have an unearned confidence to go out into these places to look for these things. It goes back to what we were talking about before: When you leave “civilization,” or the “creature comforts” of organized society and go into these places, you are quickly reminded that you are depending on a lot of things for a lot of conveniences that do not exist in those areas. So, I wanted to be sure to underline that.
If you refuse to revise, you’re refusing to write.
It goes back to reinvention, the persona you can bring to an earlier internet where you could just be a username on a forum, you could inhabit any persona you want. I think there’s a lot of ego and persona in this forum [in the book], and then as those people become actual lived characters, you start realizing, oh, how far can that reinvention actually go?How much of it is actually bullshit and lies versus actual knowledge?
MP: This started back in your MFA days, and I was curious what the process of revision was like, both turning an MFA thesis into a book, but also what was that exploration process like turning that first version into the final book?
KB: We’ve been talking about reinvention and let me tell you, this book has been reinvented dozens and dozens of times. My thesis was . . . I wouldn’t even say it’s an early draft of this. I would say it’s a distant cousin. I first queried this book when I thought it was done about three years ago. And multiple agents were very generous with their time, but they were all like, The ending sucks. And that was hard to hear, but I kind of gave myself a three-strike rule: When three different people were like, ahhh, but your ending, I had to kind of sit with it, and I completely changed the last 40-50 pages. I just trashed the whole ending and rewrote it. What I learned over the course of that is that, I don’t think you have to kill your darlings. A lot of things that we’ve talked about today are my darlings. But I do think, for me, radical reinvention has to always be on the table. You can keep the characters, you can keep the setting, you can keep your obsessions, but at the end of the day I had to be telling someone a story. And most of the time it was myself. It wasn’t just me putting words on a page for the sake of words on the page. It was, Okay, how do you tell yourself a story that makes sense? And then what does that mean for someone else? I think that was learning how to write a novel and not just a novel-shaped pile of words. So constant reinvention and just a total and complete embrace of revision. Because writers would always [say] the real writing is revision. And it’s unfortunately very true. You have to keep editing yourself and you have to keep revising yourself. And if you refuse to revise, you’re refusing to write.
MP: Reinvention and revision . . .
KB: They’re both painful, necessary, and unavoidable.
I found out my mother was a slut from my best friend, at a bar with my secret Greek boyfriend who was possibly a homosexual and his uptight brother who pretended to know nothing of our affair. I was high on myself that evening. It was a buzz I got rarely, the way somebody who hardly ever drinks gets plowed after one sip. At eighteen, I had progressed from being a girl who never attracted much attention, to a woman who never attracted much attention—so this kind of evening, featuring me as the heroine of an illicit liaison, flanked by single, sexless friends who suspected but could not confirm my “other life,” made me feel like a tingly imposter with all eyes upon me.
I was dancing, I remember that. My best friend, Sera, and my lover, Alex, were dancing with me—not with each other, or alone, but each trying to be my partner. Sera was fiercely jealous of Alex, not because she was either attracted to him or because she didn’t like him, but simply because he claimed my attention, and she was not accustomed to having to compete. She was used to being the flower around which all the bees buzzed; used to feeling magnanimous for allowing me to be the Queen Bee fed of her charm, wit, and loyalties on a priority basis, while others had to work hard. Alex’s older brother, Yannis, was hot for Sera, but this was of little consequence since he was a prematurely balding, stoop-spined twenty-two-year-old, who worked at their father’s diner fifty hours per week, lived above the store, and had skin the color of flour-coated dough. If you yelled to him, “Hey, dude, where’d you put the beer?” he would reply in a Spock-like voice, “I believe it is in the vehicle.” He was weird, and while marginally sexy in a dark, mortician kind of way, definitely not Sera’s type.
Sera and I were fond of bars. Though I was not prone to getting drunk on my own sexual power (even the phrase seems absurd), I was quite known for getting inebriated on just about anything else. We’d had fake IDs since age sixteen, but we’d started drinking when we were twelve, stealing from my mother’s bottles and picking up an extra pack of Benson & Hedges when she sent us to the store to buy hers. We were not “fast girls”—Sera was a virgin, and Alex was my first lover—but like many young women who came of age in the mid-1980s, we were heavily into partying, dancing, dressing to the nines even to sit around at McDonald’s or study hall, and doing “everything but” with guys we picked up at parties, since dating per se (the way Sera’s mother described it at least) did not much exist among our crowd. You made out once, and then you either automatically became boyfriend-girlfriend (which did not necessarily involve dates), or you carefully ignored each other for the remainder of your teenaged life.
“I’ll stop the world and melt with you,” Sera sang, shimmying her shoulders on the dance floor. Alex had told me once that he could tell she’d be good in bed because of the way she moved her shoulders when she danced. She was uninhibited, he said; he could tell. Since I was the first girl he’d ever slept with, I was unsure what made him such the connoisseur but felt both oddly proud of Sera and flattered that he might be trying to make me jealous. “There’s nothing you and I won’t do!” She pointed at me and threw her arm around me—this song was laden with significance for us as it had played constantly in the discos during our senior trip to the Bahamas a few months prior. But my time in the Bahamas had been spent stealing away from my friends to sneak to Alex’s room—he had even sprung for a single so we could be alone—and that Sera didn’t know it made me feel treasonous to both of them, no longer giddy with my wriggling, sex-kitten abandon. So, I stiffened, drew my arm away.
I don’t remember the name of the bar. There were so many in those days. I don’t remember what Sera and I were talking about, or how talking was even possible in the midst of her singing and competing with Alex for my dancing attentions (funny since I was not a very good dancer; inhibited, I guess you could say), but somehow we got from point A to point B. Point A being that Sera suspected I was “totally in love with” Alex—something in her tone made me bristle as if wrongly accused—and point B being that she did not want to see me make the same mistakes my mother had. “I don’t want to see you turn into your mother,” was what she said, by which I thought she meant divorced. I figured she did not want me to marry Alex because she feared he would divorce me due to his family’s disapproval. Though I’d never discussed this worry with Sera, I assumed that, as usual, she had read my mind. “Oh, we’re just fooling around,” I laughed, trying to sound worldly and laissez-faire to put her off. But Sera’s pointed face puckered like I was something she had bitten into that had gone bad. “Emily,” she said, somber amid the music, “that’s exactly what I mean.”
My mother was popular. She had me when she was twenty, so when I was ten years old and she was thirty, she still had girlfriends—all single or divorced—who came over and smoked Benson & Hedges at our kitchen table, wearing silk blouses that revealed tan décolletage. They had bouncy, feathered hair like Charlie’s Angels, long fingernails, numerous shiny gold chains, and sometimes three rings on one finger. My mother got us a discount on our rent from Tony Guidubaldi, our middle-aged, married landlord, who also had a plumbing business and more money than most of the men in the neighborhood, even the mobsters. She knew all the bartenders; she never had to pay for drinks, her friends teased. I was proud of my mother. My father had been a heroin addict and car thief. I had a dim memory of watching him shoot up, but my mother said he never did that in front of me and that I must be imagining it based on something I saw in a movie. Mom kicked him out when I was three, and she heard he went to jail shortly afterward. Neither of us ever saw him again. My mother was like the women on the popular 1970s sitcoms: Rhoda, Alice, One Day at a Time. Divorced, independent, spunky. She made Sera’s parents, who were only a decade older than Mom, seem about a hundred years old.
Mom was initially upset about Sera, who, when we first met at ten, was bookish and fat. While we spent most of our time in my bedroom playing elaborate imaginary games that involved things like Charlie’s Angels living behind my wall and Marie Osmond secretly being my mother, Mom surveyed with anxiety out the picture window of our ground-floor apartment all the cool girls of the neighborhood, smoking their Newports and wearing their Italian jackets with red stars around their last names, emblazoned on the back. These girls, some only a couple years older than I, looked like mini versions of my mother’s friends, and Mom ached for me to be one of them so I could have a good life. She encouraged me to dump Sera, saying I would look fat and nerdy by association (though I was a stick and didn’t read much), but it was no use. I loved Sera with an intensity to which both my mother and I were unaccustomed—with the intensity Sera would later inspire in all our high school friends once she was no longer fat or buck-toothed or frizzy-haired, although still bookish, which had somehow become acceptable and even made her look a little like a rebel.
Sera’s family had bookshelves with The Brothers Karamazov and The House of Mirth shoved alongside photo books of Paris with titillating titles like Love on the Left Bank. Mom kept her Jackie Collins and Harold Robbins novels in a messy pile on her dresser and lent them to her friends when she was finished and never asked for them back. Sera’s parents were fat and unpopular, too, but nicer to kids than any of the popular people I knew. They ate ice cream: there were always eight kinds in the house. Mom never had anything in our fridge except her unsweetened sun tea, which guests weren’t allowed to touch. When Sera slept over, her parents didn’t understand to feed her before she came (it must have been inconceivable to her father, the cook, that his bella figlia mia, Serafina, would not be greeted at the door with a meatball or a cannoli), so we had to order pizza, if Mom could afford it that week.
Mom stopped going out when she got breast cancer my sophomore year. And although by then she had come to like Sera well enough, remarking constantly on how thin and cute she had become (as though she had not seen her in four years, instead of almost every day), once she got sick she began disliking Sera for a different reason. Now Sera was too popular—dragging me to parties every weekend, when Mom could see full well, judging by the fact that the phone rarely rang for me unless it was Sera, that I was invited by virtue of our friendship and not on my own merit. Having a daughter in high social demand loses a significant amount of cachet when you are dropping weight and in pain and have lost one of your breasts. When you are sick, you want your children to be hopeless nerds who have nothing better to do than sit at home with you. Mom was jealous, though when I told Sera’s mother that in passing, she winced like I’d smacked myself in the face and said, “Mothers shouldn’t be jealous of their children’s lives,” as though Mom wasn’t ill and deserving of any special consideration. As though she’d been wanting to say something like that for a long time—even when Mom had firm, perky boobs. After that, I didn’t like Sera’s parents as well anymore.
My mother assumed Alex was my boyfriend because he took me to fancy places for dinner, like Oprah Winfrey’s new restaurant, The Eccentric, and I never had to bring any money. No variation of my “we’re just friends” speech could convince her. I’d been waiting tables at Alex’s family’s diner since January, and several times Mom had come in and run into his parents. Each time my heart throbbed with horror that she might insinuate something about “our lovesick kids,” accompanied by a lewd wink or some other horrible sign. Then Alex’s father would fire me, and I wasn’t entirely certain that if I didn’t see Alex at work every day, our relationship would long survive. (We were both beginning classes at UIC in less than a month, but all Alex’s Greek friends would be there, too, opting to stay close to their clan. I obsessed: what excuse would we make to even associate?) But each time Mom dropped by, she was quiet, almost unrecognizably demure. I’d taken my job to supplement her losses when she started taking so much time off work. Maybe she felt shamed, like Alex’s parents were giving her charity. Mom was on disability now; I made more money at the diner than she did off her checks.
I fell in love with Alex right away. I’d noticed him even before, in the halls at school, but he hung out with the Greek people speaking Greek and didn’t listen to the Violent Femmes or wear black vintage clothing or swallow speed between classes and drink beer out of McDonald’s Coke cups. The Greeks were as foreign to us as the Amish—though once I knew them, I realized they only listened to dance music instead of alternative, wore shiny, tight clothing Sera’s crowd considered tacky, and drank mixed drinks at sponsored Greek dances without needing fake IDs. Alex had no qualms about his Americanized Italian girl employee hanging around his Greek friends, but we had to hide our romance in case they told his father. We never held hands in public or made out by our lockers like some couples. To compensate for the lack of visible drama, I wrote him long, moony letters in class declaring my undying devotion and calling us “star-crossed lovers the world aims to keep apart.” When he visited Greece after graduation, I sent him a bottle of Chicago rain, and later, my dishwater-brown ponytail wrapped in a blue ribbon when I got my hair bobbed to surprise him. Alex acted pleased by my new hairdo, but Yannis said the ponytail was creepy like Fatal Attraction and had scared his aunts, who apparently had no qualms about opening their seventeen-year-old nephew’s mail.
This had been going on for six months.
You may be wondering what kind of a person Sera was, that she would tell me, her best friend, that my cancer-ridden mother was a slut. You may be assuming that she said it in anger, out of jealousy that she did not have a boyfriend, that she was still a virgin, that I was leaving her behind. And on some level, I guess all of these deductions would be true. But on a more primal level, Sera’s motivation had little to do with guys or even teen-chick competition. She purposely upset me so that she could comfort me. She did it because that was what she knew how to do—was what she did—and, in retrospect, was why so many people loved her. She was the one who would point out that your boyfriend was probably cheating on you and then take your phone calls four times a night and listen to you cry without ever tiring of your idiocy. She would play matchmaker between stocky, desperate girls and their hot, football-player crushes, and when things went wrong and the girls got burned, Sera would pick up the pieces. Sera would disguise her voice and call your mother pretending to be a proper adult for whose child you babysat, in an earnest attempt to enable you to go out on Saturday night, and then when the plot was ultimately foiled, she would scheme with you about how to break out of your house and concur that your mother was a bitch prison warden. She would get you high and then nurse you through a bad trip. Sera was everybody’s mother, but a Mephistopheles of a mother, honing in on and somehow catering to your darker side and secret fears or desires.
You may be wondering what kind of a person Sera was, that she would tell me, her best friend, that my cancer-ridden mother was a slut.
Oh, don’t think we weren’t on to her. Behind her back—and to her face—we all agreed she was manipulative, controlling. But teenagers are notoriously bad listeners, fickle hearted, and by and large fairly stupid about the workings of the human mind, or even about how to forge a school absence note that actually looked and read like it was penned by a fifty-year-old. She was a rare commodity we could not do without, and we did not, really, mind the dramas she stirred up. We liked to be the center of attention, and Sera could make you feel like you were the center of her world—even if it turned out you were one of ten people to call her that night, and you noticed that she rarely called you. Soon she would be majoring in psychology, but she had been our shrink for years, and much later, in therapy myself, I would see that, like all great analysts, she had a certain ruthless immunity to other people’s pain, just as a seasoned surgeon fails to gag when slicing through flesh and yellowed, bulbous fat to the blood and guts beneath. She was fascinated by being needed—by other people’s capacity for need. That was her fix, her need, and while I had not really considered the implications of my failing to confide in her about Alex—when being confided in was her prime vocation—I knew that my need for her was crucial to our relationship. She was the rescuer, and I often needed saving: from my mother’s stronger will; from the advances of scary asshole boys; from term papers on books I didn’t really grasp; from my future without direction. And now from the jaws of my mother’s looming death, which truly was inevitable, we all saw. Sera and I had been friends for eight years, and like a married couple, we had our patterns. She would slice open my skin and fat and stir around my guts, and then she would stitch me back together. And I didn’t mind, really. My mother had never been that interested in what went on under my skin—nobody had, even Alex. Her efforts made me feel loved.
“Before my dad opened the restaurant, when he was still tending bar at Cagney’s, he said your mother slept with every regular at the bar and used to hit on him all the time. She had no pride, he said. She’d go with married guys just for buying her a drink. I don’t want to see you like that with Alex, just because he has money, just because he’s all Oh-I’ll-Take-You-To-My-Condo-In-Athens or whatever. He’ll never admit he’s even dating you—he’s totally going to marry some tacky Greek bitch with big hair—if he’s even straight! Can’t you see he’s just using you?”
And I could. I could. I could have fallen right into her waiting arms.
But here is what happened instead: I became hysterical.
In the middle of the dance floor, while the Violent Femmes intoned, “One, one, one ’cause you left me,” I felt my face crumple into a grimace and whines well up between my throat glands. This is what I saw: my father, in a dark corner of the bedroom I would later know only as Mom’s, a strap around his arm, tapping, tapping. Then, the arm flying back, strap flailing, as he smacked my mother’s face. Some memories are fake: I know. I’ve had flashbacks of various grisly accidents I could never have experienced without being killed: cars plummeting off cliffs and the feeling of free-falling, the claustrophobia of chaos in a burning plane. Other memories verge on dream, like lying in my twin bed at night listening to the radio for so long that the Top 40 station turned into the religious station, muffled voices from my mother’s room, the sound of something pounding the wall rhythmically, the squeaking of an angry bed . . . I knew.
Once, I’d even intruded. Once, when I was old enough to know what sex was but young enough to still think it could not apply to my mother—once, knowing Sera got to sleep with her parents when she had a bad dream—I stirred in bed, plotting, gathering nerve, then scuttled across the dark kitchen, conscious of the fact that roaches scurried out of my way, still frightened of me after all the years we’d lived side by side. I had a nightmare, I would say to my mother, and wait for her to invite me into her wide, white-sheeted bed, rumpled with the smooth cool skin of her. I had the nightmare all planned just in case she asked: Satan lived behind my wall and I was going to have to marry him. But outside her door, I hesitated; I was aware of hunger scraping my stomach, but there was no food in the apartment. I had to pee, but I rarely used the bathroom at night because I didn’t like the sight of bugs scurrying when I turned on the light and shocked them. “Mom,” I whispered. “Mommy.”
An arm on my shoulder. I whirled around, terrified, as though one of the roaches had grown to monster size—I yelped. But it was only Tony Guidubaldi, in my mother’s striped terry cloth robe, his hand circling my shoulder blade like a broken wing he hoped he could repair. “Whatsa matter, babe?” he asked. “You have a bad dream? You lookin’ for your ma?” But I burst away and ran the few steps back to my room, hopping into my sweat-sticky bed, listening to the caller on the radio say, I was saved seven years ago but my son . . . I waited for my mother to come and find out what was wrong—she must have heard me in the hall—but she never arrived. In the morning, Tony Guidubaldi was gone, and after that Mom started letting me spend weekends with Sera. Her parents took us on long drives to the Michigan Dunes, cruising in their green Nova for quaint coffee shops in Cherry Valley, where one could obtain the world’s best apple pie. Years later, I said to my mother, “When you were dating Tony Guidubaldi,” and she said, “Don’t be crazy. We never dated—he’s married. We were just good friends.”
There are some memories that come from a kind of archetype of human suffering: the fear of falling; the hopelessness of trapped limbs thrashing everywhere in a dark, confined space; the itching sting of fire. I went through a stage where I loved all the made-for-TV junkie movies, imagining each addict was my father, and maybe, maybe I have transposed his image, his strap, his slap, on a picture I saw long ago: just actors playing a part. Not my father. Not my mother’s face. There are memories that do not belong to us, no matter how real they seem. But for a week, Tony Guidubaldi’s watch sat on my mother’s bureau, and the following weekend, it just disappeared. There are memories that will always be ours, no matter how hard we will them to go away.
Sera had chased me to the bathroom, where I was leaning, weeping over a sink like I might throw up. “Emmy,” she pleaded, “it’s no big deal. So what about your mom? She’s not like that anymore, and you’re not her—for God’s sake, you’re a virgin—”
“I’ve been screwing Alex for half a year!” I screamed. “We go at it everywhere—parking lots at night, the bathroom at work the minute Yannis goes on an errand, the elevator at UIC after orientation. You have no idea—you don’t know anything about me!”
“Oh, you’re lying just to piss me off,” she said rationally. “You’d never do that; you’re totally scared of guys. Besides, we made a pact. You swore.”
“Duh,” I said. “I fucking lied.”
Even after she’d torn out of the bathroom, I lingered, sniveling and dwelling on my misery. I was just like my mother, who was dying alone at thirty-nine, jobless in a roach-infested apartment we could only afford because she’d boned the landlord for years, along with every other neighborhood asshole. None of them came around now. None of them would probably even show up at her wake, though maybe I’d get it for free if she’d fucked any of the Rizzis who owned the funeral parlor. I would spend my college years letting Alex buy me things, shaking my shoulders on dance floors trying to be somebody else while poor Yannis jerked off nights thinking about my tits, and then Alex would marry some Greek girl just like Sera predicted, or maybe he’d come out of the closet someday, but still I’d be kicked to the side of the road as an obstruction to his Athenian pursuit of tight boy ass. I was the world’s biggest loser; I would believe anything; the first time I made a move without Sera and look what I did. I was a slut, and my mother was worse than a slut. My mother was already dead.
Back near the bar, Sera and Alex were arguing. I approached them warily, like a tired mother having to break up the public spats of her annoying children one time too many. Alex grabbed my arm when he saw me. He was a lanky, ethereal boy with fine features, too much fashion sense about women’s clothing, and a soft, sweet voice; I had never seen him angry before. “How could you tell her about us?” he hissed in my face. “She’s the biggest gossip in the whole school. We might as well go have sex in front of my dad!”
Sera pushed his chest. “Who do you think you are, Conan the Barbarian? Let go of her!”
“Mind your own business,” Alex whined like a baby. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough?”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be a dork. I’m not going to tell anyone. I’m just mad that Emily broke our pact, so now you guys are going to have to make it up to me somehow.”
“Like how?” I said. I knew she was up to something, but I wanted it to be over quickly so I could go home. Alex had the car. I had no money, as usual.
“Well, we were supposed to lose our virginity at the same time,” Sera said. Then, with a flourish in Alex’s direction, “We vowed ages ago. But now I’m going to have to wait till I get to Madison, because there’s nobody here in Chicago I want to sleep with. I’ll have to start college a bitter virgin.” She laughed—suddenly, she did not sound bitter. “The sooner I get laid, the less likely I am to be angry that Emily is so selfish. Then I’d have a secret to keep, too.”
“So go screw Yannis then,” I said irritably. “He’s totally in lust with you.”
“Eeew,” Sera said flatly. “I think not. Alex here got all the charm in the family. Alex, by the way, are you gay?”
“Huh?” Alex said.
“Bi, then?”
“Why are you asking me that?”
“It’s scary out there. I wouldn’t want my best friend Emily to get AIDS. If you’re bi, I hope you use protection.”
Alex stared at me desperately as if for help. My arm felt bruised; I looked away. I wondered if my mother had fallen asleep on the couch watching TV as usual. I wondered what kind of girl goes out partying, losing her panties in the parking lot of her high school while her bald, breastless mother falls asleep to The Tonight Show.
“You are really cute,” Sera said to Alex. I noticed then that she had never become truly pretty—that despite her new, nice figure and smooth hair and post-braces teeth, her face was somehow already old, lacked the dewy innocence of youth. We all worshipped her for being smarter and braver than the rest of us, but guys feared her for that, too. Brains don’t go far toward getting guys in high school. Sera had never had a boyfriend—never even seemed to fool around with anyone we knew all that well. Our guy friends asked her advice about their naive, girlie-girl girlfriends while Sera collected dust like a spinster aunt. She must have hated us all: normal girls deemed stupid enough to date by the wannabe studs who were intimidated by her mind. Maybe she had a right.
Our guy friends asked her advice about their naive, girlie-girl girlfriends while Sera collected dust like a spinster aunt.
“Emily and I always share everything,” she sing-songed. My eyes bugged. I glanced at Alex, but as I’d failed to come to his rescue a moment before, he refused to meet my eyes now. “I don’t like to feel left out.”
“Come on,” Alex laughed. “You’re never left out of anything. You know everything about everyone. What do you care what Emily does with a guy like me? I thought I was, like, totally beneath you.”
“Well, if Emily thinks you’re so great, maybe I should reconsider. She’s a very smart girl, you know.”
Alex didn’t even turn in my direction at this compliment—if that was what it was. His body leaned in closer to Sera, and I thought then: he is either totally not gay, or he is way smarter than I thought. Brighter than I was, apparently. Alex’s laugh was suddenly throaty; I turned away, speechless. Maybe Sera would not really go through with it—maybe she was only trying to show me what a dog Alex was—how he’d jump at the chance to put his dick in any hole, even right in front of me. I was convinced. How could I let her know? How could I beg her, right in front of him, not to take it too far?
“So if you and Emily share something, and it’s both of your secret, then you’d keep it together and not tell anybody else, right?” His eyes were seductive—never, even in the moments before climaxing, did he look at me that way. Even under the stars, on the beach in Freeport where I lost my virginity, his eyes had been confused, ambivalent, worried. I remembered how the first time we’d tried to put a condom on his half-mast penis, it kept popping off and flying around the room, and how we chased it, naked at the shabby Tip Top Motel on Lincoln, time and time again, until his erection was lost and the condom was dry, so we just watched videos for a couple of hours and then went home. I did not know that boy could become this man. Always, I had imagined us as partners in crime: children throwing rocks at old ladies’ windows, wild but harmless. I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t known Sera capable of treachery, but Alex . . . Maybe this was why Sera would win—would always win. I did not understand people; I looked at surfaces; I believed what I wanted to believe: in a grown-up mother who would invite me into her safe bed, in Charlie’s Angels protecting me from behind my wall. Sera believed in turning human need to her advantage. And need would always win out.
I walked out of the bar.
Yannis was leaning against the brick wall of the building, smoking a cigarette. I had never seen him smoke. His dark eyes were in the shadow of the neon sign; he looked like a Gothic vampire, or a detective in a 1940s film. His gaze flicked lazily over me, then back toward the distance, as though he were trying to figure out where he was supposed to be instead of here.
“Do you have any money for a cab?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “I’ll take you.”
“What about Alex and Sera?”
“Alex has money for a cab. You don’t. Either way, my family pays for the cab. So I’ll take you.”
I followed him to the car. But once inside, he drove toward the diner, and I was confused. Yannis lived above the diner, and Alex and his parents lived in the building next door. I’d crashed at Yannis’s on numerous occasions, on the couch, when it was really late or I was too drunk to go home. But it was only midnight, and all the drama had sobered me. I said, “I don’t think Alex expects me to come back here or anything. I was planning to just go home.”
“It’s easier this way,” he said. “We’ll take you back in the morning.”
I didn’t know what to do. I felt dangerously near crying again, but Yannis was not the sort of person one easily cried around—it was obvious he would think me frivolous and immature, and he might even mock me. I chewed on the inside of my mouth and ventured, “Um, Alex and I kind of had an argument.”
“Yeah, I know. My brother’s a spoiled asshole.”
I gulped.
He took me to his apartment. I was not so clueless as to fail to consider that he might be trying to get me into bed on the strength of my anger at his brother. But he just handed me a glass of water and left me in the living room, heading to his own bedroom without any attempt at friendly conversation, which was typical. Normally, Alex smuggled me over some blankets and a pillow when I stayed the night, but Yannis hadn’t offered. The couch was covered in plastic and would be uncomfortable without a sheet over it—I curled up on the floor with a sofa pillow and a stiff afghan. Horizontal, my drunkenness returned; the room spun a little. Maybe I was just plowed, and that was why I had reacted so strongly to Sera’s comments about Mom. After all, she wasn’t saying anything I didn’t already know on some level. Maybe I was even drunk enough to have misinterpreted what was going on between Sera and Alex: maybe they were only fucking with me. Maybe Alex would turn up later and spoon me in his arms and say he and Sera had taken separate cabs. Maybe Sera would call my house in the morning and, in her Noël Coward accent, accuse, “Can’t you take a bloody joke?”
I couldn’t take a joke. That had always been a shortcoming of mine. This reassured me as I lulled into a hazy, drunken sleep.
In truth, I must have passed out. I only came to when he tried to enter me. Then my body screamed awake, squirming, jerking in protest, but Yannis’s heavy arms, hot from contact and rage and want, bore down upon my bones. He used one hand to guide his rigid penis in, the other arm bent across my chest and bearing all his weight so I gasped for air, my arms flailing like dying snakes, unable to strike. His knees ground into my thighs, holding them apart. Once he was up me, he pushed himself onto both arms, grappling with me briefly as I struck at him, but soon my wrists were in his hands, gripped tight and pushed into the plush carpeting while he pumped into me and I shrieked, then begged, then finally murmured listlessly, “Stop, no.” He, too, had been drinking, so his act was perhaps neither as satisfying nor as quick as he’d intended. Near the end he started muttering frantically, “Shit, shit, come on!” By the time he climaxed, I was sobbing in pain.
The spasms of the climax seemed to reassure him. “I’ll stand up to my father,” he groaned into my neck as they shook him. “Forget about Alex, he’s a pussy. I have more money than he does, anyway. Ahhh, you feel so warm.”
I did not bolt for the door when he let go of my wrists, when he rolled off my throbbing legs. My skirt and tights were around my ankles in an indecipherable tangle, my shirt pushed up to my chin, breasts hanging out of my bra so the wires stabbed my tender skin. Semen leaked onto the afghan his mother had made. The clock on the side table indicated that almost four hours had transpired since we’d arrived here, and I’d first passed out. Had he slept, too, or spent that time watching me, fantasizing, planning?
Yannis fell asleep on the floor, clutching me. It surprised me, more than anything, that he had not invited me to his bed, so clear was it that this rape had, in his mind, heralded our new romantic relationship. He and Sera and Alex had played a hand of cards, and with a quick reshuffling I was now his. I wept silently while my body went numb and slick under his sweating arm. I did not move until daylight made my nudity unbearable, and I scurried to the bathroom to wash up and rearrange my clothes.
When I reentered the room, Yannis was sitting up. He offered me orange juice, and I took it and drank it without speaking. While he drove me home, he was silent as usual, but before I got out of the car he said, “We’ll go to a movie and dinner on Friday. Alex and Sera can accompany us if you like. Think of a restaurant you want to try . . . but none of that raw fish or Ethiopian mush you girls like.”
I did not slam the door.
Approaching my front door under Yannis’s gaze, if I thought anything it was, I always knew this would happen. Not him, not last night’s exact scenario, but that prickly sensation on the back of my neck when I found myself in a parking lot alone after dark, or in the deserted restroom of an office building, or when a strange man walked behind me on the street. My fear was the ancient archetype for all women: the knowledge, intrinsic in our flesh, that we can be violated at any time. Now it had happened. It did not occur to me, not once, to call the police—to tell anyone at all. While it would be wrong to say I felt anything resembling relief, it might be accurate to say that, finally, I could stop waiting.
From now on my life would exist, like my mother’s, on the other side.
In the living room, Mom was still asleep under our own afghan, which was light and worn from years and store-bought. The TV was off. I sat down at her feet; her toenails were painted seashell pink, but the polish was peeling, her nails growing out. She had several purple splotches on her legs—she bruised easily now. Her head was wrapped in the turban she wore at home; she did not take it off except to shower. Although I was her daughter, and we had lived in this house alone together forever, we were not symbiotic enough that she was comfortable showing me her bald head. Whenever I saw it by accident, I felt a queasy horror akin to remembering my father shooting up or seeing Tony Guidubaldi’s bare feet in our roach-infested hall that by rights belonged to him.
I touched my mother’s leg, and she opened her eyes and looked at me, but not with any joy at seeing my face, or worry at the expression of pain I wore. Her eyes had gone blank a long time ago. Or maybe I didn’t wear any expression of pain, anyway. Maybe my eyes were blank, too. Then, abruptly, below her dead eyes, she smiled.
And suddenly, I could not imagine why I had been so angry at Sera for what she’d said about my mother’s past. The clarity of that fury drained from me, and I couldn’t remember what was so bad—so inexcusably shameful—about being the neighborhood slut, anyway. With an intensity so rough it doubled me over, I missed the long-past squeaking of my mother’s bed, the muffled, complicit adult laughter that excluded me, that rhythmic pounding on the wall our bedrooms shared—the lullaby of my youth. I longed for those days when my mother was still invincible, when I was proud of her for not being like me, but like those brazen girls on the corner who owned our small world. I wanted more than anything to escape the brutal, glaring truths of adulthood: that I’d never liked those girls, with their gang member boyfriends. That had we grown up together, my mother and I would not have been friends. That my mother never knew me; Sera was the one who understood. That they had both betrayed me. The fact that I’d betrayed them, too, with my secrets, my desertion, didn’t help. I was alone. Mothers die. College, with neither my best friend nor my first love, loomed.
“Did Sera call?” I asked, though it was only eight in the morning. Before Mom could answer, I blurted, “You know what? I don’t think we should answer the phone today. Let’s just spend some time together, you and me. Let’s not talk to anyone else.”
“But what if your boyfriend calls, hon?” Mom said groggily. “It’s Saturday. Isn’t he gonna want to take you out?” She closed her eyes. I wanted to shout: Don’t!
There is still one secret Sera never learned. One summer afternoon when we were eleven, on the hottest day of the year, I chose to accompany Mom on the bus to pick out linoleum rather than go with Sera’s family to the beach. I told Sera’s parents that Mom was dragging me against my will, but the truth was, I wouldn’t have traded that day for all the cool breezes along Lake Michigan—that I wouldn’t trade it now for all the romance of the Aegean Sea. I went because Mom invited me. She so rarely invited me. I wore my best, sparkling white jean shorts, like on a date. Sera would have thought I was nuts, but when Mom took me to lunch afterward, I was too excited to eat, full on nothing but the anticipation of our every happiness.
A raven, poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin told me, is one of the few birds that will look at you as it sings. Ornithology has shown that birdsong patterns are passed down through generations, much like human language; they contain sounds that no longer have a source. Birdsong, in a sense, is an archive of the landscape, the culture, and simply the old songs. When a raven sings to us, then, what is she trying to tell us of the past?
Ravens feature prominently in Hymn to All the Restless Girls, Ní Churreáin’s third poetry collection. Ní Churreáin’s ravens are both storytellers and a mode of attention. They insist on interruption and resistance. Perhaps they are guides for the titular restless girls who, it turns out, are our key to the history of women that the Irish Free State and the Catholic Church tried to bury.
To reinstate the histories excluded from official archives, Hymn to All the Restless Girls draws on Irish language, folklore, and physicalized speech such as lamentation and caoineadh (keening). Ní Churreáin is playful in form, extruding songs, mythologies, and even curses through formats like constitutional text, institutional procedure, and prayers. Poems such as “Archive 41.2” and “The Home for Unmarried Fathers” borrow structures and invert subjects to write against the official languages that have governed Irish women’s bodies, labor, and silence. The poems document the historical brutality against women and the absurdity of the mother-and-baby homes. The result is a collection that reframes the restless girls not as moral failures but as bearers of knowledge that might otherwise be lost.
One such type of knowledge is the fiachairecht, the ancient Celtic art of raven-watching, which Ní Churreáin gamely wandered into while writing Restless Girls. Or did the ravens lead her there? From Odin’s Huginn and Muninn, said to be memory and knowledge, to Lewis Carroll’s perennial riddler, ravens have a long literary history. They’re messengers, witnesses, perhaps tasked with remembering what cannot be neatly concluded. If the relentless “nevermore” of Poe’s raven forecloses the possibility of Lenore, Ní Churreáin’s ravens resurrect Ireland’s restless girls, insisting they will not be nameless for evermore.
Lucie Shelly: I’d love to begin with the animating idea in the title: restlessness. In Hymn to All the Restless Girls, restlessness takes many forms. Anger, lust, mischief, defiance, even glee. I found myself wondering, is “restlessness” in girls and women innate, or is it what manifests when some force or energy is suppressed? What does restlessness mean for you in relation to poetry?
Annemarie Ní Churreáin: I love that you’ve mentioned glee because for me there is a lot of joyful energy and seeking in this book as well as anger, frustration, and outrage. Perhaps this restlessness comes out of a quest for transformation. In the Irish mythic tradition, restlessness often signals a person who is on a sacred journey. The poets and warriors of our oldest stories are rarely at peace.
I also think thatto be restless is to belong to more than one world. That’s something that Irish people understand very intimately, living as we often do between languages, traditions, and cultures around the globe. And maybe it’s something that women understand especially well. We haven’t always had the luxury of stillness as a pose for achieving self-knowledge, wisdom, or change. It hasn’t always been safe for women to be still. In a patriarchy, sometimes you have to be on the run, you have to be able to move fast.
LS: Poems like “Hail Queen of Heaven,” “Night Prayer at the Temple,” and many others invoke rituals or ritualistic language. There’s keening, charms, rites. Do you think of physicalized language—ritual speech, lamentation—as a way of recording suffering or remaking it into something powerful? Or something else entirely?
ANC: I really believe there is magic at play when we give breath to poetry.Audre Lorde, in her essay “Poetry is Not A Luxury,” writes of the illumination that occurs when we work with language as a tool for transformation. We all know that experience of manifesting change in your life by speaking it aloud. And certainly, there’s something [of that power] in poetry. Paula Meehan has spoken about how, in prison, two lines of poetry can save a life. Joy Harjo has written about the power of poetry to change the past. She articulated it so beautifully, I won’t paraphrase, but it’s this idea that poetry operates outside linear time. By the very act of writing or speaking poetry, you’re stepping into a dreamworld where you can transfigure even the past or the future. Yes, definitely—it’s about much more than recording history or suffering. It’s an invitation, also a portal.
LS:My feeling while reading was that not only did the poems move through historical time, they moved through worlds—the mythological world and the “real” world. We enter “the Donegal County Archives,” we even go into a Woodies Homeware store, but we also encounter these Gaelic mythological figures, Medbh, Gráinne Mhaol, banshees, omens. The blend made it feel, for me, like the mythic was reinstating the private, unseen female experience as historical.
To be restless is to belong to more than one world.
ANC: I’m interested in the worldview that is made possible through the Irish language, and about the land as a veil between this world and the Otherworld. Certainly, in the Gaeltacht regions of Ireland, where the Irish language is still spoken and folkloric traditions are very much alive, there’s wild respect embedded into the culture for powerful and restless female figures.
When you grow up with the banshee, the Cailleach, the bean feasa, or historical women like Gráinne Mhaol as part of your frame of reference, it gives you a place to retreat to when you have the Irish State and church and all of the awful legacies and internalised shame of a colonised country bearing down on you. I’ve always had somewhere imaginative to retreat to, and that is one of the gifts of having an ancient language or of being connected to indigenous stories. These figures live in the psyche as magic-makers, guides and connectors to land, the spirit world, and each other.
LS: For readers outside Ireland, and even those within, could you describe what it looked and felt like to grow up in a Gaeltacht region?
ANC: I grew up in the Gaeltacht community of northwest Donegal, and Irish was my first language. But a Gaeltacht is more than simply a place where the native language is spoken every day. It’s a worldview rooted in a special instinct for place, magic, and relationships. For example, the relationship between people and place, or that relationship between the spheres of the physical and the metaphysical. It’s a way of understanding that as humans, we live ‘ar scáth a chéile.’ Cree scholar Dwayne Donald describes colonialism as “on-going process of relationship denial,” and to grow up in a Gaeltacht is to grow up immersed in the parts of Irish culture that could not be denied or destroyed.
I came of age in the 1980s, when teenage girls in rural Ireland were having apparitions of the Virgin Mary—the moving statues. Later, I felt a little embarrassed about that phenomenon. I remember being at university in Dublin and looking back on the footage of thousands of people gathering to see these “magical presences” in the landscape, and feeling: Wow, we’re the subject of ridicule. Now, I can look back on that really differently. It was a folklore living in the culture, it was being torn between these two worlds. This hunger for mystery was so in the consciousness, and still popular to that degree, in 1985! It’s kind of incredible. In 1985 teenage girls and young women were being brutalized by church and state. They were living through the end of the theocracy. They were often not in control of their narratives or destinies, but three teenage girls went out one night in Sligo, and they ended up positioning themselves right at the centre of a hugely exciting public story. There’s a delicious power in all of that.
Maybe I took it [the Gaeltacht worldview] for granted for a long time. To a certain extent, I spent a lot of years trying to escape Donegal, wanting to explore other ways of living. Asking, well, what else might I be? But with this collection, I discovered a fierce desire to celebrate where I come from. It has shaped every part of my life. It doesn’t matter if I’m editing, or writing opera, or writing poems, that wellspring of Gaeltacht culture feeds everything, especially my poetry.
LS:I’d love if you could talk about some of the spiritual and mythical motifs that appear in the collection. In particular, I’m interested in fiachairecht, and Caoineadh.
ANC: Well, fiachairechtis the Irish traditional art of watching ravens for prophecy and omens. A powerful songbird, the raven (an fiach dubh), often appears in Irish poetry and features very prominently in our oldest warrior stories. Sometimes, the raven is linked to the [Celtic] Morrigan goddess. And the white raven in particular is an auspicious sign.
When you’re deep in a poem, your subject suddenly appears everywhere. Wherever I was, there seemed to be a raven watching me.
A few years ago, I was walking in Poison Glen in northwest Donegal, and a raven flew gracefully across the full moon, and I became enchanted by what it might be trying to tell me. The image imprinted itself on my mind. I filed it away until, later, looking through old copies of a journal called Eiriu, I came across two texts: one about fiachairecht, the art of raven watching, and one about dreanacht, the art of wren watching.
As is the case in many native cultures there’s a belief in Ireland that certain animals can act as guides, that we can acquire knowledge from creatures. I found a kinship between the raven, its behaviors, and the restless girls. There are so many beautiful beliefs around ravens—some of which I list in “Proclamation” and the Raven Chorus poems. These birds led me straight to many of the poems in this book.
LS:Did you have to learn the art and practice of how to watch them?
ANC: I suppose I did. When you’re writing poetry, you’re led down completely unexpected roads. I started naturally to watch ravens over the course of the book, and I made myself alert to their patterns of movement. When you’re deep in a poem, your subject suddenly appears everywhere. Wherever I was, there seemed to be a raven watching me or a raven in a tree trying to tell me something.
According to the old practice, you must track the direction a raven is flying in and listen to the particular sounds it’s making to decode the behaviour. If the raven calls from the northeast end of the house, robbers are about to steal the horses. If it calls from the house door, strangers or soldiers are coming, etc. Traditionally, they’ve been navigators, helping people plan routes and anticipate what the future holds.
Similarly, figures like Sinéad O’Connor, and other restless girls who have appeared throughout Irish history, have tried to guide us, though they’ve often been a kind of puzzlement to us. We’ve sometimes looked at them and wondered: What are they trying to tell us? What is their behaviour communicating? A lot of people watched Sinéad tear up the image of the Pope and they just didn’t understand what she was trying to say. In a way, I’ve tried to approach the ravens—these curious little creatures that sing so boldly—with that question: What are they drawing my attention to?
LS:It’s making me think, what is this restlessness but an attempt to communicate? And the Caoineadh, that’s keening?
ANC: Yes, Caoineadh is a form of lament historically performed by women at wakes or at gravesides. Actually, it’s not unique to Ireland and also exists in many other cultures. The keens were often disturbing, and contained raw, unearthly emotion, spontaneous words, weeping, and elements of song. The keener had the power to make an otherworldly sound that connected her to the metaphysical world. And within that sound, there existed not merely sorrow but sometimes rage too. A keen might, at times, berate the dead person! The keen might stray into comedy. The keening woman embodied and expressed the full, gnarly, and tangled spectrum of gut emotion. That’s something that I was very excited by in this book, the chance to let female figures be with the intensity of their emotions. Although the keening tradition has died out of contemporary life, it’s no wonder that we’ve held fast to the cultural memory of it.
LS:That rage feels in conversation with the current moment. The collection explores how the Catholic Church and Irish State governed women’s bodies, but I read it at a time when reproductive rights and female autonomy are under attack in the U.S. Across pop culture, from Lily Allen to Rosalía, there’s a renewed interest in the Madonna-whore complex. Many of your poems, like “Gospel of the Magdalenes,” “Wedding Dress for a Restless Girl,” can be quite sensual even in political or religious moments—there’s a sense of rapture, or rapturous anger. I’m interested in your lens on this contemporary moment. How has Ireland’s past informed Irish women’s relationships with their bodies today?
ANC: In Ireland we’ve had decades and decades of systematic surveillance, of having our female bodies judged, hidden, and punished in ways that are too numerous and complex to list. Caelainn Hogan’s Republic of Shame is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how Ireland punished so-called “fallen” women and their children.
The conservative estimate is that 85,000 women and children went through mother-and-baby homes. And the word “home” in this context is misleading. Many homes were sites of incarceration akin to work camps. We’re only really now beginning to process the scale and legacy of what’s happened in Ireland over the past 100 years.
In Ireland we’ve had decades and decades of systematic surveillance, of having our female bodies judged, hidden, and punished.
Now, there’s new autonomy and freedom for Irish women. It feels like we’ve cut ourselves loose. The cloud has lifted, a gate has opened, and new horizons are visible. But in that space, there’s so much to be figured out.
I’m asking: what do we locate ourselves in relation to now?Where do I take my spiritual sustenance from? For so long, poetry alone has provided that for me. But now it feels safe to also explore other possibilities—whether that’s ancestral worship, Paganism, or centering a mythological figure like the Cailleach in my life. Definitely, it means drawing again, in new ways, from the Gaeltacht culture.
I think we’re going to see more of that spiritual enquiry emerging among younger Irish poets. Twenty years ago, spirituality felt like a really dirty word. Women had to be brutal in cutting ourselves loose from the Church because it had been so toxic.
LS:I learned recently that the word “matrimony,” the state of being married, is etymologically directly connected to motherhood, the state of being a mother. But poems like, “All Her Marriages,” “The Home for Unmarried Fathers”—which is such an amazing inversion of the mother-and-baby homes—showed a difficult history and relationship between being a mother and being a married woman in Ireland.
ANC: My own relationship with motherhood is through the lens of having a mother rather than being a mother. I’ve chosen to not have children, and honestly, I think I was frightened out of motherhood by what Caelainn Hogan aptly termed the “shame-industrial complex” that was created by the Irish State and the Catholic Church. I often jest that I’ll have gathered the courage to be a mother probably by the age of about fifty. A real pity that I’m not a man!
The mother–daughter bond is fascinating to me. Poems like “Vision at Valentia Island,” and others, reference my estrangement from my mother, trying to locate myself in relation to her, trying to locate myself in that absence. So many of my female peers have complicated relationships with their mothers and yet so many of us report a much more straightforward relationship with our grandmothers. My grandmother, Mary Thaidhg, is still very central in my life. She’s been dead twenty-five years but she visits me in my dreams several times a week. We’re in an ongoing conversation.
This book also feels like a coming-of-age book for me. I’m trying to figure out my relationship to Donegal, to Irish history, as well as my maternal lineage, and to this feeling that I am on some kind of threshold, I suppose. I’ve been thinking a lot about the ceremony of marriage and what it might mean to wed myself to certain places or experiences. Do you remember when British artist Tracy Emin married a stone? That doesn’t seem so crazy to me at all.
When our taekwondo master spars with us, it’s slow, instructive. He’s demonstrating a drill we’re about to do in pairs or walking through possible attacks or counters with a student to show them their own tendencies.
I hadn’t seen him spar for real until a former student, a heavyweight finance bro who used to spar in college, came back one day. Anu is 25, bulky, and flexible. Our master is a 31-year-old featherweight. “What level do you want?” our master asks Anu before they begin, which is both a flex and a real question. Even though our master could destroy Anu right away, it would be easy for either of them to get hurt. Anu because he rolls his ankles just from walking across the room. Our master because he’s fighting someone heavier with less control over where his kicks land.
They begin warming up with no gear, light contact. Our master wears a white uniform, black collar, black belt, black stripes down the shoulders. Anu wears a green muscle shirt and rolled-up white pants. Anu struts around before holding his fist out to make contact and begin. Our master bounces a little, relaxed, baiting. He holds his leg out, tapping Anu several times. That was the old style, he says, like sword fighting. Now it’s all cut kicks. Anu tries headshots for more points. He’s flexible. But our master slides 45 degrees or steps forward to clinch. Anu punches, which is fewer points. But it’s good for him. His arms are imposing and can psych his opponent out. After some time, they decide without speaking to put on their chest guards and helmets. Another student and I lace and tie their chest guards. Anu likes his tight; our master likes his loose.
Anu is blocking well, but our master’s foot finds its way under, over, and through his arms.
Our master jumps once and kicks Anu three times, each one higher than the last, before landing. “What the hell was that?” Anu says.
“It’s just this one,” our master says and demonstrates the three kicks on the dummy to show Anu.
Anu, almost 100lbs heavier than our master, goes up for a headshot. Our master ducks and stands back up in time to gently lift Anu’s leg and send him rolling across the floor.
“If you weren’t staring at yourself in the mirror, you could have killed me,” our master says.
They spar and rest and argue. Accidentally hurt each other, rest, spar.
I sit unmoving like suddenly the Olympics has commenced in front of me. Like I’m a kid up past my bedtime and if I move my parents will remember I exist.
After a while Anu looks over at me and asks, “Do you like watching us dick around?”
“Yes,” I say, and realize everyone else has left.
I couldn’t sleep after the first time I saw them fight. I stared at the ceiling, buzzing and glowing like I had a secret. I just learned people could fly, and I was a person, too.
The taekwondo studio, I’ve found, is the only place where I can be completely focused on something outside of myself. For a long time, I have found this experience to be rare. After puberty, I understood my value was tied to my ability to be attractive, both pretty and cool, and that awareness accompanied me in every context. I saw myself from the outside the way I saw actresses in movies romanticized. Could I fall in love with me from this angle or that? If ever I was fully inside myself, focused on something out in the world, that awareness of my role would snap me back out of myself and point my gaze at me. After becoming a mother, I perceived expectations on me to grow exponentially in impossible and conflicting ways. The demands of motherhood require you to exist above reproach as you care flawlessly and tirelessly for your perfect children. But the things you need to do to fulfill those duties (when they’re young: not sleep, not shower, not talk to any other adults, not be frustrated or resentful) are in direct conflict with being pretty or cool.
But at taekwondo, there are no societal expectations for how a middle-aged woman is supposed to be as a student. It’s already unusual that I’m there. In class we only consider taekwondo and the other people in front of us. Are we attacking or defending, sore or tired, warmed up or stiff or strong, laughing, frustrated, amazed. We, teens and adults of all genders, wear the same uniform. We’re not pretty. We’re not parents. There’s no one present I’m supposed to take care of and, notably, no particular way I’m supposed to feel.
My other middle-aged, married friends and I have a list of books and films we avoid because we’re afraid if we consume the wrong one, it’ll be impossible for us to stay married. Miranda July’s novel All Fours is one of them. But I risked it because one of my middle-aged, married friends recommended it after he saw me struggling to write about ideas of home and safety.
July’s narrator is 45, a semi-famous multimedia artist married to a man, Harris, and mother to one nonbinary child, Sam. She has birth trauma. She has a best friend, Jordi, the only person in her life with whom she’s always honest. I, too, have an admirable and capable husband. I have kids, birth trauma, and a very limited number of people with whom I am honest.
The narrator describes the self-governing system of shame so many mothers experience, even in private, even in their own homes. She says before she and Harris had kids she could easily “dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it.” When she describes how Harris was “openly rewarded” for every parenting task he did while she was “quietly shamed” for the same things, a deep recognition stirred in me. But, as July writes, “There was no way to fight back against this, no one to point a finger at, because it came from everywhere. Even walking around my own house I felt haunted, fluish with guilt about every single thing I did or didn’t do.”
It’s amazing how efficient a system of shame can be when the shamer and the shamed share one body. Years ago, I had a student in a fiction workshop who was my age, an outstanding writer working on a novel about political revolutionaries in Pakistan. There was a line in her novel I think about all the time. The narrator’s grandfather, a radical poet, says something like, “Yes, make a woman’s body shameful. Then where will she live?”
After becoming a mother, I perceived expectations on me to grow exponentially in impossible and conflicting ways.
No one told me to feel guilty every time my husband does the dishes (most days!) or makes our son’s lunch or supervises our kids’ baths and showers (half of the time). He signs them up for summer camp. He cleans the humidifiers. I keep track of the things I don’t do, subtracting from the calculation of my moral performance.
When I drop the kids off at school and pick them up and manage each of their opposing whims and snacks and fights and questions until evening, I don’t know exactly what I’m “doing” and don’t feel like my husband should be doing it. When I brush their hair and donate the clothes they’ve grown out of and go through months of homework and crafts to decide what to keep or recycle and look up their symptoms and maintain friendships with their friends’ parents, I don’t think my husband should be doing it. But when he does bedtime so that I can go to taekwondo, I’m sent down an emotional flight of stairs, landing, shivering at the bottom, imagining the kids as adults, still troublingly blond, on the phone with each other, never being able to remember a time when I was there while they fell asleep (I do bedtime three nights a week).
When I was a new mom my friend who’d been a mom slightly longer than I had came to visit. What a relief to have someone witness your baby and show them things you didn’t know about yet (Duplo blocks)! My friend was talking about how much her husband does for the kids, how she felt like he was better at taking them places, managing their bodies in their various carriers, and not becoming overwhelmed by their constant talking and demands. She said of course she does things, too, like clip their nails. She couldn’t think of anything else. “I do other stuff,” she said. To herself. To everyone.
Sometimes after taekwondo I pull into the garage and sit there for an hour or more. Sometimes I drink nips like a 90s dad, sometimes I don’t. I answer texts, read horrifying headlines my dad has sent throughout the day, scroll TikTok. I’m tired for one thing. Let’s say it’s 10:30pm. Taekwondo ends at 8:30, but sometimes we stretch and talk for a while. Sometimes we keep practicing. Or video each other spinning-roundhouse-kicking a ball out of the air. Or see how far we can jump or high we can jump. Sometimes we show each other pictures from our weekends or of our dogs. Sometimes we make plans for one of our birthdays, or play would you rather or read out horoscopes or riddles. We want to be in one third of a run-down cinderblock strip mall and we want to be there for a long time. It’s not a rose garden or a spa. There are no nature sounds, real or piped in, unless you count the screams of someone seeing a spider. In the garage after, getting out of the car: It’s hard to move when you’re tired and have been sweaty and then still. It’s hard to turn back into a wife and mom when you have been just a person. My tombstone will read: “Devoted wife and mother. It took her forever to get out of the car.”
When I do come in, I do it quietly in case the kids are still awake. If they know I’m home, they’ll want me to crack their toes and take turns lying in their beds. They’ll get wound up again and I can’t tell them no, even if what’s best for them is to get a healthy amount of sleep. “I came into the house my usual way, like a thief,” July writes. “I turned the lock slowly and shut the door with the handle all the way to the left to avoid the click of the lock. I was often two or three hours late because I had trouble admitting that I was planning to talk to Jordi for five hours. But how could it be any shorter, given that it was my one chance a week to be myself?”
Is it leaving the house that lets the narrator be herself? Or is it talking to her friend who doesn’t need anything from her? Conversely, “When Harris comes in late he slams the door cheerfully behind him. He’s trying to be quiet, but not that hard. His mind is on other things, and why not? This is his house.” Yes, if we’re not comfortable in our bodies or in our houses, where will we live?
July’s narrator sets out on what is supposed to be a cross-country road trip from L.A. to New York. But she does not drive across the country. She’s nervous about driving all that way alone and makes excuses to stop. She has an intense interaction with a young man at a gas station. She stops for lunch and runs into him, Davey, again. Then she gets a room at a cheap motel by the Hertz where Davey works, twenty minutes outside L.A. She doesn’t know how long she’ll stay but slowly extends the reservation to encompass the whole two-and-a-half weeks she’d planned to be away. She lies to Harris and Sam, reporting her stops in different states headed east, and to the friends she’s supposed to visit in New York, saying something came up with a crisis or project and she’d see them next time. She hires Davey’s wife to help redecorate the motel room. She goes for walks with Davey every day, and they slowly reveal to each other they feel the same mutual desire and obsession. They spend the rest of the narrator’s vacation in the room in creative and intensely intimate ways.
July spends a lot of time describing the redecoration of the room, and in fact, the redecoration of the room was more uncomfortable for me to read about than any of the other ideas in the book, menopause, infidelity, desire, suicide, the deathfield, sex, lying, motherhood, divorce. All those things make sense. But redecorating a temporary place, a room that doesn’t belong to you, seemed random, indulgent, outside the logic of the narrative. I wasn’t sure if my reaction was a critique of the book, or a critique of the importance of a place. I felt afraid while they decorated, and afraid in the scenes when the characters were in the room. Were they going to reveal to me something I wanted or needed but couldn’t have?
In an interview with The Yale Review, July says, “Gradually, over years, I came to realize that the narrator’s desire to decorate was the tip of a very large iceberg. What makes a home? Can you make it up? Will it be ‘real’? Is real just a construction held together by fear? And if a home is a place for love and intimacy and honesty, then maybe it is not one thing, different for everyone, always changing—and political. Since there is no pure form of love and intimacy and honesty, they are always made of long histories of unsafety. Everyone in a home feels a different kind of unsafety, depending on who they are. Cozy! Ha. But coziness is the goal. A safe, relaxed feeling that is possible for the narrator in the motel room and eventually (spoiler alert) everywhere else too.”
One of the guided meditations a therapist thought might help after my own birth trauma was to imagine a place where I felt safe. I couldn’t imagine one. There were, as July describes, long histories of unsafety attached to every place I could imagine, even if that unsafety was the fear of losing it, or of it not being mine.
Even before I had any experiences where I was afraid I was going to die or my child was going to die, I’d do a thought experiment about where I might want to have my ashes scattered, which is really a question of where feels the most like home. Where would I not feel like a stranger or an imposter at all for eternity?
It’s hard to turn back into a wife and mom when you have been just a person.
My family used to rent one side of a tiny duplex for two weeks every summer on a lake in Michigan. It’s where I learned to swim and to drive. It’s where I had all my first crushes. That seemed like a perfect contender, but the duplex went up for sale and the new owners tore it down to build what my parents derisively called “a mansion.” I can still feel the soles of my feet on the knotted wood slanting steeply over the bed. I’d lie on my back and put my feet on the ceiling until my legs went to sleep and so did I. My childhood home, maybe, though more complicated, less filled with concentrated joy than the summer duplex. I drove by it when I was back home visiting a friend and the new owners had cut down the tree so grand in the front yard it took a chain of four kids, me, my brother, and our friends, eight little fleshy arms, to encircle it all the way around, fingertips touching. And in the tree’s place, almost laughably: a Trump sign. The arboretum in Ann Arbor, where I walked for hundreds of hours in undergrad, belongs to other students now. If my ashes were there, I would feel like an eternal college student, and that’s not how I feel. Moore State Park, where I live now, has fields and water and trails lined with azaleas, but I still feel like a transplant in New England. Our first apartment here burned down. Our own house now, where both our kids were babies, perhaps. It’s in New England, where I don’t belong, but my body is here in this house, my blood soaked into the grooves between the bathroom tiles where I hemorrhaged after my daughter was born. I could be scattered in the backyard. But how strange to be there when the kids won’t be. The hope is they’ll be grown up and living new places filled with their own dangers. And this house isn’t mine. It belongs to me as a wife and mother. If I were neither of those things, I couldn’t live here.
One’s mind naturally goes to where they were happiest.
The taekwondo studio is our master’s, not mine, and so there is danger there, too. If I were to disappoint or betray him somehow, or less likely, if he were to disappoint or betray me, it would feel different. I think he thinks about this, on some level, almost all the time. The sameness of the place, day-to-day, is remarkable. If you forget something, it is likely unmoved from where you left it when you come back. His voice is the same, his intonation, his phrasing, his teasing. We do the same routines at the start of class before we break off into whatever we’re individually working on.
He is also very, very slow to let people actually know him. Perhaps there was danger for him in his own studio when his friends from real life joined our adult class. Now there were opportunities for them to mention things about him his students didn’t know, opportunities for his students to become friends with his friends. One of his friends wanted to practice talking to girls. “He can practice on us!” I told our master, but he seemed hesitant. “Let’s say he gets weird,” he said. “Who cares if he’s weird,” I said. I’ve always prided myself on being unflappable, not judging anyone or protecting myself. “And then you guys feel weird,” he continued. “Then it’s weird here. It’s bad for business.”
It seemed cold and frankly inaccurate to think about this magical place as a business, even if it is one. But then I realized it was entirely up to him to maintain the magic for us. And that’s lonely. When you’re the only one with the ultimate responsibility, it’s as lonely as being a parent.
Maybe that’s the key. I get to be a kid there. I get to be taken care of.
My son and daughter also take taekwondo, but I insist on us each attending our separate classes. My son wants to come to the adult class. His friend, he reminds me, goes with her mom sometimes. “Unfortunately, it’s too late for you,” I lie. The truth is, if my son is there, I will take care of him, and I don’t want to.
I liked Harris, the narrator’s husband in All Fours. He reminded me a lot of my own husband. They’re both, oddly, sound engineers. Both equal coparents. Both sensible, thoughtful, steady. Even when they fight, Harris and my husband speak “very slowly” and calmly. Harris and my husband both keep track of fairness and equal distribution of tasks, logistics, scheduling. They’re polite or passive aggressive, asking if something is right when they believe or know it is.
My body is here in this house, my blood soaked into the grooves between the bathroom tiles where I hemorrhaged after my daughter was born.
My husband and I have been together for a greater portion of our lives than we have not. And because we work on this shared project of being married and raising kids, we need each other likely in more ways than we realize. I think because of this element of need, part of me needs to be kept a secret from him. Having a secret part of myself feels like a form of safety, something to catch me if my husband should suddenly disappear.
When the narrator sets out for what she and Harris believe is her multi-day drive, they say goodbye in the driveway. Harris takes a picture of her hugging their child. “‘Call us from Utah tonight,’ he said, hugging me. I gave him a look that said: If I survive, if I come back to you, let us finally give up this farce and be as one. He gave me a look that said: We could be as one right now, if you really wanted that. To which my eyes said nothing.”
My best friend from high school, Sarah, and I talk on the phone every morning for 20 minutes (if our children, morning routines, and latenesses to work allow). She’s also married to a man who makes more money than she does. She also has kids. She, too, feels the strain of need and dependence on what would otherwise be a connection to her husband that’s free to be as intimate as possible. One day she’d learned she’d be receiving a small inheritance from the death of a family member. “Secret account,” we both whispered. Our husbands don’t need to protect themselves in this way, which makes us feel bad that we feel that we do. But our health insurance is their health insurance. Our houses their houses.
Sarah has a gift this summer. Her kids’ camp ends at 4pm each day instead of the usual 3pm school pickup. “What should I do?” she asked me. Should she work longer hours to make more money and so her company doesn’t have to hire a parttime person? Should she go home and organize and clean so logistics at home are smoother? “Secret weights,” I said. “Of course,” she said. “Tell work you’re at home and tell home you’re at work and lift weights for an hour every day.” We need to be strong. It doesn’t have to be a secret, but it’s better if it is. Ta da! I can lift this air conditioner. Ta da! I can live on my own at age 90.
When I watch people who are better than me fight (everyone), I can usually tell what they’re doing and appreciate how good they are. It’s similar to reading better writers than me. What a thrill to see what they do and to wish I could do it. But there are some writers who seem to be operating on a different plane. I can’t identify what they’re doing; I can only experience it. When I watch our master fight, it’s like this. He’s physically and mentally on a level where I can’t recognize the decisions he makes or what happens after he leaves the ground and before he lands again.
One night in a small class, just me and two others, our master breaks down one of his kicks for us. First, he shows us a cut kick.
“But the cut kick is a fake,” he says.
You lean back on your standing leg and lift your cutting knee and foot between 90 and 45 degrees. Instead of cutting when you leave the ground, you turn your cutting knee toward the ceiling, so your opponent, who is watching the angles of your knees and feet to predict your next move, reacts as though you may be switching from a cut to a push kick. But you’re not doing a push kick either. Instead of extending your leg then, you turn your standing foot, which is no longer standing, 90 degrees, twist your waist, and land a roundhouse kick. You leave the ground once. These shifts in position take place in the air, and they happen in about one second.
“This is level one,” he says.
When my mom was my age and I was my kids’ ages, she suddenly made us all go to church. My brother and I were old enough to feel the injustice. We had not previously had to put on uncomfortable clothes and sit quietly on hard benches, bored, hot, and dying of thirst. She gave us word searches and gum, which, if we were living our emotional truths, we would have slapped out of her hands. But she had had an experience. She’d seen a leaf, bright green and bursting out of its bud, and heard a voice say, “yippee!” So now we had to go to church while she investigated her new spirituality, a belief in a form of a god. The Bible as a text was fascinating to her, and she loved to intellectually spar with the others at Bible Study.
She didn’t need this place forever. She felt satisfied or lost interest after a year or two. Simultaneously we grew and entered new and different stages of needing her and being able to intellectually spar with her. But even without church, she can access the feeling she had with the leaf. She has a similar experience when she’s alone with the moon, she says. She has this secret, glowing feeling, like safety and extasy and oneness.
I’ve had this feeling, too. When I pause a movie I’m watching by myself to smoke a cigarette at night in the dark. When I ride my bicycle or sleep in my car or remember my journal, where I really exist, is with me in my bag. When I’m reading a book that blows my mind. When I watch our master spar. When I was nursing my kids, I could scurry them away to a quiet bedroom, encircle them with my arms, and feel them latch. Secret. Safe.
There are some writers who seem to be operating on a different plane. I can’t identify what they’re doing; I can only experience it.
Why are secrecy, independence, and safety twinned together in these cases? If the knowledge that our master can fly is only mine, if I’m secretly getting stronger or smarter, the world cannot do its work on it and take away my awe, make a thing dutiful or shameful, make my attention shift to myself and my value at this angle or that.
Whenever my kids are trying to convince me of something or make a deal, they say, “If you let me do this thing, while I’m doing it, you can read by yourself or play cards by yourself or take a nap so you can stay up late by yourself…” They say it in a listing tone, drawing out the e sound in “self” to make it sound irresistible. And it is! They know me so well!
The narrator of All Fours uses the motel room to, among many things, interview her women friends about menopause, marriage, lust. One of the women she interviews is a historical biologist and says that the ecosystem around marriage is the problem, not marriage itself.
“‘For example, dances. They once fulfilled an important function in society—court dances, barn dances, ballroom dances—they allowed people to legally touch someone who wasn’t their husband or wife.’
‘That’s . . . healthy?’
‘Yes, biologically it’s important to feel different arms and hands . . . smell strange bodies. A diverse human biosphere makes for a healthy marriage.’
She said this last part with exhaustion, as if she’d made this argument a hundred times.”
The narrator makes a note: “Some customs have remained—monogamy—but not all the microtendrils that actually made it possible: the community, the dances, and God knows what else.”
What else? For me, artful, measured fighting.
Natalia and I are facing each other, our faces squished in our foam helmets. She’s 33 with a long thick braid of curly brown hair and bright blue eyes. We’re in the same weight class even though I’m taller, because she’s solid muscle and my body is held together with hopes.
“Jane, your job is just to try to bother her,” our master says.
Natalia is supposed to focus on distance.
My legs, though inexperienced, are long, which is good for me. Everything about Natalia’s body, ability, experience, and attitude are good for her. She’s strong, fast, smart, and loves to fight.
We’re not kicking hard, and getting tapped in the chest guard, though that’s the opposite of the goal, feels good.
My footwork is bad. I can’t close distance. I’m self-conscious under the gaze of our teacher.
Over and over, he tells me to move with instead of against the kick when I’m blocking so there’s less impact, but I can’t make the change in real time.
One thing works once, to lift my front leg and tap her when she fakes, so I try doing that all the time.
When our teacher calls time, Natalia says, huge smile, flushed face, “Want to go again?”
I fight Natalia again. I fight Anu. Anu fights Natalia. Natalia fights our master. Our master fights Anu.
Anu and our master argue between rounds. If I had done this, then this would have happened, one of them says. No, says the other, because I would have done this.
Everything about Natalia’s body, ability, experience, and attitude are good for her.
“I love listening to you guys argue,” I say.
“I do it to buy myself more time to rest,” Anu says.
“I know you’re doing that,” our master says.
When I fall asleep that night, I think about how the second time I fought Natalia she was so far away. “She’s changed her strategy,” our teacher had said. “What do you have to do to adapt?” She was always out of range unless she was coming in to attack. Even lying calmly outside the moment, I can’t figure out what I should have done. I think about how I look at my opponent’s chest guard to try to anticipate their moves. Does their weight shift forward or back? But Natalia and Anu both look straight into their opponents’ eyes.
If the roles of wife and mother come with constant questioning, shame, conditions, fear of loss, it’s hard to remember what it’s like without all that. There is so much sex and lust in All Fours I didn’t even mention. The book is largely sex and lust. That seems to be the narrator’s path back to understanding herself as a person, and the motel room is the place she can have that feeling. My mom’s motel room was a church for a year or so, and then she could have that feeling of awe and oneness, with the moon. At the dojang, right now, I get to be a person. Once I’m confident enough that I exist outside of other people’s survival and pleasure, I can forget myself. Forget shame, forget the constant struggle for recognition. My secret safety is myself, dissolving, wide open to awe. Sprinkle my ashes on the way my mom feels when she looks at the moon. Sprinkle my ashes on the way I feel when I watch our master spar, (and then, maybe someday, everywhere else, too).
In Tracing the Ether: Contemporary Poetry from Saudi Arabia, theorist and translator Dr. Moneera Al-Ghadeer gathers sixty-two poems by twenty-six poets who have inherited both the ruins of pre-Islamic longing and the blue light of a world digitally mapped and endlessly refreshed. Tracing the Ether is one of the first English-language anthologies to present Saudi poets not as cultural emissaries, but as participants in a shared global lyric—writing through the accelerations and dislocations of the digital age.
Al-Ghadeer’s scholarship has long traced how memory and language persist against erasure. Here, she extends that inquiry to a generation moving fluently between the aṭlāl, or the ruins, and the algorithm. For her, the desert—once a site of origin—now flickers as a conceptual afterimage: a home without borders, continually overwritten and reread.
These poems confront the collapse of modernity, the instability of belonging, and the uncanny intimacy of technologies that archive even as they efface. A house shrinks into a pixel. A WhatsApp notification behaves like a revenant. Frida Kahlo and Mahmoud Darwish drift into the same stanza as if they’ve always lived there.
I spoke with Al-Ghadeer about translation as a form of return, the desert’s digital afterlife, and the new genealogies these poets make possible—genealogies shaped not by inheritance, but by echoes, traces, and the fragile architectures of memory.
Jood AlThukair: The anthology opens with Goethe’s declaration that “the epoch of world literature is at hand.” What does it mean, today, for a Saudi poet to enter the world not as an emissary of “difference” but as a participant in the universal?
Moneera Al-Ghadeer: The poets in Tracing the Ether claim their place by engaging with global currents: they address technology, converse with pop culture, and reference philosophical and literary figures. Technology and media dissolved cultural borders, enabling the rapid movement of events, ideas, and practices. These poems display a layering where unique local inscriptions are interlaced with universal phenomena, a synthesis that sustains the local and the global simultaneously.
This interplay demonstrates how a grounding in local particularity is generative, not just in engaging, but in illuminating or even reshaping the prevailing understanding of the universal experience. By introducing these new Saudi poetic voices, Tracing the Ether seeks to disrupt Anglocentrist discussions and demonstrate that effective universal participation lies not in assimilation, but in introducing new, complex experiences into the global conversation.
JT: You frame tracing as both a cartographic act and an elegiac one—a gesture rooted in pre-Islamic poetry yet reconfigured through Google Maps. What kind of “home” are these poets tracing when the map itself has become a mirage?
MG: The “home” these poets are tracing is not a fixed physical structure but an existential and conceptual graph—a lineage that memory compels them to map, even as technology threatens to erase [it].
The act of “tracing,” or “ather” in Arabic, is an elegiac gesture rooted in the ancient Arabian poetic tradition. Pre-Islamic qaṣīdah is preoccupied with remnants and fragments: the traces of departed tribes, the faint marks of henna or tattoo, and the fleeting scenes with the beloved.
These traces become sites where memory reclaims itself. The Arabic words for trace (ather) and ether(atheer) share the same root “athara,” which connotes the suggestive concepts of leaving or following a trace, in both influence and narrative.
The desert is a philosophical condition for Arab poetics.
The contemporary poet’s need to trace these origins echoes a powerful comparative gesture: the irresistible, siren-like call of memory. The Sirens’ song in the Odyssey and the pre-Islamic poet’s halt at the desolate ruins (al-aṭlāl) both represent traditions that converge on the seductive, arresting power of the past. The contemporary Arab poet cannot abandon this enchantment.
The millennial poets—like Ahmed Al-Mulla, Ahmed Alali, and Mohamed Kheder—are concerned with the technological tropes that overwhelm belonging and dwelling. They track this lineage not as a literal return to the desert, but as an existential and conceptual graph that compels them to reposition home and situate their poetry as global while contributing to modern Arab poetics.
JT: Your introduction evokes a haunting line: “a home without walls or boundaries—the desert.” Do you see the desert as a spatial metaphor for world literature, or as its ethical counterpoint?
MG: This is my reading of the poetic depiction of digital displacement. It addresses the work of Ahmed Al-Mulla, whose speaker experiences his house’s features being digitally erased by Google Maps. He captures this loss vividly:
“In a nutshell: / after I left it / it left me. / It no longer has a door / or window / or bedroom. / It was simply a speck / on Google Maps”
The digitally featureless home becomes poetically reimagined as an unconditional open space. The poet elevates the lost dwelling of the vast, self-defining landscape of the desert, offering a sense of refuge, freedom, and radical becoming, transforming the “lost” house into a return to an open space. This poetic strategy directly confronts the way technology diminishes the experience of dwelling.
This digital disembodiment is repudiated in Ahmed Alali’s poem, “The Way to Our Home”:
“Google Maps lies / this is not our home / the house that my father built / its walls like cheeks that flush whenever we fall in love.”
Here, the digital map is a disavowal, unable to capture the emotional reality of home. This highlights the struggle of the millennial and previous generations to locate the authentic “home” in a hyper-modern, digitally mapped landscape.
The desert, therefore, is far more than a geographical setting; it is a philosophical condition for Arab poetics, a theoretical figure reinforcing the symbolic importance of the terrain. It represents a state of radical objectivity, a prelude of articulating the mute world.
While the desert signifies absence, it paradoxically stages the lyrical ego’s essential encounter with memory, forgetting, and loss—like the traces summoned in the pre-Islamic preludes.
In millennial Saudi poetry, the desert becomes a zone of radical difference, where poetry is pushed to its limits. The rhetoric of the desert in Arabic letters is radically different from Eurocentric views—including Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, Foucault, and Derrida. While they conceive of the desert as metaphor, their readings diverge from the Arabic tradition.
In the Arab poetic tradition, the desert functions not only as the setting for an existential becoming and a contested origin that challenges the notion of “origin” itself. The modern Arab poet is “writing” in a pre-semiotic void, constructing the desert as an ethical counterpoint.
This act of inscribing meaning into the void establishes a responsibility to the non-existent, making the desert a condition for critiquing presence and absence. The poet’s traces transform the desert’s void into a site for creation and new language that resists traditional norms.
The desert is a testing ground where the poet’s efforts may be erased or remain incomprehensible until the reader responds to the “mark” left behind. It becomes, as some ecological readings suggest, a stage where a new system of meaning becomes possible. By focusing relentlessly on the physical characteristics of the object, the poet forces language to strip itself of its associative belongings and confront the “thingness” of things.
The algorithm teaches the poet that everything is becoming data—traceable yet fragile and erasable.
It is a kind of “counter-site” to the humanist tradition, exposing the arbitrary nature of linguistic structures. The poets’ relation to the desert is diverse, from Haidar Al Abdullah’s ironic summoning of Imru’ al-Qays, to Al-Mulla’s existentialism, to Khulaif Ghalib’s reiteration of Bedouin roots:
“I will live with the Bedouin starting today/with no household forcing me to stay/no palm tree forcing me to climb/no path bending its back beneath my feet.”
JT: You write that millennial Saudi poets have “moved away from the project of modernity,” no longer burdened by its dichotomies. What does poetry look like after modernity collapses, when even rebellion has lost its edge?
MG: To critically read millennial Arabic poetry, a critique of beginnings is essential. The prior Arab modernity project was fraught with debates, dichotomies, and encounters with Western thought. What attachment do these millennial poets have to pre-Islamic qasida?
Unlike modernist predecessors who sought to break with tradition, millennials are no longer bound by the imperative to conflict with the classical past. They approach tradition not as a burden but as a resource, accessed through ironic play and intertextual layering.
The poets infer a withdrawal from modernity’s grand project, allowing them to move beyond its rigid framework. Millennial poets theorize this collapse through silence and subtle renunciation of dominant rhetoric. The poetic emphasis moves away from ideological battles.
Their poetry becomes less concerned with proving modern approaches and more focused on direct expression of contemporary attitudes and responses to a world no longer defined by the narratives of the last century—including the Arab modernity project. This withdrawal allows the poetry to be evaluated on its own aesthetic merits.
JT: Technology in this anthology feels almost mystical—from WhatsApp ghosts to Google Earth elegies. What do you think the algorithm teaches poets about mortality?
MG: Technology in this anthology is a trope the poets incorporate, allowing the foreign names—Google Maps, WhatsApp, Clubhouse, Instagram—to blend with the Arabic verse while retaining their untranslatable status as remnants of the foreign object. Some poets stage a desire to engage with these platforms, while others depict the digital age with contemplative satire or melancholic observation. This shift signals a removal from ideological skirmishes of modernity toward a quieter poetic experiment.
The algorithm’s message about mortality is a cautionary tale for human creativity and presence. The output of generative AI—a synthesis of existing data—lacks subjective experience and originality. This replacement of human creation with derivative output becomes a parable of effacement: the startling erasure of the individual.
The algorithm teaches the poet that everything is becoming data—traceable yet fragile and erasable. It maps human life as specks or scars, acting as a hyper-modern aṭlāl: a precise mirror reflecting loss. Yet this mirror is limited, marked by the algorithm’s unreliability, duplication, and digital hallucinations.
JT: In poems where Frida Kahlo, Darwish, and Clubhouse appear side by side, the global becomes strangely domestic. Is this hybridity liberation, or another kind of exile?
MG: The juxtaposition of global and Arab figures—from Darwish to Frida Kahlo—is not a simple liberation but an assembly of transcultural encounters. This hybridity reframes poetic experience as intertextual participation. It confirms displacement as a shared condition, as when Haidar Al Abdullah places the millennial alongside the Arab modernist: “We bolted with the stallion, I and Darwish.” Or when Ibrahim Al-Hosain domesticates suffering through Kahlo: “Hitch our hearts to her anguish. / Our hearts drink, we drink.”
This is a form of digital and poetic citizenship asserting artistic kinship across boundaries, even if freedom remains unstable, as suggested by Hatem Alzahrani: “to be here with us now? / or not to be?”
JT: You describe translation as a “return to home.” In your experience, does translation redeem exile, or only re-stage it in another tongue?
Translation does not redeem exile; it transforms linguistic loss into a meaningful dwelling.
MG: Translation is a movement mediating the split between languages, engaging with exile. It cannot overcome displacement but attempts to create a passage—to carry and reassemble the text so it can reside in a new home closer to the “target” language.
Translation does not redeem exile; it transforms linguistic loss into a meaningful dwelling. Reading the Arabic alongside the English enables a mirroring between “home” and “displacement.”
JT: As a translator and theorist, how do you resist the institutional impulse to make Saudi poetry “representative”? To make it stand for something rather than simply be?
MG: Contemporary Saudi poetry resists being “representative” by its radical diversity. The notion that these selected poems can represent modern poetry in Saudi Arabia is destined to fail, because the diversity of this poetry is astonishing; it’s as if the poets are writing against the idea of a single movement. The greatest challenge was assembling an overview of the 62 poems given their variety. One cannot generalize their collective relationship to poetry, language, modernity, or tradition; these poems themselves display multiplicity.
JT: Fowziyah Abu Khalid (also featured in the book) once wrote, “I write because the wound refuses to heal.” What kind of wound, or silence, is Tracing the Ether responding to?
MG: The wound the poets inherit is linguistic and existential. Abu Khalid, pioneer of the prose poem and influence on millennials, stages a question: Where does writing originate?
In Desert Voices, I noted that the root of “kalimah” meaning “word,” metaphorically preserves the memory of injury. Imru’ al-Qays asserted that “the wound of the tongue is like the wound of the hand,” establishing language as a site to contemplate anguish.
The trauma also manifests through the suffering of the city. Abu Khalid’s poem “Beirut” captures this, asking: “Do they feel the festering ulcers of sleeplessness / On your beautiful eye sockets?” Beirut becomes a ravaged landscape, echoing the refusal of wounds to close.
JT: If you could imagine a new literary genealogy—not one of fathers and sons, but of interlocutors and echoes—who would inhabit that lineage beside you?
MG: Poetry constantly deletes and rewrites its relationship to predecessors. What we need is a deconstructive project critiquing the assumptions of genealogy, particularly the search for origins in Arab poetics.
This approach acknowledges influence without hierarchy, viewing the past as simultaneous voices rather than sequential chains of authoritative genealogies. The focus shifts from strict lineage to recognizing an enduring conversation across time and geography, where classical and contemporary poets speak to each other. This opens a space for comparative reading across global traditions.
“No More Cows,” an excerpt from Mega Milkby Megan Milks
Most evenings I drank a tall glass of 2% milk while being watched by cows. Boxy Holsteins grazed on pastoral landscapes above the kitchen cabinets. On the counters beneath them, one cow leered with wooden spoons and rubber turners sprouting from her back. Another cow rested on the bread box. When twisted, her body measured time. A third stood stoic beside her, waiting for one of us to lift a square in her back, permitting speech (muhh).
The cows kept to the kitchen, witness to the sun’s daily reaches and recessions through large bay windows, witness to the rhythms of my family’s everyday life. The five of us rushing in and out, separately and together, fridge open, fridge shut, pantry open, pantry shut, the gasp of a can’s opened mouth, cat kibble barrage on plastic, click of dog nails on the vinyl, bang of the cabinet doors, toaster spring, knife scrape, cyclops eye of the television blinking alive, our small movements, tinks and clinks, sniffs and gulps, faucet on, faucet off, TV off, dishwasher staggering through its phases. The door to the garage flung open, shut, open, shut. Quiet. The cows: grinning, grazing. They chewed.
When we ate together, we’d gather around the oblong table, which would be draped in a seasonal tablecloth, plasticky, kid-proof. We seated ourselves on wooden chairs with green vinyl cushions, a few split from wear, the yellow foam peeking through. My place was opposite my brothers. Mom at my left, Dad at my right. My back to the baker’s rack, where a cat-sized cow stuffie slumped, her stare drilling into my head. On the wall beside it a wire cow hung with tiny bells dangling from her hooves and belly. She had no eyes, but her presence brooded all the same.
I faced the kitchen: the stovetop island, the sink, the cabinets, fridge, and pantry. I could see most of the cows. They could see me.
They watched as I lifted each clear glass of cold, pasteurized, homogenized, partially skimmed milk to my lips, tilting it up and in. They observed as I closed my mouth over spoonfuls of emulsified ice cream. Smooth lumps of fermented, vanilla-flavored yogurt. Wet mounds of milk-drunk Raisin Bran. Mugs of scalded hot chocolate, milk skin floating on the surface.
Occasionally, steak. Pink juices spilling past the seat of a (cheddar-topped) baked potato to flavor the (butter-logged) brussels sprouts too.
Did the cows watch in judgment as we buried their bodies in ours?Did they strain in protest within the confines of their paralysis? Perhaps they preferred this new domestication to the lives they would have lived on a farm, popping out calves and pumping out milk. Perhaps they grasped it wasn’t their milk in our mouths. Perhaps they possessed no sentience.
I was eight years old, then eleven, then thirteen, sixteen, eighteen. My own gaze trained inward and registered little outside my concerns: Write back to Kim; why do I have to do dish duty; but I need to go to the Bush concert. The cows blended into the countertops and disappeared into the wall-paper. They became part of the everything that formed our home.
Not just cows. We had dish towels and pot holders patterned with cow print. Wood art in the shape of a milk bottle. Jesus Christ on the cross, bleeding out. We ate of his body, too, at Mass every Sunday.
We lived in Chesterfield, Virginia, twenty miles south of the Philip Morris plant where our next-door neighbors worked. I associated Philip Morris with cigarettes and factories. I didn’t know that the company had just merged with Kraft and now sold a third of the nation’s cheeses.
It was the era of “Got Milk?” and “Milk. It Does a Body Good.”
It was the era of Kelis’s hit “Milkshake.”
Did the cows watch in judgment as we buried their bodies in ours?
It was the era of osteoporosis awareness.
My brothers and I drank a lot of milk in that kitchen. We went through two gallons a week. Maybe more. From Ukrops or Food Lion or Giant, our three supermarkets. Store-brand milk with nondescript labels. No images of cows, whether cartoonish or pastoral. I didn’t think much about the origins of the milk that I was swallowing, though I had only to look around me, and there they (sort of) were.
I didn’t think much about our last name, either, except when introducing myself, except when it prompted reactions. Milks? You must be in dairy. Wink. Then I thought about it glumly. What a weird, maybe gross thing to be named after.
Milk: fluid secreted from the mammary glands. Milk: what makes mammals mammals. Though some features of Linnaeus’s classification system have been phased out, like the Homo monstrosus category, and despite evidence that animals from other kingdoms produce forms of milk—a worm-like amphibian, for instance, cockroaches, and some spiders, who might also have fur—this distinction for mammals has held on. Mammals make milk.
Milk supports the nutrition and development of mammalian young—exclusively, for variable durations of time across species. The shortest lactation period is the four days hooded seals nurse their young. The orangutan’s seven years is the longest.
Milk: the living fluid. Milk: the first vaccine. Milk grows organs and calibrates metabolism, gut health, and immunity. Milk is the medium for a feedback loop of signals between nursing parent and nursling. Milk is biodynamic. Full of protein. Hormones. Antibodies. White blood cells. Fat. Magic. Life.
A liquid with fluctuating properties, milk is thus doubly fluid. Its volume, content, and thickness change according to the rhythms of the day and the year, according to the rhythms and needs of the nursing parent and suckling child.
Milk is notable for its “capacity to be various, to be other to itself, to be always made anew.”1 London’s Milk Street was formerly known as Melecstrate, Melchstrate, Melke-strate, Melcstrate, Melkstrete, Milkstrete, and Milkstrate. The Milks family (plural) was formerly known as the Milk family (singular). The “s” got added in 1875 by an in-law, Sarah Matilda Milks née Smith, who felt “Milks” had more class than “Milk.” Now, when the “s” gets dropped on mailers, it’s as though the word is migrating back to its source.
Like the drink—I say over the phone or at the counter, in the pharmacy or at the box office, to my students on the first day. Like a glass of milk. But plural. This has always been my last name, and so I have always had a close and at times uncomfortable relationship with the substance and its associations. Like breasts and udders. Like cows—mainly Holsteins, those hefty white rectangles with black splotches and skinny legs, the most popular dairy cows of America. Like Big Dairy and its ubiquitous ad campaigns. Like the swirl of celestial bodies we know as the Milky Way, or the candy bar named after it, three textures in one, a small galaxy of flavors. Like coconut milk, almond milk, soy milk, oat, cashew, macadamia. Like my father’s side of the family and our roots in early American settler colonialism. Like the “wholesome” white American nuclear family that cow milk has come to symbolize. Like white nationalists chugging gallons of milk to troll an anti-Trump art installation: “We must secure the future of our diet and the future for milk drinking!” Like the rapid proliferation of alternative milks and non-white, non-nuclear families that threaten this white supremacist vision. Like former San Francisco city official Harvey Milk (unrelated), with whose post-Stonewall gayness I’ve developed a queer kinship. Like the two other Megan Milkses, both of whom, I’ve learned, are queer; one of whom is also gender nonconforming—she’s in Florida, a mixed martial artist and the cover model of the 2014 It’s All Butch calendar.
I’m often asked whether my family—the Milks side of it—has a history of dairy farming. The answer is not that we know of. The name’s origins are unknown and may be Slavic or German in nature. Melk: Slavic for border. Milch: German for milk. We apparently have German ancestry, but the traceable lineage starts in sixteenth-century Norfolk, England. While I can find dairy people in the Milk-Milks genealogy, any correspondence between the Milks patrilineage and dairying is weak.
The first milk comes from the breast. The first culture to milk domesticated animals was likely the Sumerians. The first cows to live in what is now the United States were shipped here in 1624, their presence contributing to the swift decline of the bison population.
The first American Milk is John Milk, son of Robert John, son of John. He arrives in 1662 to settle on Massachusett, Pawtucket, and Naumkeag territory, in the colonial town of Salem, where he is appointed town cowherd. I imagine John has had little to no experience with cows and is given this appointment because of his surname. He also works as a chimney sweep. Eventually John buys a lot near the river, builds a home, and marries a Sara Weston, one of several who lived in this region at the time. When he dies, he leaves behind Sara, two children, and a cow.
John begets John begets John. John Jr. moves to Boston and becomes a shipbuilder and neighbor to Paul Revere. John III begets a daughter, Jane, who marries a member of the Boston Tea Party. That’s all we have about Jane.
I know all this because my dad has also been working on a Milk book. His is called From England to America: A Short but Comprehensive History of One Ancestral Line of the Milk-Milks Family from the 1600s to Present Day. It updates an existing two-volume genealogy prepared by distant relatives.
My dad’s Milk-Milks book ends with him and us, his family. Though it’s hardly a complete record, we are fortunate to be able to trace our lineage as extensively as we can, when many people cannot due to histories of family separation, lost or destroyed archives, enslavement, colonialism, genocide, other violences. Our “one ancestral line” is, of course, an approximation at best, not a line but a mess of branched veins, incompletely mapped and entangled with other maps, all of which chart familial bonds by patrilineage. One joins the map through wedlock, recognized birth, state-sanctioned adoption. Whoever doesn’t neatly, officially link up gets lopped off the map.
Dad’s account of himself numbers ten pages (some filled with photographs) and includes his high school basketball rebound statistics, his many professional titles and achievements, and his current golf handicap.
My mother’s biography is made up of three sentences. I assume he gave her the opportunity to write her own, as he did for me after offering his version, which stated my name and academic degrees; that was it. I corrected some incorrect details and added my book titles (my children) and a note about my use of they/them gender pronouns. It didn’t occur to me to take up ten pages.
What a weird, maybe gross thing to be named after.
Legally, I have stayed Megan Milks since birth. Unlike my brothers, whose names I have changed in this book, I wasn’t named after anyone. And because I was assigned female at birth, I have never been expected to carry on the family name. This has been, in some sense, a freedom. Now I live at an odd, queer angle to the family, to our line. I’m there and not there, a childless, quivering bulb at the end of one small capillary, destined to shrivel up without spreading.
A status I’ve chosen. I have no impulse to procreate or parent. I don’t much care about the map or the name—so I think, so I tell myself. Yet here I am begetting this book.
It started as a question about names. I started thinking about changing my first name, then wondering about changing my last.
I changed my first name. I changed it again, changed it again, I changed it back.
I changed it.
I changed it back.
These name changes were social, not legal, and for a variety of reasons didn’t stick.
I became obsessed with names and started a column named Name Tags for a quarterly newsmagazine in Chicago. I wrote the first column, which functioned as both a call for pitches and an exploration of my own name, then edited one guest writer’s essay per issue. In that first column, I wrote:
A name marks, abbreviates, begins.
A name is a failure, always already inadequate to describe that which it purports to name.
A name is a tool for giving instruction, that is to say, for dividing being. (Socrates in Plato’s Cratylus)
We are given some names; we take others.
What is your relationship to your name(s)?
When the publication folded, I resuscitated the column for an online website. The pitches rolled in until that publication ceased running and I let the column die.
I could write a whole book about names, I thought. My name. I could use the writing to make myself decide on a new name.
It started when, as a Halloween costume, I cut out the title from the title page of Ariana Reines’s The Cow and taped it to a dangly earring so that my face—black splotch painted over one eye and a cheek—read Megan Milks: The Cow. White T-shirt. Black jeans. My best and laziest costume.
It started when grade school classmates started calling me Megan Milks the Cow.
Or when my friends started singing “Megan Milks, Megan Milks” when they saw me in the hallways at school, as if one name couldn’t live without the other.
SOCRATES: Take courage then and admit that one name may be well given while another isn’t.
It started as a joke to myself. What if I wrote a book about. . . milk?
It started with milk. Which was among the first words that I learned. How confusing to try to understand that I was a Milks, that Dad was a Milks, that Mom had become a Milks, that there were many other Milkses, and that we may or may not have been named after this white stuff that we drank. Did families take their names from beverages?
Milks. I’m ambivalent. I dislike the sound. Voiced out loud, it’s clunky in the mouth, clotted up with too many consonants. It doesn’t lilt or sway, or declare itself with confidence. It’s inelegant, unwriterly, embarrassing. But it’s distinctive—in a mundane way. This makes it both memorable and easily spelled and pronounced.
I ask my family what they think.
My dad: “I’m proud of the name.”
I ask him about nicknames, and he shrugs. “People said stuff in school, but I pretty much ignored them.”
Mom: “I would say it’s pretty neutral. It’s kind of a cool name, actually. It’s different. It’s short. Easy to write.” Shorter than her maiden name by three letters.
“The funny thing is, I don’t like milk,” she says. “Even when I was a child. I never liked it.”
A cousin: “It’s very unique and I like it the older I become. However, as a kid I hated it.” His nicknames: “Milksy, Milks, 1% Milk, Got Milks, [First Name] Milks a Cow. He also mentions “lots of milking or milk jokes in the sexual nature.”
I ask my younger brother Derek—annoying nicknames? Not really. “It’s probably worse for girls.” He’s thinking about boob jokes. No one made that kind of joke to my face, though I’m not sure it would have registered if they had. I was will-fully oblivious about that whole world.
Derek brings up one of my childhood friends, whose given name was Smelley. We are agreed: At least our last name wasn’t that.
My older brother Michael doesn’t want to speak with me about it. He needs to protect the family name—from me, I guess.
It started when I saw Jordan Peele’s Get Out and found myself implicated in the milk moment. It’s that scene where the Black protagonist’s white girlfriend is sipping a large glass of thick milk while trawling a dating site for her next mark. It’s milk as a symbol of whiteness. I took in this scene with the tingling creep of self-recognition. Uh-oh, I thought. Is that me? I’m white, but not that kind of white—right? I haven’t drunk cow milk in years. Which was beside the point. Get Out effectively implicates all white people in anti-Black racism, and I, a white person named Milks, felt the implication pointedly.
I started researching, learning, researching more. My interest began to shift from names to the thing itself.
Milk: It’s everywhere, in everything. Bodies and bottles and family and history and dairy and whiteness and cows. Our mammalian kin, plus the spiders and that one lactating amphibian. Gender and hormones and climate change. Trains, refrigeration technology, plastic. I pluck off the cap and the milk spills out, flowing in all directions. Milk as soft global power. Milk as colonial force. Milk as symbol of increasingly entrenched cultural divide. I walk by a giant “Milk. It Does a Body Good” campaign featuring Olympic athletes. I watch Aubrey Plaza in a “Wood Milk” ad paid for by the Milk Processor Education Program. I watch tradwife influencers cradle mason jars of creamy raw milk. I get the news alerts: Wildfires in Texas kill more than seven thou-sand beef and dairy cattle; bird flu confirmed in cattle in two states, then several, then sixteen. I stop in the dairy aisle and survey the options: whole milk, skim milk, 1/2%, 1%, 2% in pints, quarts, gallons. Half and half. Creamer. Cream. Caffeinated. High protein. Soy.
It shows up in my reading, shimmering on the page when it does. Achilles milks the spear’s poison. Two pints become crucial evidence in the first essay of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The moon is milky. His skin is milky. She smiles, milkily.
Since I’m writing about milk, I’m writing about my family name.
Since I’m writing about my family name, I’m writing about family.
Let me tell you about mine. I’ll start with me. I’ll take up ten pages. Maybe more.
Find me tucked into the long side of the kitchen table, which I have just set: five plates, five forks, knives, spoons, paper napkins. I’ve put out the butter, the salt and pepper, our salad dressings—Italian for everyone but Dad, who prefers ranch or sometimes the orange stuff. I’ve poured three glasses of milk. Unsweetened iced tea for our parents.
If I’m in elementary school, my long hair is pulled back by the neon pink scrunchie headband I so love. I am done with my dinner and impatient for Derek to finish his so we can move on to dessert. I need to do my math homework and practice for the spelling bee. I aim to win. At school I am called the expected things: Nerd. Brownnoser. Dorkus porkus. Megan Milks the Cow.
That one’s the stickiest. I interpret it as a comment on my fatness: Megan Milks, the Cow. The as in singular. The one and only cow (fat girl) of the third-grade classroom. Then fourth grade. Then fifth. Later, as an adult, when someone who doesn’t know me as fat or as formerly fat accurately guesses my childhood nickname, my first impulse is to assume they’re calling me fat. But the context—a small group of kind, anti-fatphobic friends—will lead me to check myself and, pulling the logic backward, wonder if my younger peers were simply verbing my last name.
But I had never milked a cow and to be called a cow, the cow, made more sense.
Green’s online Dictionary of Slang compares its entry on Cow (n.) to those of Bitch (n.) and Sow (n.). When applied to humans, these words are typically used to describe “a woman,” especially an unpleasant or unattractive one. Cow and sow, but not bitch, are used to call a woman fat.
Milk: It’s everywhere, in everything.
Cow has also been used as slang for prostitute; for “an awkward or stupid person”; for “an objectionable thing” or “horrendous situation” (as in, it’s going to be a cow of a day); and more. In the 1950s it was used in the US to describe an effeminate male homosexual. At the same time, to be cow-simple in queer parlance was to be a man attracted to women.
One can be cow-cunted or cow-faced. I don’t know which is better.
I don’t know which is worse, for women to be associated with cows or for cows to be brought into cis men’s misogyny.
Though the word has become laden with insult and moral judgment, there’s nothing inherently negative about fatness. (Fat activists have been telling us this for decades.) Still, it’s inaccurate to describe cows in this way. A cow is a block of muscle containing a large and complex digestive system inside which grasses and feed convert to milk and meat. Cows are bulky, boxy, solid. Not fat. I guess they are heavy. Hefty.Massive. Terms also wielded as insults against people, especially women, of size.
So, then, as a child, I know to be insulted by “Megan Milks the Cow.” At the same time, my life is much bigger than my feelings around this epithet, and I enjoy it overall. I have my own rosy bedroom and a weekly allowance that I save up to buy My Little Ponies and Mariah Carey cassettes. I have a bike and friends who live in biking distance. A mom who takes me to the library every two weeks. My brothers are annoying but bearable. I can eat pretty much whatever and whenever I want. It’s a fine middle-class life in semirural central Virginia.
I spend most of it reading. On summer days I stretch out on the sunroom futon with a stack of books. Sometimes Tiger, our cat, permits me to read to him. The French doors shut the world out, though behind their glass I am lit up for anyone in the family room to see. I hide my face behind my book and pretend to be unseeable. As the sun heats up the closed room, I become aware of my body and other disappointing intrusions. I prefer to live in story.
Michael raps on the door. Dinnertime. (Tonight it was his turn to set the table.)
I sit down in my best shirt, an oversized button-down in soft silk, a gift from my favorite aunt. The back of my bra is itching where it hooks. I’m in eighth grade, my bangs swooped up and sprayed rigid. These days I am boarding the earlier bus to high school in the morning because I’m in accelerated math and my middle school has run out of curriculum. I take math and science at Michael’s school, then another bus ferries me to mine. In his school my brother does not know me, though I’m showing him up in his—our—algebra class.
On the high school bus the first day, I sit in the only open stretch of seats, unaware—no thanks to Michael—they’ve been left empty for a reason. These seats, I soon learn, are the territory of the four Black boys who board the bus a few stops later, who own the bus because they act like they do. While the rest of the mostly white kids cram together in twos and threes, these kids each claim their own row.
“Who’s this bitch in my seat?” Moi? I turn to face my interrogator. As he slides in next to me, I hug the window, unsure whether I’m expected to respond. “Yo, what is your name, bitch?” I don’t remember if he asks for my last name, too, or if I just introduce myself in full like a dork. He—and I forget his name now, though he shared it, while shaking my hand—starts calling me Cereal Baby and greets me as such every morning. Though I would not say we are friends, at one point he informs me I look like a Christmas tree. Holiday sweatshirts and light bulb earrings are socially acceptable, even approved of, in middle school. But not in high school. I retire my holiday flair. He is a friend to let me know.
By dinner I’m wiped and I still have to practice my oboe.
Or I’m sweaty and dusty from softball, settling down with microwaved leftovers, back late after a game. I’ve freed my ponytail to cover my ironed-on “nickname” with my hair. I’m not sure why my dad signed me up for this team, but I’m playing with girls I don’t know who all know each other. They have tried to include me but I’m shy, aloof, and also gay, obliviously; they’ve stopped trying. When the coach says we can put our nicknames on our jerseys instead of our last names, my teammates cheer and I panic. Everyone has a good nickname but me. I want to fit in, so on the shirt sheet I write Milkyway, which is clever, I hope. It will give the impression that I can hit the ball to a galaxy far, far away, that I am a real slugger.
When I show up thus named, my teammates are perplexed. “Do people call you that?” the pitcher (“Mandy-pants”) asks. I shrug, tongue-tied and embarrassed. When I go up to bat, no one knows how to rally for this unknown, suspect person. My dad’s voice rings out clear and strong and humiliating: “Go Milky! Hustle, Milky!” He doesn’t know how to cheer for me either.
I sit down at the kitchen table. I take a sip of milk.
Now I’m in high school and blurrier by the day. Receded, subdued, over it, get me out. If I’m seventeen, I’ve replaced milk with water for weight-loss purposes. I will eat little, return to my room, flip the cassette to record the second side of a Tori Amos bootleg while finishing my AP Calc homework, then creep down to the garage for my cardio time, during which I blast pop music and fling myself around in a loose approximation of aerobics. It is the highlight of my day. If anyone opens the door and intrudes on this party, I freeze in place and wait for them to leave.
For now I’m sixteen. I’m drinking my milk. I’m telling you about my family. Mom is on my left, setting down lasagna on a trivet in the center of the table. No, not lasagna, something simpler because she’s in college now. She didn’t finish her BA the first time around; she got her MRS degree instead (she jokes). She met my dad at a frat party at Virginia Tech, the story goes. My mom, drunk—it was her birthday—pointed to a tall stranger across the room and declared she would marry that man. They’ve been together ever since. After his junior year, they married and lived in a trailer until he graduated. She (a school year behind) chose not to reenroll, taking a job at the college instead.
She has been mostly happy to be a stay-at-home mom, but now that we’re older she’s completing her degree. The change has been good for her. She is reminded of how smart she is, a quick learner and likable: Her younger classmates all want her in their project groups. She’s studying information systems at VCU. I like this new version of Mom, but I’m too self-obsessed and perpetually irritated to tell her.
I’m also big on academic achievement, so this would be the first detail I share. My mother has always been smart, likable, and good at what she does. She runs the house and manages our lives and gets us where we need to be: in my case, to the library, to jazz and tap classes, to short-lived riding lessons when they replace dance, to Girl Scouts until I quit, to symphonic band until I can drive. Mom is fun, silly, a talker with an easy sense of humor, often the good-natured butt of our jokes. After meeting her on parents’ night, my fifth-grade teacher tells me I have a great mom. I’m miffed to hear her mom-ness so casually appraised, but it’s true. Mom is great.
I don’t know which is worse, for women to be associated with cows or for cows to be brought into cis men’s misogyny.
Dinner is pork chops and canned green beans with mushrooms. She scoops some beans onto her plate and passes the dish to Derek. He sets it down. He’s not ready yet for the beans.
My younger brother by five years is painfully shy and slow to speak, to put on his shoes, to tie them. Slow to eat. Finicky. For years he asserted a rejection of pizza until the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made him rethink. Right now he is fixated on removing the fat and gristle from his chops, so he is holding up the beans. He chews slowly. Swallows slowly. Has to be goaded into finishing. We are always waiting on Derek. But his language is rhythm: On his drum set he’s fast, nimble, a force. He’s taken over the sunroom with it. Which is fine. These days I read in my room.
“Derek,” Mom chides. He sets down his fork and knife reluctantly and dumps some beans next to the meat on his plate. Passes them to Michael.
Michael has a hat on, camo print. Mom made him take it off, then relented after beholding the greasy gloss of his hair. He’s fifteen months my elder. We were once close, but our lives have been going so differently. I’m flourishing in a magnet program twenty-five miles away; he’s at the less-resourced local school and struggling. Now that he can drive, he is drinking and driving. Skipping school. Our parents have made him take up a sport to keep out of trouble. He chose wrestling, which has required him to exert control over his diet and body, and he has risen to this challenge in ways I could not have predicted, diminishing himself in a matter of months from ruddy and robust to svelte, cut. He’s got a girl-friend now, too, and a hunting gun, a chewing tobacco habit, and new Confederate signage. Not long ago he dropped a weight on his face, an accident that left his front teeth dead and brown. He’s stopped smiling. Occasionally he’ll bring home a deer carcass and hang it from the hind legs by a hook in the garage to bleed out. Then I can’t use the space for my cardio routine, and I’m mad but keep my feelings to myself. We all keep our feelings to ourselves.
Dad goes for a second chop. He’s changed out of work clothes into a Hokies shirt and has one eye on the TV behind my head. We’re watching the football game or the basket-ball game or the six o’clock news. The stories of our time are Rodney King, the Gulf War, the Bosnian War, Clin-ton’s impeachment, Matthew Shepard, Columbine. Lorena Bobbitt: a Virginia story. Dad cheers for his team. Mom tsks her reactions to tragedy and war. Dad travels frequently for his job in the Defense Department and brings home free swag: seasonal candy, duffel bags with company logos (Keebler, Hershey’s). When he’s home, he goes to bed at 9 p.m. and we turn the TV down. Except on Fridays when he stays up for The X-Files, which is our thing (me and Dad’s). On weekends he mows the lawn and weeds the flower beds, checks on the vegetable garden in the backyard. He is quietly pleased when I ask him to take me to the park to practice basketball. He drives us to church every Sunday, and to Northern Virginia to see family on holidays, and if we’re not in the van at the designated time, he will pretend to be leaving us. It’s usually Mom who’s late, still in the bathroom. Or Derek, putting on his shoes. The license plate reads 5 MILKS.
Back to me. The pork is dry and I force it down with a gulp of milk.
No more pork. I’m vegetarian.
No more milk. Water. I’m seventeen and I don’t want to be here anymore. I’ve eaten in this kitchen, lived in this house, for nine years, the longest I’ve lived anywhere. Soon I will leave, and my family will move, but I return in my mind all the time.
It’s the last time we all share a home. Soon Michael will enlist in the army and leave for basic training. Soon I’ll leave for my parents’ college pick, their alma mater, where I’ll spend two unhappy semesters keeping empty days full with crew practice, an impossibly heavy course load, and binge eating; soon I’ll have totaled two (used) cars. Soon Derek will go silent when our parents tell him they are moving to California. Soon the house will be packed up, the kitchen dismantled. Soon we’ll all be elsewhere.
I didn’t milk any cows growing up, but they gathered in that kitchen.
Their origin story is simple enough. My mom saw a cow item while shopping one day, a decorative dish. She thought it would be funny to display in the Milks kitchen, and it fit the kitchen’s country-style aesthetic, the buttery cabinets, the bay windows with ruffled bangs. She bought it. The first cow.
The first cow was installed on the wall above one of the cabinets, where she stared down at us, a soothing solidity in the most chaotic room in the house. Her shining eyes beseeched us: More cows, please, she needed company. My mom asked family and friends to keep a lookout for cow décor, initiating years of such gifts. In no time, we had amassed a whole herd.
After a few years of these cow gifts, my mother started to weary of the theme, or so I thought. Unwrapping a stuffed cow from Harrods, a gift from my aunt, I read her enthusiasm as feigned, her laughter forced. “Another cow?!”
I remember her expressing relief at leaving behind the country aesthetic when my family packed to move for California in my college years. “No more cows,” she declared, dropping a stuffie into a giveaway box, its tiny bell dinging dully.
Upon examination, this memory collapses. I couldn’t have witnessed this scene; I was in Charlottesville, not present when she packed for this move.
Maybe I’m remembering my first visit to their new home in Rocklin? I can see her now, introducing me to that Spanish-style kitchen, where country aesthetics wouldn’t jive. “See?” she says with a triumphant flourish of the hand. “No more cows.”
I sit down with my mom now and ask her about it. Did she resent the endless supply of cows that people kept giving her? No, she says. She started it. She invited it. It was a big country kitchen, and she thought cow and milk items worked well. In the new house in California, dairy kitsch didn’t fit.
Derek, passing by, chimes in. “You got sick of them,” he says.
Maybe, she allows. But she saved them all.
We’re at the high square table in their kitchen in Chester, where they live now, not far from where I grew up. Their current home is less milked out. My mom says she gave most of the cow décor to Michael when he and his wife bought a home, and she put the rest in storage. No more cows.
As we’re talking, I spot a ceramic Holstein above the kitchen cabinets, in profile, more rustic. My mother laughs. The cookie jar. She forgot about it. “The battery is dead, but it used to go moo. Oh! There’s another thing.” She disappears into the dining room, still talking, to retrieve a cow reindeer Christmas decoration: that is, a cow with an udder and reindeer horns, leading a sleigh. “Oh!” She heads to the family room to grab a cow stuffie from the mantle. She holds it out, happy to help. “Want to take a picture?” I do.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of The Emilysby Heather Abel, which will be published on June 16th, 2026 by Penguin Random House. You can pre-order your copyhere!
Eve is at a breaking point. Alone with her two children in Massachusetts while her husband pursues his music career in New York City, she’s frustrated, bored, and above all, lonely when she runs into Demeter, a childhood friend with whom she shared one transformative summer. Demeter is as beautiful and charismatic as Eve remembers, but she’s also distraught. Demeter’s daughter, like a growing number of others, young and old, cannot go outside during the day. No one knows why, and doctors are skeptical that these people—soon dubbed Emilys, after a famously reclusive local poet—are telling the truth. But Eve believes her friend, whose company revives her and gives her purpose. She will help Demeter—if she can just figure out how.
Eve’s search for answers brings her into the fold of an unlikely band of detectives—the local librarian and the town’s most prolific writer of letters to the editor, who both loved the same woman and now hate each other; an actor hoping to make amends for past mistakes; a hermit botanist whose seed collection might hold a clue if she’d only open her door. They meet in playdates and potlucks, the Elks Lodge and the food co-op, the botanical garden and the riverbank, venturing deep into the town’s past and finding their way towards a future wilder and more wondrous than they had ever expected. But for Eve, this future will require a price: She is keeping secrets from her husband, fighting with Demeter, distracted from her children. What is she willing to risk to find a cure?
The Emilys is a capacious, profound book about how love of all kinds—love between friends, between mothers and kids, between strangers and neighbors, love for the earth—opens up new possibilities. It asks: How will we learn to live in an altered world? How will we keep each other safe? And when the darkness comes, how will we find joy?
Here is the cover, designed by Elena Giavaldi:
Heather Abel: The first time my daughter rolled down a hill was in the tall grass behind a farmer’s market. She was nervous, so I laid down and showed her how, which she found hilarious. She reached the bottom exhilarated, grass clinging to her red curls. I watched her tiny legs trudge back up the hill—it seemed like a mountain—and as she rolled again, my joy leaped up to match hers. It had been a long day. All those days were long. But I suddenly felt so beautifully alive, part of the green grass, the autumn sky, her laughter. Just then, another mother walked up to me, shaking her head. “Careful,” she warned, motioning toward my girl. “Ticks. People are getting sick.”
This is it, I thought: Motherhood. The triumphant joy, the inescapable danger.
I started writing The Emilys with that moment in mind. In my novel, a mysterious illness unsettles a small New England town. It sounds scary, but it’s not dystopian. The book follows the people in the town—especially two moms—as they come together to figure out what’s happening. What interests me about our treacherous world is how we carry each other to safety. How we laugh ourselves through trouble. Because it’s not enough to warn each other, we have to join each other.
Contradiction became the pulse of the novel. How to love the natural world, even as we humans have changed nature in really terrifying ways? Where do you find happiness if you’re unable to go into the sunshine? I leaned on these lines from Rilke: “Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength.”
I wanted a cover that showed nature as a place of real solace, and also of potential danger. When I saw Elena’s cover, I gasped. It’s the cover of my dreams. I love the little girl hidden by the mysterious pink dot. Here childhood seems both innocent and imperiled. The girl’s white dress reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s, the poet who floats in the background of The Emilys. And I love all the green, the tangled grass, the low leaves. Sure, it makes me nervous. But I also just want to dive into that green and see what I find there.
Elena Giavaldi: For this cover, I knew from the very beginning that the main color had to be green. It’s a color that shows up constantly in the book, and nature is such an important element throughout the story. Even though the novel touches on intense themes, there’s still an underlying sense of optimism, and the cover needed to reflect both. The design had to feel lush, green, and inviting, but also a bit off—slightly eerie, with an edgy quality. The artwork aims to capture that balance, while the pink elements lift the mood and make you wonder what they are and why they’re there. The title is so strong that I felt it needed a bold typeface to really make it stand out. It’s been a pleasure diving into this novel and finding the right cover direction!
Every sunset Tom hunts the dragon in his backyard. On an unknown day in the recent past, the dragon climbed from the canal on the eastern perimeter of Tom’s property and made a home in his lake, where it eats the koi fish Tom and his wife Jeanette purchase from the pet store. With the credit card swipe comes a vow to give the koi a good life. But inevitably, they are to be eaten by a dragon. It isn’t fair.
Tom’s means of hunting involves a revolver and a golf cart. The golf cart, he’s driven often. He and Jeanette rode it to and from the bars along the Intracoastal before they moved to this ranch house with a backyard lake. The move was necessary. Jeanette enjoyed the bars too much.
The gun is a gift from a neighbor. He lives in a state like that. For all his fifty-five years, Tom has been staunchly opposed to guns and – with the exception of a singular weekend trip in the nineties to impress the brothers of his first wife – hunting. The revolver is not loaded. He hopes the dragon implicitly understands the threat of a gun.
Tom cannot patrol the lake all day, what with his job and his wife and the demands of his wife’s condition. One afternoon, he installs a trap. The trap is a box built of steel fencing, and beneath it Tom buries raw meat to attract the dragon. The idea is that, when the dragon enters, the contraption will snap closed and the dragon will be humanely disposed of in the Everglades.
Jeanette doesn’t give a shit about the trap. He drives them in the golf cart to show her what he’s made, but she’s distracted. Wine sloshes from her glass onto her foot as they tread the uneven terrain of their yard. Her Santa Margherita is precious to her, she explains, and doesn’t he know the price has gone up?
Maybe that’s your sign, he suggests.
She asks to be taken home before seeing the trap. The dragon circles beneath the lake’s surface. The water drags.
Tom hasn’t slept through the night in months. Now, he leaves bed before sunrise to discover the trap has shut. Inside: no dragon. Only a scowling racoon, angry about his predicament. Tom frees the racoon and sits on the golf cart to take in the day. Cicadas buzz. It’s a cotton candy sunrise. At the beginning of their relationship, after nights spent talking until daybreak, one freewheeling conversation toppling into another, a giddy-giggly-headfirst romance known best by people who don’t know better, Tom and Jeanette would take the Zodiac out on the Intracoastal and idle there to name the shapes in the sky. Tom couldn’t believe his luck. His first marriage died emotionally two decades before it died legally. The kids and all. There was so much loneliness there. Jeanette was a deep breath after being underwater. This morning, one cloud looks like a duck. Another, a tornado.
Later, after his nightly patrol, Tom senses it before he hears it. Then, he hears it. Jeanette stands in the kitchen, tumbler in hand, yelling into her phone. An empty bottle of Pinot Grigio sits on the counter behind her. She’s moved onto vodka. Usually he hopes that seeing him will help her come to and remember. But alcohol makes her mean, and alcohol decays her memory, and Tom left his optimism somewhere in the buried meat of the dragon trap. She hangs up the phone.
Can you believe it! Olivia won’t come to her own mother’s birthday unless I promise not to drink.
Tom knows this already; he had arranged the ultimatum. Jeanette knows this, too, but has forgotten since he told her that morning, when she was still sober and agreeable, after he finished naming the clouds.
He crosses the living room into the kitchen and drains the bottle of vodka into the sink. It gurgles as it goes. She swats at his back and kicks at his calves.
Jeanette, I noticed the alcohol I got rid of is back.
Am I a child? Because you treat me like a child.
OK, he agrees. He disposes the empty bottle in the trash, then moves to the refrigerator to see what else she bought.
You’re an asshole. You know that?
Why don’t we watch the sunset? It’s still going.
She mimics him, echoing his words petulantly. I’m done with this! I’m done!
She marches out the back door and slams it so it shakes. Tom follows Jeanette outside and watches as she descends the patio stairs toward the lake. I’m done, she yells into the air and tugs the wedding band off of her finger. She flings it into the water, indifferent as skipping stones. Her necklace goes next. These items are in good company with her other jewelry, Tom’s wedding band, her last two cell phones. Then go her shoes, which Tom finds funny, thinking of the mud and how quickly she’ll regret the move. He remembers the music festival, when the rain came down suddenly in sheets, and they both laughed as he carried her through the crowds and dirt to the car. Neither of them cared about umbrellas or ruined hair or money lost to a rain-or-shine policy. He remembers feeling like two teenagers. Not even a year has passed since then. Now, Jeanette stomps toward the golf cart parked next to the lake. She takes the revolver and chucks it, then sits in the driver’s seat and fumbles through the cup holders for the keys.
Where are the keys, she yells. The fucking keys, Tom! He expects to find the keys when he pats his pocket. He doesn’t. And then: the quiet roar of a golf cart engine and a drunk woman’s woo! Tom looks up to witness the slow-motion lurch of Jeanette crashing into the lake. Across the yard, the dragon climbs out from the water and stares in their direction. Tom swears he can see the white feathered tail of a fish dripping from its mouth.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
