Page 131 – Electric Literature

7 Novels Across the World About Turbulent Coming of Age

Posted on January 8, 2024January 8, 2024 by Intern Electric Lit

The FamilyMart on the corner of Yingchun Road and Changliu Road, right across from my middle school in Shanghai, was no larger than 25 square feet, but had all the necessities swarms of middle-schoolers needed to self-soothe after marathon test prep: fish balls on skewers bathing in a perpetually bubbling brown broth, mini Taiwanese sausages roasting under a heat lamp, plastic-wrapped onigiri bursting with mayo and pork floss. Though no one dared to test this during peak student hours, I knew the market sold alcohol to minors: my mom had been sending me on beer runs since I was nine or ten, and no clerk batted an eye.

My novel, River East, River West, is in part a social portrait of restless and suffocated youth in Shanghai. I’ve long been fascinated by the effect of place on adolescence, how a locale’s social and environmental factors exerts an influence on how young people behave or misbehave, how landscape informs crevices of society young people burrow into or the barriers they break out from. In Shanghai, this meant FamilyMarts and dark KTV rooms where teens could drink and frolic, all-night cybercafés and gargantuan malls, city parks teeming with feral cats, residential housing towers dense as concrete forests where supervising adults were too often absent, busy making money in distant cities.

This is a reading list about young people growing up too fast, too hard, too weird, too tenderly because they live in places where the setting is a driving force for complicated youths. Let these books take you around the globe, from working class towns of volcanic northern Tenerife to squatter apartments in Beijing, from a desolate eastern French town corroded by alcohol to the rooftops and cafés of Mexico City, from 1990s Burundi to the tundra of the Canadian arctic. In these stories of fevered hopes and bleak pessimism, absentee parents, epidemics of violence, the anonymity of buzzing metropolises, the wilderness remote towns, the suffocating provincialism, and racial and class tensions are all vivid setting traits to contribute to a kaleidoscopic collection of youth in flux—spanning continents, but all authentic portraits of hyper-particular settings.

Burundi: Small Country by Gaël Faye, translated by Sarah Ardizzone

“To live somewhere,” Faye writes, “is to melt carnally into the topography of a place.” In the musician’s debut novel, we meet 10 year-old Gaby, a French-Rwandan boy living in 1990s Bujumbura, Burundi, in a bougainvillea-filled cul-de-sac of the Kinanira neighborhood. He attends the French school, steals and gorges on the neighbor’s mangoes with his band of mostly mixed-race friends, picnics by the glittering lake with his family. Due to inflation, everyone in Bujumbura is a millionaire; democratic elections are on the horizon, neighborhood bars called cabarets brim with colorful opinions and artisanal liquor.

Gaby’s innocent childhood cracks open when his Rwandan mother and French father split up—on their last outing as a family, following a muddy forest trek and a visit to the palm oil factory where his father supervises a colonial enterprise, Gaby notes that the palm oil came to spoil the happiness of his childhood, mixing into the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. In neighboring Rwanda, ethnic tensions are coming to a boiling point, and Gaby’s visit to Kigali with his mother for an uncle’s wedding is full of chilling precursors of the genocide to come. Soon, the unthinkable happens, and Gaby’s once innocent band of boys—who’d smoked cigarettes at his 11th birthday party by a crocodile carcass, who’d picked idle fights over small neighborhood squabbles—are buying grenades off the black market and arming to guard the neighborhood as violence spills across the border. Years later, the cul-de-sac once teeming with great trees is now bare, barricaded with tall walled compounds and barbed wires. But the cabaret— the ubiquitous neighborhood bars where obscurity reigns and tongue are set loose, where the real country, this “small country where everyone knows everyone,”—still stands, and Gaby returns to see if he can still find memories of home and the ghosts who haunt him.

Spain: Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu, translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches

This novel’s original Spanish title is Panza de Burro, or “donkey’s belly,” a Canarian description of the low-lying cloud cover clinging to the volcanic landscape of northern Tenerife. The ten-year-old narrator and her best friend Idora live in a working class town where many of the adults’ livelihoods are tied to the resort economy of the island’s south. For the girls, the sea is a three hour walk away. They spend much of their languid, suffocating summer failing to get to it, settling instead for a made-believe “canal beach” with concrete slabs and a trickle of water littered with ubiquitous pine needles.

The town’s roads are steep (“a vertical neighborhood on a vertical mountain”), the houses multicolored and half finished, the minimarket a distributor of junk food and mean gossip. The narrator resents the holiday residences her mother needs to clean, from which she feels separated by “a barrier of clear clingfilm.” The girls eat and purge and gorge on berries and pears that make them shit endlessly, they grind their bodies on everything, including each other, they roam in the heat and volcanic haze. The clouds are always low, hovering right above their heads, their oppression a pressure cooker, presaging the boiling point towards which the novel is gathering force.

Afghanistan: 99 Nights in Logar by Jamil Jan Kochai

It is summer in Logar province, and an America-raised teen called Marwand is visiting his family’s village in rural eastern Afghanistan. This is a land of orchards and streams and mulberry trees, of curving roads leading to mazes of interconnected compounds, of courtyards covered with flower petals carried by the wind, of laborers and fields, of US army operations in the surrounding black mountains, “so that those of us down in the river valleys only ever heard the softest hum of gunfire, the gentlest tremble of stone.”

Kochai’s novel unfolds against this backdrop of “Ts” and “psychopathic white boys” and “robots in the sky” in 2005 Afghanistan, but the militarized elements make way for the centerpieces of familial lore, sumptuous feasts, and rowdy shenanigans as the children adventure around this landscape, searching for the escaped and much pestered family dog Budabash. In between, the cousins and friends succumb to mystery illnesses, crash weddings by hiding in burqas, and tell each other countless nesting doll-like stories.

By turns surrealist, absurdist, and deeply heartbreaking, the novel portrays a social landscape of intimate ties and bullet-ridden memories–including a tragedy that marks an eternal wound on the family’s beating heart. This secret is unveiled as layers of tales-within-tales rich with oral tradition are peeled back, culminating to a reveal so poetic and striking that it makes for a landmark chapter in contemporary American literature for its linguistic statement.

Mexico: The Spirit of Science Fiction by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer

To the delight of his cult followers (of which I am proudly one), Bolaño’s metaverse of poets coming-of-age in Mexico City appear in this early novel in his oeuvre as familiar echoes, doppelgangers, and kaleidoscopic fragments. Here, we loosely follow Jan and Remo, variants or alter egos of Arturo and Ulises of The Savage Detectives, perhaps, as they roam through 1980s Mexico City, surviving on milk and avocados, dwelling in rooftop tenement rooms, taking part time jobs at newspapers, writing rabid fan letters to writers they admire.

Reading the book can feel like tracing a map of the city: Bolaño writes of “the ghosts that appear behind trees and on cracked sidewalks in the old neighborhoods of Mexico City,” “the dens of San Juan de Letrán, the neighborhoods around Garibaldi where we sold Virgin of Guadalupe lamps on the installment plan, the chop shops of Peralvillo, the dusty rooms of Romero Rubio, the shady photography studios of Avenida Misterios, the hole-in-the-wall eateries behind Tepeyac that we reached by motorcycle as the sun was beginning to rise over the neighborhood…”

The literary youth in the novel drift in and out of the periphery of workshops, talks, magazines, interviews, they harbor crushes and zip around by motorcycle, they hunt for dusty science fiction tomes in foreign language libraries, they question the dark sides of the “artsy parties” taking over the city, they hallucinate of basilica as monsters, they love with unbridled idealism. The book is capped off by the standalone “Mexican Manifesto,” one of Bolaño’s most brilliant short stories (in my humble opinion), which centers entirely on the ecosystem of lust and exploitation inside a Mexico City bathhouse, and is in itself a masterclass in using place as a driving engine in fiction.

Canada: Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq

1970s, Nunavut, a small town of twelve hundred (human) souls in the Canadian high Arctic. It is a world of freeze and thaw, of sea ice and spring release ripe with smells of the life entrapped, fierce winds and 24-hour sunlight (“The sun is shining brightly overhead. The sun always brings life and mischief, serenity and visions. It’s two o’clock in the morning and I’ve shrugged off my curfew”).

Interspersed with poems and illustrations, this debut novel by Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq juxtaposes the narrator’s sensorial connection with her social and natural environment and ordinary teen preoccupations with the dark underbelly of sexual and substance abuse the town’s children witness and experience. There are butane highs, homes shaking with country music and parties best avoided, the creak of a door opening onto a dark room, unwanted touching, entering, rape. Nearby is the Arctic Ocean, and when it’s frozen over our narrator takes walks on the water. Her adolescent years follow rhythms of cold and thaws, of ever-present darkness and ever-present light; she goes to residential school, is kicked out, she takes up a job at the local grocery store. She grows breasts and kisses the butcher, she harbors crushes on Best Boy, but those are not who enter her in violation. She tells of classes she abhors and creatures she rides in spiritual communion. There are famines, storms, bodies growing within a body and born into the Northern Lights as the narrator navigates pregnancy. Tagaq, a Nunavut native, offers a tale imbued with both the most harrowing darkness and the most poetic ode to the destructive and magical forces in the human soul and the natural world.

China: Running Through Beijing by Xu Zechen, translated by Eric Abrahamsen

When Dunhuang gets out of jail, serving a stint for selling fake IDs, he is greeted by a classic Beijing sandstorm. The sky is “a blur of yellow dust behind which the sun glowed,” a “sandpaper sky.” This effect of dull sepia suffuses the novel’s landscape of city hustling, where livelihoods are often on the brink, but does nothing to diminish the novel’s frantic energy. Dunhuang has nowhere to sleep, so we follow him along Beijing’s Ring Roads and various fake good markets—Book City, Electronics City, the university gates where counterfeit masters and doctorates are for sale. He takes up with Xiaorong, a young woman selling fake DVDs with a penchant for arthouse films, and finds shelter for some time. When her boyfriend returns, Dunhuang takes the porno films she’s unwilling to sell and makes enough of a slim profit to rent first a bunk, then a concrete shack with a scholar tree in a dirt yard as his personal urinal.

Undercover police lurk everywhere, everyone is scamming everyone, and when Dunhuang’s new bike is instantly stolen, he takes up running across the city to make DVD deliveries. In between, he gets drunk on cheap beer and hot pot, he fights his buddies and steals their love interests—but at the end of the day, when someone needs a bailout from jail, Dunhuang is here to borrow money and help his friends. Xu captures the frenetic energy of early 2000s Beijing and the fortune-seekers occupying its lower ranks with touching compassion and rattling optimism—the protagonists are survivors fighting for each day in the big city, offering each other glimmers of mercy in what’s often been characterized as a merciless city. A breathless, profoundly engaging portrait of the hustling outsiders of China’s capital, this novel has been called a landmark of the “jing piao” or “drifting in Beijing” genre—an artful anthropological portrait easily read in one sitting.

France: And Their Children After Them by Nicolas Mathieu, translated by William Rodarmor

A lake, a heatwave, a town in France’s Great East region where teenagers Anthony and his cousin are chasing any stimulation that comes their way. At home, the adults are getting hammered at yet another ordinary apéro. The river valley, one close to the Luxembourg border, has drifted into a post-industrial torpor as its mines and factories become ruin; in the teens’ city, an enormous furnace that was once the city’s beating heart has become a monument of rust.

Mathieu, who grew up in this eastern region, writes of lake water “dense as oil,” of beaches called The Dump or the American Beach, where a local variant of mythologized, evil “rednecks” live. Back home, fathers broken by years of driving forklifts are getting angry and drunk over flavored apéricube cheese, railing against the nearby housing projects and the immigrants moving in—“families grew that way, on great slabs of anger over depths of accumulated pain that, lubricated by pastis, could suddenly erupt in the middle of a party.” Racial tensions and frustrated masculinity brew towards menace as the teens steal canoes and Yamaha bikes, or any modes of transport they can get their hands on to move through the desperate valley and seek a shot with the girls they lust after.

Over the course of four summers leaping along the 1990s, Mathieu’s tale follows new feuds and old rancors, long-harbored crushes and dissipating dreams amidst adolescent ennui and rage that curdles into resignation: the characters are constantly confronting their inability to escape their hometown and their affection and ultimate ease here—a sense of unshakable belonging in their forsaken valley.

The Physical and Invisible Walls that Determine the Lives of Palestinians

Posted on January 5, 2024January 16, 2024 by Jo Lou

As the bombs continue to fall in Gaza and violence tears through the West Bank, the areas of historic Palestine that are occupied by Israel, it is easy to get lost in the complicated geopolitical histories, statistics, and competing media narratives.

That is part of why journalist Nathan Thrall, whose earlier work with the International Crisis Group led him to write deeply researched articles on Israel-Palestine, zoomed in not just on a few characters, but one particular man: Abed Salama. In Thrall’s new book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, he paints a picture of the modern West Bank, divided by both political and concrete walls. Salama’s son was the victim of a catastrophic 2012 school bus crash that left some fifty kindergartners engulfed in flames as desperate onlookers pleaded for Israeli emergency services to rescue the children.

Thrall weaves together the story of several lives, each broken up by physical and social lines, and living in the shadow of tragedy and Israel’s military occupation. Thrall also faced his own challenges as he began his book tour, where he faced event cancellations, as many voices critical of Israel experienced as the war began.

I talked with Thrall about life on the other side of the wall, what this tragedy represents for Palestinians, and how this book’s story illuminates larger themes of Palestinian displacement, fragmentation, and mourning.

Shane Burley: Tell me who Abed Salma is, where you encountered this story, and why you wanted to write this book?

Nathan Thrall: Before there was the story of Abed Salama, there was the story of this accident. I live two miles from the walled enclave where the students who were on the school bus lived. In my daily life, I would pass by this walled ghetto without paying it any mind. After the accident, though, I couldn’t stop thinking of the parents and children and teachers involved. Most of them are residents of Jerusalem, people who share this same city with me but live a radically different existence. A separate and unequal existence. They live on the other side of a 26-foot-tall concrete wall and face the worst consequences of an Israeli policy of deliberate neglect. The Palestinian Authority is not allowed to come into the area in which they live, and Israel basically doesn’t go in except as a policing force. The accident was the embodiment of this policy of utter neglect of more than one hundred thousand people.

I tried to find anyone I could who was connected to the accident. Emergency service providers, doctors, social workers, parents, teachers. A family friend told me that she was distantly related to one of the parents of the kids on the bus, and that turned out to be Abed. I drove through the checkpoint, passed to the other side of the wall, and found myself in Abed’s home. He told me his story, not just about the twenty-four hours of his life where he was searching for his son, but also his personal and family history, the story of his activism in the First Intifada, of his first love, of his arrest and torture. And I realized that, through Abed, I could tell the story of Israel-Palestine.

SB: When I was reading the book, I kept thinking about this 1952 book about the Warsaw Ghetto called The Wall. That book describes the escalating trauma of living in the ghetto, but amongst the dozens of intimate character portraits there is one character the narrative all centers on: the wall that surrounds the ghetto. And I felt like in A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, the partition wall that separates the occupied West Bank from Israel is a sort of character in this story. What role does this wall play in people’s lives in the West Bank, and how is it a part of this particular story?

NT: I’m really glad to hear you say that because the wall is its own section of the book. It’s really the only section of the book that’s not centered on a particular person affected by the tragedy. That section goes into the story of an IDF Colonel, Dany Tirza, who was the wall’s chief architect. The wall had to be a central character in this story because it dictated so much of what happened on that day. It determines so much of these people’s lives. They’re surrounded entirely by walls. They have, on three sides, a 26 foot tall, concrete wall and on a fourth side a different kind of wall that runs through a segregated road, Route 4370, famously known as the “apartheid road.”

The enclosure of what is today around 130,000 people in the town of Anata and the Shu’afat refugee camp is the central element in their lives, separating them from their schools and health care providers and higher paying jobs in Jerusalem. The wall meant that parents who wanted to send their kids to the Jerusalem schools on the other side of it had to weigh whether it was worth the risk of their children passing through a checkpoint every morning and afternoon and being confronted by Israeli security forces. Many parents didn’t want to take that risk and chose instead to put their children in a West Bank school, a private school, to avoid Israeli soldiers.

So the wall was important to me, not only in describing how these people live, but also why they’re circumscribed and why the wall was routed in the way that it was. The architect of the wall describes exactly the logic of how he routed it in Jerusalem and around Anata, explaining why he chose not to follow the Jerusalem municipal boundary and instead created an enclave that straddles the Jerusalem municipality. The overriding principle was to remove as many Palestinians as possible from the heart of the city, while relinquishing as little land as possible. That has driven so much of the policy of the state of Israel for decades.

SB: As you write in the Epilogue, part of how this became a story in Israel was a reporter covering the really callous social media comments that some Israeli kids made about the attack. Their ambivalence, while certainly shocking, also seems to have some relationship to the infrastructural unwillingness by Israel to provide any substantial support to Palestinians in the territories. How do those cultural attitudes relate to the structural decisions Israel is making with regard to Palestinians in the West Bank?

NT: The main relationship between the hatred and racism shown by those Israeli youth and the structural barriers that led to tragedy unfolding in the way that it did is that it is a lot easier to dehumanize people with whom you don’t interact. The reality of Israel-Palestine, of Jerusalem, of the settlements abutting Palestinian towns in the West Bank, is one of segregation. That geographic, political, and social reality of segregation is what all the characters in the book had to navigate on the day of this awful tragedy.

The wall had to be a central character in this story because it dictated so much of what happened on that day. It determines so much of these people’s lives.

One of the central elements of the book is that it’s not as though any of these Israelis as individuals actually desired that a bus full of kindergarteners continue to burn while Israeli fire trucks took more than thirty minutes to arrive. Some of the teens who wrote jubilant posts on Facebook did desire that, but the emergency service responders did not. Yet the entire system in which they operate is designed in such a way that the very, very late and inadequate response to this crash was entirely predictable.

SB: Mourning is an important part of the book, and so central to both Palestinian and Israeli lives that this may be one of the elements most shared by all the characters in the book. So, for example, we focus heavily on the way that mourning mobilized the Palestinian communities after the crash, but also meet a Haredi organization dedicated to ensuring mourning rituals are able to be observed. What role does mourning play in Palestine, and what political role does it play?

NT: The act of mourning is different depending on whether you consider the deceased to have been a victim of occupation. If there is a victim of occupation who is killed you are not supposed to, for example, do the traditional ritual of cleaning the body and other standard burial rights; instead you bury them in their clothes. So the whole act of mourning, just from the very first step of determining whether this person is a martyr, a victim of occupation or not, is of course, very political.

The father in the book, Abed Salama, when his son died, one of the things he deeply regretted was not being able to hold his son and say goodbye to him. If they had gone by the declaration of the Palestinian Authority that all of the kids who were killed were martyrs, then Abed and the other parents shouldn’t have done any of the traditional rituals even if they could. In this particular case, Abed couldn’t have because his son was too badly burned.

SB: Your book was released just days before the Hamas attack and subsequently experienced the cancellation of many of your book events and talks, with one particularly notable example when the London police preemptively shut down a planned talk hosted by the How To Academy over alleged “security concerns.” You are obviously not the only one, there has been a massive wave of repression of critical voices in the weeks after the Hamas attack. How did the cancellations affect your promotional efforts for the book, and what has the tenor been like for critical voices since the war began? Do you think it’s becoming increasingly difficult to voice perspectives like yours? And do you think there has been a difference between how critical Jewish and Palestinian voices have been treated in this regard?

NT: The October 7th attacks and the Gaza war had a polarizing effect: on one hand, in mainstream spaces it became much more difficult to have discussions about Palestinian life under occupation; on the other, among younger people and the left more generally there has never been greater support for Palestinian rights. Gatekeepers at some large, mainstream institutions have succeeded in quashing pro-Palestinian speech. At universities, Palestinian freedom of expression has been greatly curtailed and Palestine student groups have even been banned.

It will also be up to people around the world to make clear to their governments that they do not support the continuation of ethnonational domination.

In the cultural sphere, book talks, film screenings, award ceremonies, and musical performances relating to Palestine have been canceled, including about a fourth of the events I had planned in the U.S. (and the main event I had in London, which was shut down by the U.K. police). This has affected Palestinians most severely, but the target is broader—speech that is sympathetic to Palestinians, no matter the identity of the speaker. As a prerequisite to giving a book talk at the University of Arkansas, I was told that I had to sign a pledge that I would not boycott Israel or the settlements. One could boycott virtually anything in the world—the fossil fuel industry or China or Saudi Arabia or the Republican Party—but not Israel or the settlements. I refused to sign, and the talk hasn’t happened. What many people don’t realize is that these sorts of infringements on freedom of expression were in place long before October 7th. It’s just that they have gained steam since.

SB: You and I are talking at a time when no ceasefire is in place, nearly 20,000 Palestinians have been killed, the Israeli right is entrenched and a voluntary end to the Occupation feels as far as ever. As someone who lives there and is deeply invested in the future for the people of the region, are you optimistic about that future? And what kinds of actions for those in the U.S. are most helpful?

NT: As shocking as it may be to hear this, I believe that there is a better chance of ending this system of oppression today than there was on October 6th. The reason for that is very simple. This is a contest between two grossly unequal parties. One is Israel, a nuclear armed regional power with the backing of the strongest state in the world. And the other is a party that is politically divided, militarily weak, barely holds any territory, and even what it ostensibly holds is still controlled by Israel. It really has no ability to impose the kinds of costs that would be necessary to overturn the system. The problem has been that the stronger party has not had a strong enough incentive to change the system.

For the first time in many years, ordinary Israelis find themselves with a strong incentive to change the system that was in place prior to October 7. Change could come if the Israeli public is convinced that the price that they are paying for endless occupation is too high and that something else ought to replace it. Whether there will be a realistic or credible or decent proposal for changing it, we have to wait and see. But there definitely is a desire to change the system that seemed impermeable to change just two and a half months ago.

It will also be up to people around the world, and particularly in the U.S., to make clear to their governments that they do not support the continuation of more than half a century of ethnonational domination, that they do not support the collective punishment of two million people in Gaza. Ordinary Americans can increase the pressure on the Biden administration to demand a ceasefire right now. If Biden feels he is paying too high a price domestically and internationally for his support of Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza, he can be convinced to demand a ceasefire. The difference between a ceasefire today and a ceasefire several weeks from now could be the saving of thousands of innocent lives.

Exclusive Cover Reveal of “If Only” by Vigdis Hjorth

Posted on January 5, 2024February 1, 2024 by Jo Lou

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the novel If Only by Vigdis Hjorth, which will be published by Verso Books on September 3, 2024. Preorder the book here.

“A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.”

So opens Vigids Hjorth’s ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux’s A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? And proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life.

Here is the cover, art by Anja Niemi.

Editor Cian McCourt: “We used the Norwegian neo-romantic painter Harald Sohlberg for the cover for Will and Testament, which did a grand job representing the gravitas of that novel (and the painting helpfully featured a cabin). But with the next Hjorth novel we published, Long Live the Post Horn!, I wanted something that captured the very contemporary, very relatable angst in her fiction, as well as hinting at the humour in her writing, which often goes unremarked on. I’d loved Anja Niemi’s work for a long while, and when the penny dropped that she was Norwegian (and a fan of Vigdis, as it turns out), she was the clear choice. And I’m delighted we can return to her for If Only. This new cover gets right at the heart of how a love affair, when played out in its most ardent, obsessive key, can unmoor you from your sense of self. I think it speaks to the awful ambivalence true passion begets.”

Author Vigdis Hjorth: “I like it immediately. I like it intensely. I like that it’s so red. I like that it is not naturalistic, that it is artificial. I like that the woman’s face is realistic in its expression, the horror at the sight of what may be her own future self.”

The design team: “We were thrilled to be able to feature the stunning work of Norwegian artist Anja Niemi on the cover. Like Hjorth’s brilliant novel, Niemi’s ‘The Socialite’ implores the viewer to investigate her relationship—not to her self—but to her selves.”

My Mom Rage Is a Response to the Avalanche of Worry That Comes With Parenting

Posted on January 4, 2024January 4, 2024 by Intern Electric Lit

Since having my daughter at the height of COVID fear in May 2020, I have learned the best way to scream in your car. Windows up, no matter how hot it is. Maybe you think about what it would be like if you accidentally left your baby in the car this hot. Maybe it’s good you feel too hot. Maybe you deserve it. No music. Shut off NPR, silence reports of death tolls or an active shooter or the election or a new hot restaurant or air pollution. If you can, wait until no one is walking past, though you might not be able to wait. The scream will be loud and painful; the car amplifies the sound in a way that scares you—the first time.

Cover your ears.

My entire life, I’ve prided myself on never being an angry person. My parents rarely yelled at me, and I rarely yell at anyone. I’ve never been in a physical fight. In my dreams, I sometimes try to scream at someone, but I can’t. I try to hit someone, and my arm hits soft like a child’s, or my fist dissolves into smoke. In these dreams, I’m angry about my weakness. When I’m awake, I’m not. The symbolism is, of course, obvious.

If I read enough, fixed everything, controlled it all, she would be okay.

But six months after my daughter was born, something changed. I’d been up all night, every night, Googling every terrifying thing that could happen to our precious, perfect baby. I’d fallen in love, and was obsessed with the many possible ways I could lose her. If I read enough, fixed everything, controlled it all, she would be okay. A false, impossible hope, I knew—but I didn’t care that my worry was beyond logic. Sometimes, in the middle of an article on the Mayo Clinic’s website, I’d realize I’d read it before—many times before. None of it helped, and yet I kept on. Was the swaddle too tight, was her room too cold, was she wearing too many layers? Was her cough okay? Was this rash ok? Was that other weird sound okay? Was she eating enough? Was I playing enough? Was I playing too much?? COVID anxiety multiplied my new-parent anxiety. At the start of the pandemic, the rhetoric for parents of young children was that they could and maybe would die from COVID. Public spaces (which I avoided as much as I could) were almost intolerable. Someone coughing made my adrenaline jump like I’d seen a bear. Even on walks with my daughter in the stroller, anytime another person passed, I worried about the air we breathed. I suffocated. Later, that rhetoric about COVID changed, but my body has never quite forgotten it.

One night, changing the laundry over for the hundredth time, my fist connected to a basket of laundry. I found myself throwing it across the room. I write “Found myself” because my body felt like the time I’d accidentally grabbed an electric fence—my chest pained and buzzed and my arms became locked and tough, tingling all the way down into my fingertips. I wanted to make a loud sound, wanted to keep myself from disappearing, fury without a target (the laundry, sure, but not just the laundry). Another night I went to my car and screamed. The sound was so loud it pierced my own ears like a needle; the bear was back and it was me. I couldn’t remember ever screaming like that. And once, after putting my daughter down for bed, she was asleep, but my ankle cracked and she woke. I got her back to sleep, and then I closed the door a little too loud and she woke. I tried to get her back to sleep again and failed. I couldn’t shut my brain off until she was asleep and I needed her to sleep and she needed to sleep and I set her down in bed just a little too hard and left the room. Over and over, I slapped my face.

My anger had at last forced me to look at it. I wasn’t even sure what I was raging about. It was never rage at my daughter. I loved her so deeply even something as small as the precise sound of her tiny teeth crunching an apple made me ecstatic. I try, every so often, to write about my love for my daughter, but I always fail. Instead I build a garden around it; I cannot get to the heart of it with language. I worried I could not stop the world from taking the best person I knew, that they would never know her either. I don’t even like writing those sentences. We’d planned for and wanted this child. I had a supportive and devoted spouse who loved being a father. We had every privilege imaginable—whiteness, steady money, family support, maternity and paternity leave, health care, a safe home. I had no right to feel rage. It was me, I thought. My fears were wrong and had broken me somehow. I was determined to figure out why. I was determined to fix myself. Didn’t my daughter deserve a happy mom who didn’t need to go scream in her car? I watched the way my daughter felt my moods, the way I felt sunshine, wind, rain. I watched her begin to imitate my walk, the inflection in my voice. If I was a mirror, I didn’t want her seeing her reflection in such a broken one.

Even if the rage was new to me, it was not new to parenting.

I went to therapy, of course, and I turned to books. I don’t know if there are actually more books about mothering being published now, or if, like playgrounds, I am simply more aware of them because I am one. I thought my rage was new, that I was a violent monster, but the books I read taught me that monsters are everywhere. Even if the rage was new to me, it was not new to parenting. Talking about it, publicly, is new.

I read Rachel Yoder’s 2021 excellent, darkly funny novel Nightbitch first. In the novel, a new mother’s rage becomes so great she turns into a kind of werewolf. And, eventually, she likes it. The sentences are long, looping, delicious. The main character does not have a name. She is just “the mother,” or later, “Nightbitch.” I felt like I was reading the inside of my own mind—if I allowed it to truly do what it wanted, pure instinct, feral. (Of course, what mother can allow this? Even now, here I am hiding in a parenthetical.) I devoured the book, read pages without realizing I had read pages, the way I hadn’t read since I was a child reading Harry Potter. Yoder captures the precise monotony of having a young child, but more than that, helped me discover something about my anger: it was not new for me. Here, Yoder’s narrator describes her first real rage:

“Her child’s screams fanned a flame of rage that flickered in her chest.

“That single, white-hot light at the center of the darkness of herself—that was the point of origin from which she birthed something new, from which all women do.

“You light a fire early in your girlhood. You stoke it and tend it. You protect it at all costs. You don’t let it rage into a mountain of light, because that’s not becoming of a girl. You keep it secret. You let it burn…

“Her anger, her bitterness, her coldness in that darkest part of the night surprised even her. She wanted to think she had become another person altogether the night before, but she knew the horrible truth, that Nightbitch had always been there, not even that far below the surface.”

I recognized the flame. I thought about when my younger sister sat in my room pushing every button the way only siblings know how to do. I picked her up and threw her bodily from my room. And later, the many touches from men I didn’t want. I knew I couldn’t get angry, or lose control. Before I ever nurtured a child, I nurtured anger. Now, I am the thing to be feared. Yes, I thought, reading Nightbitch: I am an animal. I am only now failing to hide it.

I turned to Minna Dubin’s 2023 nonfiction Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood to think about why. Mom Rage is a vulnerable, deeply researched work that locates mom rage by describing a “basement” of systemic issues that can underpin moments of rage, wearing on mothers long before an angry outburst. Dubin describes many of these issues as different versions of a lack of “mothercare”—a capitalist system that punishes women for leaving the workforce to do care work; a racist and ableist healthcare system that does only the barest of medical minimums for mothers; a governmental uninvestment in providing universal, quality childcare; the dominance of the nuclear family that erodes the “village”; a pervasive, social-media influenced belief in what mothers “should” do and look like, which demands mothers subdue their anger. At the same time, there is little incentive to fix these problems—why would we? The entire system is balanced upon mothers providing free childcare at home. As Dubin writes, if mothers blame themselves for their anger, and society blames them too, then the larger society needs to take no responsibility. The problem of mom rage is mothers’ own problem to fix.

After that, rage is physical: the nervous system responding to constant stimuli of small children, lowered coping ability from sleep deprivation, and the high stakes, for giving a shit about what you’re doing. In her book Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control, Amanda Montei locates motherhood’s trajectory through a lifetime in the body, and through touch. Dubin also writes, “Mom rage lives in the body.”

Rage seems inevitable—the standards are high, the hours are long, the demands immense. Of course we rage. Dubin also shares her own moments of rage, and the subsequent shame. I saw myself there, too—the electric limbs, the Nightbitch—but I knew how other mothers would react. I saw them on Goodreads, on Instagram, in the New Yorker’s review of the book: how could a mother act this way? It makes sense—mothering and caregiving are burdened by many of the same difficulties no matter who you are, but the web of experience is so unique it’s impossible to fully see yourself in other mothers. There were many other mothers who saw their rage in the book, too, many still who felt this rage unfathomable. They did not think Of course we rage. They thought, as I feared my daughter did: How could you?

Mothering and caregiving are burdened by many of the same difficulties no matter who you are.

Even with all these books, we are still circling the question of what to do with this rage. In the New Yorker’s review of Mom Rage, Merve Emre writes about Dubin, “She sensed that her reactions were excessive, but she made no real effort to understand. Understanding was not the point of her essay. The point was to unleash the primal scream of a mother who had regressed—spectacularly, obscenely—into a tantrumming child, not unlike the three-year-old who had spurred her rage in the first place.” When I raged, I threw things. I screamed. But inside, I felt older than ever. I did not feel like a child. The review is steeped in the kind of misogyny, infantilizing, and judgment that mothers and caregivers rage against. The review was clear: even in 2023, this is bad, monstrous, not allowed.

When I told a male friend about my anger—peripherally, for I chose not to share the whole truth—I told him how hard I worked to not yell at my daughter. He laughed. “I yell at my kids all the time,” he said, shrugging. I didn’t ask him if he feels shame about it. He doesn’t seem to, and I’m pretty sure I know the answer: no shame in yelling for many fathers.

Mom Rage was a candle held out—yes, thank god, it isn’t just me. But there was still too much of myself in the dark. I still didn’t yell at my daughter, or at my husband. After reading Mom Rage and the New Yorker review, I understood—there was no appropriate place for me to feel rage. Like Nightbitch, I feared I was bad at the core. I was not able to let myself be feral. I was not allowed to be angry. I was a bad mother if I was angry. With nowhere else to go, I turned my rage inward. I raged at myself.

When my husband tried to help and understand me, I would often tell him I was a bad mom.

In my post-rage, post self-harm shame, when my husband tried to help and understand me, I would often tell him I was a bad mom, a terrible mom. “Please get her a better mom,” I told him. “Send me away.” I said it as a way to punish myself further. The next two books I read played on that ultimate fear—that your child would be taken away from you. One of the mothers sharing their rage stories with Dubin for her Mom Rage interviews hesitated after Dubin’s question. She wanted to make sure Dubin was not going to take her child away. Early in my pregnancy, I’d listened to a story about a woman experiencing postpartum psychosis who was separated from her child in the earliest, most tender days. I didn’t think this was me, maybe, probably not, but the thought was there—what if?

Next I read Jessamine Chan’s 2022 The School for Good Mothers, a novel about a dystopian system for the punishment and “retraining” of mothers who have been, subjectively, bad. If they do not pass the tests at the end of their retraining, the mother (and a few fathers) have their custody revoked. I read it like it was true crime. When Frida, the main character, sees a therapist who makes her list her fears, the list is so large and random that it reveals nothing useful. Yes, I thought. And despite those fears, Frida makes the mistake of leaving her daughter alone for a few hours anyway. Agents from the school then install cameras in Frida’s home to monitor her behavior. She wonders how a mother separated from her child should behave, sit, eat. How often she should cry, rage. Social workers interview her, asking her a barrage of questions:

“Frida’s motives. Her mental health. Whether she understands a parent’s fundamental responsibilities. Her concept of safety. Her standards of cleanliness. The social worker asked about Harriet’s diet. Frida’s refrigerator contained takeout boxes, some sweet potatoes, one package of celery, two apples, some peanut butter, some string cheese, some condiments. Only a day’s worth of milk. The cupboards were nearly empty. Why wasn’t she paying attention to Harriet’s nutrition?”

I recognized this voice, this surveillance over the thousands of decisions I made every day, how every decision seemed poised to shape my child forever, and mold me in the shape of “good mother” or “bad mother.” Yes, I heard the other mothers on Instagram, in the moms group, what Dubin calls a “cultural mandate to be hypervigilant” (39). But for me, that surveillance was internal. That questioner was myself. My fear and anxiety came from constantly surveilling myself against a standard built from a lifetime of absorbing the mothers around me, the mothers in pop culture, all of it. My own mother tells me, “You’ve always been a mommy, always taking care of other kids.” But I don’t remember this. I wonder if this is fiction, made to make me feel better.

I understood my rage as a response to my powerlessness.

On some days, I thought the way Frida thinks about herself: that she’s not as bad as “those bad mothers” in the news, the ones who set their houses on fire, or leave their children on subway platforms, or strap their children into car seats then drive into a lake. While I read the scene where Frida’s daughter Harriet is taken from her arms, separated, likely forever, I cried enough for strangers to glance at me. My heart was in the story, but I was reading The School for Good Mothers on a beach in Mexico, celebrating my sister’s bachelorette party, thousands of miles away from my own daughter. I ordered another mimosa. I dried my tears. On my worst days, I thought: Maybe I am just as bad. If there was a real School, I belonged there. Not for retraining, but for punishment.

But there is no School. The world, as it is, trains and punishes mothers.

This is a love story—if you can believe it. After all that obsessive reading, all that punishment—I fell in love. I read Yael Goldstein-Love’s 2023 novel The Possibilities. In this novel, Hannah has an eight-month-old son, and she remembers two births: one, where he survived because she insisted on a C-section, and one where he did not. The intrusive thought of his tiny, lifeless arm stays in her mind, sticky in a way that makes her feel like she did actually see it happen, even with her living, breathing son right in front of her. She describes these moments as a “car-swerve feeling”:

“Like when you have a near-miss on the road and seconds, minutes, maybe even hours later you’re still waiting to feel relieved not to have died in a fiery crash…Not because you aren’t grateful to have escaped. And not because you aren’t certain that you did, in fact, avoid becoming roadkill—you haven’t lost your mind. But, rather, because you feel in a deep, primal, hard-to-describe way that the crash came too close to occurring. Because it didn’t seem a simple yes or no in those car-swerve moments, did it? A simple it didn’t happen or it did? Instead it seemed, in those moments, that the way things could have gone had some lingering reality, some awful stickiness that clung now to the moments carrying you away from when you might have crashed but didn’t.”

Goldstein-Love captures the exact way my anxiety felt—the idea of a near miss. That even if something hadn’t actually happened to my daughter, that something else was bound to. And then, I understood my rage as a response to my powerlessness. My rage was a response to the avalanche of worry that you cannot help but absorb as a parent. As Goldstein-Love writes, after a while, I cannot take “The agonizing need to keep this someone safe, a need as bodily and insistent as hunger, thirst. But impossible to satisfy because, deep down, you knew that you were powerless: against accidents, disease, an active shooter. Against your baby disappearing from his crib without a trace. Surely every parent felt this. It was too much, the hugeness of what we’d opened ourselves up to. A child was too much to have at stake” (131). No matter how perfectly I loved my daughter, I could not protect her. This infuriated me.

Because she saved him once, by insisting on a C-section, she wants to trust her fears, rather than push them away as irrational. Hannah feels like the only thing separating them from a different reality, a worse reality where her son died, is her. Her instincts had saved him; how could she ignore that twinge of worry? Many, many times I’d thought about bringing my daughter to the hospital, then thought irrational. Until the moment she had an allergic reaction severe enough to prescribe an epi-pen. That time, I knew to go to the hospital without hesitation. How could I talk myself out of fear, when it had protected my daughter when she needed it?

And then the character Hannah’s son starts disappearing. At first, just from Hannah’s view, and then from the world at large—Hannah’s therapist and her ex-husband also start to forget her son. Soon, Hannah discovers that her visions of her son’s death are not “just” hormonal, are not postpartum anxiety, but instead are real, happening to their child in a parallel reality. Both she and her estranged mother have the ability to see “the possibilities.” They have the ability to jump between them and protect their children in multiple realities. Hannah ultimately chooses to stay in her own reality, and to protect her child in the reality she knows, but that doesn’t make the other possibilities less real, or less powerful.

So much of my life and my mothering has been denying my anxiety, denying my anger. Irrational; you worry too much; you can’t control it, so don’t worry about it; overactive imagination; mommy brain; just the hormones. Like Frida in The School for Good Mothers, my fears are boundless, but unlike Frida, they are not random. My fears aren’t of kidnappers, really, or Red Dye #40. They are of the things that can happen to children no matter what, even inside my own care. I fell in love with The Possibilities because, instead of telling myself my rage and anxiety were worthless, I now felt my worries did have power. My worry could bend time, reshape reality; my love could traverse a universe. My fears still arrive, urgent like Hannah’s, a feeling that there is something that I can fix, and that I must do it, “[l]ike a muscle memory of the mind” (101). But instead of shoving them away as irrational, I honor them. As if there is a reality in which they really could happen. That reality is this reality. Then, the rage goes away.

This doesn’t erase the very real dangers for women, caregivers, and children. This doesn’t erase the lack of mothercare in the United States. This doesn’t erase the paradox of having children: you spend your life trying to keep them safe and alive, and you will always fail. It’s telling that I found the most solace in a work of fiction, in a world that doesn’t exist. I always felt like I was missing a mother’s instinct. But perhaps this is my version of it. While I hope for and work toward the possibility for a world with fewer fears, and better care of children and caregivers, right now I honor my worries. For now, I will feel powerful in imagining all the possibilities.

8 Novels About Memory Loss

Posted on January 4, 2024January 3, 2024 by Jo Lou

Maybe a novelist’s real medium isn’t so much words, but the idea of memory itself. Every choice we make—voice, POV, backstory, moments buried as nothing or shouted as epiphany—is a matter of genre and taste. But it all comes from how we, or our characters, experience or recollect existence. Given how primal and important the idea of memory is to the novel’s architecture, it’s not surprising that authors often confront its opposite—memory loss.

My last novel Little Threats, leaned on memory as a thematic device and I didn’t quite grasp the importance of that to me at the time. Fiction is like that. When the subject ended up in my new novel, Sleeping With Friends, I was finally able to write about my own mother’s coma, but through the novel’s character, Mia. She’s a Connecticut housewife who may or may not have had an accident.

There are countless moving stories of memory loss. It’s a universal possibility, either through illness, or aging. But the books I’ve collected here do something different. For example: a drug that can curate memories and allow you to experience someone else’s. Someone hiring out a whole cast to act out and recreate what might be his only memory. An amnesiac detective trying to solve his own tormented past.

All these novels begin with the idea that memory loss could be something more than the act of forgetting. Each of these books take a risk, and offer something original, strange, and fantastic.

Rema inder by Tom McCarthy

If, like me, you were browsing bookstores every weekend in the late-aughts, no doubt you spotted this book featured it in your local Staff Picks section—and for good reason. Remainder may be equal parts fever dream and intellectual exercise, but there’s more to it than that.

A man is severely injured in a mysterious accident and receives an enormous sum in legal compensation. He has no idea what to do with it. He winds up having a moment of déjà vu, what could be a dream, or maybe an actual memory, and decides to entirely recreate it—right down to the cracks in the wall and the smell of liver frying in a pan down the hall. But this involves buying an apartment building, and hiring actors to live there, practicing for this one significant scene. There’s intense foreboding as he descends further into his obsession: trying to recreate something that may or may not have ever been real. (And yes, McCarthy’s novel came out before the film Synecdoche, New York.)

Fledgling by Octavia Butler

This dystopian novel, which was Butler’s last, is really about the dividing line between one life and another. Shori is recovering from injuries in a cave and doesn’t know anything about herself. She turns out to appear like a ten-year-old though she is much older. She immediately instinctively hunts and eats an animal, but ordinary things, like rain, need to be remembered. “I was recognizing things now, at least by category—bushes, rocks, mud….”

Social constructs are at first unknown—since Shori has no memory—even as she wanders naked through a burned-out town where she wonders if she had in fact lived before. It’s this confusion at the world around her that fascinates me. And of course, Butler being Butler, she then builds everything back up so that we see it with fresh eyes.

The Shimmering State by Meredith Westgate

A photographer named Lucien finds himself at the Center, a California rehab where patients are given an experimental drug called Memoroxin (or Mem). It was developed for use among dementia suffers but is also the hip recreational drug of Hollywood because of its addictive voyeurism and ability to curate memories. It’s very Don DeLillo–esque—a very risky esque to try—but Westgate pulls off what could be a high-concept trick, making her own authentic comment on how we live and process in the moment, and after.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder

Originally published in 1994 but translated and named a best book of 2020 during the pandemic, The Memory Police’s easiest comparison is Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet it sings with more poetry than Orwell’s plainspeak. As objects and concepts seem to disappear, only some of an island’s residents are able to remember them. “Transparent things, fragrant things . . . fluttery ones, bright ones . . . wonderful things you can’t possibly imagine,” the character’s mother tells him, showing him things she has hidden away that everyone else has forgotten. Ogawa tackles an impossible idea so skillfully, he makes us want to believe it.

Eliza beth Is Missing by Emma Healey

With delicate prose, Emma Healey is able to keep us grounded while also achieving a dreamlike effect. The mystery here is very meta: Maud, a woman living with Alzheimer’s, is trying to solve a missing persons case—her best friend who’s suddenly not at home, as well as her own sister who vanished 70 years ago. What is real, and what is imagined? What has been forgotten? And what does it mean when our concerns are dismissed by others?

In the Woods by Tana French

Gripping from the first word, Tana French has become known as a mystery maven for a reason. In this first book of her Dublin Murder Squad series, we begin by being taken into the narrator’s confidence about what he cannot trust of memory. We’re then launched into a precise police-report style recounting of a crime from 1984 of missing children in the woods near Knocknaree. It turns out our detective, Rob Ryan, is actually one of the victims—the one left alive. Trauma has taken his memories of that event. Rob now works as an investigator, so this is a double-case narrative. A 12-year-old girl has gone missing from the same woods, and he has to solve it—while also combing through his own traumatic past.

The Chimes by Anna Smaill

Amnesia through music… New Zealander author Anna Smaill is onto more than just a terrifying earworm here. In a fictional, primitive London, there’s an instrument called the Carillon—which enforces tinnitus, brainwashing its listeners until they can no longer remember. This happens ritually twice daily. Simon has traveled in from the country after his mother’s death, and befriends Lucien—the two teenagers roaming the city. Simon is on a mission to find out the meaning of what his mother told him on her deathbed.

Adjacentland by Rabindranath Maharaj

Adjacentland is an ahead-of-its-time novel which steers into eerie territory with its focus on creativity and AI. Our narrator awakes in a compound, where he comes to believe that he was once a comic book writer who warned that the reliance on artificial intelligence would make the imagination obsolete and subversive. As he searches for sketches, notes, and clues he may have left for himself before his memory loss, both he and the reader learn of Adjacentland, a primitive land of misfits and outsiders. It is only in Adjacentland that the imagination has survived. “Today is a new day but yesterday was the same day,” reads one of his foretelling sketches.

I’m in Love with My Ex’s Absence

Posted on January 3, 2024February 18, 2026 by Wynter Miller

The Space

I loved you, and when you left, you left a Space. And I fell in love with that Space. Not right away, I mean, but over time. At first I hated the Space. It was just always there! But then I somehow got used to the Space. Then I started to appreciate it, and then I missed it when it was gone.

Before I knew it, the Space and I had become friends. I started really enjoying hanging out with the Space; I liked talking to it, and listening to it too—to its opinions, hopes, doubts and worst fears. This might sound strange, but the Space and I even sort of had our own secret language.

One night, the Space and I ran into some old friends of mine, David and Iris—I don’t think you know them—walking out of the movie theater. “David!” I said. “Iris!” I hugged them both. “I want you to meet someone.” I gestured to the Space. “This is the Space.”

David and Iris looked at me, and then at each other, and then at the Space.

“And this,” I said to the Space, “is David and Iris.”

The Space smiled.

“I’m sorry,” said Iris. “What?”

“Iris,” said David.

“This is the Space,” I said.

The Space waved.

We went our separate ways, but a few hours later I texted David: So what did you think?

Of the movie? he responded. Yeah good.

No of the Space! I wrote. We’re just friends now but I think there might be a real connection here?

And I was right about that. The following week, the Space and I went for a walk behind the college when it started to downpour. I took the Space’s hand and we ran for cover under a nearby tree, where I stopped abruptly against the trunk and the Space sort of stumbled into me. Before I knew it, the Space was looking into my eyes and I was looking into the Space’s eyes. Then the Space put its arms around me and kissed me, and I kissed back.

The weeks that followed might have been the best weeks of my life. Some nights the Space and I went on proper dates—skating hand-in-hand at the university ice rink; hiking up Mt. Geryk—and other nights we just spent hours on my couch talking to each other and kissing. It really didn’t matter what we did as long as we were together. One night that summer, I told the Space I was falling in love with it, and the Space said it loved me too. That was our first night together; I fell asleep in the Space’s warm embrace.

Soon the Space and I were basically living together; it kept its own place, but it was at my apartment all the time. We got used to each other’s daily rhythms and habits; we ate our meals together, exercised together, watched TV or read together every night. I grew accustomed to falling asleep next to the Space, and waking up to find the Space still there beside me.

Admittedly, sometimes the Space would get quiet—distant. At times I felt like the Space was right there with me, focused and present, but at others it seemed vacant and removed. In those moments, as strange as it sounds, I almost felt lonely—despite the presence of the Space.

One night that fall, the Space and I were watching a science fiction movie when my phone rang. It was you. I was taken aback; I hadn’t talked to you in months. “Hold on a second, will you?” I said to the Space, and I took the phone into the other room.

You asked if we could meet and talk. “Yeah, sure we can,” I said. “But I should tell you that I’m seeing someone.”

“Oh,” you said. “You are?”

“Do you remember the Space that you left when we broke up?”

“The—what?”

“There was a Space—a really significant one,” I said. “And while we didn’t get along at first, we eventually became friends, and—”

“You and—who now?”

“But the relationship, you know, evolved,” I said. “And now things with the Space are going really well.”

“Oh-kay,” you said. “Well, I—OK.”

“But listen—how are you?” I said. “Is everything OK?”

“Yeah,” you said. “I’m fine.”

“Good—I’m really glad to hear that,” I said. “It’s really nice to talk to you,” I added, because it was. I’d missed you—maybe even more than I’d realized.

When I got off the phone, though, the Space sat me down and said it needed some time apart. I was flabbergasted. “I don’t understand,” I told it. “I thought things were going great.”

But the Space said it needed space. I asked the Space how long it had felt this way, but the Space wouldn’t elaborate; it just sat there silently, an empty expression on its face.

“We’ve built a life together,” I told the Space.

The Space didn’t even reply.

“How can you not have anything to say to that?” I said.

The Space left my place that very night. I was so bereft I couldn’t sleep. I called you early the next morning and you came right over to console me. “I just miss the Space so much,” I sobbed into your shoulder.

“I know,” you said.

“I honestly don’t know how I’m going to live without it.”

“I know it seems impossible,” you told me. “But tomorrow, you’re going to realize that you don’t need the Space as much as you thought. And there’ll be less of the Space in your mind the day after that, and the day after that. Until one day you realize you’ve forgotten the Space completely.”

I nodded as if I understood, but inside I knew I’d never get over the Space. I vowed right then and there to keep its memory close, and to hold a place for the Space in my heart.

An Undocumented Farmworker’s Quest for Happiness in Europe

Posted on January 3, 2024January 4, 2024 by Jo Lou

Celina Baljeet Basra’s debut novel, Happy, at once fulfills and tragically subverts the promise of its title. Happy Singh Soni, the titular protagonist, struggles to hold on to his optimism and imagination while laboring under appalling conditions as an undocumented migrant worker in Europe.

Young, upbeat Happy—an ebullient admirer of new wave French cinema from rural Punjab—goes to Europe in pursuit of riches that are artistic as well as material: he hopes to become an actor in European cinema (he is compared in looks to Sami Frey, the actor in Bande à part, Jean Luc-Godard’s 1964 film, who makes constant reappearances in the novel). Accordingly, Happy saves his wages as an amusement park worker, and pays mysterious “coordinators” to travel to Europe. Once in Europe, however, he is placed in a series of menial, low-paying jobs, in the futile attempt to repay immense debts to the “coordinators”—initially as a restaurant worker in Rome, and then as a laborer on a radish farm—even as his cinematic dream recedes out of reach.

Throughout the novel, Happy’s life attests to the sundering and coming together of nations—from the Partition of India in 1947 (during which his parents had to flee from newly created Pakistan to India) to the current migration crisis and the far-right reactions across Europe and the U.S. Yet the novel’s ambitious form—fragmented into many voices, which nevertheless knit together into a kaleidoscopic view of consciousness—at once records and seeks to mend the sundering it describes.

Celina Basra brings to the novel the intense care and attention to arrangement that has characterised her work as an art curator. Based in Berlin, she has worked with Berlin Biennale, Academy of the Arts Berlin, Arts Night London, and Nature Morte Delhi, among other institutions, and is a co-founder of the curatorial collective The Department of Love, which explores love as a mode of resistance and collaboration, and which has held exhibitions in China and the U.K.

I spoke with Celina Basra on Zoom about fragmented forms and narratives, the complicated and ambiguous trajectories of 21st-century immigration and labor, and recognizing the inner lives of marginalized characters as well as inanimate objects.

Pritika Pradhan: Happy, the name of the novel’s titular protagonist, is loaded with significance—at once indicative of his upbeat nature and at the core of the novel’s tragic irony, where he struggles to maintain his cheerful narration amid terrible events. Could you tell us what inspired you to choose this name, and how did it influence your envisioning of the novel’s narrative and protagonist?

Celina Baljeet Basra: There is this dissonance and this allusion to humankind’s eternal search for happiness and Paradise, which becomes more pronounced if it involves emigrating. But at the same time, it is not an uncommon nickname and abbreviation for Harpreet, in my extended family, or at least in Punjab. So Happy is a name I was familiar with, and I realized that there’s something there to work with. This is how the character came to me. While the character is entirely fictional, the underlying facts and experiences are very real. And it evolved organically from there: the name played a role in building the character in his world.

PP: The form of the novel is fascinating, consisting of segments narrated from different points of view. Could you please tell us more about your choice of this specific, fragmented form for this novel?

CBB: The basic story had been percolating for a long time before I could finally sit down and move beyond, as Happy called them, the hopeful beginnings that I had stored away in my old hard drive over many years. When I found the voice of Happy, it was through the prologue—the cover letter, or letter of application—which he writes to an employee in Italy, while working on a farm. From then on, the structure of the novel, with its many different fragments, its short chapters, its different voices, and its polyphonic nature, sort of came together and it really then poured and was written fast and furious. It was the only way I knew how to write the novel.

After struggling for some time to find this voice, I also grappled with the question of how to write this story, which is not my own. There are touching points in my family history maybe, and of course a lot of research and interest over many years. But still, this was the way I knew how to write it, because I feel some stories—especially those of flight or migration—can best be told in a scattered way. To me, at least, the idea of a novel that is written in one sitting, with a big chunk of time, and in a linear way—that’s not how I feel about the novel. When you have to take care of people—your kid or your family—or when you have to work other jobs, life is not linear. It is a bit like opening Happy’s bag of documents and stories, half-written and unfinished, and of objects that were close to him, the objects he touched that formed his life and that he used to build his world.

PP: In the segment “The Accidental Library,” Happy describes a miscellaneous and indiscriminate collection of objects: “The Library doesn’t hierarchize, nor does it discriminate.” While reading this novel, I felt this anti-hierarchical vision is realized in the proliferation of voices in the novel, which ranges from the titular protagonist to a necklace from Mohenjo-daro, or a pigment from a Pietà. What is the significance of giving voice to persons, animals as well as inanimate objects?

CBB: What I found interesting in relation to Happy’s obsession with the films of Jean-Luc Godard, or the stuff he finds in The Accidental Library, is how accidental these obsessions are when you were a teenager. The time when I first sort of thought of this novel [was in terms of] books falling in your lap. For me, it was like the process of going to my German grandmother’s attic, where there was a big box of Françoise Sagan’s work. So I read all of Sagan—Bonjour Tristesse and so on, but without really a deep understanding. I was only thinking, Oh, this is a cool character. I want to be like her. But Happy couldn’t have been more different from this cool French girl. So I went back to that time of building imaginaries or ideas of what is desirable, and how accidental these influences can be if you don’t have everything at your fingertips—all the museums and the libraries.

I am an art historian, and I did work, and still do work in the art world. Right now [in the Talking Objects Lab] I am part of a team that works on the idea of the retribution of colonial objects from former colonial contexts, and with African philosophy and artistic interventions that engage with the idea of what to do with these objects that should be given back, [and] how and when and why––the decolonization of memory and knowledge. As a curator, I work with objects and space, amongst others, and this also played into the novel.

PP: So much of Happy’s world is composed of imaginary voices only he can hear: the seductive, and slippery voice of “Europe,” the outsiders of Bande à Part whom he hopes to follow. What role does the imagination play in his story? How does Happy’s imagination inspire him to identify with Europe initially, and support him through his ordeals there?

CBB: The border or the difference between imaginary and real becomes increasingly blurred as the novel continues. And definitely it is always a question with Happy, whether what he hears is reliable, or does he occasionally tell himself those stories and lies in order to cope? I think that’s definitely a thing for him.

Being born and raised in Europe, living in Europe, I often thought about the idea of Europe and what is it really? Following events like Brexit, we have the idea of Europe as something that wants to close off against whatever comes from outside, as is happening in the Mediterranean Sea. And I also read about Europe in literature and plays, as well as mythological paintings, such as of the abduction of Europe. A lot of the Europe chapters had to be cut in the end, because it was too much. And Europe is important in the novel, and I envisioned her as an HR manager for Europe in a way. I was playing around with a bureaucracy, and how opaque and discriminatory it can be when you want to move, but do not have a passport that enables you to do so. The experience of trying to get a visa differs wildly, depending on your passport, and is impossible in some cases—which is why other paths are being taken. So there is this humorous aspect, and a dark aspect to Europe.

At the same time, Europe has aspects that are quite human. Sometimes you can feel that Europe is quite insecure—she isn’t really sure of what her image is, or what her role is anymore. She can’t really change the rules like Happy expects her to and is really quite powerless in the end. She is, as you say, this slippery, seductive voice of Europe, who urges Happy to sign the agreement. For me, Europe in the novel is an imaginary character, who is quite vivid, although she might not really exist. However, I would also encourage other readings, if the readers are pleased to do so, such as reading Europe as a real character.

PP: Happy’s only romantic relationships are also lived in the imagination – an unexpressed desire for his male friend and nemesis, Kiran, and later for his fellow farm worker, Zhivago. Could you comment more on this unspoken yet haunting same-sex desire?

We all know that some ideas, desires, and romances that are entirely imaginary can be so intense—especially when you’re young or lonely.

CBB: It was clear to me from the beginning that Happy’s feeling of being different might be rooted in his sexuality, which needs to be repressed for obvious personal and political reasons related to the context he grows up in at that time. And that [repression] becomes so automatic that he doesn’t even question it anymore. He outsources it into his imagination, instead of sort of thinking of it as something that can be acted upon, that could be real, that could be fulfilled. And we all know that some ideas, desires, and romances that are entirely imaginary can be so intense—sometimes even more intense than the real ones, especially when you’re young or someone who is very lonely or does not have a lot of touching points with the real world, where he can do real things and act in a way that other people find impressive. Instead, he has to be impressive in his own little world. And so [the imagined relationship with] Kiran, is this classic case of wanting to be with someone with certain aspects that you find dangerous or you are the total opposite of, and someone you want to be like but could never be.

With Zhivago, I think that idea is much more real and actually beautiful, but it’s still not reciprocated. Happy is also at that point setting out to realize his dream [of being an actor in European cinema], only to be increasingly disappointed on encountering this big reality check, where things are very different from what he imagined them to be. He doesn’t even open that door [with Zhivago]. However, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot [happening]. There is this eroticism or desire that is expressed through other routes he finds, such as through voices from objects like the bag of flour. And not everything is spoken about; there might be even things that I’m not aware of. Even in a diary, there are things you won’t write down. As a child and a teenager, I tried to tell a good story, but I couldn’t even write about it because there were things happening that were very dark. So you try to tell a story to yourself in a way that you can process. And I think that’s what Happy does a lot of the time. At the same time, there is an increasing divide between reality and imagination, as the novel proceeds.

PP: Once in Italy, Happy is mysteriously but irrevocably affected by powerful, unnamed forces: moved from one job to another, and put down when he tries to agitate for better conditions. What is the reason for keeping these forces unnamed? What do they reveal about the world Happy inhabits?

CBB: When Happy enters Italy, he is moved around like an object and he doesn’t know the faces of the people who are moving him around. And that’s what it is. If you are in that situation, where you are migrating to Europe—not by the books, but without the documents, then you use travel agents who then are linked to other travel agents who then are linked to agents or smugglers, whatever you might call it, because they have many different names. If you research this, you will find a million different ways to do this [migrate], and a million different stories. Some may be half-legal, others entirely illegal, so a lot of power structures come in. If you look into the food industry, or the vegetable farming industry in Italy, or southern Europe, a lot of these migration trajectories end up pointing to the mafia. When I was researching [the novel], talking to activists and researchers, particularly in Italy, I realized that they had to be very careful due to personal security reasons.

That’s why it’s so hard to really uncover all the threads. And it’s impossible if you are Happy, if you don’t have a lot of resources and power on your side. If you are in that situation, this is how it feels—you really don’t know [who is moving you around]. There is this entity, this big, unnamed global corportation. I played around with the idea of bureaucracy and HR, so the [movers] are called the “coordinators.” For me, this was a kind of twist because in addition to being a curator, I often worked in situations where I was a project coordinator for cultural events—project coordinators can be many things in many different contexts. So I applied that idea to this context [of migration], because in the end it’s coordination. There is this basic bureaucracy involved, no matter how violent the external context might be.

PP: Some of the novel’s most heartening (and ultimately heartbreaking) scenes ensure from Happy’s relationships with fellow workers and migrants from different countries – the servers at the restaurant where he works, and his fellow radish pickers at the farm. Could you tell us more about the solidarity and togetherness among the migrant workers in the novel across national and ethnic lines, which co-exists with their intense loneliness and enforced isolation due to their immigration and class status?

CBB: I had this question in my mind [about] how certain areas and lines of work are entirely in some nationalities’ hands, and others not at all. In the U.K., who picks your strawberries? Who picks the asparagus in Germany? And then there are Malinese orange pickers in the south of Italy. So you look into it, and then you find that you have these communities that are also sometimes quite apart from each other. At the radish farm, it becomes apparent that the Sikh workers do some work and the Eastern European workers do other work, and then there’s talk of what happens with the Malinese in the south. Zhivago links these worlds because he is moving around, or has moved around quite a bit, but none of the others do or can.

First we idealize the place we want to move to. But then sometimes it doesn’t turn out as great, so you idealize the place you’ve left.

So for me, the novel was always about imagining what if? Because of course these relationships do exist, but they’re so private and so unique to each context that I just wanted to imagine: what would it feel like if Happy strikes up a friendship with a Polish and a Tibetan dishwasher in the Roman restaurant? The back of a restaurant kitchen is stressful, of course, as a working environment, and can be so ultimately unfriendly and hard to endure for any workforce, which is portrayed in popular series like The Bear. But for Happy it’s a little utopia. He will get this moment where he has friends, and becomes popular and strikes up relationships. And we know he practices his Italian because once you work with other workers from other nationalities, you will practice their language, which is quite fun to do. This is just to imagine what are the relationships like, what is the talk at the back of the back door, who shares a cigarette with whom?

I have traveled to Italy often, and have been interested in places affected by tourism and migration. I’ve always been interested in people who work in providing other people’s pleasure. Once you have worked in a service position or industry yourself, you realize that you could just as well be an umbrella—some guests or customers don’t really see you. So it’s more important what your colleagues mean to you, and how that can empower you. Happy always tries to strike up relationships, always tries to connect to people, to please people and entertain them. And that to me was a way to make the picture of the world richer.

PP: It is significant that the voices of Happy’s family in India (in particular his mother Gul and sister Ambika) continue even after Happy has left for Italy. How does the inclusion of the homeland and family change the depiction of immigration in the novel?

CBB: To me, this continuity was quite important, to let them speak and let us hear their voices making his absence felt. The family unit is scattered now. But it is also important to show that life at home goes on—it’s not an unmoving ideal. First we idealize the place we want to move to, even if it’s just moving to another town to study or find a new job. But then sometimes it doesn’t turn out as great, so you idealize the place you’ve left, and say, wow, that’s actually how we need to return. And then it becomes this idea where, okay, I will go abroad and I’ll make my luck and find prosperity, and then I’ll return. But then it’s not the same place that I left. You might not be able to return in that way because you’re not the same, the people you’ve left are not the same. And you can never recreate the past, because you might then in retrospect realize, oh, that was happiness. You might think, I will go back to that tree, that house, that meal, and then happiness will come. And it might, but it will always be fleeting because things are moving. To me, that was important in the depiction of places like India, which to so many people growing up here in Germany is this far off place of another imagination. A lot of people will just tell you their India story when you meet them and always the same clichés, you know? So it was important to just and try and attempt to make it complex. It is a place Happy has to leave, in order to try to realize himself. But it isn’t a place that’s entirely bleak. Though there are no prospects for him to evolve in that place in that village, there’s love.

This idea of a mother—Gul, and also [Happy’s sister] Ambika, who is also a mother—is very close to my heart. Shortly after the novel found a publisher, I gave birth to my first daughter. Then in the editing process, which was wonderful and intense and necessary for this very scattered book, a lot of these ideas [about motherhood] found their way in, and made the novel richer. We have the voices of Ambika and Gul in particular, but also the father, Babu, and Fatehpal [Happy’s elder brother] who emigrated as well, but is living his own life and is not very close to Happy, because he left when Happy was still young. They’re all scattered around now, and that’s something that I felt I could identify with. In my own family, everyone is never in one place, but there are always many. So I’m fond of these voices and how they evolve, allowing a space for absences and grief, but also hope and love.

7 Books on the Dark Side of True Crime

Posted on January 2, 2024January 2, 2024 by Intern Electric Lit

I am not immune to the appeal of true crime. I’ve read In Cold Blood, Helter Skelter, and I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. I’ve listened to The Staircase, Serial, and Dr. Death. I have watched The Jinx, Making a Murder, and Unsolved Mysteries. In fact, because I am a novelist, I have thought a lot about the way these narratives work. The ones I’ve listed all share a few elements: colorful characters, evocative settings, heroes and villains. But most importantly, they are molded. What do I mean by this? Like memoir, they are of life but they do not necessarily resemble life. They are shaped, aesthetic objects.

Memoirs, unlike, say, biographies, do not plod along at the pace of daily life. Their authors distill events, excising superfluous details and controlling the flow of information to create structure. True crime works in a similar way, except that its authors are mining the lived experience of others for material. (Notable exceptions are beautiful true crime memoirs like The Fact of a Body or Memorial Drive.)

True crime—in its modern iteration anyway—is entertainment predicated on the suffering of others. Despite its name, it is interested in story over truth. It cannot afford to get bogged down in messiness, frustration, and randomness. Fine. Fair enough. I enjoy a tight and twisty narrative as much as the next person. But what are the implications of this kind of storytelling on the survivors of these events? On their communities? On the allocation of material resources (police, media attention, money)? What are the implications for those who consume violence and fear?

My novel, Rabbit Hole, follows a young woman named Teddy whose long-missing sister, Angie, has developed a true crime “fandom.” After their father, who was suspected—on the internet—of involvement in Angie’s disappearance dies by suicide, Teddy starts to engage in the online communities obsessed with her family. Even as Teddy fears the menacing internet rubberneckers who see her as a character in their conspiracy theories, she can’t resist their seductive pull.

The seven novels in this list are interested in various “dark sides” of true crime. Some of them offer correctives to famous true crime narratives, while others investigate the effect of the public’s attention on families, journalists, and victims themselves.

The Comfort of Monsters by Willa Richards

When Dee McBride goes missing in Milwaukee during the “Dahmer summer” of 1991, her disappearance is largely ignored. Media and police resources are instead devoted to obsessing over the details the man Richards refers to only as “the serial killer.” The Comfort of Monsters is a pitch-black book about familial loss, grief, and lurid public interest in grizzly tragedies. Richards explores the way that families and even entire communities can become victimized by tabloid interest in sensational crimes. If you love true crime, you may actually hate this book. The brilliance of Richards’s novel is her refusal to allow the narrative to mimic the fake and tidy structure of a true crime story. Instead, it hems closely to real life and honestly depicts the festering wounds that come with not knowing.

Penance by Eliza Clark

In a small coastal town, a sixteen-year-old girl is immolated by three of her classmates. Ten years later, the definitive account of the event is penned by a journalist who has spoken to everyone involved and heavily researched the crime. Still a critical question remains: how much of the story is true? Eliza Clark, more than anyone on this list, is explicitly interested in the impulses that drive true crime consumption and the ethics of the genre.

Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin

When Claire’s sister Alison goes missing on a Caribbean vacation and turns up dead in a nearby cay, two resort employees are arrested. They are quickly released, but by then the story has already exploded into a tabloid obsession that will haunt Claire for years to come. When she runs into one of the accused men years later, as an adult, Claire must reckon with the unsolved questions at the heart of her sister’s case and the way the crime (and its surrounding hoopla) affected so many others. Schaitkin riffs on a Natalee Holloway-esque disappearance in this novel, which interrogates true crime’s perennial interest in missing white women and the implications that such interest can have on multiple communities.

True Story by Kate Reed Petty

This book is one of my favorite reads of the last few years. A wildly inventive, formally playful look at the fallout from a high school sexual assault, True Story is interested in the role of memory and the way a single, monolithic story can become the dominant narrative around a crime. Alex, the victim at the center of the story, must ultimately defend herself not only against her possible assailants (and the community that rallied to protect the young athletes) but against her friend, Haley, an aspiring filmmaker keen on flattening and commodifying her story.

More Than You’ll Ever Know by Katie Gutierrez

We’ve all heard of men with multiple families, but what about a woman leading such a double life? For true crime blogger Cassie Bowman, the story of Lore Rivera—and the dramatic way her marriages ended in the arrest of one husband for the murder of another—is too good to pass up. But as Bowman digs into Rivera’s life, often at the expense of her own personal relationships, she uncovers a story more complex and more human than she bargained for.

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

The title of Jessica Knoll’s latest comes from something a judge said to Ted Bundy during a sentencing: “you’re a bright young man.” In this novel, Knoll seeks to correct the true crime narrative that has warped Ted Bundy, transforming him from an arrogant, not-actually-all-that-bright murderer into a mythical, larger-than-life charisma machine. By focusing on the sorority sisters who would become Bundy’s final victims, Knoll offers a corrective and perhaps a new focus for avid true crime fans: the bright young women who suffered at Bundy’s hands.

Missing White Woman by Kellye Garrett

I’m showing off a little by including this book, since I was lucky enough to read an advanced copy. It doesn’t come out until April, but you can pre-order it now, and you should. The title comes from the late journalist Gwen Ifill, who is quoted in the epigraph: “I call it missing white woman search syndrome. If there is a missing white woman, you’re going to cover that every day.” Garrett cleverly explores this phenomenon in a book that is itself a twisty page-turner. When Bree wakes up on the final day of a romantic getaway to discover a dead woman in the foyer of the Airbnb her boyfriend rented, she knows she is in trouble. Add that to the fact that her boyfriend is nowhere to be found, and the dead woman is a Gabby Petito-type—someone the entire internet has been looking for. A tense, smart thriller that captures the madness of social media and addresses the intersection of true crime and race.

In “The Storm We Made,” A Malayan Housewife Becomes a Spy During WWII

Posted on January 2, 2024December 7, 2023 by Jo Lou

Set in World War II, Vanessa Chan’s utterly gripping debut novel The Storm We Made is the story of an unlikely spy and the consequences of her actions. When Cecily, a bored Malayan housewife in British-colonized Malaya, encounters the charismatic General Fujiwara, she is seduced not only by the force of his personality, but also his dreams of an “Asia for Asians.” Stifled by the narrow confines of her existence as the wife of a low-level bureaucrat, Cecily agrees to act as a spy for the general, unwittingly ushering in the most brutal occupation her people have ever known.

Ten years later, Cecily finds her nation and family on the precipice of destruction, and is determined to do anything she can to save them. Told from the perspectives of Cecily and her three children—eldest daughter, Jujube, who serves tea to Japanese soldiers and develops an unexpected bond with one of them; fifteen-year-old Abel, who has disappeared; and the youngest, Jasmin, who spends her days locked in the basement to avoid being sent to a comfort station—The Storm We Made moves effortlessly through time, building to a thrilling crescendo. Filled with unforgettable characters and beautiful, vivid language, this is a novel of family, secrets, survival, and resilience during the darkest of times.

Vanessa Chan is one of my closest friends and all-time favorite writers. I was lucky enough to be one of The Storm We Made’s first readers. We spoke over Zoom in the fall of 2023 about the journey of The Storm We Made, how to approach research as a historical fiction writer, illuminating a deeply underexplored time in history, the fraught intimacies that can happen between colonizers and the colonized, and the power of charisma.

Gina Chung: The Storm We Made takes place across a span of several years. You weave a very tight, propulsive plot while also grounding us in historical context. For many writers of color, I think there’s this idea that we somehow need to “explain ourselves” to a more mainstream audience when we’re writing about places that we come from. Was this something you considered?

Vanessa Chan: When I was writing it, I thought about how I would explain it to someone like me. It is true that the history of this time period in Malaysia is woefully underwritten—it’s almost not written. Southeast Asian history is really not covered by novelists or historians. I would explain things the way that the research I did through my family was told to me—where there were important explanations about dates, places, what life was like during that time. But I also balanced that with not overexplaining things that you could get in context.

I do think that history, if it’s not written, does need to be explicated, because you cannot assume that people know things that they have never had access to. And it is the responsibility, I think, of the novelist and especially of the historical fiction novelist to explain what happened during that time, if no one else has any context. But at the same time, I think things like names of food or small phrases can just be gotten in context. So I wasn’t purposely obfuscating in order to make a statement about the colonization of literature, but at the same time, I was also not trying to explain too much. I just talked about it the way that I would hear a story like this.

GC: You give us a wide cast of characters in this novel, while also anchoring the story in the perspectives of Cecily, a mother, and her three children. Can you talk about how you created these characters?

VC: When this book was first being written, it was initially a book about three sad children living through the war. And we need to have space to tell stories that are inherently sad, but for me personally at the time, I was going through a series of personal griefs, and it was also the pandemic. We couldn’t go anywhere, and I, a person who felt like I had no agency at the time, was writing about three children who had no agency at the time. I needed to bring myself some joy and infuse some of that into the book, so I wrote about their mother, who, as happens during the book process in ways that you don’t expect, became the main character. She’s this flawed woman who is a spy, and gets to run around and do things, both good and bad. I think that brought both myself and hopefully the book a bit more movement and joy.

GC: What role do whiteness, white supremacy, and colonialism play in the dynamics of the novel and in Cecily’s fateful decision to become a spy for the Japanese?

VC: This novel is set in two timelines across British colonialism and Japanese colonialism. Obviously, because the British colonized Malaysia for over 150 years, that infused everything to do with the book. But less directly, the characters in the novel are a race called Eurasian, which means a different thing in Malaysia and in Southeast Asia than it does in the U.S. Here, it means people who are mixed—European and Asian. But in Southeast Asia, it means a specific race of people who were born out of colonial intermixing—mostly Portuguese intermixing, but also some others like Dutch, the English, and the French. And because these people are born out of colonial intermixing with white people, white supremacy is inherent in that culture—the idea that the fairer you are, the closer to white you are, the better your English is, the more educated you are, the higher you are in the totem pole, the closer you are to the colonial masters and to the ideal. And all of these dynamics play a part in The Storm We Made and in Cecily’s psyche, and also her rebellion against these structures that she’s told are the way that things should be.

GC: A recurring theme in the novel is obsession, particularly Cecily’s obsession with the charismatic General Fujiwara. She’s really drawn to the general, but she also hates that she is in thrall to him. What, if anything, did you want to say or explore about obsession and its consequences with this novel?

VC: I think I want to reframe that a little bit. The reason that I wrote the character that way is because I am extremely preoccupied with the idea of charisma, and whether it is inherent or it can be taught, as well as the effect charisma has on people. Obsession is often the byproduct of someone’s charisma. This is a feature across a lot of my work and definitely in this novel. I think Cecily is taken in by the charisma of this general and his ideas. She’s smart enough to know that something is wrong, and she doesn’t understand why she’s so drawn and feels so compelled to do these things, but she does it anyway. I also sometimes wonder if the impact that charisma has on people is situational, which is the case with this book. Fujiwara and his charisma hit Cecily exactly at the right time in her life, because she was feeling particularly dissatisfied. I sometimes wonder if different charismatic people in history—both good and bad—had hit at different times in history, would their impact have been the same?

GC: The world of The Storm We Made—particularly the impact of the war and competing colonial interests on the Malayan people—is powerfully and vividly portrayed. What did your research process for this novel look like?

It is true that the history of this time period [the Japanese Occupation] in Malaysia is woefully underwritten—it’s almost not written.

VC: It’s really interesting, because I think there’s this idea—almost a rule—where writing historical fiction is like, method. A lot of historical fiction writers are known to immerse themselves in a very deep way in their characters before they write them. But I started this novel in a burst of surprise, in response to a prompt, and kept writing the majority of it during the pandemic, when the archives were closed, and there was no ability to do a ton of primary research. People sometimes ask me, “Did you interview thousands of survivors?” And sadly, there are not thousands of survivors to interview. A lot of what I wrote was based on things that had followed and infused my family’s lore and storytelling over the years. I just put those on paper and realized that it was a more significant amount than I thought it was, enough to build a book, and then I went to check all of this later. I did talk to my grandmother—she was the fount of most of these stories that I had heard over the years. My father also helped me fact-check the novel, because he’s a big history buff. My uncle sent me an old book of photographs from Malaysia over the years, when he heard I was writing this book. In a way, it sort of became a family affair.

GC: Speaking of family, what role does family, whether it’s your own or just themes of familial love and connection, play in your writing?

VC: Family is very important to me, and because this is a book about a family based on some of my family, I don’t think I could have done it without the relationships that I have with my family. Someone asked me once, “Why did you write in four POVs?” I think I wrote in multiple POVs over multiple timelines because I come from a very noisy, dramatic family that’s used to talking all at the same time—that is how I’m used to receiving information. So my family didn’t just inspire the plot, they also inspired the form. My mother also passed early on, when I was writing the novel. I had just started to write it, and I used to shamefully post, on Instagram Stories, bits that I’d written of this novel and of other stories. I would delete them quickly after, but she learned how to screenshot and expand them so she could read them, and towards the end, when she was quite ill, she couldn’t really talk that much, and we didn’t have much to talk about, because it was the pandemic, she’d make me read these bits to her, because her eyes were going.

GC: You wrote this novel during an extremely dark period in our own history, and you’ve also spoken about the devastating losses that you experienced during this time. How did the times in which you were writing impact these times that you were writing about?

VC: I think when I first sent this book out, agents could tell that the novel was perhaps written at two different times, because the first part moved a bit more slowly, and was angrier and sadder. And then the next part moved quickly, and people moved through time with speed. I think that is almost a direct impact of the circumstances we found ourselves in. The first parts of this novel I wrote in 2020, during lockdown. And then the world grew a little bit, when we were allowed to step outside—that’s when I wrote the part of the novel with more agency.

I was preoccupied with the idea of what we do when we are faced with circumstances beyond our control and still have the minutiae of our lives to live.

I was also, at the time, preoccupied with the idea of what we do when we are faced with circumstances beyond our control and still have the minutiae of our lives to live. When I talked to my grandmother, I’d ask her, “What did you do during the war?” She’d be like, “We went dancing at the neighbors’ house. Do you think we just sat at home and cried every day?” There were some days where they cried, and other days where they would squeeze through the hole in the fence to go to the neighbors’ house and have little dance parties after curfew. I always think that if our descendants ask us down the line, “What was it like during the pandemic? What did you do?” We’d be like, “We were quite sad, but everything went on. We went to school on Zoom. We had our little petty grievances, and our lives continued. It was just overhung with a shadow of a larger world event.” I wanted to write a similar idea—that there’s a big war going on, but also you have petty nonsense going on in your life. You have family arguments, little loves, crushes, and things like that.

GC: Your book is going to be published in more than twenty languages and regions worldwide! How does it feel to know that your book is going to be read by so many readers around the world? Can you tell us what the process of going out on submission was like?

VC: It’s really thrilling to know that Malaysia, which is a small country, is going to have a place on bookshelves all over the world, in all these different languages. The process of selling this book was fairly chaotic. My agents sent this book out, and I had already had a trip planned to go back to Malaysia for the Lunar New Year. The manuscript went on submission, I hopped on a plane a day and a half later, and then I got back online, and I had all these messages, and they were like, “There’s been a lot of interest in your book, and you have to do phone calls with these editors.” I was on calls with NYC editors from 10 pm to 12 am and 4 am to 6 am local time. I did a number of these on my dad’s not-great Wifi in the middle of the night, while my dad tried to cook dinner and eavesdrop behind me. So it was wonderful and chaotic. The book also sold in a number of other countries at that time. The most touching, for me, was learning that the book would also have a publisher in Japan. I received a long letter from a publisher in Japan who wanted to publish the book that basically said, “It’s time for us to show Japanese people’s stories that aren’t just about Japanese soldiers going to the front and the women that they left behind, but also about the people that they impacted during this time.” I’m not a very teary person, and I was quite emotional when I got that request.

Announcing the Best Book Cover of 2023

Posted on December 29, 2023December 10, 2024 by Jo Lou

Last week, we asked our social media followers to vote for the cover of year from the best 32 designs of the year. This year’s tournament was fierce, with surprise twists and crowd favorites that bowed out early. The winner edged out the competition by a mere 6 votes.

From 32 cover designs, here are the semi-finalists:

Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter, illustration by Angela Faustina, design by Natalia Olbinski Heringa, vs. Toska by Alina Pleskova, art by Katy Horan

Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy, design by Will Staehle, art direction by Evan Gaffney, vs. Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith, design by Beth Steidle

From the Final Four, now we’re down to two crowd favorites:

We spoke to the author of Ripe and the designers of Ripe and Glaciers about creating their book covers:

Electric Literature: Tell us about your design process for this book cover and what you wanted to convey through the artwork?

Beth Steidle: The first edition of Glaciers, by Alexis M. Smith, was published in 2012. It was very well received, and the cover was well loved. Tin House wanted to celebrate this book and introduce it to a new audience with a reissue approximately 10 years later. The biggest challenge was to come up with a new package that still retained many of the successful elements of the first package (left): a vintage sentiment, elements of collage, a lightness, and femininity. However, for the new edition, we also wanted to visually highlight the overarching environmental concern and shifting landscapes that factor into the book, an element of the narrative that is so critical to our current national conversation. The most beautiful moment in this book, for me, is when the protagonist reaches out to touch a glacier, so that is the moment I focused on for this design.

EL: Did you have any interesting false starts or rejected drafts you can share with us or tell us about?

BS: This cover was not the cover that was originally approved. The first cover featured a vintage illustration of a woman wearing a green cardigan and sheath dress. The mountains and glaciers were superimposed over the woman’s dress. We loved that cover but there were concerns that the green cardigan could be construed as too old fashioned, so we opted for the more surreal design. It felt smarter and timeless.

EL: What’s your favorite book cover of 2023, besides your own?

BS: 2023 was a fantastic year for book covers. Ripe and Tomb Sweeping are both favorites of mine but, ultimately, Paul Sahre’s cover design for the paperback edition of The Employees by Olga Ravn, wins my vote for best cover of 2023. It’s such a creepy, compelling image, perfectly paired with that minimalist white background and off-kilter type. It tells you everything you need to know and also not nearly enough, which is what the best book covers should endeavor to do.

Electric Literature: Tell us about your design process for this book cover and what you wanted to convey through the artwork?

Designer Natalia Olbinski: The pomegranate, a symbol that structures the novel (each section is named for a part of the fruit), was a natural choice for the cover direction, and a preference of the author’s. The initial set of designs included the pomegranate fruit or seeds, depicted in a variety of ways: photographic and illustrative, some realistic and some very abstract, with some reference to a void or black hole. After that first round and a title change, I believe it was Sarah (or Jaya Miceli, art director) who had proposed the artwork of Angela Faustina, whose evocative oil paintings of close-ups of glistening pomegranate seeds and membranes are striking and even grotesque. We tried another round of covers using paintings from Angela’s series with different type treatments, and voilà! This composition was just right.

EL: Did you have any interesting false starts or rejected drafts you can share with us or tell us about?

NO: I typically need to try out all of my bad ideas to get to someplace interesting so I have a ton of sketches for this cover. Plus there was an abundance of visual references in the novel—of the tech industry, black holes—which were so interesting to play around with. There’s one concept I never developed past a sketch which I liked, a floating pomegranate with a black hole shadow—flat and bold, just the shapes. But I think we got to the strongest solution with the current cover.

EL: What’s your favorite book cover of 2023, besides your own?

NO: The cover for Mister Mister by Guy Gunaratne designed by Jack Smyth reminds me of old school poster art in how dynamic and punchy the art is. I’d hang it on my wall. The cover for Happy by Celina Baljeet Basra, designed by Alex Merto, also puts a big smile on my face.

Sarah Rose Etter, author of Ripe:

Electric Literature: As an author, what was the book cover process like for you?

Sarah Rose Etter: With any book, at least for me, we have a few rounds of cover ideas because I’m picky about a cover. I always tell the publisher that up front—I just love visual art so much that it matters to me a lot.

During the pandemic, while I was writing Ripe, I was just deep in my pomegranate research—I was searching films, art archives, anything I could get my hands on. Angela Faustina’s art popped up and became something I returned to over and over again while I was drafting the book. At one point, I was recreating her paintings myself in between drafts, mimicking her style.

Scribner asked me to send over a bunch of art that had inspired me while drafting—and of course, Angela’s work was at the top of the list. When the cover options were sent over, this cover jumped out and I was floored—it hadn’t occurred to me that Angela’s work would end up on the cover. But now it feels like kismet in a way—I got incredibly lucky with this cover.

EL: What are your thoughts on the cover and how the artwork ties in with your book?

SRE: Angela’s work is so visceral and unexpected. Her pomegranates make you look twice—the painting feels like it could be part of the human body or the brain, but it’s still beautiful. Since the last section of the book specifically is about seeds and the interior of the body, her work just fit perfectly as almost a foreshadowing of what is to come,

I think, too, sometimes you need a great title for a perfect cover—we were going back and forth with title options for the book, and once we hit on Ripe as a title, we really needed a juicy, glistening cover and Angela’s work was a perfect fit for that, too. The title and the font both work so well with the art—it just all came together. When Jaya [Miceli] and Natalia [Olbinski] sent this cover over, everyone got really excited—you felt that buzz of “Oh yes, that’s it!” The team at Scribner worked really hard to nail this cover so I’m really grateful to them.

EL: What’s your favorite book cover of 2023, besides your own?

SRE: I honestly really love the cover for Glaciers—it’s bold, unexpected, always makes me look twice so that’s tough competition! I also love the new McNally editions covers. But this is an impossible question for me, especially with the number of art books I buy. Every Sophie Calle cover is incredible. I also saw there was a crazy galley going around in the UK where the entire book was hardcover and holographic with no title on the front—it was beautiful, but now I can’t remember the title of the book so I guess those wild artistic choices can backfire. It’s still a gorgeous book.

The winner of Electric Lit’s 2023 Book Cover Tournament: Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter, illustration by Angela Faustina, design by Natalia Olbinski Heringa.

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Announcing the Best Book Cover of 2023

Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter, illustration by Angela Faustina, design by Natalia Olbinski Heringa, vs. Toska by Alina Pleskova, art by Katy Horan

Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy, design by Will Staehle, art direction by Evan Gaffney, vs. Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith, design by Beth Steidle

Sarah Rose Etter, author of Ripe:

Burundi: Small Country by Gaël Faye, translated by Sarah Ardizzone

Spain: Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu, translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches

Afghanistan: 99 Nights in Logar by Jamil Jan Kochai

Mexico: The Spirit of Science Fiction by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer

Canada: Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq

China: Running Through Beijing by Xu Zechen, translated by Eric Abrahamsen

France: And Their Children After Them by Nicolas Mathieu, translated by William Rodarmor

Remainder by Tom McCarthy

Fledgling by Octavia Butler

The Shimmering State by Meredith Westgate

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder

Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey

In the Woods by Tana French

The Chimes by Anna Smaill

Adjacentland by Rabindranath Maharaj

The Space

The Comfort of Monsters by Willa Richards

Penance by Eliza Clark

Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin

True Story by Kate Reed Petty

More Than You’ll Ever Know by Katie Gutierrez

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

Missing White Woman by Kellye Garrett

Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter, illustration by Angela Faustina, design by Natalia Olbinski Heringa, vs. Toska by Alina Pleskova, art by Katy Horan

Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy, design by Will Staehle, art direction by Evan Gaffney, vs. Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith, design by Beth Steidle

Sarah Rose Etter, author of Ripe:

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