8 Uncanny Novels that Will Make You Question Your Reality

Posted on by Jo Lou

As a young child, I’d wake in my bed, certain I was somewhere I didn’t belong, crying desperately to go home. And so, my relationship with the uncanny began.

In Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” the basic definition of the term is, in-of-itself, a contradiction. For the uncanny, Freud uses the word unheimlich, from his native German, which translates to not of the home. This definition suggest that uncanny events must involve the unknown or unfamiliar, but as the essay continues Freud explains that the uncanny can also be an experience where something heimlich, of the home, becomes unheimlich when private or concealed information is revealed. In the uncanny, the familiar and the strange overlap. 

As an adult, I’ve come to understand that many of the uncanny experiences of my childhood were the result of a secret revealed when I was too young to understand it. My father was a small-time weed dealer, tending to his crop and clients after his children were put to bed. The strange voices in the hallway, the ring of a spoon against the rim of a coffee cup chiming through the dark, the footsteps in the attic that bowed the ceiling above my bed: these experiences were all real. The isolating uncertainty I felt as a child seeking answers, only to be dismissed, contributed to the uncanny nature of these events. The revelations that shift an object, space, experience, or person from familiar to strange can be based on something concealed by others, or, something a person has concealed from themselves. In my case, the majority of my early uncanny experiences were a combination of the two.

But there remains a handful of events that I cannot explain, and these uncanny experiences have deeply shaped my interests as a writer. At work on my most recent book Hatch, a collection of interlinked prose poems about an artificial womb and an apocalyptic future, I was haunted by an image from my childhood. In a clearing, in the pine woods, far back from any road, there was an abandoned farmhouse. It was almost entirely intact, and on a bench in one of the bedrooms, someone had laid out a green dress and a pair of low-heeled leather shoes. Someone had laid these objects out like they were about to put them on, and then… 

For years, I wondered what had happened to the family who left the farmhouse behind. What had become of the woman who meant to wear the green dress? Though I’ve never written their story, the farmhouse, the green dress, the low-heeled leather shoes, the unknown woman and her unknown fate, all feel a part of everything I write. Stories have always been the closest I can come to understanding what I cannot.

Just as I’m invested in the complexities of the uncanny in my own writing, I find it thrilling to encounter in the work of other authors. The nature of the uncanny is highly subjective, informed by what haunts each of us most. Below are eight uncanny books that hold space in my heart and quicken its beat, even as they chill it. 

Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba, translated by Lisa Dillman 

“We were once a happy city; we were once happy girls.” But with the arrival of Marina, the survivor of a car crash that killed her parents, life at the orphanage is changed. The girls, who narrate Barba’s darkly dreamy novella as a collective we, have only their shared experiences of the world, including a set of rules they have invented and agreed upon. Marina’s arrival serves as a violet disruption of the we. To the orphans, who were previously absent an awareness of their own fragility, Marina’s scarred body introduces mortality and the possibility of serious injury and death. She becomes an unsettling object of fascination and repulsion. Like a virus, Marina sickens the body of the collective. A ritualistic nightly game, where each girl takes a turn as an object for the others’ pleasure, only quickens the spread. An I among the we, Marina leaves the orphans with a sinister, forked choice: assimilation or purgation.

Disquiet by Julia Leigh

The return of the exile, disrupting the status quo established in their absence, is a familiar plot, which Leigh injects with adrenaline by pairing one return with another, creating mirroring events that are striking both for their similarity and difference. In Disquiet, the day that Olivia, the daughter who ran away years before, returns to the family chateau, bruised, with a broken arm and two secret children, is also the day that her brother and his wife are returning from the hospital with their first child. Olivia’s arrival, with a young boy and girl trailing behind, is a shock. It’s doubled then darkened with the news that the expected grandchild is stillborn. As an act of compassion, the parents have been permitted to bring their infant home—a chance to say goodbye. The chateau’s grand entry is full of balloons to celebrate a homecoming, but uninvited company has crashed the party, and the birthday girl, baby Alice, was born dead. What follows is an eerie unraveling of family secrets and loyalties that decay decades of carefully maintained control. 

White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi 

Published 15 years ago, White is for Witching is a novel boiling with the ghosts of empire and war. Tragically, over a decade later, it has not lost any degree of its political or humanitarian urgency. By setting the book in Dover, whose famous white cliff coastline has been at threat of invasion since the 10th century, and is the location of a contemporary immigration removal center, Oyeyemi is able to shine a spotlight on British nationalism and xenophobia. Here, in Dover, during a slew of violent attacks against immigrants, a mentally and physically fragile girl, Miranda Silver, walks into the night never to return. But is that really what happened? White is for Witching is chronologically disruptive, beginning in the present and shifting between various times in the past. The novel starts with Miranda’s disappearance as described by three of the primary narrators: her protective and possessive twin brother Eliot, Ore, Marinda’s first romantic interest, the clear-eyed daughter of a Nigerian immigrant, adopted by white British parents, and finally the sinister, sentient Silver home at 29 Barton Road. Yes, the house is alive. 29 Barton Road is also viciously racist, enjoys supernatural powers of compulsion, and has a domineering sense of ownership over generations of Silver women. Where is Miranda Silver? Is Miranda alive? To answer these questions, you’ll have to read White is for Witching for yourself.  

The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada, translated by David Boyd 

With her husband’s job transfer, Asa leaves the city and her unsatisfying job behind for a new life in a small town. Conveniently, her in-laws own a house, neighboring theirs, that the couple can move into rent-free. What a windfall! Except, Asa has no memory of this house, despite previously visiting her in-laws. This is one of many holes in Oyamada’s uncanny novella. An unsettling slow burn, The Hole opens with Asa experiencing a series of vague discomforts best kept to herself lest she seem ungrateful. The move. The new home. The transition from underpaid temporary worker to housewife. The constant proximity of her helpful, professionally successful mother-in-law. The stagnancy of a long, hot summer. As Asa’s isolation increases so do the peculiarities around her. The song of the cicadas grows impossibly louder. Children’s laughter cuts through the hot air, but Asa cannot see any children. One day, she falls into a hole that seems perfectly designed to trap her. Freed by a passing neighbor, Asa discovers the land is full of holes. Like a deranged game of Whac-A-Mole, children’s heads rise and disappear. A strange, fanged creature, who dens in an empty well, appears. With the discovery of physical holes, Asa discovers more and more holes in her memory. A transformation, terrifying for its banality is underway. 

The Law of the Skies by Grégoire Courtois, translated by Rhonda Mullins

The portrayal of children as vessels of innocence is shattered in The Law of the Skies. A dozen six-year-olds and three adult chaperons tumble off a bus into the woods for a short camping trip. None of them will survive. While the vast majority of violence inflicted by children is the product of ignorant exploration with no harm intended, there are those chilling few who take a true pleasure in causing damage. Enzo, the murderous boy hunting his classmates across Courtois’s nauseating novella is one of those. To make a little girl cry, Enzo smashes a snail. Later he will wield a rock against his teacher. An unrelentingly violent parable, The Law of the Skies sets good against evil in an unforgiving natural world. When Enzo dispatches adult authority, his classmates are left to fight or flee. Like Lord of the Flies, The Law of the Skies demands readers consider the conflict of appearance versus reality, the necessity of rules and order, and the innate nature of evil. Despite knowing from the first page that there are no survivors, the narrative propels forward with a hope that innocence will be rescued and order restored. In denying this longed for conclusion, The Law of the Skies is a destabilizing exploration of our relationship to violence.

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell

“They’re like worms. … Like worms, all over,” a boy murmurs on the opening page of Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream. Writhing with tension, this slim novella is structured as an ongoing conversation between two characters. The first is Amanda, who lies blinded in a hospital bed with no understanding of how she came to be there. The second is David, an unsettling young boy guiding Amanda toward a critical memory she has temporarily lost. Schweblin’s quick-paced, dialogue-driven structure creates a sense of defamiliarization for the reader. Entering into Fever Dream everything is strange. Gradually, Amanda recalls that she is staying at a vacation home in the countryside with her daughter, Nina. Here, a neighbor, Carla, befriends Amanda and shares a bizarre story. Carla’s little boy, David, has no soul. Once, he was a perfectly normal child, but now Carla says he is a “monster.” Believing that her neighbor must be unstable, Amanda dismisses the story. Hints at its truth are woven into her experiences in the country, but Amanda fails to see them until the situation is dire. Earlier in Fever Dream, the phrase “rescue distance,” representing how far Amanda can be from Nina while still able to protect her, is introduced like a blaring klaxon. As much as it is an uncanny work, Fever Dream is about motherhood, and the desperate, even deranged lengths a parent will go to protect her child from the visible and hidden dangers of the world.

Bone House by K-Ming Chang

An object as fine and eerie as a dollhouse miniature, K-Ming Chang’s micro-chapbook Bone House is a queer, Taiwanese American retelling of Wuthering Heights. Chang is a writer who pairs the beautiful and the grotesque in a way where each compliments the other. Bone House is rich with imagery that is simultaneously alluring and repelling. A girl is hung by her long, thick hair. Bones arrange themselves to send messages from the dead. The boundaries between what is natural and what is supernatural are porous and Chang’s characters accept what they encounter with little questioning.

After moving into a butcher’s living, meat-hook studded mansion, the story’s unnamed narrator discovers the complex and destructive love story of Millet, a foundling, and Cathy, the lover who ultimately rejects her. As Cathy’s insistent ghost performs acrobatics above the narrator’s bed, demanding to be seen, they develop their own attraction to Millet. How does a person leave a toxic relationship when their lover returns as a ghost to haunt the house they once shared? This is Millet’s challenge: to free herself (and Cathy) from a cycle of desire and violence where love and consumption intertwined. Cleanse it with fire. Burn, baby, burn. 

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi 

“You should worry about your own madness instead of mine.” These are the words that Tara, a woman diagnosed with dementia, hurls at her adult daughter, Antara. As her mother’s health diminishes, Antara takes her in, ostensibly, to care for her. But, the two women share decades of resentment for one another. When Antara was a baby, Tara, a dissatisfied Indian housewife, all but abandoned her daughter to pursue a relationship with an exploitive guru. Later, Tara will bring a young and powerless Antara to the ashram where she is neglected and subjected to casual abuse from her mother and the guru’s ecstatic followers. In a reversal of roles, an adult Antara finds herself positioned to care for the mother who failed to care for her. What is a child’s obligation to such a parent? Where Burnt Sugar slides into the territory of the uncanny is in how Antara faces this question. Simply put, she wants revenge. Despite Antara’s insistence that she  needs her mother out of her life, her actions indicate an obsession with the woman. As long-held secrets are revealed, Antara becomes mother to a little girl of her own. The tension in Burnt Sugar crackles as each of the women is forced to see the other in a new light. 

7 Novels About Women on a Journey to Figure Out Who They Are

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Is an identity crisis just par for the course as human beings? Does it happen to everybody? I wondered this to myself as a friend told me that her brother-in-law had decided, in his late thirties, to hit the pause button on his life. He was going to Bali for two months, she said, to “find himself.” This was shocking not in the least because he had a family he would be leaving behind in order to go off and conduct this search, but also, because he wasn’t entirely clear about whether he would be coming back. A search for self on a paradise island free of responsibility. Only in a man’s world, I thought, enviously. A woman would never go about it like that.

I didn’t set out to write a story about a woman in search of herself. My original intention was to generate some acting work. If I could write a great play (or even just an okay one, I acquiesced, whenever I had writers block), produce it and perform it myself, then the “right” (whatever that means) people would see it, which would lead to more scripts—ones I hadn’t had to write myself—flooding my way. Then, I’d be in. I’d be a busy actor having no choice but to turn down parts and I would never have to write anything ever again.

My novel, Dominoes, is a love story. But not that kind of love story. The protagonist, Layla McKinnon, has been living a life she’s relatively happy with. She has her routine, her job, her family, her best friend and, where we meet her in life, she has just met The One. She’s had little impetus to scratch below the surface of things, even despite her insecurities about her mixed-race heritage. But all that changes when she is presented with evidence by her best friend that The One may be a descendant of her enslaved ancestors’ owners. Layla is forced to interrogate the life she’s been living and the one she thought she wanted to build. To ask herself if she truly knows who she is, what she stands for and if she or anything about it need to change.

This is a reading list about women who, at any one time, have had their doubts about who they are and who they present themselves to the world as. In these stories, they are piecing together the puzzle of their own identities. For them, the importance of this notion waxes and wanes, it is not necessarily their primary preoccupation, but bubbles to the surface in varying degrees. The question of their own essence and what it means in a fast-paced world where it feels like everyone else is so sure of themselves and what they stand for, may not always be the point of these stories but it is certainly an essential by-product. To someone not in that questioning, contemplative place themselves, it may well be missed. For me, however, they became the parts of these books which spoke the loudest. Read these books for their keenly observed female protagonists’ exploration of the world around them—through language, location, love, politics, and friendship—and for the ways in which the lives they are leading or the new ones they are seeking out, speak to their essence. And as for my friend’s brother-in-law, he came back in the end. But, just as with the characters in these novels, finding yourself back where you started doesn’t make it all for nought. It’s in the journeying that we find our essence, not necessarily at the destination.

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Two mixed-race best friends who meet as youngsters at dance class, find themselves on divergent paths as one (the unnamed narrator) watches the other—Tracey—achieve their shared childhood dream becoming a dancer. Through her teens, twenties and thirties, we see the narrator going through the motions: university, first job, short lived love affairs, the allure of orbiting a celebrity when she lands a job as assistant to a pop star the girls idolized growing up. She watches on as Tracey’s career fizzles out, replaced by the challenges of  motherhood on the same council estate they were raised on. Smith’s thought-provoking insights on race, trauma, aging and the choices we make in life and where they lead us subtly force the reader to consider these things in relation to themselves at every turn. On reading the last page, I thrust the book into the hands of the nearest person in my vicinity telling them to read it. I defy you not to do the same thing.

Half Breed by Natasha Marshall

While technically a play, this extended monologue for one performer reads like a novella you’ll whip through in one sitting. Jazmin is “the only Black in the village.” Not only does she not want to end up a target for her best friend’s bigot of a boyfriend, she doesn’t want to become a teenage pregnancy statistic. She wants to get out. So, when her beloved Gran secretly signs her up to audition at a London drama school, her chance to break free of her small town and achieve her dream of becoming an actress looks to be within her grasp. There’s just one thing stopping her: herself. Examining her life, friendship, hopes and experiences, Jazmin is determined to make a decision and commit to a destiny of her own making and we’re rooting for her all the way, willing her to bravely take ownership and step out into the big wide world. Poetic and lyrical, every line buzzes with the unmistakeable energy of a writer penning something they simply have no choice but to speak aloud.

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

Emira is trying to figure her life out as a Black, twenty-something woman with her whole life thing stretched out before her for the taking. When she is approached by a security guard at a store who accuses her of kidnapping her young charge because the toddler is white and the two of them together simply doesn’t compute (at least not to the prejudiced), a chain of events is set off which force Emira to question not only who she is but who should be given a say on her life. Her employer? Her boyfriend? Or better still, someone without a white savior complex. The plot makes for a thought-provoking discourse on a multitude of issues. It is a meaty coming-of-age story which have you begging Emira to finally take all that she knows to be true about the world and herself and to use that knowledge to seize autonomy over her own life once and for all. 

The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi

Anisha, a London based Bollywood film translator, has romantic ideals about language. She dreams of having the linguistic aptitude to offer up new translations of Russian tomes of scholarly significance. Though coupled up, her lukewarm feelings towards her boyfriend, Adam, come second place to her friendships with Naima and her beloved cat. But when Adam, a fellow linguist, reveals that he can introduce her to a top secret school which promises fluency in any language in the space of just 10 days, Anisha is plunged into an addictive, morally dubious community which challenges both hers and our notions of earning the right to certain abilities, appropriation and colonialism in a completing unexpected, completely brilliant way. It is all the more thrilling and thought-provoking to have this one read to you, so opt for the audiobook if you’re that way inclined and you’ll devour the whole thing in mere hours. 

Assembly by Natasha Brown

There’s a lot to be said for the slimline novel, and this one, with its meticulously crafted prose should be your first port of call if you’re seeking to learn more about the continued effect of colonialism on the modern world and, in particular on the lives of people of color. A nameless Black woman who seems to have it all — the cushy career, the big bonuses, a serious relationship with man from an old-money white family — tells us through a sequence of vignettes why a life blighted by racism at every turn is not much of a life at all. In fact, it is impossible not to feel her utter exhaustion at simply having to exist in such a world. The poignancy with which she reflects on her experiences and the conclusions she draws on her future given all that she has already suffered, makes the choice she is faced with about her health all the more hard hitting and, sadly, justifiable. A breathless, read in one-sitting corker of a debut. 

Temper by Phoebe Walker

Purpose and identity are often inextricably linked to place for many women. We feel this in almost every line of Phoebe Walker’s debut. Infused with her characteristic poetic imagery and keenly observant eye for the world around her, she gives us yet another unnamed narrator (a theme worthy of a reading list of its own!) who has left London on the coat tails of her corporate boyfriend and his new job. Being a freelance writer, she has the freedom to work from anywhere, and the Netherlands, she reasons, is as good a place as any. But the promise of expat life, with its shiny, social media-ready exterior and the feeling of excitement in the first days and weeks, quickly fades. What our protagonist is left with is creeping isolation, loneliness and a lack of purpose. When she reluctantly befriends an untrustworthy fellow expat who has been shunned by everyone else who knows her out there, the narrator’s reflections on just how and exactly where to go about building a life for oneself in a big world, becomes all the more intriguing and absorbing. 

Luster by Raven Leilani

Edie’s life is all kinds of messy. A frustrated artist moonlighting as an assistant at a publishing house, until she is eventually fired for sending inappropriate emails, she ends up becoming a live in nanny-cum-sister figure to her married lover’s adopted Black daughter, Akila. On the face of it, this crazy living arrangement is something Edie should be running a mile from, but the whole thing—approved of and encouraged by the wife of said lover—serves as a unique setting for Edie to fully examine her life. Thought-provoking and at times, uncomfortable, you will spend the book rooting for Edie to learn about herself while simultaneously teaching Akila what it means to be a young, Black woman in a world of prejudice and privilege, not to mention luxuriating over Leilani’s lust(er)-worthy writing. Lines like: “In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence” reverberate in your mind long after you put the book down.

Alvina Chamberland Takes a Scalpel to Straight Men’s Secret Attraction to Trans Women

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Alvina Chamberland’s debut novel, Love the World or Get Killed Trying, is an explosive work of autofiction that combines playful and poetic prose, zingy social commentary, and razor-sharp gallows humor. The novel is structured as a stream-of-consciousness travelogue where we journey around Europe with the novel’s protagonist, an opinionated trans woman coming up to her thirtieth birthday. In the wilderness of Iceland and along the busy boulevards of Paris, we witness our protagonist probing questions of philosophy, society, sexuality, and love—while also dealing with the dangerous blend of discrimination and desire that informs straight men’s treatment of trans women.

Love the World or Get Killed Trying is a glorious, soul-shaking, vibrant manifesto of a novel. As its title suggests, it is a voice-driven testimony about how hard it can be to remain soft, while living in a world where trans people’s rights and autonomy are increasingly under political threat. 

Over a combination of email and Google Docs, Chamberland and I spoke about a range of topics including: the importance of breaking rules and bending genres, transmisogyny as a heightened version of misogyny against cis women, the uses of humor as a tool of survival and transcendence, and the manifold problems that result when straight men are unable to fully face, name and own their desires for trans women.

Shze-Hui Tjoa: What made you start writing this novel? 

Alvina Chamberland: I started mainly for two reasons. First: to survive. Ever since I was 19 and first fell madly in love, I’ve needed writing to not be driven out of my mind, and to try to make myself and my experiences of the world understood. It’s an escape route from death-spiraling anxiety, through giving the darkness form I create a moment where it can’t take over my life. 

Second: because I haven’t read many other books like this, and I need it to be out there in the world, a novel written by a trans woman that dares to be literary and poetic and abstract and realist and non-linear and dreamy. A novel which politically confronts straight men’s behavior towards us and demands change, and personally exposes both the universal and specific experiences that have shaped my life—my hope is that this vulnerability can connect and build bridges between people with very different structural positions.

ST: There’s so much humor in Love the World or Get Killed Trying! I especially love your protagonist’s quips about place as she travels – I laughed out loud to read her description of Iceland’s “Scandinavian Design temples dedicated to the fear of inflicting stains and the feeling of being dead inside.” What roles do humor and observation play in your writing?

AC: Oh my god, so many! First of all, trans girls need a wicked sense of humor in order to survive all the extremes and hypocrisies this world throws at us. In turn all these experiences make us so clever, sharp and witty in our observations. I can break down and build up social structures with my trans woman friends in ways I can’t with anyone else. This of course translates into how I write—or all the dark experiences portrayed in this novel, the humor goes even darker. 

Writing is an escape route from death-spiraling anxiety, through giving the darkness form I create a moment where it can’t take over my life.

One of my favorite terms in the world is “gallows humor,” but in order to inhabit that term, one must spend a lot of time in the gallows. I think I can say I have, and although I am dead serious and want to make a reader cry a hundred times, I also want to make her laugh nearly as much. It’s through this combination one can transcend the role of a one-sided victim without foregoing honesty, or denying the pain and tragedy and injustice of far too many things in our world.

ST: One of Love the World’s big themes is around “spotlighting straight men’s frequent and secret attraction to trans women.” And of course, the opening epigraph cites several statistics about the commercial popularity of transgender porn, explaining how “Transgender porn has presumably become the largest, most popular genre of porn among heterosexual men.” 

Could you say more about why you chose to write a book that spotlights this subject? I’m also curious about the differences between being desired and fetishized, which is one of the related themes your novel touches upon.

AC: I suppose the simplest way to describe the difference between being desired and fetishized would be: is a guy interested in me predominantly because I’m a trans woman or predominantly because I’m Alvina? The latter brings us closer to desire, as it allows me to be an individual. Of course, other factors also play in, like if the guy is keeping me secret, if he sees me as viable for a long-term relationship or just a fling/one time thing, if the desire’s solely sexual, about my body, or if it’s also about my personality etc. Unfortunately, not more than 1-2% of the rows of straight men who want to have sex with me live up to all these criteria, and straight men really have to start grappling with their hypocrisy, objectification and cognitive dissonance towards trans women. One rarely sees “feminist men’s groups” addressing these topics, rather they can often be the most silent and intimidated by trans women of all straight men —too busy pretending to “tolerate” us to ever date us. Like, my experience is that white middle class liberal northern European men may be the most transphobic in the world. 

The whole issue of straight men’s desire is of course extremely relevant to me as it encircles my, and most straight trans girls’, lives. I mean the reason trans women, especially trans women of color, are the group within the LGBTQI+ umbrella facing the most murders and extreme violence, isn’t that straight men harbor more hatred towards us, but rather that they harbor hatred towards themselves for desiring us. And yet, any and every trans girl knows just how common and normcore this desire actually is. In our current society it wouldn’t be safe for many of us to do so, but if trans women one day collectively decided to out every man who seeks us out, a full-blown revolution would ensue by nightfall. There’s just so many of them and they’re almost completely invisible.

ST: I love that phrase—“a revolution by nightfall.” What kind of revolution are you thinking of, what do you hope it will dismantle or change?

Trans girls need a wicked sense of humor in order to survive all the extremes and hypocrisies this world throws at us.

AC: Allow me to get a bit abstract here as I’m talking about something that goes beyond our imaginations of liberation for minorities/subgroups. It’s about straight men finally being placed in a position of vulnerability, outside of their comfort zone, getting into contact with our very queer life experiences and thus not staying in the heteronormative echo chamber most of them have lived their entire lives within. This carries with it so much potential for collective freedom and liberation and a radical shift of fragile masculinity, thus far built on hiding, shame, and obsession with other men’s approval. 

What may not be as revolutionary—but would cause an important shift in many trans women’s lives—is creating an understanding of what transitioning really means in a physical sense, beyond identity. Of course if someone looks like society’s definition of a man, yet identifies as a woman, most straight men won’t find her attractive. But if a woman lives up to the beauty standards for women, she’ll be desired by most straight men, whether or not she is trans. For us to be held to the same beauty standards as all women isn’t revolutionary, but it’ll at least mean we won’t have to look perfect in order for a guy to even consider a date with us in daylight. The goal however is to eradicate these cisnormative patriarchal beauty standards altogether…

ST: Your novel is so incisive about how transmisogyny is a heightened version of regular misogyny. And as a fellow writer, I’m curious how (or if) you think this dynamic plays out in the careers and public reception of trans writers.

AC:  To begin with, most well-known trans women authors and intellectuals are lesbians. That has a lot to do with the messy extra trauma and hyperfemininity straight trans girls often endure and express, which has us deemed less competent. For similar reasons trans men may be deemed even more competent than lesbian trans women by institutional powers. Us straight trans women are generally granted visibility as models, actresses, or sex workers—the desire for us is hidden like gay desire was in the 1950s, and we are largely limited to a few select occupations like cis women were in the 50s. And if we’re very beautiful, we get reduced to that beauty and accused of “pandering to the male gaze.” At the same time cisnormative society defines a successful and respectable transition as one which leads to beauty and passing. It’s a double bind, damned if you, damned if you don’t.

I notice that this doesn’t happen to normatively attractive trans men, who reap rewards in a more linear fashion. The more I’ve started passing, the more I’ve noticed that queers and feminists expect me to be a bit stupid and conservative, until I prove them otherwise. Meanwhile, straight men are now the ones who seem the most eager to give me compliments for both my beauty and my intellect. Yet, before I became beautiful in a cis passing way, they completely ignored me and my work. So, I guess beauty is the prerequisite for them to pay me any attention at all, and I still deem it unlikely that they’ll be lining up to buy my book…

ST: There are many fantasies of romance woven through Love the World. The protagonist develops all these imaginary relationships in her head—with Cristiano Ronaldo, or the ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. But also, she’s in a kind of imaginary relationship with us—her readers—as she’s always breaking the fourth wall to talk to us directly. Was writing this book about finding connections, for you? 

AC: Since writing is such a solitary process, I think the real answer would be that the deepest connection I am seeking is one with myself. My hope is, however, that all this intense digging—all this openness and vulnerability and honesty—will make others feel connected to me as well. But that’s up to them to decide. I have no control over where the text goes, though I wish I could put it in the hands of more straight men, who perhaps are the ones who need to read it the most.

If trans women one day collectively decided to out every man who seeks us out, a full-blown revolution would ensue by nightfall.

Most of all though, I don’t really have a target audience. I hope what I’ve written is heartbreakingly human enough and good enough as literature to traverse beyond static identity borders. And not because I’ve compromised and watered down my reality to make it more palatable—quite the contrary, real bridges are built through being adamantly real, getting humanized by showing just how human you are. 

I don’t want cis people to read this and be like “I’m a good ally, I read a novel by a trans woman, and it has nothing to do with me.” And neither do I want trans women to read and only feel empowered (although perhaps that too), but rather seen and understood in all the complexities we’re forced to live through. Or not—because in the end this is a novel, and I can only represent my own voice in it, and that voice may resonate with some and not with others. Its resonance may indeed occur in the most unexpected directions, which is the beauty of it.

ST: I keep coming back to this line near the end of the novel, which has stayed with me over all the months since I first read it: “Cool, composed, self-assured, professional—all characteristics we try to attain in order to better become machines. I don’t possess these qualities, and I have quit trying.” 

Love the World makes such intentional room for “too muchness”, instead of eliding it like other novels do. I’m curious what you feel it brings to the reading experience—or to the reader—when a writer doesn’t shy away from showing the contradictions, messiness, or complexities of their “behind the scenes” world…  because I feel like Love the World does this with such style and flair, and in a one-of-a-kind way compared to other books I’ve read. 

AC: I feel literature can capture the complexity, battles, and contradictions going on in our inner monologues to a deeper extent than more visually focused art forms. It’s difficult to make a film that only showcases what is going on inside a person, but it’s much easier to write a book based on that foundation. I find this especially important in today’s social media world where Twitter allows 240 characters, Insta-success comes from establishing a simple and consistent brand, and activists are seen as the most radical and worthy of visibility if they present themselves as 100 percent certain. The thing is though, most of us are neither simple nor consistent nor completely sure, which doesn’t mean we are total messes who can’t articulate any opinions… But honesty lies somewhere in-between and in this novel I’ve tried to enter various questions with that broad embrace. Indeed, I guess you could say I approach politics more as questions than answers…

A Workshop for Shame and Sexual Energy

Posted on by Wynter Miller

Erotic Bodywork by Mark Bessen

Standing in line at the H-E-B checkout, I’m mindlessly deleting emails when a photo of a naked, pornographically hot beefcake stretched out on a massage table illuminates my screen. I recoil and quickly pull the front of my jacket around the phone, worried I’ll scandalize a wayward shopper, or worse, traumatize some passing youth. I tap the bookmark button, then quickly swipe to another screen and wait for my turn to clumsily scan my groceries.

Once I’m settled in my car among frozen pizzas, off-season blueberries, and kitty litter, I reopen the email to check the sender, worried some porn site has laid hands on my address. I’m relieved to discover it’s a promotion for an erotic massage workshop, distributed to a mailing list for Austin Naked Yoga. I’d signed up a year ago when I overheard a couple of Daddies talking about the group while I was sunbathing nude in the gay section of Hippie Hollow, Austin’s nudist “beach” (really a limestone cliff on Lake Travis). Now, safely in the cocoon of my Corolla, I grin as I read the copy below the beefcake photo:

Join Bo, experienced leader and gifted giver of bodywork, as you give and receive touch, experience relaxation, eroticism, sensuality, brotherhood, and a very intense release.

Oh, I think. Well then.

I read on.

Every participant will receive massage for one hour and give massage for one hour. Bo will empower attendees by reviewing full body, Swedish, and deep tissue massage techniques, glute and outer anal massage techniques, and genital massage techniques. Erections will occur and are most welcome. Participants may choose to release their erotic energy during the session or take it with them.

My oh my. My cheeks feel warm and I know I’m blushing. Coincidentally, after almost a year of delay, I had attended my first gay naked yoga class about three weeks before. I’d been keen to participate after hearing about it that day at Hippie Hollow, but I’d been too nervous to go alone and only mustered the gumption when a friend asked me to accompany him. Safety in numbers.

But naked yoga is one thing, an erotic massage workshop is something else entirely. Still, I’m curious, and when I get home I decide to ask my boyfriend, Brandon, if he has any interest in going as my massage partner. I’m anticipating a “no,” but I’m not sure where it’ll fall between “abso-fucking-lutely not” and “maybe at some point in the abstract future.”

I get a firm “No, thank you.”

“Fair enough,” I say, a little bummed and a little relieved. We’ve been in an open relationship for a couple years, so I could still go on my own, but his “no” makes it easy not to venture outside my comfort zone. The class, I think, might have been too big for my (absent) breeches.

The next week I go to yoga class again with my friend Evan. It’s my second or third class, and it’s as liberating and exciting as I’d imagined, a yogi exhibitionist fantasia. I still feel shy during the initial strip-down, still find myself giggling during Happy Baby and smiling as I push up my glasses (the only thing I’m wearing) during Downward Dog. After class, I’m standing around chit-chatting and flirting, still naked, when a skinny older guy I’d noticed eyeing me during class comes up to me.

“I’m Bo,” says the man standing stark before me. “I’m doing this massage workshop on Saturday.”

I mutter an introduction, looking over at Evan, struggling to maintain eye contact with Bo. For a moment I think he’s going to ask me to be his partner, and I start rehearsing excuses in my head, simultaneously feeling guilty that an excuse is my knee-jerk response. But then it clicks, and I realize I’m talking to the “gifted giver” himself.

“How open minded are you?” Bo asks.

The question feels like a challenge and an affront. I’m here, aren’t I? I want to say. I’m fun!

But Bo’s question is delivered with a softness and compassion that lower my defenses.

“I’d say moderately,” I answer. “But it depends on what you’re getting at.”

He smiles. “My model for the Erotic Massage Workshop just canceled. So, I need a substitute.” He’s speaking pragmatically, simply, hurriedly. “Would you have any interest in filling in? I’ll just massage you for both sessions, demonstrate the techniques on you, and the rest of the time just give you a massage.” He pauses briefly. “And I’ll pay you a hundred dollars.”

I notice he’s speaking in the future tense, rather than future subjunctive, as though I’ve already agreed, as though this is a foregone conclusion. I feel myself blush and demurely wrap one foot around my calf. Our nudity makes the conversation feel rawer, the nerves of my skin exposed to the warm musky air of the yoga studio. Evan, who’s been standing nearby and has clearly overheard the solicitation, walks away, smirking, to check out some other booties.

“Oh,” I say to Bo. “Interesting.” I pause. “I need to think about it. Can I get back to you?”

Bo and I exchange numbers. I tell him I’ll let him know one way or another the next day. I need to ask my boyfriend about the prospect, sleep on it, jerk off on it.

When I get home, I tell Brandon about the proposition and ask for his opinion. I suppose I’m partially asking if he’s okay with me getting felt up by a massage instructor, but since that’s clearly within the bounds of our open relationship agreement, I’m more interested in his reaction to the element of financial exchange. To me stripping down for money.

“Go for it,” he says, chuckling. “You’re having a whole hippie-dippie nudist woo-woo moment. It seems like you’d have fun.”

“For the record,” I say, “I don’t think it’s a moment. I am a hippie-dippie nudist. A free spirit. A liberated queen!” I toss my imaginary locks.

“Sure,” he says.

Brandon doesn’t say it, but I know he’s thinking about a story I’d shared with him before. A story about another massage, when I was seventeen, at a chain called Massage Envy.

Back then, no one would have described me as a hippie-dippie nudist. I was not a free spirit, did not possess even a scant trace of whimsy. I was a type-A, overworked, under-slept, five-AP-class-taking little shit. All I thought about was college applications, which extracurriculars would help craft the most compelling narrative for my future success, and competitive gymnastics.

I was tragically repressed. No one at my high school was out, and I had only recently begun to even allow myself to consider that I was gay, to allow myself to explore those feelings, in my mind and on the internet. I’d probably known somewhere deep down for years, but it wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I dared voice my personal “persuasion”—a rhetorical dodge because even uttering the word “sexuality” made me uncomfortable.

After a physical therapist recommended a massage for my gymnastics-injured spine, I called the local chain in town, Massage Envy. I was already suspicious of the place, especially the questionably sensual name, which evoked both sin and the puritanical value system in which sin exists. The local paper for our geriatric beachside town had recently run a series about another massage business, Crystal Spa, which had been shut down on multiple charges of prostitution.

On the phone, after I spent too long justifying why I was getting a massage, the receptionist replied: “Wonderful. Now let’s get you scheduled with one of our licensed clinical massage therapists. Would you prefer a male or female therapist?”

My stomach seized up. “What?” I whispered.

She repeated the question.

I looked around to make sure my bedroom door was closed and listened for my father in the hallway. We had been on precarious terms since I’d come out to him a few months earlier, and, after a few outbursts, had settled into a hostile silence. I imagined how my father would feel about the idea of a man kneading his son’s warm nude body. (It wasn’t hard to imagine, because some not-so-small part of me still disapproved, too.) But with a barely healed lumbar injury, my back was killing me. I needed someone strong to knead my knotted muscles. Plus, I was curious.

I imagined how my father would feel about the idea of a man kneading his son’s warm nude body.

“Male, please,” I said softly.

On the day of my appointment, I pulled into a parking space at the opposite end of the shopping center from Massage Envy’s gaudy purple sign. Inside, a marble reception desk shimmered with a golden sheen that matched the receptionist’s spray tan. She checked me in and swiped my debit card, “just for incidentals.” I wondered if incidentals were what had gotten Crystal Spa in trouble. Then I heard footsteps, which materialized into a tall, dark-haired man with a thick mustache and thicker Slavic accent. He extended a hand.

“Hello, I’m Alex,” he said gruffly, giving my hand a firm shake. My dad had made me watch the Terminator movies at least five times each, and I imagined Alex as Arnold’s replacement in the next installment. “Please follow me.”

Alex led me to Room 6 and ushered me inside. It was dimly lit, which I knew was supposed to be relaxing, but instead made me worry about the possible hygiene concerns brighter light might reveal. Alex pulled out a clipboard from under his muscular arm and began asking for my medical history: what brought me in, where it hurt. The procedure of it comforted me. Despite the flouncy decor, the appointment had at least the façade of a medical encounter.

When I told him I had a gymnastics injury, his eyes lit up. “Romania has some of the best gymnasts in the world,” he said, beaming with national pride.

I smiled in agreement, relieved to find common ground. Then Alex pressed the center button on a silver iPod mini and the room filled with the sound of rain and a sitar. He pulled back the purple sheet on the massage table.

“Undress,” he said, directing me to leave my clothes and belongings in the chair and get face down under the sheet.

“Undress, as in . . . ?” I asked, eyes averted.

“Completely,” he answered; he’d clearly made the clarification many times before.

As the door clicked closed behind him, my heart fluttered like it was supposed to on the first date I’d never had. Uneasy, I stripped out of my tee and below-the-knee Volcom shorts (I was still performing straightness), then whisked off my plaid boxers and shimmied under the sheets.

I shifted uncomfortably until I heard a knock on the door, followed by Alex’s voice. I lifted my head to grunt an affirmation, then settled into the lavender-scented face hole. I could feel myself trembling and tried to force my body still. Alex folded back the sheet, exposing my back down to my last vertebra.

I heard the spatter of massage oil. I heard him rub his hands together vigorously. As soon as he made contact, I felt my body jerk away.

“Just try to relax,” Alex soothed.

I was fully shaking now, teeth chattering. It took me a few long minutes of Alex’s tentative, preliminary pats on my back before I settled down. I breathed through my panic like I’d practiced in therapy.

I’d never felt a man’s hands against my skin like this. The warmth and pressure as he glided his hands from my neck down to my lumbar spine. Coaches had prodded at me to correct my form, laid on top of me to press me deeper into the splits. Physical therapists had probed my nerves and joints. But this was new. With each measured stroke of Alex’s hands, I felt a muscle relax, an insecurity fade away. I was a touch-starved teen, and this was delicious.

“How’s the pressure?” Alex asked, interrupting my bliss, now ten or so minutes into the massage.

“Good, good,” I muttered, but the disruption allowed an outside reality to creep in. The sound of his voice was quickly succeeded by thoughts of my father. I imagined that he would writhe in disgust if any man tried to lather oil on his back. I felt a stab of shame, a flash of anger, then a momentary pity.

I directed my thoughts back to my body on the massage table, my face smushed into the head cradle. Alex had just ventured a bit south of the sheet. No complaints, it felt lovely, just a little surprise. Glutes are muscles, too, I told myself. Still, the butt-touching made me feel like I was doing something bad, and it pulled me out of the experience of the warm sheets, the warm hands. No, this wasn’t anything bad, I corrected myself. There was nothing even sexual about this—this was a massage to relieve back pain. A medical procedure.

Okay, I asked myself, then why do you have a raging boner?

I felt myself swell under my abdomen, a throb with my heartbeat. Briefly, I panicked that Alex might be about to finish with my back and ask me to flip over, revealing a teepee erect on the table. But fortunately, he moved from my glutes up to my shoulders, where the nerves were less touchy, and then walked to the other end of the table.

He began to massage my calves. Then, gradually, the circular motions inched up my leg, past my knee, and into the uncharted territory of my inner thigh. I felt a little chill as Alex pushed the sheet to one side, and tucked it under my leg so that it covered any embargoed goods. Oh, no. I shimmied to adjust myself, to brace against these new sensations. I felt myself pressing into the massage table to the motion of the massage. No, no. I urged the carnal forces to retreat as he continued to massage my hamstrings. I tried to think about SAT questions, and college applications, and the tumbling pass I was training on floor. Anything else. No, not now. And then Alex’s hand lingered on my inner thigh a femtosecond too long, and I stifled a moan. I felt the gooey warmth beneath me, gluing the sheets to my abdomen.

The wave of shame crashed over me immediately. I felt my skin go hot and knew I must be bright red.

I briefly considered telling Alex I needed to end the massage now, but I clung to the hope that he hadn’t noticed. I wasn’t sure if he’d realized what had happened. But he must have smelled the teen angst, right? He must have felt my body shudder and contract? I hoped not. I didn’t know. I’ll never know.

I wanted to fuse with the table, to become inanimate. When Alex instructed me to slide down and turn while he tented the sheet over me, I rotated onto my back, feeling the wet stick of cum beneath me, the physical manifestation of my shame.

For the rest of our time, I laid there, hardly able to notice the massage. I hated myself. Hated my body for betraying me. Hated how I hadn’t been able to will my body to stop, how I’d lost control.

I felt, too, like something had been taken from me. I’d never even kissed a boy. And now a man had made me cum. That was supposed to be something special. That was supposed to mean something.

After the massage, Alex stepped out and I pulled my clothes on quickly. I was confused. I’d never felt anything so incredible, and never so powerfully hated myself, within the same hour. I wanted to disappear.

Thirteen years and hundreds of hours of therapy later, as I’m considering whether to model for the Erotic Massage Workshop, I’m thinking about Massage Envy. I’m thinking of bildungsromans and rites of passage and even something like kismet.

When I tell Brandon I think I’m going to do it, place myself in a vulnerable position in front of eager eyes, he replies, “You’re not just doing it for the money, right?”

“No, no,” I assure him.

“Or the story?”

“Definitely not just that,” I say. “It sounds fun!” What a liberating and absurd experience! I pause, then ask, worriedly, “But does taking the money mean I’m, like, legally, a sex worker?”

As soon as the words come out, I feel ashamed. Intellectually, I believe sex work is real work, and that the puritanical legal framework in America is unjust and stupid. Yet here I am, concerned that I’m about to cross a legal line I don’t think should exist in the first place. Worrying it’s unseemly for me to dabble in sex work when I have the privilege of not needing the money. Wondering if this even “counts.”

I shake the thoughts from my head, and text Bo to tell him I’m game.

On the day of the workshop, at the designated time, I check into the fitness studio, the same place where naked yoga is held. Bo is at the front.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

“Pretty nervous,” I say. “Excited, but nervous.”

He leads me over to the table, muttering comforting things I struggle to pay attention to. Most of the men are already there, standing naked around their massage tables. Then Bo leaves the room to continue checking guys in, and I’m left standing beside a massage table at the center of a semicircle of massage tables, dozens of eyes furtively glancing my way. I’m not sure whether I should undress now or right before the workshop begins, so I split the difference, wait a few minutes, and then undress. While I strip out of my clothes, I avoid direct eye contact with anyone, looking around but not looking anywhere, never letting my gaze linger too long. I take a seat on the table, grateful that the wall of the studio is mirrored, so I can peruse the scene without needing to engage real eyes.

In my peripheral vision, I register that an emaciated old man, butt naked, is walking toward me. Before I can react, he puts one hand on my thigh and reaches out to shake my hand with the other. I mutter some dismissive pleasantries and remove his hand, shifting away from him. He walks away, then right back, this time grabbing my inner thigh and rubbing his semi-erect dick on my leg. I push him away and wave him off. “That’s enough of that, thank you,” I say, sliding off the table I’m sitting on, making it a barrier between us. I immediately beat myself up for my too-polite tone. Still, as he walks away for the second time, his deflated ass makes me sad, and I worry I’ve hurt his feelings, done something wrong.

It feels like a comeuppance for my prior thoughts about doing this as a fun new adventure, about flirting with sex work.

The start of this workshop does not bode well for the remaining two hours. It feels like a comeuppance for my prior thoughts about doing this as a fun new adventure, about flirting with sex work. I want to bail, but I don’t want to ruin things for Bo. I walk to the front corner of the studio where I’ve left my things and futz with my phone, take a few breaths, then excuse myself to splash water on my face in the bathroom. I tell myself I’ve gotten this far, I have to finish.

When the class is set to begin, Bo directs everyone to their tables, and then pulls me aside. “Minor problem,” he says, and my stomach clenches. “We’ve had a no-show, and an odd number doesn’t really work for a massage clinic.” After a moment of looking around and presumably thinking up a plan, Bo guides me over to a sexy-cute bear cub with dark hair bleached on the ends, the right amount of fur, and a big bubble butt. Bo tells me to choose between two options: Either he can massage me for an hour while Hot Cub serves as a “floater” massaging other workshop attendees, and then massage Hot Cub for an hour while I serve as the floater, or both he and Hot Cub can massage me for an hour, and then Hot Cub and I can switch. The “four hands” option.

I almost take the opportunity to dip out completely. The no-show gives me an out, and a big part of me wants to take it—Hot Cub is game to participate as the model, so I wouldn’t be ruining the class.

But I want to see this through. I let Bo choose. We go with the four-hands option.

“Welcome to the Erotic Massage Workshop,” Bo says, then launches into his spiel about how we’re going to learn five techniques for outer anal massage and nineteen for penile stimulation. Bo introduces me and Hot Cub to the class. I wave awkwardly.

I’m the model for the first hour, so I climb onto the table as Bo says that we’ll be starting face down. I’m nervous, but the nerves are keeping me soft, which is probably good for now, while we’re learning the outer anal massage techniques. I’ll need to save up for demo-ing the dick massage later. Hot Cub is absentmindedly massaging my legs, my back, my ass while Bo demonstrates the techniques for the class.

As I settle face down, I’m feeling really good. I love massage, love the feel of the oil. After that time with Alex, massage became an important part of my wellness regimen, after a few years’ delay. This is gonna be good, I think, starting to enjoy myself. I think about how beautifully poetic, how full circle this is, a symbolic bookend to the shame I felt with Alex. A redemption. A reclaiming.

Then Bo’s voice snaps me out of my reverie.

“One way to get access to the area is to pull a knee up like this,” he says, moving my leg into a frog position, his forearm caressing my crack and hole. “Or, if it’s more comfortable, hands and knees. Mark, can you . . . ?” he asks.

“Yep!” I say, too chipper, as I climb into tabletop position. I squeeze my eyes shut and focus on my breathing. This is moving really fast. Now I’m worried I’m supposed to be hard, but I’m not yet, because I’m worried I’m supposed to be. We’ve quickly sailed past my comfort zone. We’re in the zone of what I wish I was comfortable with. What I’m intellectually comfortable with, but still feel myself having a visceral, clenching reaction against. I push through. What is there to be ashamed of, even? I ask myself. But shame refuses to oblige logic.

“You okay?” Bo whispers to me.

“Yep,” I say again.

“You’ll also notice this position gives you full access to the penis,” Bo tells the class. The medical term feels out of place, but I don’t have time to dwell on it. He grabs my dick. “We’ll cover those techniques in more detail when we flip over.”

After reviewing the outer anal massage techniques again, Bo sets the class to practice. This first half hour will be face-down, the second face-up, on our backs, and then we’ll switch giver-receiver positions and repeat. The instructor and Hot Cub set to work on me.

I’m more relaxed now, without all eyes on me. I settle back face down, which is more comfortable, and feel one of them spread my legs to the edges of the table for better access.

Ten minutes go by, and it feels great.

And then it feels . . . too great.

I’m worried I’m getting too close. Four-handed massage, it turns out, is a game-changer. We’re only fifteen or twenty minutes in, and I have to model for the dick techniques after this. I prop myself up on my elbow and lean over my shoulder. “Hold off,” I say, “too much, slow down.”

They do for a few minutes, but after a brief reprieve they’re back, one working on my ass, the other on my dick, which is tucked down in the gap between my legs where it’s getting too much attention.

No, no, I think. Not again.

I call over my shoulder again to slow down.

But they don’t hear me, or don’t want to stop.

I do my best to will myself calm, to diffuse the sexual energy into the rest of my body, and for a few seconds, it’s working. And then it isn’t. The cosmic balance is too perfect. I start to prop myself up again and say, “Hold on, hold on. I’m gonna . . . ” and then I finish into someone’s hand. As I come, someone, I’m not sure who, continues to pump me. I shove my face into the pillow in front of me.

“Oh,” Bo says.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Oops. I’m so sorry.”

“That’s okay,” he says. “That’s fine. Just a little change of plan.”

Hot Cub leans down and whispers, damp breath in my ear, “That was hot. Really fucking hot.”

I chuckle, and I appreciate him, but I’m still spiraling. Mostly, I’m worried about the logistics. In about ten minutes I’m supposed to flip over, but I don’t think I’ll be able recharge in time. A darker thought creeps in, too: Was it bad they’d made me come, despite my protest? Despite the fact that it felt great, that I was riding a flood of endorphins? Should I have had a safe word? They didn’t hear me, I tell myself, I wasn’t clear. And regardless, I’d known what I was getting into.

I feel a carryover of the Massage Envy shame. Some censorious moralism that I haven’t successfully battered out of myself. I’d just been jerked off by two pairs of capable hands, and still I wasn’t able to remain present. Much of the time, face down, I’d just been comparing the experience to Massage Envy. Why was I stuck spending time in retrospection when, of all times, I should have been most in the moment?

As I towel off, I worry that others in the class noticed. Meanwhile, Bo has worked out the logistics and swoops in to save me. He proposes that Hot Cub demo the next portion, face up, and then I’ll do the face-up session during the second half. Thank god.

For the next hour, I learn nineteen massage techniques and apply them to Hot Cub. As I glide my oiled hands over his body, the coarse hair of his legs, I look around the room, this sanctuary of touch. Sweaty bodies, focused on one another, some contorted in ecstasy, some blissfully still. This workshop is a marvel. Helping men become more comfortable in their bodies, teaching us, repressed and liberated alike, to find pleasure for pleasure’s sake, something so beyond my worldview at seventeen.

In the past thirteen years, I realize I’ve come really fucking far. I’m still fighting a lot of the shame I was fighting at seventeen, but I don’t feel the same self-loathing I did back then. Not once during this workshop had my father’s judgment interrupted my thoughts—and there was only a transient visit from the ghost of shame past. I could see now that much of the hatred I had felt radiating from my father was really my own insecurity, reflecting back at me. Sure, I was still probably a little too sensitive (both physically and emotionally) to serve as an effective model for this type of thing on the regular. But I’d been brave. I’d gotten through this new, nerve-racking experience, and I felt better for it. More open.

“It looks like you’re enjoying yourself,” Bo says as I reach for the massage oil.

And I am. Throughout the rest of Hot Cub’s massage, I smile the whole time (and only tremble slightly).

When the workshop ends, relaxed and invigorated, slicked in sweat, I’ll put my clothes on. Bo will slip me a Benjamin folded into a tiny square, a funny detail I’ll ascribe to either discretion or a lack of pocket space. I’ll head out to my car, still smiling—flushed, alive—and I’ll text Brandon a picture of me holding my hundred-dollar bill.

But for right now, I’m recharged, and it’s my turn for the face-up portion of the demonstration. Maybe I’ll even let myself enjoy it.

In Her New Book, Geraldine DeRuiter Takes on the Patriarchy, but Really All She Wants Is a Decent Meal

Posted on by Jo Lou

Before Geraldine DeRuiter first went viral in 2018 for her essay, “I Made the Pizza Cinnamon Rolls from Mario Batali’s Sexual Misconduct Apology Letter,” she felt well-known food publications never wanted her work. And then, she made the cinnamon rolls. From that moment on, DeRuiter was thrust into the culinary spotlight. She won a James Beard Award, published her first book, and continued to write essays on her popular blog, The Everywhereist. 

Then, at the end of 2021, she went viral again. This time for her scathing but truly hilarious review of her experience at the Michelin-starred Italian restaurant, Bros. What came next was another wave of attention on DeRuiter and her work. Perhaps most notably, this included a rebuttal profile piece of the restaurant’s owner and head chef courtesy of the New York Times’ Rome bureau chief. To say she felt her credibility was questioned would be an understatement. 

In her second book, If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury, DeRuiter explores what it means not only to be a woman writing about food, but also what it means in the larger context of being a woman who must make daily decisions about the role food plays in our lives. From making it, eating it (or not eating it, as is much of the messaging women receive), working in it, and examining our heritage, family, and life choices through food—DeRuiter shares her stories with great candor, while providing important historical and academic research throughout. 

I had a wide-ranging discussion over the phone with DeRuiter about the history of “ladies’ menus,” who is allowed to be successful in the food world, and her last great meal.

Kelly Hoover Greenway: The cover of your book is this beautifully manicured hand smashing what I’m assuming is a cinnamon roll. It’s quite funny, but also such a strong visualization of what’s to come inside. How did you land on that?

Geraldine DeRuiter: I had it pretty clear in my head that I wanted cinnamon rolls, but there was a lot of  discussion about whether or not that would be too literal, and I understand that. It is such a big association that people have with my work, so it was a question of, do we lean into that or do we try to deviate from that a little bit? We explored a couple other concepts. There was an earlier iteration of the cover that was of an eggplant.

KHG: Oh, that’s funny. The eggplant signifying the emoji used for a penis…

GD: Yeah, that one was tough because it was funny, but I did not want the focus of this book to be about “the patriarchy” itself, right? The eggplant would have communicated that in this ridiculous way. It’s not about the eggplant. It’s really about what we as women experience. So I said less eggplant, more cinnamon roll. 

KHG: Like a lot of people, I first became familiar with your work when your Mario Batali cinnamon roll apology letter essay went viral in 2018. In the book, you talk about the backlash from that, and I have to tell you, reading it made me never want to go viral. The flip side is that you won a James Beard Award for that essay. And, I imagine it didn’t hurt in the selling of this book. Can you talk a little bit about the extremes of how that one essay impacted you?

GD: Oh, absolutely. I think that a lot of the nature of going viral as a writer is a double edged sword, right? You write something you want to do really well, it does really well, a bunch of people see your work, and your career usually has a little bit of a boon from it. And also… you get vitriol, hate, death threats, and a backlash of people telling you that your work is garbage. That is baked into the system. And so what happened with the Batali piece was exactly that.

I think I wrote that blog post in about 45 minutes because it was just pure rage coming out of my fingers; I just sat down and it all came out. Obviously, I did not expect it to do what it did. It started to pick up and then it was just like wildfire. Martha Stewart is retweeting it and Pete Wells from the New York Times is retweeting it. It got picked up by Eater and all of these outlets that historically didn’t publish my work. And then I got, just a stream of insults. My Twitter account got hacked. I got death threats.

KHG: You end that chapter by saying that after not checking Facebook messages for a while, you logged on to see a threat from a man you didn’t know. Underneath the threat, he’d typed out your home address; it’s chilling to read. I can’t help but then ask, how do you feel about wading back into those waters with this book?

GD: Scholarly detachment makes it easier to talk about things, in that if you are writing about something in the context of a book and if you are using academic citation to talk about what this means in the greater scheme of feminism and food writing, it does make it somewhat easier to talk about your own experiences because it gives you a bit of distance from it. 

That being said, oh my god that was a horrible experience to write about all of this again! At the same time, I think it’s really important, and I realize how much of this experience is unfortunately, so universal. The overton window has just gotten moved way too far over into thinking that we are allowed to be treated like crap on the internet and no one thinks it’s a big deal, and that is horrible. That is horrible. So, I wanted to talk about that. There was no way I was not gonna talk about it. Even if it sucked, there was no way. So, what do you do? You try and you try and get a little distance, you try and properly cite your sources. You take a couple deep breaths, and maybe take a break. When I was writing that chapter, I was in Oaxaca. So I was like, all right, let’s go to a couple of art galleries and maybe get some tacos. And then I went back to it.

KHG: You’ve mentioned not wanting to center the patriarchy, but you do take the patriarchy on in quite a lot of your  work.

GD: I don’t know if I take it on so much as complain about it. 

KHG: Well, there aren’t a lot of people who talk about how the patriarchy fits into the food world. How have you seen the patriarchy’s influence be the most destructive in that space?

Men are allowed to be great chefs and women can merely be great cooks, and that has existed for forever.

GD: I think one of the ways in which it is so destructive is who is allowed to be successful in the food world. If you look across the industry, what you see is the people who are allowed to succeed are white men almost across the board. There are women in the industry as well, but how they are framed and how we look at them is different. Men are allowed to be great chefs and women can merely be great cooks, and that has existed for forever. And that kind of ties into this idea of when you do work within the home, it is devalued. The vast majority of cooking that happens within the home is done by women. The vast majority of meal prep, of grocery shopping, and of cleaning up afterwards—that is almost universally done by women. There are exceptions, but the majority of James Beard winners, Michelin star holders, head chefs, and executive chefs are all all men.

KHG:  That’s what we call the math not mathing.

GD: Right? And somebody might say, well, it’s a pipeline issue. First of all, that’s still a problem, right? Then we need to address the pipeline. We need to address why we’re only letting guys into the pipeline. But it’s actually not true because more women are graduating culinary school than men. So what is so toxic about this industry that is pushing women out? What is so toxic about it that it isn’t letting women and non-binary people succeed? There is a lot of toxicity that is baked in, and it also just seems to inherently reinforce a lot of shitty gender stereotypes and a lot of really harmful constructs that are bad for both men and women. 

KHG: You created this book as a memoir in essays, and I have been told that genre is quite hard to sell. Was it always a memoir in essays? And, what was the process of selling it?

GD:  It was always a memoir in essays, but I feel like the original concept that I had was perhaps not as ambitious as the book is now. I think now the book is better and speaks to broader issues and more important issues, which really speaks to my editor, Aubrey Martinson’s, work on this. 

It did not take me long to write the proposal; I wrote it in a few days. Part of that was because I had such a clear idea for what the book was going to be. We offered the book to my old publisher, and they made an offer we were not thrilled with. So we walked away. We shopped the book around and there were multiple publishers interested, and it went to auction. I do believe that part of the reason there was so much interest—and this is the difficulty and the brutal honesty of it—is because there had been such virality around the [Batali and Bros’] pieces. 

And so that virality was directly related to me being able to sell these books because I said, look, here’s what the New York Times said about my piece. The Corriere della Sera called me the heir to David Foster Wallace. Is that true? I don’t think so. Did that help me sell this book? Hell yeah, it did. It also helped that Twitter was still a thing at the time, and I had nearly 140,000 Twitter followers. So if you look at all of that, it makes it easier to sell a book that is perhaps in a genre that is a little bit more difficult. 

So it went to auction, and I got a six figure deal which was pretty phenomenal. 

KHG:  That’s incredible! One chapter I want to ask you about is, “Paying the Price.” It really captures all three buckets of food, feminism, and at least for me when I was reading it, fury. 

GD: That story explores the concept of “ladies’ menus,” which historically have been menus that don’t have prices on them. And these have existed because back in the day, restaurants were gathering places for men. If a woman did go to a restaurant, she would go in the company of a man who was escorting her. And so it was expected that she wouldn’t pay. If you think about this, women have only been allowed to have credit cards since 1974, it puts things in perspective.

What is so toxic about this industry that is pushing women out?

And so I write about going out to eat and receiving these menus without prices when I’m with my husband. And what it also means to go out to eat on a date. If you are a woman and you’re going out on a date with a man, what that expectation is and how there can be a feeling, not justly, but there is a feeling and perhaps expectation that this is transactional—that if you allow someone to buy you dinner, you see them as a potential romantic partner and that certain things are to be exchanged and that is not something that we should be expected to do, but it becomes a horrible sort of prevailing societal mentality that we get caught up in. And what I compare it to is asking someone,  “Well, why did you go up to his hotel room? Why were you walking down that alley? Well, if you didn’t want him to think that you were this, that, or the other, why did you let him buy you dinner? So it kind of falls into that pattern.

KHG: Am I remembering correctly that a server at a restaurant where you did receive one of those menus said that women don’t want to think about money?

GD: That’s precisely what happened. We were at a restaurant in the north of Italy and we were with our friends, Ollie and Nicole. Nicole and I got menus that didn’t have prices. And we were so confused. If you’re looking at a menu that has no prices, your brain kind of glitches out. One of the main purposes of a menu is to inform you of how much things cost. And so, my husband, Rand, and Ollie were saying the prices are quite reasonable and Nicole and I had no idea what they were talking about. We finally started to put it together and the maître d’ comes over and says that women don’t like to think about money. Nicole and I said it is very important that we think about money. That is something that I advise every human to do. Not because I think money is great, but because I think income equality is great. 

KHG: It’s amazing the larger context of conversations that take place with relation to food and dining.

GD: Absolutely. Someone asked me, “Is there a reason why you picked food? It’s a great vehicle to talk about feminism.” And I was like, food is a great vehicle to talk about everything!

KHG: Before I let you go, I do have one more question. I feel like you’re always in search of a decent meal to eat. 

GD: This is accurate. 

KHG: So what was the last great meal you had? 

GD: I don’t know if this counts, but I just flew back from my aunt’s memorial yesterday. My husband, Rand, had flown back the day before. He came to pick me up from the airport and when he opened the trunk to put my suitcase in, it was filled with groceries so he could make me dinner. He started listing all the different things he could make me, and even though he makes me dinner almost every night, I knew that he was exhausted too. It was such a beautiful and loving act. 

He ended up making pan roasted steelhead and he got the skin super crispy, which is so good. He served it with roasted asparagus and smashed garlic fingerling potatoes. I was looking at the plate and it was just so beautiful. It was 10 out of 10, five stars, no notes. 

KHG: One of my favorite quotes in the food space is by Virginia Woolf. She said, “One cannot think well, love well, or sleep well if one has not dined well.” When you were telling me that story, that’s what I thought of. Thank you for sharing that.

This Is Not a Drill or Maybe It Is

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

You Take a Covid Test Then Take a Picture

of your covid test then take two subways
to work. You turn your time card, take 
your mask off to drink tea. You take 
attendance and teach The Poet X. 
You teach The Joy Luck Club. You cross 
your fingers for each student dancing in the hall.
You learn new names. You memorize new pronouns. 
You wonder if your cancer will return.
You taught some of these kids on Zoom.
You saw their faces then. They sat 
in folding chairs in front of bunk beds. 
Now they’re wearing masks. 
Your eyes look at their eyes. 
Your life is recognizable, unrecognizable.
You grade four papers, then another four,
press two for Cantonese translation, 
update your Google slides. You stand outside 
in chilly columns as they sweep your school
for bombs, holding only folders to your chest. 
All clear. You walk the six flights 
back to class. You give your students extra points 
if they don’t check their cell phones
when they finish workshopping their drafts. 
You walk between the groups and say “Good job
just spacing out!” and mean it. They laugh. 
Nobody knows which lockdown drills are real. 
You take two subways home and pick 
your own kids up from after school -
your living, vibrant kids. Your son sits on the floor
to play with beads. Your daughter hates being alone. 
Your wife is on the F train now and has a cough. 
Your life is recognizable, unrecognizable. 
You do not know if it will ever be
better or worse than this.

Nina is Wonderful!

I prop my phone against the ketchup 
so we can all see Nana’s face, her short hair
white in Key West sun, my two kids at the table, 
the baby buckled in, the big kid reaching 
jammy hands out towards my screen.
Between their shrieking, Nana tells me
her friend Janet used to say “Nina is wonderful!” 
each time her toddler daughter Nina spilled juice,
sassed back, or sat her dressed-up self down in the bath,
new party shoes and all. I think of this sometimes
when Mia grits her teeth and mumbles “Never”
when I ask her to put on her socks. Mia, 
four years old in a track suit jumping couch to couch 
while Leo licks crayons beside her. 
Nina is wonderful, now thirty-plus in Denver 
doing something with philanthropy,
and Mia is wonderful, and Leo, too,
though he won’t wear his coat. And surely my wife 
and I are wonderful as we haul two full car seats
and a stroller through the airport 
several times a year, caravanning up the terminal
towards the loving arms of grandparents,
and what could be more wonderful than that?
Oh Mother Goddess, oh Nana and Abuela,
oh lifelong friends like Janet, oh women 
who’ve schlepped any children anywhere,
please help me to survive these years 
of ear drops and sippy cups,
this age of so much wonder.

Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Ominous Music Intensifying” by Alexandra Teague

Posted on by Jo Lou

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the poetry collection Ominous Music Intensifying by Alexandra Teague, which will be published by Persea Books on October 1, 2024. Preorder the book here.

In poems that swirl together traditional American patriotic music with current horrors—from gun violence to climate change—and in which Yeats’ famous apocalyptic figure of the Rough Beast takes a painting class, wears a spacesuit, and listens to public service announcements, Ominous Music Intensifying takes on the too-muchness of contemporary, apocalypse-prone America with its own hard-hitting music, dark humor, and the occasional fiddle duel. Teague expands her subject matter here to include chronic pain, generational poverty, and questions of safety—bodily and psychological—as she writes letters to Mitch McConnell about UFOs (and everything else), reckons with sexism and dental trauma, torture devices and sad clown paintings and the pandemic, asking “What kind of safety, breaking apart to make us?”

Here is the cover, designed by Dinah Fried of Small Stuff Design, artwork by Andrea Kowch.

Author Alexandra Teague: For months after I first ran into this Andrea Kowch painting, I couldn’t get it off my mind. While the women and crows weren’t directly characters in my poems, they existed in the poems’ same emotional landscape: ominous, askew, maximalist Americana—with maybe fiddling or off-key patriotic songs drifting in the window from the desolate gold fields. The painting asks us to reconsider what is beastly, what’s domestic, what’s safe, what’s homey. It’s a fairytale-real landscape into which the Rough Beast could slouch, as he does into my poems, moving from Yeats’ famous “The Second Coming” into contemporary scenes of gun violence and pandemics and climate change. A landscape that suggests both strange humor and danger; order and incongruity; allegory and real apocalypse. I’m so grateful we’ve been able to use Kowch’s “The Visitors” to invite readers into the kitchen (please grab a thrift store chair and don’t mind the hyena) for some poems and pie.

Designer Dinah Fried: From a design perspective, our primary goal was to allow the haunting and evocative painting (“The Visitors” by Andrea Kowch) to express the tone of the cover, and not let our design decisions distract or compete with it. In that spirit, the stark white cover and unadorned black typography are meant to be a quiet counterpoint to the visual and emotional richness of the image with its bleak landscape; piercing stares; voracious animals; chaotic tabletop; flaming red hair; and glistening, ripe berries. We chose the typeface Eagle Bold—originally designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1933 for FDR’s National Recovery Administration (part of the New Deal)—as it felt as if it might have existed in the same time and space as these three windblown bakers.

For the Teenage Girls in “Headshot,” the Boxing Ring Is a Place of Transformation

Posted on by Jo Lou

Rita Bullwinkel’s debut novel Headshot takes place in the confines of a boxing ring in Reno, Nevada, over two days of championship matches to determine the winner of the 12th Annual Women’s 18 & Under Daughters of America Cup.

Her protagonists, eight teenage girls, fight each other in a series of face-offs for the title “Best in the World”—a distinction that promises each of them varied but uniformly glorious escapes, ends, or transformations, and means nothing much to anyone else. 

The book animates the fantasies and realities of both competitive sport and adolescence in swift, muscular prose. Over the course of each fight, a window opens into the desire and delusion that motivates these girls to fight, and through it we glimpse as well the radical uses of the female body, whether it’s being looked at, measured, trained, or landing a series of punches.

I spoke with Bullwinkel at her home in San Francisco about the worldbuilding common to writing a novel and competitive sport, the strange intimacies of physical games, and the boxing narratives she’s bored by.

Olivia Parkes: A boxing tournament for teen girls felt like such a tight format for drawing out the psychology of girlhood: it’s a pressure cooker for perfectionism and obsession, a study in how the body is seen and used, as well as what it’s capable of. On the other hand it’s a jarring place to see those themes play out: boxing is a simulation of killing, a sport where you learn how to hit someone in the face and receive that same hit in return. In the early pages one of the fighters seems both obsessed with physical beauty and longs for a black eye. How did you land on this context for the novel?

Rita Bullwinkel: I grew up playing a lot of competitive youth sports. I ended up competing in the Junior Olympics eight times and was the co-captain of a top 20 ranked division one water polo team. From a really young age, eight or nine, I would travel to these weekend tournaments filled with dozens and dozens of other young women. 

The space of the tournament is one that I’m intimately familiar with. At the same time, it’s a bizarre, almost like science-fiction-like space, where the constraints of the world are incredibly finite and also intensely claustrophobic. In remembering that space, I was interested in the world building that had to happen, in both my own life, and also the lives of the girls I was competing against, to make a world that felt so heightened and so high stakes, when in reality it had no weight or importance in the culture at large.

I was interested in setting the book in a boxing ring in particular because of the inherent theater of the sport. So much about a boxing match feels like a play, from the lighting to the dialogue between fighters, which is nonverbal. I was interested in the boxing match as an archetypal piece of theater and also an archetypal American piece of theater. For better or worse there are tons of particularly American boxing narratives that we all carry around, and it’s something that I, as a viewer and reader, bring a lot of narrative baggage to.

OP: I think we’re quite used to seeing boxing as a spectacle, a form of entertainment that has a thrilling effect on its audience. But the fighting in the book doesn’t work that way. The audience is for the most part listless and inattentive. It’s made up of the coaches and judges and the one or two family members who accompanied each fighter to Reno. The fights here are unimportant to anyone but the girls themselves. How were you thinking about that tension, between the absolute passion of the girls and the inattention of their tiny audience?

So much about a boxing match feels like a play, from the lighting to the dialogue between fighters.

RB: So much about writing reminds me of being a young female competitive youth athlete. I’m struck by how, in order to make any work of art, you have to build up a world in which it has meaning before the thing can come into fruition. And that same kind of building up of meaning is how I remember the space of the tournament. In order to come to a match, in order to come to compete in something, you have to build the narrative in your mind that it’s the most important thing you’ll ever do. I’m interested in that dichotomy, of being forced to build a world for yourself that is so disparate from the world that society sees around you.

OP: The story is told with a kind of God’s eye narrative voice that animates the competitors’ pasts, as well as their futures, while they summon the emotion and imagination that is required to win. I was struck by the fact that in almost all of their futures, this particular event, which is so central to them now as a focus of meaning and desire, is either forgotten by or irrelevant to their future selves. They can’t remember who they fought, why they wanted it so badly, whether it mattered. 

RB: I think that part of the book is about the really bizarre and strange way that the playing of a game can effect a collective memory. The narrative refers to a lot of games beyond boxing. There are hand clapping games, which never have a winner. There are pool games, like throwing rings in a pool. I think that when you play a game with someone, it does a really weird thing in shaping a shared memory. If you encounter someone who you played a game with, a game that had some kind of import, there’s a shared physicality that exists somewhere, even if it doesn’t exist at the front of the mind.

OP: I was interested in the fact that the fight that’s so vital to the teenager is irrelevant to the woman they become. It seemed to me somehow very poignantly adolescent, to place so much meaning on a single idea or event, believing that it will have a totalizing transformative effect. That particular type of desire seemed like a key into the identity formation of teenagers.

RB: It is. It is very adolescent. And yet it still feels relatable to me as an adult. I feel like I’m no less prone to delusion now than I was when I was 15. Part of my interest in having all the protagonists be adolescent women is that I can’t think of a group of people where the gap between the way that group of people see themselves and how the world sees them is so vast. I’m conscious of the fact that when I was 15, 16,17, the gap between how I understood myself and how the world understood me was enormous. 

OP: What was that gap?

In order to come to compete in something, you have to build the narrative in your mind that it’s the most important thing you’ll ever do.

RB: So much about being a young woman is defined by how well you can embody who you are. I think you could argue that the image of a young female is perhaps the most charged visual image ever. I mean, it’s very, very loud. I think about it in terms of how difficult it is to photograph a young woman, because the image of women in general is so charged. I even see it in author headshots, or portrait photography. That it’s very difficult to arrive at a visual depiction of a woman that has power and character. And as a teenage girl you’re receiving all of these messages that the only way you’re going to successfully exist in this world is by understanding the way you look physically. It’s a bizarre thing to become acquainted with, and there’s something dissociative about figuring out how you’re going to do it. What strategies you’re going to use. And then in the case of young female athletes, you’re also using your body for this totally other thing.

OP: One of the main ways the girl fighters in the book train is by watching videos of themselves. They also have to buy completely into the psychology of winning. In order for that to happen someone has to lose, and in the case of boxing that means physically beating them—with your fists. What made you want to get so close to that desire?

RB: I think there’s something comforting in binary the situation sports provide. It’s lack of nuance, right? In a game there must be a winner. Nothing else in life functions that way. 

I think specifically for young people, to whom everything about the adult world is opaque and strange, it can be a deep relief to enter a contract with clear rules of engagement, where you’re agreeing to that lack of nuance. It feels easy and seductive. I think that most of the young woman in the tournament are more interested in the narrative of themselves as a champion than they are in their triumph over another. They have to create these narratives of conflict in order to do the insane thing they’re doing with their bodies. But the eight main characters in the book, who are competing against one another, are ultimately comrades. I think there is an intense level of respect that comes with agreeing to play a sport with someone. To engage in or play a sport with someone is to agree that you’re equals in some way, which is one of the reasons, of course, why co-ed sports are so contentious. Because people don’t want to agree that the match is right, that it’s equal. 

OP: There’s also almost no dialogue in the book. The girls are involved in these deeply intimate encounters, but they never actually speak to each other. At some point you say that language has no place in the gym, that what you’re dealing with here is “the language of animals.” How did that absence of speech challenge or enable you to draw out the relationship between the fighters? 

RB: I think it allowed for me to depict a different kind of intimacy, which is the unique physical intimacy of sport. I was thinking recently about how within our society there are so few social contracts you can enter where it’s acceptable to touch someone else. There’s the romantic encounter. There are services like getting your hair done, or getting a massage. And then there’s physical sport. That’s it. 

It was really important to me that the book did not read in a Freudian way or reflect the idea that these young women boxers are acting out some type of masculine sexual energy that they’re unable to perform in other parts of their lives. I think they’re doing something much more interesting than that. That they’re engaging in a form of agreed physical intimacy that’s actually much more complex than acting out some type of sexual desire.

OP: The book turns its attention softly, but repeatedly, to the economics of the world of teen female boxing. There’s not a lot of money in the sport, and what there is of it circulates almost entirely between these exhausted-seeming men: the coaches, the referees, the judges, and the gym owners. Why was it important to you to bring that into the book?

RB: I have these really vivid memories of the cost of sports league memberships, and the cost to compete in tournaments. I remember seeing those numbers and being 14, with no source of my own income, and having to ask my parents for the money to do it. It was, for me, very expensive, but in hindsight everything was very low budget, because they were tournaments for 14-year-old girls. And it was, in fact, the case that all the people collecting the money, all the places where it was changing hands, were pretty much all exhausted adult men. 

As a teenage girl you’re receiving these messages that the only way you’re going to successfully exist in this world is by understanding the way you look physically.

I think that my generation is one of the first to grow up with the full actuality of Title IV. Looking back on it, I think a lot of the reasons why youth women’s athletics, or soccer leagues for five and unders for women exist is because colleges suddenly had to provide sports scholarships at the equal monetary rate for women as they were for men. All of a sudden this need for youth camps and youth training facilities and youth tournaments for women came into existence. 

In my experience growing up, I also had almost exclusively male coaches because women in my mother’s generation never played sports, so they didn’t know how to coach.

In writing the book, I wanted to decenter the coaches. I thought of them as a kind of décor. One of the classic sports narratives that I really abhor and had no interest in creating was this “diamond in the rough narrative,” which I think is particularly prevalent in boxing. Where an experienced male coach says to a young woman or a young fighter, you don’t know the talent you have, but I’m going to unlock it for you.

OP: Million Dollar Baby.

RB: It’s present even in the way people tell the narrative of Serena and Venus, where their father is the person that could tell they had talent and was responsible for cultivating it. It’s always a father or a coach, and it’s just boring.

OP: It’s perfect, because the coaches in your book are not invisible—the book draws attention to their presence again and again, in a soft way. But they’re irrelevant. They’re not a specter of terrible masculinity and they’re also not figures the girls really look up to. 

You’ve mentioned a couple of different sports or female narratives that you’re consciously working against. It made me wonder how you were thinking about competition and perfectionism in femininity. We learn that Artemis, one of the first fighters, sizes up other women physically everywhere. And along with this kind of implicit knowledge of who’s “prettier” is this kind of obsessive perfectionism around training.

Unlike the boxing match, life is not a game. There are no winners and no losers, just people with different, infinite repositories of love and joy and pain.

RB: It’s true that very early on the book makes it clear that Artemis is physically comparing herself and her physical attractiveness to the other girls she’s boxing against. She also compares herself to her sisters. But I think of that as the narrative that she needed to build for herself in order to do this delusional, insane thing. Overall I thought of all eight of the young women more as comrades than as adversaries. I was also thinking about the narrator as a kind of Greek chorus of young female athletes, a voice that encompasses all the young female athletes that have come before them, and all those that will come in the future. That was part of my interest in going into both past and future. The perfectionism in the book is in some sense just either what’s required to do this thing or a byproduct of it. I think that to train like that you have to be incredibly obsessive. 

OP: For almost all of the girls, boxing offers some form of control, whether it’s control over the body, because you train it, or control over another body, which becomes a kind of object. The book says at one point that you can’t train for a sport unless you believe you have control over your own destiny; the point of training is to change the outcome of the future. What interested you in that desire?

RB: I don’t think I was consciously writing about control. I think it’s certainly part of the appeal and seduction that this specific type of encounter with someone offers. It’s part of what drives people to do physical sport. I don’t know if I’ve ever had such close control in my life over anything as I had over my body in a very specific period of time. Which has gone now! But it’s a very subtle thing. I would imagine it’s what drives people to become dancers. This idea that you can so closely control a bodily movement. It’s a very specific type of intoxicant.

OP: It also sits well with this sense of them being teenagers. It makes a kind of sense to me that this particular form of control is intensely desirable at that point in time. At that age, they’re in control of very little. 

RB: Exactly. There’s the feeling that if they can get this one thing down, then they’ll be able to sort everything out. But that’s not true, of course. Winning or losing won’t help them either way. And unlike the boxing match, life is not a game. In life there are no winners and no losers, just people with different, infinite repositories of love and joy and pain. 

The Stakes of Driving While Black Are Unconscionably High

Posted on by Jo Lou

I was excited when I RSVP’d. It would be a lovely way to end the tour, I thought, maybe even comforting— a balm for the months of nightly performances, all the new faces. I secretly love weddings despite the bitter hopelessness loudly knocking on the door to my temperamental heart. I get to dress up, there’s tons of wine, the social atmosphere is easy because everybody at least wants to be in a good mood, and, aided by said wine, I’ll be goddamned if witnessing the weight and depth of commitment and certainty of love doesn’t make me cry a little bit, every time. Either because it’s the stuff of Lisa Frank unicorns and Pixar fairy tales, or because (in spite of and in spite of and in spite of), I believe it for myself, for everybody. Maybe I’m a sucker. 

The plan was to connect in Dallas from Arizona and land at LaGuardia (that would be the worst part), pick up a rental car at the airport, and have a chill drive to Hudson, New York, land of millennial weddings and trendy second homes, about two hours away. 

But, as too many people had already hinted, the plan was far too ambitious—I’d started feeling sick two cities ago, and I was generally broken down, unraveling in airports. Whatever. I’d started taking mood stabilizers before my tour and was invigorated by the promise of such an extraordinary idea, a stabile mood. 

I’m always excited when I RSVP. 

Another problem with the plan is that it was 2017, which meant that for the past two years, anytime I drove alone at night, anytime I saw blue lights in the rearview, anytime I drove alone on a highway at the mercy of unfamiliar landscapes, and actually, every three days in between—brushing my teeth, or taking my meds, or seeing a bumper sticker about my life mattering, or seeing a commercial about mental health mattering, or if my mind wandered to any future beyond tomorrow—I thought of Sandra Bland. 

On the Dallas flight I could not get water. Twice, I asked the Dolly Parton–blond flight attendant and after making eye contact, she legitimately looked away. After the third time, a young mom in the aisle seat had mercy enough to be a White Savior and go to the back to get me one of those little half bottles. 

I secretly love weddings despite the bitter hopelessness loudly knocking on the door to my temperamental heart.

From Arizona to Dallas, my requests were ignored to my face—my requests for the one inalienable requirement for being an alive person. I was too tired to feel slighted and invisible, again, in transit, helplessly gawking at the rampant preferential treatment around me, the data and disappointment. And when I was on the ground, what I did every day was perform. I cried in the Dallas terminal bathroom after a white woman bumped me as she passed and didn’t apologize. 

LaGuardia was LaGuardia—I heard someone once describe it, perfectly and hilariously, as akin to a hallway. My plane is hours late and I arrive at the rental car place at almost midnight, tired enough to get a bottle of Coke from the vending machine, and there’s a whole drama in there— a full and properly inconvenient breakdown, everything covered from fear of lifelong loneliness and aloneness, the heaviness of expectation, the self-punishment, never admitting I’m tired, punking out. I had created the mess I was in, and worse, I had created the kind of life that could reap this kind of mess. I even called my parents for an extra serving of I-told-you-so. 

When I finally get my rental car, which is decades younger than mine and too “smart” for me, I seem to circle the same two blocks of Queens in the pitch-dark before pulling over and crying again. It’s pitiful. I hate myself for it. I can’t get the Bluetooth thing to work, I get obsessed with trying to make the Bluetooth thing work, I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t think my lights are on, this car is not on my side. I wonder if I should or can or will fold on the wedding. I realistically do not know how to use this car, it is the middle of the night, how shitty is it to cancel right before a wedding? They’d probably already ordered my food, right? 

I don’t want to fail just because I’m alone. I say a bunch of mean things to myself until I decide to go back to the plan. 

I already knew the stakes of Driving While Black, how important it was to be faultless, and how that probably wouldn’t matter in the end.

Finally on the dark road heading upstate from Queens, empty but for a few semi-trucks, I was scared, hesitating even as I sped up. The whole day was bullying me to give up. Into giving up on myself. I didn’t want to prove myself right. 

It was starting to look like wilderness, which is to say I started to think about Sandra Bland. As I drove I worried: If I were to slip up handling the unfamiliar vehicle and its screens and buttons. If I started frantically and idiotically crying again. If I got tired and drove too slow. If I tried to keep up with other cars and went too fast. If I were to pull over. If I were to be pulled over. If the cop happened to be a white man from the wilderness. No witnesses, one subtle movement in the deep dark, and just what am I doing out here driving this road at this time of night? Why was I alone, where was I going, why are my eyes so red? If they claimed I killed myself, it would be believable, everyone knows I have suicidal thoughts. 

Anything could happen. Anybody could say anything happened. 

After her death in 2015, Sandra Bland visited my thoughts daily; now I’m down to just once a week. I google her name, irrationally hoping the cause of death will have a different word after its colon. It’s not just that she was around my age, it’s how the death ruling is so effective and final. It’s her smile, and how the word suicide shut her up for good. How she was starting a new job the next week. How she acknowledged her mental illness. The video she posted, eloquent and passionate and proudly Black, condemning police brutality. She was pulled over for a broken taillight (ain’t it always that?), and after that, “hanged herself” in a cell at the empty jail. 

I already knew the stakes of Driving While Black, how they fluctuated county line to county line (that part we’d known since Till), how important it was to be faultless, and how that probably wouldn’t matter in the end. When I see someone’s on my tail and I’m already doing close to eighty, I just think, that person must not be Black. 

Every Black person has a victim who hits hardest. Whose death at the hands of the police changes everything.

Risk. Our particularly heightened sense of doom produces in us a skill for continually and quickly evaluating risk. An additional region of the brain is devoted to this analysis, gathering sensory information in order to be one step ahead. Two or three if you can make it. Otherwise, hide. You never know what they can get away with in the dark. 

Every Black person has a victim who hits hardest. Whose death at the hands of the police changes everything—about how and how often you step off the front porch, how you interpret every gaze at the grocery store, whether or not and whom you date, the list of ambitions you hope to accomplish before it’s your turn. 

Back at the rental car office, I admit defeat and return the keys. That night, instead of staying with friends, I sleep at a hotel in Flushing that’s also an all-night karaoke bar. 

I’m what you call a “high-functioning” depressive. Which is a fancy way of saying I can “pass” as someone not having a nervous breakdown, even when I am, that my depressive episodes seem, for other people, to come “out of nowhere.” Being a Black woman is another way to say I can “pass” for someone unneeding and undeserving of help. A high-functioning single Black woman: redundantly no one’s concern. 

The next morning it’s back to the suitcases, all the effort, no witnesses.

Excerpted from You Get What You Pay For copyright © 2024 by Morgan Parker. Used by permission of One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. 

7 Novels About African Women in All Their Complexities

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

I feel the thing people love the most about witnessing messy moments is the ability to look someone in the eye and see the humanity behind them. It’s the recognition; When someone screws up, it can sometimes make us feel like we don’t have to be so perfect either; that our humanness goes beyond social media aesthetics.

In Pride and Joy, I spent a lot of time trying to craft the perfect Joy—the protagonist of the book—but at every turn, Joy’s neurosis and constant need to prove her worth to her family was like sweet sabotage. Joy Okafor Bianchi spends months trying to plan the perfect birthday party for her Mom’s 70th, only for the festivities to be upstaged in the most surprising, ludicrous way. With the majority of her family already gathered at a rental home north of Toronto, it seems like the perfect recipe for perfect disaster, and her ability (or lack thereof) to navigate it all will be tested on the holiest of days in the Christian calendar: Good Friday.

Pride and Joy isn’t just Joy’s story; it’s a story of family and faith, and all the imperfection that comes with it. Through writing this book, I’ve learned to lean into imperfection and have been guided along by some other amazing writers and their female African protagonists. Here are 7 of my favorite contemporary works featuring imperfectly perfect African women:

Maame by Jessica George

Maame is Maddie, a young British-Ghanaian woman in London, who is finally learning to get her wings. Parentified her entire life, she takes her duties as primary caretaker for her ill father very seriously. But when her mother returns from Ghana, Maddie moves out on her own and has a series of firsts on the path to learning who she is. Maame is charming, moving, and real, and Maddie’s fumbles are as triumphant as her victories.

Yinka, Where is Your Huzband? by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn

“Where is your husband?” is an oft-heard phrase by many African women from the ages of 25 and up, so Yinka is timeless right off the bat. Yinka, a successful woman living in London, decides to battle the pressures of singledom by trying to find a date for her cousin’s upcoming wedding. The problem is that Yinka starts to feel as if she must change certain things about herself to find what she’s looking for, when in fact maybe the thing she’s looking for has been herself all along.

Ties That Tether by Jane Igharo

What could be messier than a woman coming from a strict Nigerian family falling in love with someone who isn’t Nigerian? What about if said woman made a promise to her deceased father to maintain her culture through marriage? Ties That Tether follows exactly that premise with Azere, a successful businesswoman, whose one night stand with handsome, tall—and white—Rafael turns her entire world upside down. In this contemporary romance, Azere has to choose between following her heart or seemingly disappointing her family.

My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite 

As the title alludes, this thriller is the definition of “imperfect protagonist”. Set in Lagos, Nigeria, it follows two sisters: Korede, a nurse, and her younger sister Ayoola, who just can’t seem to stop killing her boyfriends. Korede is often tasked with helping Ayoola get rid of the body, the act of which constantly tests the sibling relationship. Though Korede is very fond of her younger sister, she worries that one day her sister will get caught and she will really have to reckon with the lengths she’s willing to go to to protect her.

How You Grow Wings by Rimma Onoseta

How You Grow Wings follows the story of two sisters in Nigeria: Cheta, who is bold and fiery, and Zam, who is timid and doesn’t aspire to rock the boat. Both sisters navigate colorism, favoritism, classism, and cycles of abuse through the ups and downs of their life. Once Zam is invited to stay with wealthy relatives and Cheta leaves home to escape the pressures and pain of living with her mother, the two girls’ lives diverge until they’re forced to come back together again. 

Honey & Spice by Bolu Babalola

Kiki Banjo, the protagonist of Honey & Spice, gets embroiled in the messiest of conflicts at Whitewell University: publicly kissing—and then fake dating—the proclaimed “Wasteman of Whitewell” Malakai Korede, putting her personal and professional brand in jeopardy. Honey & Spice is funny and classic. Not only is Kiki faced with confronting her own preconceived notions about herself and about love, but her friends and listeners of her campus podcast “Brown Sugar” are also shown reckoning with their presumptions in very public ways. 

The Three of Us by Ore Agbaje-Williams

The Three of Us follows a married couple and their forever third-wheel, Temi, over the course of one day. Temi drops by, as always, to see her friend, simply called ‘the wife’, but today isn’t like other days. The wife has something she’d like to share with Temi, that despite the seeming perfection of her life (nice house, affectionate husband), she would like to have a baby of her own. For better or worse, this transforms Temi, and readers will quickly get to see just how uncomfortably tight this throuple is.