From classics like The Godfather and Jaws to modern marvels like The Notebook, Game of Thrones, and Crazy Rich Asians, many of history’s greatest films and TV shows began as novels. A well-written book provides the ultimate Hollywood source material, with complex characters and an engrossing plot that, when read, already plays like a movie in your head.
Here are some much-anticipated book-to-screen adaptations slated for 2024.
When Maya tunes into her toddler’s nanny cam, she sees her 2-year-old playing with her husband. There’s just one problem: her husband was murdered just weeks earlier. Following the successful 2020 adaptation of another Coben bestseller, The Stranger, this thriller premieres as a Netflix mini series January 21.
Janice Y. K. Lee’s atmospheric novel follows three transplanted women living in Hong Kong who form a tight bond amidst personal turmoil. Amazon is adapting Lee’s novel into a six-part series, simply titled Expats, starring Nicole Kidman, Sarayu Blue, and Ji-young Yoo. The first episode premieres January 26.
Romance novelist Colleen Hoover has a long list of bestsellers under her belt, and 2016’s It Ends With Us is perhaps her most well-known. Based on the relationship between Hoover’s parents, the book deals with generational domestic violence as a woman navigates her marriage while coming to terms with her childhood. Justin Baldoni (you might recognize him from Jane the Virgin) is directing, producing, and starring in the film adaptation alongside Blake Lively, Jenny Slate, and Brandon Sklenar. Find it in theaters February 9.
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune premiered to critical acclaim and took home six Academy Awards—a huge accomplishment for any film, but especially one that juggles the vast worlds, complex lore, and cult following of Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction epic. More than two years after the first film, Dune: Part Two comes to theaters March 1 with an all-star cast including Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya, Florence Pugh, and Austin Butler.
The Three-Body Problem begins during China’s Cultural Revolution, with a top-secret military project called Red Coast. The objective is simple: to contact extraterrestrial life. But the project has unexpected and long-lasting ramifications spanning generations, worlds, and realities. 3 Body Problem, as Netflix is styling the show, streams March 21.
When her car breaks down in a dark forest, Mina finds herself trapped in a bunker, surrounded by strangers and under siege by mysterious creatures. The Watchers is a crawl-out-of-your-skin supernatural tale, and horror fans have good reason to be excited about the upcoming adaptation—the film is the directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan (daughter of thriller legend M. Night Shyamalan) and stars Georgina Campbell (from Barbarian fame). It’s scheduled for a June 7 release.
When a Black woman’s body is found in a lake in 1960s Baltimore, she barely makes headlines. This motivates Maddie, a housewife-turned-newspaper reporter, to dig into the woman’s life and uncover what happened to her. A mini series based on the mystery is coming to Apple TV with Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram leading the project.
Before Idina Menzel belted “Defying Gravity” and Kristin Chenoweth bopped along to “Popular,” Gregory Maguire’s fantasy novel revealed the Wicked Witch of the West isn’t as one-dimensional as she may have appeared in The Wizard of Oz. The Wicked book is much darker than the Broadway play and navigates themes of ostracization, propaganda, terrorism. The long-awaited film is set to premiere in November, with Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande as Elphaba and Glinda, respectively.
Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer follows a communist spy from North Vietnam who, after implanting himself in the South Vietnam army, joins other refugees in California in the Vietnam War. Part historical drama, part spy thriller, A24 is adapting the book into an HBO mini series starring Hoa Xuande, with Sandrah Oh and Robert Downey Jr. Park Chan-wook (creator of acclaimed films Oldboy, The Handmaiden, and Thirst), is directing.
In the wake of the Russian Revolution, nobleman Count Alexander Rostov is placed under house arrest at a hotel in central Moscow. The novel spans years as Rostov befriends staff, guests, and a one-eyed cat while living out his sentence within the hotel’s walls. A Showtime TV series based on the novel is expected in December, with Ewan McGregor playing Rostov.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the memoir Pretty by KB Brookins, which will be published by Alfred A. Knopf on May 28, 2024. Preorder the book here.
By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.
Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective—the tropes, the presumptions—Prettyis as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change.
“I should be able to define myself, but I am not. Not by any governmental or cultural body,” KB Brookins writes. “Every day, I negotiate the space between who I am, how I’m perceived, and what I need to unlearn. People have assumed things about me, and I can’t change that. Every day, I am assumed to be a Black American man, though my ID says ‘female,’ and my heart says neither of the sort. What does it mean—to be a girl-turned-man when you’re something else entirely?”
Informed by Brookins’s personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency—whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as “other.”
Here is the cover, designed by Chip Kidd, artwork by Anita Kunz.
Author KB Brookins: “This book is unlike any other project I’ve attempted, so I wanted to make a necessary departure from my first two books’ covers (How To Identify Yourself With a Wound and Freedom House). When developing cover ideas, I thought to myself ‘how has birthing this book felt?’, and I kept thinking about breath, stillness, and balance—all things required to get to emotional clarity and own/reflect on the past. I also thought about how nerve-wracking it is to not hide behind a ‘character’ that isn’t me, and how sweaty I get when out in the Texas sun. Yellow as a background kept calling to me. I also thought about this book being my most vulnerable thing, and thought there was nothing more vulnerable to me than having a version of myself—with my skin showing—on the cover. So I took some pictures and sent those (along with summations of three ideas) to Chip and Anita, who knocked it out of the park. After some necessary input from Erroll McDonald (my editor), the idea that stuck is the one that felt most true and in alignment with the feeling that I hope the book evokes in readers—calm that has come from a Black, trans, beautifully chaotic lifetime of searching for peace. I feel so honored to have this brave book coming into the world with Knopf, and hope that readers feel as moved by the book’s design and words as I do.”
Designer Chip Kidd: “The author basically art-directed this cover, which really helped. Once I read KB’s brief on what they were looking for, Anita instantly came to mind. Her lovely sensibility and skill was perfect for this astonishing, brave book. I just stayed out of her way and let her do the magic.”
Painter Anita Kunz: “I love painting portraits of extraordinary people and I was thrilled when Chip Kidd gave me this assignment. I read nothing but great reviews about KB Brookins and really feel that they are doing meaningful and important work. My main aim was to paint them in a beautiful and sensitive way, but I also wanted to add a tiny element of magic, so I added the tattoo bird which appears to come to life.”
I am a memoirist, a writer who juices the moments and characters in my life as a way to make sense of it all.
This proves challenging, however, when I consider that I have very few memories from before I turned twelve. There’s a deep blackness in that part of my hippocampus, where the brain stores memory. I often imagine that place within my mind like a never-ending storage unit filled with innumerable servers or cabinets, each accounting for various moments in my life. In the way way back, if you can reach that place, you’ll find just a single floppy disc where those first twelve years should be.
I don’t remember the first concert I attended, which was part of Britney Spears’ “Dream Within A Dream” tour. I was ten.
The little I know is based on an amalgamation of Britney’s tour schedule, a few disposable camera pictures my parents took that night, and bits and pieces of memory my mom and dad have passed on over the years. I was entirely in love with Britney, and I emulated her in my style and artistic choices, so my dad took me to the concert as a birthday gift. My mom thought Britney was “trashy” and not the best role model. She didn’t like that Britney made me want to get a belly button ring so badly that I began wearing my magnetized earrings from Claire’s on my abdomen. (I wasn’t allowed to get my ears pierced until I was fifteen, so a navel piercing was absolutely out of the question.)
But even though she made her stance clear—rolling her eyes at the way I covered the floral wallpaper she’d selected for my bedroom with posters of Britney, The Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls, and N’SYNC—she took me shopping at dELiA*s ahead of the concert. I chose silver pleather bell bottoms, which hugged at my non-existent child hips, and paired them with a pink crop top with a sweetheart cut around my non-existent breasts.I can tell from a pre-concert photo that I’d stuffed my training bra with toilet paper. My top reveals a stretch of skin I smeared with silky, scented body glitter before adding a magnetic butterfly “belly ring.” A recent Disney Cruise had left my hair cornrowed in pink and white beads, a style I chose because I wanted to look like Lizzie McGuire. I kept them for over a month, carefully wrapping my head in a silk scarf each night so they’d last for the concert. I completed my outfit with a pair of metallic light-up Heelys, a choice that left me clutching the railing as I descended our stairs for the concert. Years later, when recounting this scene, my dad will say, ““you lit up like a strip club on Bourbon Street.” But on that day, they didn’t make me change, even after my dad snickered to my mom, “She looks like a baby hooker.” I wonder, Do I remember this or have I been told this story? Memory and memoir writing is tricky in this way.
I can tell from a pre-concert photo that I’d stuffed my training bra with toilet paper.
Once, while digging around the internet, I uncovered research about childhood amnesia that determined the average age of earliest childhood memories is between three and four. It’s a funny fact to consider as a writer, a memoirist even, that I don’t remember what currently amounts to a third of my life. My parents found it strange and frustrating when I would tell them I didn’t remember major trips we took, ones I’d begged to go on, trips to Egypt, Italy, and Spain. I also don’t remember standing on the stadium folding chair next to my dad and screaming along to “…Baby One More Time,” but he does. I don’t remember his shock at Britney’s costume during “Toxic,” a nude rhinestone bodysuit intended to make it look like she was naked and covered in diamonds. I don’t remember the headlines of my teens, decrying Britney as “crazy” and an “unfit mother” after she shaved her head and began partying with Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. I don’t remember her numerous public trips to various rehab and mental health institutions. I don’t remember when I first learned about her conservatorship. I was in the midst of my own inner and external turmoils and too close, unbeknownst to me at the time, to what Britney was going through to find any type of comfort in our shared existence.
I didn’t fully realize the impact Britney Spears’s life and career has had on my life until I began reading The Woman in Me, her debut memoir. The front flap recounts Britney’s June 2021 court testimony and notes that the “impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others.”
The writer Anne Lamott, whose first book was written for her father, who coincidentally had the same type of brain cancer my father survived, says inBird by Bird, her love letter to the writing process, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
My father and his little sister grew up in Hammond, Louisiana, just thirty minutes south of Britney’s hometown, Kentwood, which sits on the border of Mississippi and Louisiana. My dad’s mother, Theresa, lived in the same house my dad was raised in until I was in my teens. I grew up playing in my granny’s rose garden and running wild in the same woods Britney recounts in the first few pages of her book. Our fathers were raised by abusive alcoholic men who hurt their wives and pushed their sons to measure up to their expectation of what a “man” should be. Britney’s paternal grandfather, June, was a local basketball star. My grandfather, Archie, was the quarterback and captain of LSU’s football team. They weren’t far apart in age, my grandfather slightly older than Britney’s. I wonder if they might have known each other. Those parts of Louisiana and the sporting community were small back then, and in many ways, still are.
Our fathers were raised by abusive alcoholic men who hurt their wives.
I was nine when Britney Spears released her debut single “…Baby One More Time” at sixteen. The accompanying music video portrays bored school-girl Britney, and her classmates dancing in the halls, outside, and in the gymnasium after the bell rings. I began ballet when I was three and added tap and modern to my list of after-school activities when I was eight. All I wanted was to sing and dance and to be seen as perfect, a feeling Britney also describes in The Woman in Me.
One of the many ways I found calm in the chaos of my childhood, alongside reading and writing in my diary, was through putting on performances for my parents and their friends. It wasn’t uncommon for my mom and dad, who had me in their forties, to bring me out to dinner as a source of entertainment and, to keep me from sleeping on or under the table, ask me to sing. Everything felt frosted over in those moments, as if I’d been transported to a different and more deliciously colorful world like Clara in The Nutcracker. I’d belt out songs that were wiser than my years, like “Summertime” by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, or “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac. My thirst for stardom—or a path that would take me far beyond Louisiana—led me to compete and win the Miss Pre-Teen Baton Rouge and Miss Pre-Teen Louisiana beauty pageants. I auditioned for American Idol, preparing two songs—Mariah Carey’s “Hero” and Roberta Flack’s version of “Killing Me Softly”—for the Idol open call auditions at the New Orleans Superdome, just a year before it filled with Hurricane Katrina refugees. My mom came with me and let me miss a whole day of school. I was definitely one of the younger people in the crowd of hopefuls, and while I didn’t get as far as Britney did when she competed on Star Search, a similar televised competition, I did make the first four cuts at only ten years old. I continued spending all my free time in voice lessons and dance classes, auditioning for local and regional theater productions, and immersing myself in the fantasy of a life in Hollywood or on Broadway. It was this thirst for creative expression that would later translate into a need to detail everything on the page.
The writer Dani Shapiro, a favorite of mine, opines in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life that our stories “choose” us. For memoirists who are grappling with what to share or omit, Shapiro—who has also struggled with these details—says, “If we don’t tell them in order to spare others, we are somehow diminished.”
I think of a woman like Britney Spears, who has been supporting her family since she was a teenager and, in doing so, has lived to “spare” others. And I think of myself and the childhood I lost on a soccer field somewhere in uptown New Orleans when I was eleven—just a few months after I saw Britney in concert—as my dad fell down in the bleachers and began shaking so hard that we could hear him clanging against the metal out on the grassy pitch. Doctors swiftly identified the cause of his seizures as an incurable brain tumor, a glioblastoma, and gave him three to six months to live. One of the few memories I know is mine is my mom grabbing me by my small, bony shoulders in the hospital, tears transforming her face, and telling me I needed to be strong for her. Sometimes, I think of how I spared her by doing just that and, in turn, allowed myself and my mental health to be diminished.
I think of myself and the childhood I lost on a soccer field somewhere in uptown New Orleans when I was eleven.
Shapiro goes on about how the memoirist is perceived as “exposing” themselves. But writing in this way would be akin to leaving your diary open for all to read—very different from memoir. She recalls an exchange between Frank McCourt, the author of Angela’s Ashes, and a woman he’d just met. The woman told McCourt she felt as if she knew everything about him. “Oh, darlin’,” he said, “it’s just a book.”
The Woman in Me is just a book, a mechanism that, unlike an open diary, allows the reader to connect with Britney, and as Shapiro would say, “With others. With the world around you. With yourself.”
I felt this connection in myriad ways while reading The Woman in Me, especially as a child who was also subject to generational trauma. While my father doesn’t struggle with alcoholism like Jamie Spears, his father did, and that disease left its marks on the whole family. My grandfather’s drunken rages—physical and verbal abuse predominantly directed at my dad and grandmother—trained his son to be emotionally closed off. It was often impossible, still is, for anyone to penetrate my father’s porcupine-thick skin. When I experienced significant bullying as a kid, he couldn’t understand or empathize with my pains because his were always greater. As an adult, I know it’s an exercise in futility to tell him if I’m sad because, for him, it doesn’t compute. He tells me to “turn on” my happiness, as he was forced to do.
More than anything, The Woman in Me encompasses Britney’s palpable loneliness throughout her entire life. It’s an isolation I recognize. I feel it when I recall the long trips my parents took without me. In our kitchen, we had a calendar with velcro stretched across each day of the week. As days passed, I would take the small photo of me and move it one place closer to the date they’d return, affixed with a photo of my parents. There were years where my letters to Santa asked for them to stay home more.
I felt a bleaker loneliness when I was twenty-four and my mother died, which caused my only-child existence to deepen and bleed into the experience of feeling partially orphaned. The gap widened between my father and me, and his need for me to be more of a wife or parent to him than a daughter grew when he was diagnosed with vascular dementia. My mother had hoped and so did I, even, that her death would create a bridge for us to meet on. Instead it left a crater that sunk everything we might have shared. Two weeks after she died, a few days after her funeral, he left me in our home, the place she died in—her personal effects everywhere as if she would pull in the driveway at any moment—and he went on a vacation with friends – ones I’d grown up knowing – to Taos, New Mexico. These plans materialized a day before he left and I was told I was not invited. That weekend Hurricane Harvey blew through the city. When I later told him how his leaving at the precipice of my grief had hurt, he reminded me I was an adult and free to do as I pleased, as was he. These are the scenes I replay when reading Britney’s experience of her conservatorship. How impossible it was for her to get her family to treat her as their equal, with compassion, especially at the heartache she felt at being separated from her sons. My dad has never controlled me in that way, but he made it clear that we were not a team, that I was alone in my grief and should seek support elsewhere.
My dad has never controlled me in that way, but he made it clear that we were not a team.
From early ages, Britney and I turned inward, focusing on fantasies of fame and escaping our families. It was an attempt to control things that felt more within our grasp than our dads and moms. We threw ourselves into dancing, singing, and various auditions that would get us as far away from Louisiana as talent would take us. But there was another pull, the suburbia and church groups of my teenage years creating a fork within me, a divide of disparate dreams that Britney also describes experiencing. Part of me wanted desperately to leave, to eschew all that I was raised around, which my mother—as a fifth-generation New Orleanian—boldly encouraged. The other half of me wanted to fit in with my peers, to go to LSU—my grandfather and several family member’s alma mater—and marry my college sweetheart. We’d have a car filled with kids before I turned thirty. I felt I could be happy in this version of my life and that things could, in many ways, be easier, softer, gentler, and more simple.
I was diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder as a child. This mostly manifested in fears that my parents wouldn’t come home from whatever dinner party or event they might be at that night, that something bad would happen when they went to the opera—as it happens to Bruce Wayne’s parents. I was afraid of plane crashes that could take them from me. Panicked to the point of being unable to sleep until we were all under the same roof, and even then, each creak in the floorboards of our old house–all caused by the expansion of moisture in the swampy ground our foundation sat on–kept me up with Home Alone style fears of home invasions.
I overthought most situations and experienced a lot of social anxiety, which I’m told is common among only children. Where my parents were gregarious individuals who loved large social gatherings, I felt more comfortable alone in my room with a book or in the staid routine of daily dance classes and voice lessons. Britney expresses a lot of this, which surprised me because it’s hard to picture your favorite pop star as awkward or socially anxious. We both rarely knew how to articulate these anxieties and instead stayed silent or would isolate ourselves to cope. Few close to us, especially our family, seemed to understand these “quirks” in our personalities. But unlike Britney, I was somewhat lucky that sometimes my mom did. When she was in her late teens until her mid-thirties, she struggled, quite openly, with anxiety and depression. Similarly to Britney’s paternal grandmother, Jean Spears, my mother was briefly hospitalized and placed on lithium. While I’ve never been told whether my mom attempted suicide, I know she often thought about it because she told me she did. I know that when she lived in Paris, from her early twenties until she was thirty-eight, she would wait for the metro, look down on the tracks, and meditate on how fast and easy it would be to throw herself onto them and leave her body.
I stopped taking medication, I stopped seeing my therapist, and I moved to London, England, for my first love.
In my early twenties, I began experiencing panic attacks. I wasn’t sure what was causing them other than stress. I was studying creative writing at The New School, while juggling several internships. Finances were tight. From time to time, my mom would tell me they might not be able to pay for the next semester, and then my dad would spend what amounted to my tuition on a piece of art, and my mother would threaten to leave him. Rinse and repeat, so I started seeing a therapist and taking anti-anxiety medication. Everything seemed to level out when I was twenty-three. I stopped taking medication, I stopped seeing my therapist, and I moved to London, England, for my first love—a British boy—work and to get my Masters in English literature. But then my mom was diagnosed with cancer, the same type of ovarian cancer Britney’s beloved Aunt Sandra died from, only six months after I moved. Unlike my father, my mother was not a medical miracle. She lost her life quickly over the course of a short and brutal year. Moving home to New Orleans when she died was my attempt to make sense of it all. In The Woman In Me Britney tells of a wild and creative period of her life, shortly following her divorce from Kevin Federline (and before the conservatorship). During this time, she released Blackout, which she feels is her best and most artistically diverse album. She was twenty-five, which is the same age I was when I left New Orleans to spend the year traveling, visiting France, Italy, Monaco, China, South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Mongolia. Attempting to heal, I wrote about loss and scattered my mother’s ashes. When I moved back to New York, I threw myself into work at a small publishing house and tried to let my nine-to-five job, friends, turbulent relationship, and life itself cover the pain and grief I felt for the home and family I lost when my mom died.
But that’s not possible, Britney shows the reader, when her family diminishes the pain she feels during her divorce from Federline. Kevin refuses to let her see their young children, and the paparazzi’s relentless attacks and constant presence in her life bring her to a breaking point–which results in her infamously shaving her head, entering rehab and, eventually, the conservatorship.
I know that breaking point well.
I reached it at thirty years old, only five years after my mom died. What I didn’t shed in hair, I shed in weight, losing over thirty pounds in three months. The relationship I’d been in for over a year ended suddenly, and I was heartbroken, but had recently begun a new job with a sizable role and salary increase, and moved out of the house I shared with friends and into my own space. All within the same month. I was trying to stay above the muck of it all, but my sadness suffocated me in my two-hundred-and-fifty square foot Brooklyn apartment. I had moments where I looked at pills that were supposed to ease my depression and anxiety and wondered if taking all of them at once would give me a more permanent sense of relief. After I quit my job, I would lie in my shower for hours, sometimes fully clothed in pajamas I’d worn for days, and I’d put my dad on speakerphone. I tried to get him to comfort me like I hoped a father would. I’d tell him I was scared by how hopeless I felt, and he would tell me to “decide to be happy.”
Like it was that easy.
I spent almost ninety days at a mental health institute designed to treat my developing Xanax addiction.
I was placed under a psychiatric hold after I collapsed on my way to work and couldn’t tell the doctors the last meal I remembered eating. My friends and family were shocked at how swiftlyI plummeted from my place of relative stability. Some didn’t know how to respond and distanced themselves from me, others told me I wasn’t present enough to be their friend, my godmother—my mom’s best friend—stopped responding to the texts I sent asking for advice and blocked me on Facebook. Eventually, my mother’s sisters intervened, presenting me with a host of websites for rehab programs, refusing to let me come home for Christmas until I got “help”, and so I spent almost ninety days at a mental health institute designed to treat my developing Xanax addiction, continuing depressive episode, and the malnourishment it caused.
While I’m able to acknowledge, a year later, how this time in my life shaped me for the better, and feel grateful for the remarkable people I met along the way by seeking residential treatment, there are many ways I felt hurt and infantilized. I felt like a criminal when I’d come back inside the house I lived in with five other young women and men, and was forced to do a “contraband dance,” which consisted of jumping around and shaking our shoes out to prove we weren’t smuggling anything unapproved back inside. Or how I had to count aloud or hum when I went to the bathroom or showered, the door cracked wide open, to confirm I wasn’t hurting myself. I still pause before I open a drawer in my kitchen and remember a time when all drawers and doors were locked to me. I know this was designed for safety, but the damage caused from being woken with a flashlight in my face every thirty minutes while I slept left its mark. I rarely sleep more than an hour through the night without waking, expecting to hear whispers and shoes coming into my room and approaching my bed. When Britney recounts her own stay at a similar inpatient program, she articulated a feeling I often share: “I’m probably the least fearful woman alive at this point, but it doesn’t make me feel strong; it makes me feel sad. I shouldn’t be this strong. These months made me too tough.”
As a graduate student, the subject of my final project, a narrative essay, was my mother. It was the first piece of writing of mine that wasn’t about twenty-something romantic love and the hopeless pursuit of it. When I began writing, she’d recently been diagnosed with cancer, and I decided not to tell her about the subject of my essay until it was finished. The piece explored the etymology and history of tulips, her favorite flower, while weaving in the story—as I knew it—of my mother’s life. Comparing her to the flower and the flower to her. It was a love letter and a testament to the beautiful, hearty, colorful woman I knew her to be. I dedicated the project to both of my parents, and mailed them a copy once I’d submitted it for my professors to review.
A few weeks later I received a short text from my mom.
“Very nice what you wrote about me, but hurt your dad’s feelings by leaving him out. Write something kind about him, too?”
I remember feeling like she’d taken something I’d done purely out of love and admiration and turned it into a weapon.
I was furious at and hurt by her response. I remember feeling like she’d taken something I’d done purely out of love and admiration and turned it into a weapon for them both to use against me. Both my mom and dad told our family about the essay, but not that I’d graduated at the top of my class or received glowing remarks on this project from my professors, that I’d been cruel to my father in omitting him from a story about my mother’s life – a time in her life before she knew him. After that, I decided not to write about my parents – my family – while they were living. When my mother died and I began writing about her, the loss and the way it changed the structure of our family, it was hard to omit my father but I wasn’t sure how to write about him without fearing his response. That fear of repercussions that could – likely, in my mind, would – stem from my words about my inner world was so strong that after I completed my masters degree, I left the dome of literature and my pursuit of a life somewhere in those margins and began working at tech startups. It would be almost six years before I would write outside of my diary again.
Much has been said about the backlash experienced by both Britney and the public figures she lived her private life with, namely Justin Timberlake and the entire Spears family. On Justin, she’s both matter-of-fact and generous in her retelling of that time of her life and first significant—and wildly public—romantic relationship. They were very young, and while she would have had Justin’s child because she was so deeply in love with him and craved a quieter existence where she could create the family she hadn’t grown up with, he wasn’t in the wrong for feeling like he wasn’t ready to become a father. From Britney’s adult vantage point, it’s easy to spot the perpetrators of wrongdoing—their managers, who were more concerned about damaging her reputation as a virginal pop idol than they were about getting her access to safe healthcare when they decided to terminate the pregnancy in a hotel room. Reading this, I felt less anger for Timberlake—who tried to comfort Britney the only way his immature and self-absorbed pop-star brain knew how to, through song and strumming his guitar—than I did for her management, who had the power and greater maturity to know they should have gotten Britney to a doctor. I don’t think that Britney should have omitted these details from her memoir to spare others.
From my pre-teen years until I became a woman approaching thirty, I felt safest when I hid myself and disassociated deep within a book from the uncomfortable realities of my life. My thoughts and feelings were rarely shared outside of the confines of one of my journals or the Notes app in my phone.
Britney echoes a similar reluctance to be fully present with those closest to her. She describes how frequently she’d take to the woods surrounding her house and hide.
“For years that was my thing — to hide.”
We learn as children playing hide-and-seek that staying hidden is one of the ways we remain safe.
Following her breakup with Justin, Britney briefly lives in Cher’s old NoHo four-story apartment, which she rarely leaves. “I fell off the face of the earth.” She writes. “I ate takeout for every meal. And this will probably sound strange, but I was content staying home. I felt safe.”
Towards the end of the book, Britney describes the process of writing all she’s shared with us, laying out the truth of her life on the page for the very first time, as an incredibly freeing and emotional experience—but one that took a long time and a lot of work to feel ready to tell.
I write because, as a friend once told me after I shared an anecdote from my youth, I had “no choice but to become a writer.” But I do wonder, as Britney does in the second-to-last page of her book, if my family and those who closed themselves to me during the hardest moments of my life, will find and read this essay of mine, and what they’ll think.
My thoughts and feelings were rarely shared outside of the confines of one of my journals.
As Joan Didion notes in “Why I Write,” included in her 2021 essay collection, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, “Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions, I would never have needed to write a novel.”
When I told my cousin I was working on a piece about Britney’s memoir, I joked that it was also about how Britney Spears and I are the same person. “You have a lot in common with each other,” he said with a straight face. I laughed, and he doubled down, telling me that the only thing that separated me from Britney Spears was, “y’know, her being a multi-millionaire pop star” and the fact that she’s been institutionalized by her family several times. And I’ve only had that happen to me once. I feel lucky that my worries over who reads this essay and feels hurt or angry with me is small, pales in comparison to the reach of The Woman in Me — which sold 1.1 million copies in its first week. I feel lucky that I don’t need to worry much over whether or not what I’ve written will further alienate me from my father, who, even if he does read this, would likely forget the next day. I feel lucky that the private anecdotes I’ve shared won’t jeopardize someone’s career. I feel lucky that I probably don’t need to worry that thousands of people will have opinions about what I have and haven’t already shared here or in my future memoirs. And for this reason, among others, I feel lucky that while I am, as of this year, a “Hollywood girl” living in Los Angeles, this isn’t a song or a story about a girl named Lucky or Britney Spears. This is my story, a writer in my early thirties who, unlike my pre-teen self, feels lucky, fortunate, and grateful to have not gotten further on American Idol, lucky to have parents who wouldn’t move to New York or L.A. so I could be a child star, lucky to be rhythmically challenged in jazz and tap dance – lucky to have traveled a similar yet very different road than that of Britney Jean Spears.
As a Palestinian in diaspora, nothing builds my connection to the land more than literature. It is not just the scenes detailed by our great poets that makes the ground feel realer under my feet, but the gravitational pull towards each other that gives me belief in that liberated homeland. In my work as a critic, I’ve often played it safe; devoted my time to works I loved or could situate as a positive contribution to the culture, shying away from being public in my negative critiques. As I read and re-read Ghassan Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature, I am reminded that this work is, in fact, a matter of life-or-death; literatures can set the stage for the attempted annihilation of a people, and it is our responsibility to point to it. How often have I chosen a slow death in service of comfort? The truth is, I have never been able to look around a room and not see the genocidal escalation to come—if the vitriolic disregard for human life, for Palestinian life, did not permeate through to our most mundane of activities, over 18,000 Palestinians would not have been killed in the past 67 days, over 1.5 million would not be displaced from Gaza.
The truth is I have never been able to look around a room and not see the genocidal escalation to come.
—Summer Farah
As Gaza’s poets are assassinated, as the libraries are destroyed, as Palestinians across historic Palestine (and all over the world) are arrested for dissent, as writers face censorship globally for speaking the truth of the genocide that is occurring, we must consider: if literature is your corner, what will you do to rid it of these violences?
I myself struggle to find utility in the work I am capable of, in the face of genocide. Do I believe my writing is capable of changing anyone but myself? Reader, admittedly, I don’t; and so, I must learn new capacities. I have been lucky enough to cultivate a global community of Palestinian writers and allies whose work I do believe in, though.
In this roundtable conversation conducted over email, I corresponded with Palestinian writers Samah Fadil, Priscilla Wathington, and Rasha Abdulhadi about the role of poetry in genocide, countering Zionist propaganda, and mobilizing our art into tangible action.
In the few weeks since I sent these questions to my peers, there have been countless devastations: high-profile kidnappings and deaths, destructions of hospitals and historic sites, and nothing to recover the thousands and thousands of Palestinians still under the rubble.
Summer Farah: Since we’re all poets, I wanted to start with poetry. I’m drawn to this definition offered by Solmaz Sharif at a talk hosted by Washington University in St Louis: “Poetry is not an exercise in aesthetic pleasure. It is an opportunity to name, diagnose, and draw attention to actual violences that are occurring.” In an interview with Raja Shehadah at BOMB, Mahmoud Darwish said “[The Israeli Communist party] introduced me to the notion that poetry can be an instrument of change. I took this very seriously until I arrived at my own conclusion that poetry changes nothing… The only person it changes is the poet himself.“
So, I want to ask: what is the role of poetry in genocide?
Samah Fadil: This question reminds me of the call to action Rasha Abdulhadi sent to me and urged other writers to use: “Whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now.” Poetry is sand that can be thrown on the gears of genocide, so I agree with Solmaz—the aesthetic pleasure comes second. But, one must remember that sand is made up of trillions of particles of eroding rock. Poetry is sand but sand is not only poetry… Poetry is a tool that can be wielded by anyone—for good or bad, status or self, self or salve. In my experience, I can’t say that my poetry has changed anyone but myself, but when I think of all of the poets that have inspired me to reach for my pen, and who continue to do so, I’d like to think that in some way, we are all continuously changing with each other’s words.
The answer above was written before the recent targeted assassination of beloved Gazan poet Dr. Refaat Alareer, and feels especially haunting now. I wish more people knew of him and his work before he was martyred. I wish people knew the poets who are still breathing as much as they knew the ones who are not. But to go back to the question, what is the role of poetry in genocide? After seeing the literal hundreds of people around the world who translated Refaat’s poem “If I must die”, it’s a reminder to me that in our hundreds, in our millions, we are all Palestinian. My last interaction with Refaat was him asking me to send him a clearer image of my poem “lucid”. I was so incredibly honored he asked. I did, and I hope he got to read my words. I hope he enjoyed them. He is someone who held poetry very, very dear to his heart and someone who taught its revolutionary potential to his students. My role as a poet is to honor that legacy.
Writing can be propaganda, counter-propaganda, or distraction. It can be healing, or harm, or escape.
—Rasha Abdulhadi
Rasha Abdulhadi: Writing can be propaganda, counterpropaganda, or distraction. It can be healing, or harm, or escape. These trinities are no more guaranteed to be comprehensive than a good/bad binary. I think Solmaz Sharif is right, that poetry offers us some particular “opportunities” and that we can use those opportunities to make invitations to readers, to editors, to other writers, to censors, to enemies, to the audiences of those who have declared themselves our enemies. I have certainly experienced poetry that changes the self, and some work I do write for this still-very-valuable purpose.
I think of the effects of writing in concentric circles: it certainly affects the writer first (and if it means nothing to me, why would I bother?), but I am also aware of it affecting any who read it, including slush readers who reject it. I cherish those rejections, and I certainly do send work that I wish for that sometimes-antagonistic first reader to encounter, even when I am certain work will be rejected from a venue in which I might never wish to be published except for the purposes of implicating them by association with Palestinians. I embrace that the expectation for poetry to be nice or mean nothing and change nothing may enable us to say and publish and distribute work that would be considered more volatile in other formats or venues.
Priscilla Wathington: If you are a poet of conscience in this moment of genocide, this question must come up. Poetry is not a life-saving surgery. No matter how much we may repeat the metaphor, poetry is not water. It cannot write the bombs out of the sky. It cannot put back together the bodies of a loved one, or build a safe place for even a mouse to sleep in Gaza. But this is not to say that poetry or words in general are useless in a time of genocide. If words had no power to influence people’s feelings about the bombing of hospitals or the military detention of children, then Israeli forces would not be arresting poets and other writers. And more broadly, if books did not have the capacity to shift attitudes and open up new ways of seeing the world, then there would not be so many banned books. As much as poetry cannot be a replacement for other forms of action, such as calling our Congressional members here in the U.S., it can and should be an extension of our overall decolonial belief practices and commitments.
Summer Farah: For the past two months—and 75 years, and more—we’ve been subjected to Zionist propaganda that ranges from the most vile, racist tropes towards absurd logical fallacies. I’ve really learned that propaganda does not have to be good, it just has to be there.
As writers, how do we counter the efficiency of imperial propaganda? It seems so much more difficult to undo than to plant.
SF: I don’t know that I ever sit down and ask myself, “How can I, as a writer, counter the empire”. I live it in my daily life, and it comes through in my writing because it’s also part of who I am. The most inspiring thing I do is be authentic to myself. I never planned to write so much about Palestine and how fucking trapped I feel living in the imperial core, but it’s what’s been consistently coming out of me. When I put pen to paper and speak that truth, it’s the best way for me to counter whatever hasbara talking points are being spewed out that day. I use my words and my natural ability for storytelling, one I think that’s been gifted to me by my ancestors, as a way to counter the propaganda. Of course some people will just hate you no matter what. That’s not who I focus on. And honestly, I feel like their propaganda is getting weaker by the second.
PW: I agree with you both so much. We have to keep writing our truths, and our most brilliant, wild imaginings, in our own terms. As far as possible, we should not let any repressive systems set the terms for what our art or our lives can contain.
Summer Farah: Rasha and Samah, the bios you’ve used in your recent publications ask for a call to action: “[The poet] is calling on you, dear reader, to join [them] in refusing and resisting the genocide of the Palestinian people…” Samah, you take this moment to connect Palestinian struggle with others globally. I’m thinking, too, of Priscilla, in a recent interview with NPR, you complemented your explanation of the “permit regime” with a poem, as a way in for the listener.
How best can we mobilize our art into action? How best can we use our writing to build with others?
RA: Every point of contact is an organizing opportunity and a chance to inoculate against genocidal propaganda. I am unembarrassed. I will organize with customer service reps. My email signature is currently:
“If you and/or any of the folks you work with (or beyond) have a chance to listen to a podcast I was on Monday October 16th, that would mean a lot. I am making a steady practice of warmly inviting everyone I interact with to become more skillful in keeping Palestinians alive, here and in Palestine. Please share & discuss widely. A transcript & show notes with additional links is up now as well.”
I reply to every rejection to say thank you, and make sure they see that link. Many people have surprised me by replying with an acceptance of the invitation! Any place I’m invited must let Palestine in, whatever the reason they’ve invited me: Long Covid, disability justice, fiber arts/knitting/crochet, southern arts groups, grant makers. I will invite them to care and become more skillful in that care. I don’t argue, but there are many who might be ready to do something or know something, who might already suspect what they understand and could do, and will take a leap if that validation is reflected back to them by even one person: that their instincts toward life are correct, that their readiness to act and connect are welcomed.
If words had no power to influence people’s feelings… then Israeli forces would not be arresting poets and other writers.
—Priscilla Wathington
SF: I talk nice. For real though, I’m pretty good at simplifying complicated shit the average person might not know about, and keeping it conversational. No ill-will towards the Norman Finklesteins and the Noam Chomskys of the world, but I can connect with the average person on a way more personal and personable level than these older, white, sometimes well-meaning-but-sometimes-also-long-winded-academics. Talking nice is an art and will lead people to seek out your words in other forms. In my case, people hear me and end up seeking out my writing. So many people have come up to me in person or online and told me that I was able to get something to “click” in them when they heard me speak on a subject they didn’t know much about before. And my writing is extremely varied, if I do say so myself. I’ve written news articles, poetry, personal essays, viral tweets, whatever, about Palestine, and people from all types of organizations or institutions or just on their own have reached out to me because of it. So really it’s me who seeks to build with others through my writing, by inviting them in with my words, if that makes sense.
PW: I suppose there is an almost unlimited way that I could answer the question about how we might mobilize our art into action. One way might be to use your poem as a fundraiser, as Aria Aber, Noor Hindi, and others have been doing. Another way might be to have things inside the text that point the readers out of it again. Instead of trying to hold the reader inside the poem’s world, you could try to send them outside the poem to go and engage with histories or ongoing atrocities. Another way might be to try and surprise a reader into recognizing you after they had decided not to. Or, maybe you want to engage speculatively in an impossible future, and give yourself that space to imagine everything as it could be. What’s important is the intentions, I think, and for the work to come out of a place of real investment, so that it shows up in the world with that rootedness in care and in a set of broader commitments.
Summer Farah: Cultural institutions, as well as other writers, often use the line of “Well, what can I do?” when pressured on their silence. Generously, I see an issue where so many believe they are expected to lead. Ungenerously, why would we want that from non-Palestinians? So: what are we asking for from both our colleagues and the institutions built on our creative labor? What minimum expectations for existing in these artistic spaces together are not being met, other than joining PACBI [Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel]?
RA: Read, quote, teach, share the words of living Palestinians. Withdraw from places that benefit from or take a studied and calculated indifference to our spectacular annihilation. Do what Palestinians ask you to; stop trying to be clever or develop your own opinions about something you have spent no time studying, something you have no material stake in. If you have a material stake in Palestinian freedom: by all means speak and act clearly from that, broadcast that clarity wide and loud and elaborate it deeply. Believe in the meaning of your own life without thinking you must be a genius to matter—this is an imperial lie, a patriarchal lie, a capitalist lie, an ableist lie, a white supremacist lie, and only those who wish to support those violences benefit from you believing you have no power. Vajra Chandrasekera’s recent blog post—a second book announcement, of all unlikely places to find sincerity—is a must read on this topic, with searing clarity on the role of writers publishing and announcing their own work in the context of multiple ongoing genocides.
SF: Literally could not have said it better than Rasha. Every single word, amplified times ten.
PW: For me, the minimum line is always rooted in human rights. If an institution can’t affirm that we are all deserving of clean water, food, and dignity, and cannot condemn the indiscriminate bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure, then what “cultural” role do they have? Culture is a celebration of people. It depends on people. What is a love of culture without a love of people?
I find myself constantly re-assessing the parts of myself I feel are “allowed” in literary spaces. I see writers—established or otherwise—struggling with this compartmentalization, constantly falling for prestige. I appreciate when people are honest about these temptations. Does anyone have thoughts, guidance, offerings on the trappings of compartmentalization? Of this journey away from prestige?
SF: Compartmentalization is a big big trap. I tried to do it for so long as a young, wide-eyed Black Palestinian J-School student in a sea of white peers and professors. Whenever “the Middle East” came up, “isn’t that whole place a little iffy?” was the level of nuance I was working with. I tapped out early on, and I also stopped mentioning I was Palestinian because it always brought unsolicited questions and comments from said white peers. But this was a disservice to myself.
I tried to keep the charade going when I entered a formal 9-5 newsroom-type job that quite literally ended up breaking me, both physically and mentally, especially when I had to work on content I did not approve of. Not going to lie, I was pushed out of these institutions by my own body. It rejected the shit after 5 years of laborious paper pushing and pathetic pizza parties. I had to find a way to make myself whole again. What you see now, the fact that you even know who I am, that you’ve read my words and even see me as a writer and poet… that is the direct result of me abandoning the idea of careerism within institutions and focusing on bringing together all the facets of me I was always told would never fit together. And not for nothing, but 90% of the literary orgs I once clamored to be a part of or published in have been totally silent during the genocide on Palestinians, so my respect for them has plummeted. The news orgs I once applied to be a part of but was met with radio silence all those years ago now ask me to go on their shows. They can keep asking, because I realize that they were never worth my time, care or energy. They want a mouthpiece, and they won’t find one here.
RA: Empire, capitalism, ableism, meritocracy, anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, cisheterosexism, more… all of these coercive “norms” come with their own recruitments and organizing projects, their own orientations and trainings. And their own incentives. There are many rewards for being digestible, a tasty morsel, another commodity for well-established markets. We should never underestimate the capacity of such systems to recycle even our best attributes or hardest held hurts into reasons for us to reinvest ourselves and everyone we love into the mouths of the death machines. This is what is means to be one of “the good ones,” to be “chosen.” I laugh when folks tell me they’re surprised I haven’t been “accepted” for one or another kind of opportunity, funding, or publishing or “nominated” for this or that award. Believe me, I am not at all surprised!
Poetry is sand that can be thrown on the gears of genocide.
—Samah Fadil
Summer, you’ve reminded me before of Zaina Alsous’s line: “I don’t know what they thought I was capable of; / I wish I was more capable of it” from “Violence” inA Theory of Birds. I wish for every one of us to become “more capable of it.”
Look, I don’t blame people for being confused about how to make a meaningful life—or what a meaningful life could even look like—much less how to understand their own power in this heavily weighted context where so much is set against us and kept from us. I don’t even necessarily fault folks for following the advice to “take the money and run” if that’s the option they have to survive. All of these institutions owe us reparations, but with blood money, the amount of money is never anywhere equal to the volume of blood. It’s very important, if you take the money: to Run, to Resist becoming a poster child or firewall for institutions that would elevate and save a few and reject so many others. I encourage us to be wary of survivals that depend on so much suffering, on extraction from others who are just as precarious as we are or even worse off. I would rather we keep our focus on making life with each other than appealing to the village gods of well-endowed institutions for ascension to the heavens that have been build with our bones.
PW: There’s a lot in that question so I will focus on the end of it, around prestige. There’s a tension in this question because people who are oppressed and marginalized are typically most in need of those high-prestige opportunities and funding in their immediate lives. And there is also a justice in seeing people who have typically been excluded getting those big opportunities. So, I just want to name that. And at the same time, we have to really be careful about what an opportunity is asking us to be faithful to.
So I want to answer from both directions by saying we have got to keep building alternative platforms and opportunities that uplift marginalized folks. We need to sustain and take care of the spaces for us that already do exist. And at the same time, if we accept a high-prestige prize or opportunity, we have to do our best to move responsibly within that type of space, to try to leave it better and wider than we found it.
Summer Farah: Who are writers based in Palestine we should be looking to?
I treasure the work that Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and Fady Joudah do translating Palestinian poets in their series at the Baffler, Poems from Palestine. Unconventional, maybe, but I’ll offer the Martyrs of Gaza Twitter account, documenting the life of each Palestinian killed by Israel.
PW: I’ve got to start with Mosab Abu Toha, who has been arrested and bombed and has barely made it out of Gaza, to Egypt. He shouldn’t have to choose between life and his homeland. His recently published poem, “Obit,” is so stunning and haunting, and I hope it gives Americans pause, because it is our tax dollars that paid for the shrapnel and the bullets described in that poem. Recently, I have been reading Asmaa Azaizeh, who is both a poet and a journalist. She is based in Haifa, which I want to highlight because some 20% of Israel’s current population is actually Palestinian. Some of her poems have been translated into English, including by the phenomenal Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, so I encourage folks to look up her work. She is quite an acrobatic writer—I admire her leaps! And I bring up her craft because I want to point to her deftness and artistry. I want to keep insisting that Palestinian life deserves the chance to be as abundant and gorgeous as it wants to be.
RA: Anyone who is still alive. Anyone we can keep alive. Anyone reposted by other Palestinians. I’m so heartsick over how endangered our folks are and how hungry empire is to make us or them into superhumans, supercriminals, tragic heroes, museum exhibits, cover models, or numbers in unmarked graves. Catch me on another day and maybe I can answer this question more “strategically.” Today, my heart is in the rubble.
About the Writers
Samah Serour Fadil is calling on you, dear reader, to join her in refusing and resisting the genocide of the Palestinian people, the Sudanese people, the Congolese people, the Sahrawi people, the people of Tigray, and all oppressed peoples all over the world. Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now. We can refuse with every breath, with every action. Resist. Resist. Resist.
Rasha Abdulhadi is calling on you—yes you, even as you read this—to renew your commitment to refusing and resisting genocide everywhere you find it. May your commitment to Palestinian liberation deepen your commitment to your own. May your exhaustion deepen your resolve and make you immovable. May we all be drawn irresistibly closer to refusals that are as spectacular as the violence waged against our peoples.
Priscilla Wathington is asking you to resist the lie that you are too helpless, or too busy, or too small to do anything. Take your small hand and your small voice and add it to this symphony against the genocide taking place in Gaza; and speak up not only about Gaza but also Congo, Sudan, your own backyard, and everywhere that humanity is at risk.
When I wake up, Kai has a hump jutting out of his back. Except, when I wipe the sleep from my face, I see the hump is a McDonald’s restaurant about the size of a backpack. He’s bent over in the snail position, naked except for a pair of boxers, inspecting himself in the mirror door, his face creased with concentration.
I love McDonald’s. I love it so much, in fact, I use it as an emotional measuring stick. For example, I do this thing where I say I’d rather have McDonald’s than X, where X is a variable, which stands for someone or something unpleasant. Usually, the X is also someone or something of considerable importance. Last night, the X was Kai.
He got home two hours late from the video game night with his friends and, to top it off, he forgot it was his turn to pick up dinner.
“We were stuck on the final boss,” he said. “The guys get weird when I bail.”
Recently he’s been pulling these stunts a lot. So I threw the TV remote across the room and stormed off to fill my wine glass in the kitchen. There, propped against the counter, I fed him my favorite line, implied a McRib and order for French fries would offer more emotional fulfillment than him.
“Anybody in there?” he asks, neck craned at the building in the mirror.
I slump off the mattress and crawl over beside him. My fingernail taps one of the tiny glass windows. Inside, there are booths, ivory plants, a pair of soda fountains, trash cans with plastic trays stacked on top, a counter, and overhead menus.
“I didn’t mean what I said last night. About the McDonald’s and McRib. I didn’t think my wish would come true.”
“What are you talking about?” Kai asks. “What wish? I got out of bed and this growth was coming out of my back, but I think it’s starting to look like a building.”
“Do you want me to call for help?” I ask. “This seems serious.”
“Saw is in the garage. We can cut it off.”
Of course, in this instance, “we” means “you,” as in me.
“Let me move you to the backyard,” I say, grabbing his foot. “Weather’s beautiful this afternoon.” I drag him outside into the grass. He grunts and wheezes, but he doesn’t protest.
Despite my apprehension, Kai seems unperturbed by me playing surgeon. I pour beer in a glass and set it beside his arms. I’ve brought out some of his favorite comics, so he can distract himself while I work. He wiggles his arms and tells me not to worry.
He smells like cheeseburgers and dollar-menu apple pies; much better than the cologne he wears. He’s radiating familiar warmth, which reminds me of what it feels like inside a busy kitchen. Unlike his usual aroma, it’s comforting.
I nurse him some beer and torture the jagged blade across the building’s base. Metal grinds against brick and he yelps like an injured dog. My breathing grows labored. This goes on for twenty minutes and I don’t make a scratch.
“Coming along great,” I lie.
He’s started to stretch like he’s a bear skin rug with a coffee table in the center, except the coffee table is a McDonald’s. Little ceiling lights have illuminated the restaurant’s interior and I see uniformed employees at the registers. Their faces are too small to discern, but they wave like they want me to open the door.
Kai grunts my name and tips over the beer glass. He looks up to meet my face, but his head has gone pancake flat like it’s sinking into the lawn.
“I’m almost out of beer,” he says.
I want to say I love you, but the lie pushes beyond the bounds of my comfort zone.
So I grab him another beer. While he dozes, I prop his head atop his favorite comic book. “I’m sorry I wished for the McDonald’s,” I say, and as I say it, I wonder if it’s true.
Back inside the house, I call up my old work friend, Vanessa. She has an interest in manifestation, intention setting, wishes. She’s not full-blown new age, but she does tarot and astrology readings. She claims she manifested an ex’s orgasm from five hundred miles away. One time, when money was tight, she purchased a jacket containing a stack of one-hundred-dollar bills in the pocket, a wish she’d been making for weeks.
“Is it possible to manifest a person into something else by accident,” I ask. “Kai’s had a bad morning.”
Unfortunately, my question prompts an interrogation. Vanessa doesn’t believe in accidental manifestation. She volunteers to lend me some books from her library, let me do some independent research if I’d rather not go into detail, but without specifics, she can’t share insight.
“I think my boyfriend is turning into a McDonald’s,” I say.
“Oh, I used to date a man like that. He went through an Arby’s phase. Couldn’t get him to eat anything else. Doubt it involves a wish or intention. Give it a month, and if he doesn’t change up his diet, consider an intervention. A lot of guys are resistant to therapy, but if he’s depressed, maybe you can talk him into group therapy. Remember to visualize him as the best version of himself, and when you visualize, express gratitude. Gratitude’s important.”
“Thanks, I’ll give it a shot.”
When I hang up, I try to visualize Kai, the wish, and taking back the wish, but I never ate breakfast, and lunch time has passed. My stomach gurgles and I visualize a McDonald’s quarter-pounder haloed by a golden glow. Each time I attempt to picture my boyfriend, the image sharpens, and the light intensifies.
Is it normal to get hungry during a crisis?
I Google the question, but I refresh the search page before the results can populate, because I don’t want to know the answer.
By the time I return to the backyard, the McDonald’s is as big as a shed. Kai’s feet stick out from the bottom, like the building fell on him, like he’s the dead witch in The Wizard of Oz. There’s a flowerbed, containing his favorite comic nestled inside some petunias, at the part of the building where his head used to rest. His limbs must’ve sunken into the gravel parking lot or fed into the grass medians around the perimeter. The Golden M sign grows out of the spot where his left hand had been placed and, beside it, the glass of beer I poured for him sits untouched.
I sniff around the restaurant’s dumpster, the hedges, and black-top oil slicks, searching for the scent of him, a clue he was here and I didn’t make it up, but the whole yard smells of grease and grilled meat, salty French fries. It smells like McDonald’s. I cup my hands around my mouth and call his name, ask him to let me know if he’s okay, though I don’t anticipate a response and, after an hour, my voice grows weak.
It takes a long time of sitting there brooding on the gravel to accept my situation. It takes me longer to stand and work up the nerve to pass through the glass doors. Sundown, and Kai is the same size as any McDonald’s across America.
“It’s the smell,” I say to the cashier, when she asks what brought me here this evening. She looks like Kai. All the employees look like Kai, or watered-down clones of Kai. Or I miss him. Or I love McDonald’s and he has become McDonald’s, so in a way I have come to love him and my memories of him too.
“Are there any other customers?” I ask.
“No, but there will be other customers.”
“But what if I don’t want to share?”
“Then don’t. This is your McDonald’s.”
I don’t know if there’s any grief to eat my way out of, because right now, for the first time in a while, I feel content. I order a McRib, the extra-large fries I’ve been craving all day, a large fountain soda, and two of the dollar-menu apple pies. The restaurant is open twenty-four hours. It has reliable wifi, immaculate bathrooms. It will keep me fed and see to my needs regardless of circumstances. I wish I could speak to Kai over the intercom, hear his voice, but I take it back, because I know I’m better off longing after the possibility, letting it linger like an echo in my mind while I dine in the peace of a corner booth, feet kicked up on the table. I slurp through my straw, nibble on my pie, yawn like I have nowhere to go.
I figure this is good a place as any to stay the night.
As an immigrant, I initially binged Norwegian literature to learn more of the language and the culture of my new home, but it soon felt more like an escapist pastime. Racism clouded most of my off-the-page interactions until I forged relationships with BIPOC Norwegians who empathized and shared their strategies.
In my novella Sita in Exile, set in the contemporary Norwegian Arctic, the protagonist’s preferred escape route isn’t fiction, but Hindu mythology. Sita, a newlywed desi copywriter from the Chicago suburbs, has followed in her mother’s footsteps in a way neither of them would have expected: just as her then-newlywed mother accompanied her husband from India to the United States decades ago, Sita’s married her boyfriend of not-quite-a-year and followed him to a small Norwegian town where the pandemic hasn’t quite frozen the economy. As Sita struggles to keep her grip on her relationship and on reality itself, she is buoyed by the women of color in her life: Bhoomija, a fellow American desi trying to make it as an artist in New York, and Mona, a second-generation Norwegian balancing the demands of parenthood with her goal of becoming a competitive surfer.
Sita in Exile is shaped by the Norwegian classics—like Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, with its own protagonist-in-exile—but also heavily influenced by the work of other BIPOC Norwegian novelists. Approximately 10% of the country is of Indigenous or minority background, and while BIPOC Norwegian writing is plentiful, English translations can be hard to come by. Here are 10 of my favorite BIPOC Norwegian novels with English translations, or, at a minimum, with translated English excerpts:
Pakkis by Khalid Hussain, translated by Ingeborg Kongslien and Claudia Berguson
Sajjad, a Pakistani Norwegian teenager, struggles to create and live by his own value system while navigating the clash between his religious immigrant parents’ dreams and social pressure to prioritize football, parties, and the white gaze. Pakkis, first published in 1986, when Hussain was himself a teenager, was the first Norwegian-language novel by a non-white author, and this spare, earnest coming of age story is now considered a modern classic.
Sami novelists have been publishing since before Norway’s independence in 1905. In this coming-of-age story, Lina, a 15-year-old girl struggling with dyslexia in the Norwegian far north, only manages to get through school by nursing crushes on student council president Ailu and soccer star Larin. But when she’s with Zlatan, an older man who lives in the forest and fosters her talent for traditional Sami art, life itself seems not only bearable but real. Vars’ debut Katja, translated into Norwegian from Northern Sami in 1988, is considered canon. Katja evokes the visceral sorrows of its eponymous protagonist’s boarding school experience and post-graduation navigation of non-Sami society. Lina’s story in The Most Beautiful Dawn is less bleak but no less effervescent.
Mogos drew upon his own experiences of asylum center life in northern Norway for his debut novel. As the government struggles to determine whether he is Ethiopian or Eritrean, an unnamed protagonist lives in a suspended state. He whiles away the hours either in banter with his friends or in arguments with the refugees from other regions, punctuating an existence that feels increasingly meaningless with all the trappings of masculinity and an uncertain future. As in Mogos’ most recent novel, the Eritrea-set Amid the Chaos, the young men in Mottak (the Norwegian word for reception, as in Reception Center) luxuriate in their discussion, making it both easy and impossible to ignore the surrounding despair.
Black Sky, Black Sea by Izzet Celasin, translated by Charlotte Barslund
When Oak, a naïve aspiring poet, joins protests in 1970s Taksim Square, he meets Zuhal, a committed revolutionary whose magnetism almost sways him from his pacifism. Although Oak attempts to live an apolitical life, thoughts of Zuhal’s glittering ideology—and glittering eyes—refuse to slip away. As Oak continues down his own more pedestrian path in Turkey’s politically turbulent 1980s, he is always cognizant of the alternate path of armed resistance and the allure it can have. Celasin, a political refugee who came to Norway from Turkey in the late 1980s, deftly weaves domestic scenes with dramatic moments.
After his father yells about the destruction of the reindeer’s traditional grazing fields because of the construction of a new dirtbike path, teenage Lemme and his sister Sánne take Lemme’s dirtbike and disappear. As their parents search for them, the siblings have transformed into reindeer, and they will have to look to the natural world and the old stories for guidance.
Atuonuo is proud of her mother, who lives on her own terms rather than by the rules the village elders would impose on a widow. When the charismatic Kevi proposes, Atuonuo is besotted, but hesitant to tie herself to a man so young. Kevi’s turn to aggression is quick, harsh, and lyrically wrought, and she must accept help from both her mother and the village elders to survive the beastly onslaught. Kire, who immigrated to Norway from India as an adult, is known for her translations from both Norwegian and the North-East Indian language Tenydie, as well as for her own English-language poetry and prose infused with the folklore of Nagaland.
After a tragic loss, Johnny follows his wife, Kari, from the United States back to her native Norway. Centered on Johnny’s grief, his dislocation, and his relationship with his daughter Marita, the prose of this novel echoes the language of grief as it cracks and compels. Chilean Norwegian author Carmona-Alvarez’s background as a musician is clear here and in the novel’s sequel, Bergen Youth Theatre, which follows Marita into her adolescence.
The Yellow Book by Zeshan Shakar, translated by Kari Dickson
The entire Oslo Trilogy is worth reading (here’s an excerpt from the hilarious first book, Our Street, translated by David M. Smith), but its second volume, The Yellow Book, makes full use of the indefatigable warmth of Shakar’s prose.
Norwegian Pakistani Mani has made it… kind of. His top-notch degree hasn’t netted him an international consultancy job that would reassure his anxious father or his girlfriend, Meena. Instead, he finds himself settling into a government job at the Ministry of Education. It provides the possibility of belonging to something ambitious, positive, and—put in the diplomatic jargon of his new life—mainstream, if he can just maintain his focus. Shakar’s light touch brings levity to a novel about a young, brown man living in Oslo during the 2011 terrorist attacks.
Emily Foreverby Maria Navarro Skaranger, translated by Martin Aitken
Navarro Skaranger’s debut novel All Foreigners Keep Their Curtains Closed delved into the life of a teenage girl in a predominantly ethnic minority suburb of Oslo. The 2020 film adaptation is currently available to stream on Netflix.
Her latest book Emily Forever presents its young, pregnant, working-class protagonist through a kaleidoscope. The sharpness of the details describing Emily’s changing life are softly satirical—chosen, it feels, to match those that would delight a newspaper reporter penning their first expose about multiculturalism—and her dulled responses leave her something of an enigma. A quietly rebellious novel that sees Emily through the lens of others, the 19-year-old expectant mother refuses to grasp for something to make meaning of her life, stubbornly defying societal expectations.
The Thinnai by Ari Gautier, translated by Blake Smith
In a working-class neighborhood of Pondicherry, Gilbert, an old Frenchman, settles himself on a local’s thinnai (veranda) and spins a tale about a mysterious diamond his family has been guarding for generations. Is Gilbert merely a loquacious holdover from Pondicherry’s days as a French outpost, or does he have a new con in mind? This is a picaresque written originally in French; Gautier is an Indo-Malagasy writer who immigrated to Norway as an adult and grew up amongst the communists, the missionaries, and the market stall women he paints so vibrantly in the novel.
The WGA had been on strike for months, with SAG-AFTRA joining the picket line fray just days earlier, when Bethenny Frankel, former star of Real Housewives of New York City, took to Instagram to say her piece: reality TV stars needed a union. It wasn’t fair that networks aired reruns of their shows for years or could use their faces in promotional materials for forever, all without paying the people who owned those faces one cent in residuals.
Soon, Bethenny upped the ante: She was suing The Real Housewives’s network, Bravo, and parent company, NBC, in a class-action suit alleging “depraved mistreatment” of reality TV participants. “[T]he sordid and dark underbelly of NBC’s widely consumed reality TV universe has remained under wraps for far too long,” Bethenny’s attorneys wrote. “Please be advised that the day of reckoning has arrived.”
The news grabbed my attention immediately. Regardless of Bethenny’s motives—which were quickly questioned in my social media feeds—if somebody wants to start a union and blast the executives who messed with my WGA friends, I’m here for it. But I was also interested for selfish reasons. I was working on a reality TV project myself, one centering Bethenny’s television alma mater, The Real Housewives.
Put another way, I’m 34 years old, which means The Real Housewives has been on television for half my life.
I’ve been re-watching old seasons of the franchise, trying to understand what this show—often treated as a trashy guilty pleasure—means for the more feminist, equitable society I want to live in. This undertaking involves dissecting women in 11 different cities over 17 years because, yes, that’s how big Bravo’s franchise is. Put another way, I’m 34 years old, which means The Real Housewives has been on television for half my life.
Re-watching old episodes, the overlap in our lifespans couldn’t be more obvious. It didn’t feel like viewing a show; it felt like reliving my life, remembering the world that raised us both.
Over the last 17 years, The Real Housewives and I made ourselves small, viciously slut shamed, and un-ironically Girlbossed; we mourned past pains and wore pussy hats so we could be #WomenSupportingWomen, but we also lost sight of what support should look like and who deserved supporting. We made paltry attempts at intersectional feminism that ended in backlash, costing us allies—and rights. Throughout all this, society’s expectations and definitions of women kept changing—continue changing—but one truth remains: We might often categorize The Real Housewives as frivolous pop culture, but it has always reflected how the world exists for real women. Two things can be true.
Then came Bethenny with her call for a union, safer workplaces, and management accountability, all things I want for women everywhere in that more equitable world I dream of. When Bethenny introduced those ideas as Real Housewives demands, I wanted her to succeed because I want women to succeed, and I see The Real Housewives and regular women’s fates linked.
So yes, I’m paying attention to Bethenny Frankel. I don’t want her call for change to go the way of our dream for a female president, of a lasting MeToo movement, of a woman’s right to define themselves and control their bodies—all things we thought we’d achieve in the last 17 years, only to come up short.
Speaking of those years, how did everything go so wrong? If my Real Housewives re-watch has taught me anything, it’s that the answer was always there. We just needed to pay more attention to what we were watching.
The Real Housewives debuted following five Orange County women in 2006 when I was 16 years old. It was a time when fashionable meant wearing skin-tight, low-rise jeans, pants so traumatically unflattering, we invented an insult for how they deformed our bodies—the muffin top—and everyone publicly counted the days until the Olsen twins, Lindsay Lohan, and other starlets turned 18 and could all be legally slept with.
It meant wearing suggestive clothes and a don’t-take-me-too-seriously demeanor.
Our ideas about what it meant to be a woman were so small that when Bravo announced its new show following five “glamorous… sexy, sophisticated” housewives, viewers knew exactly what that meant: Straight, skinny, white, cis women. Itdidn’t yet mean screaming, partying, or throwing wine, stereotypes with which the show would later become synonymous. It meant wearing suggestive clothes and a don’t-take-me-too-seriously demeanor, all while performing the labor of the homemaker archetype with an easy, agreeable smile. Those first season Orange County housewivesnailed this formula—except Jo.
Jo is a 24-year-old engaged to an older, wealthy man named Slade. And Jo, it should be said, is not white; she’s Peruvian-American, though we can likely thank ABC’s fictional Desperate Housewives for The Real Housewives’s decision to cast one token Latinx woman.
When we meet Jo, she’s acing the acceptable type of womanhood. Low-rise jeans look great on her. She’s recently quit her job, intending to stay home, to be Slade’s perfect housewife. The problem? She hates cleaning! She’s bored! In the 1960s, women were prescribed valium for this. In 2006, we put them on TV and watched their relationships implode.
Slade wants Jo to be happy caring for his house, picking up his dry cleaning, and parenting the kids from his first marriage. But Jo wants to go out! Jo wants to work! Jo does not want to clean! So, they fight. Slade laments Jo’s disinterest in becoming that housewife he’s always wanted, and she criesbecause she loves this creep. She wishes she was more like the woman he dreams of, too.
Enter Kimberly, Jo’s housewife fairy godmother. Kimberly, like Jo, used to work, until it was time to quit her job to raise babies. Kimberly, also like Jo, struggled with this identity shift at first. But then, Kimberly found new hobbies: Day drinking at country clubs, getting a boob job, buying lingerie.
The worst part of this regressive Cinderella story is realizing Kimberly seems genuinely happy. She’s not only accepted the narrow parameters of womanhood in 2006—she’s embraced them, just like my friends and I embraced low-rise jeans. We never considered changing our pants or the roles society thrust upon us. We shrunk our bodies to fit the jeans, and we shrunk the women to make them ideal wives.
The Real Housewives scored one of its first water-cooler moments in 2009, courtesy of the first season of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. This cast had no token Latinx woman—only skinny white ladies with dark skin via spray tan. Needless to say, our ideas about how to be a woman were still very straight, very white, and very small. And maybe it was because I was getting older, but it felt like the punishments for acting out had gotten steeper. Which brings me to a popular late-aughts punishment: Slut shaming.
Laurel’s face crumpled as she realized what everyone really thought of her.
Exhibit A: Laurel. My senior year of high school, my class voted Laurel “biggest mouth,” because once in English class she made a list of all the guys she’d hooked up with, and “class whore” wasn’t allowed. When an oblivious teacher announced, “This year’s biggest mouth is… Laurel,” during Senior Awards Night, Laurel’s face crumpled as she realized what everyone really thought of her. I thought she was going to cry. Girls who were her friends—some of whom had voted for her—tried to comfort her, while boys who’d gladly accepted blowjobs before also voting for her snickered.
Exhibit B: Danielle. Danielle isNew Jersey’s single wife who likes wearing skimpy clothes and sharing that she’s been engaged 19 times. She does not fit the mold of what a proper housewife, née woman, should be.
The rumors begin: most involve her sex life—specifically that she sleeps with married men, something the other housewives frequently repeat without much proof. During the season, the women also find a book andpolice records that seem to very much prove Danielle was arrested in the ’80s for kidnapping and extortion, and for troubling involvement with the Columbian drug cartel. But why shame a woman in 2009 for her cartel-kidnapper connections when you could nail her for a real crime, like enjoying sex? In the season finale, Danielle and married housewifeTeresa have a fight that ends with Teresa flipping a table and calling Danielle “prostitution whore,” a moment still seen as one of series’s most iconic of all time.
No one chastises Teresa for making a scene at dinner—never mind for weaponizing sexuality, shaming sex workers, or confusing cheating rumors with sex work. Those latter infractions were the era’s social norms. But calling attention to oneself, making a scene, that could get a woman in trouble. At 18, when the show first aired, I attributed Teresa’s lack of punishment to the fact that she, unlike Danielle (and Laurel) had a husband—a man—who vouched for her behavior. In fact, he called it “sexy.” I thought loud female behavior didn’t matter if guys still wanted to sleep with you and support you.
But that teenage explanation was a shallow understanding of a deeper truth: Teresa didn’t flip the table because she was angry about how the world controlled or shamed women. She flipped it to put a woman who didn’t conform to traditional expectations in her place. (Which was also why Laurel’s friends voted for her, even if they didn’t know that themselves.) Any woman who stands up for a world that holds women down always will find allies to protect her. It’s the ones making moves against that world who end up out of luck.
With the 2010s came changes for women. Not systemic changes. But we did make several superficial changes. And we certainly called it progress. Actually, we called the changes Leaning In, and from leaning in, a new female archetype was born: The Girlboss.
TheReal Housewives’s viewers Leaned In by embracing louder, Teresa-esque wives who weren’t afraid to start fights, throw drinks, or even launch a prosthetic leg. We didn’t care if these women had a man’s permission—as long as they were mostly still white, conventionally attractive, and managing the houses and kids (labor that continuously went unacknowledged). And these new, louder housewives Leaned In, too: They capitalized on fame from the show and started businesses. The women sold everything from clothing to cannoli, sex toys to hair care, butt workouts to booze. They were women; hear them roar—then buy one of their products.
Outside of Real Housewives-land, I was a college student, then a recently graduated twentysomething who embraced this Lean In-Girlboss mantle in full. It’s embarrassing now to admit, but I did. After years of being told to stay small and quiet, of understanding men should dictate when loud female behavior was OK, this new attitude felt good—or, as my friends and I suddenly loved to say: Empowering. And since we couldn’t put our names on products like the housewives,we Girlbossed by focusing on different things, like pants. First, we killed muffin tops by moving our jeans’ waistlines higher. Then we ditched jeans altogether for something infinitely more comfortable: Leggings. When the world told us leggings aren’t pants, we insisted they were. We channeled Orange County housewifeTamra, who in 2014 became a GIF after screaming, “THAT’S MY OPINION!” perfectly encapsulating the regrettable Girlboss attitude that having an opinion is the only requirement necessary to share it.
Plenty of people at the time knew these Lean In-Girlboss ideas were garbage.
Plenty of people at the time knew these Lean In-Girlboss ideas were garbage, particularly queer and trans writers and writers of color. They called it faux feminism. Rich people feminism. White people feminism. Because the opportunity for conventionally attractive, mostly white housewives on TV to make money isn’t a landmark moment for labor or gender equality; it’s capitalism with beauty gatekeeping thrown in. And what oppressive systems were we dismantling, exactly, by replacing skin-tight jeans with…skinnier, tighter leggings? (Leggings that, in 2013, Lululemon founder Chip Wilson proclaimed “just don’t work” for all bodies.) Critics dubbed the era’s pathetic attempts at feminism as society paying lip service to progress while making none at all. And they were exactly right, except for one thing: Not enough people who needed to hear this criticism—and yes, I’m talking about white women—were calling themselves feminists, anyway.
Most were in a period of I’m not feminist, but… a line I distinctly remember telling my college roommate in 2012 after one of our school’s star athletes allegedly sexually assaulted a female student and received little punishment. Not even Sophia Amoruso, the largely forgotten white woman who coined the term Girlboss, considered herself a feminist, telling Elle Magazine in 2014, “I don’t really like to use that word.”
But the deeper into the 2010s we went, the more many women’s relationship to the word changed. Maybe it was because one in five women were sexually assaulted in college—a new stat for the public in 2014, even though it seemed obvious to me and so many others who’d attended college in the 2010s. Maybe it was because of Beyoncé. Isn’t everything good that happens, on some level, related to Beyoncé? Or maybe it was because the more times society leaves you saying, I’m not a feminist, but…, the more opportunities you have to ask yourself, But why not? Which is to say: The 2010’s embrace of feminism—particularly for white women—took time. But once we arrived, the Girlboss’s rebrand from superficial symbol of vaguely empowered white woman in leggings to superficial symbol of a white feminist was swift.
And there’s no doubt she was a superficial symbol, because if this new Feminist Girlboss had any substance to her, then we would have addressed the important critiques about how class and race and wealth and other factors create uneven pains and obstacles for women.
But she didn’t. So we didn’t.
Worse, by the time masses of white women did start considering these critiques, we were approaching November of 2016, the moment we thought we had a fool-proof plan to solve them. As New York housewife Carole put it: “This is a historic election [because] … we showed the world that Americans will not tolerate division, exclusion, fear-mongering, sexist, and racist rhetoric.” Carole is reading from a pre-written speech, of course, one she never delivers. But it’s a speech that echoes what my fellow Girlbosses and I had been so sure was true: We were going to solve gender inequity by making a thin, blonde, white lady the first female president of the United States.
The 9th season of The Real Housewives of Atlanta filmed the summer before the 2016 election but aired mostly in its aftermath, premiering just two days before the election where the lady president did not save us.
The idea that America was cruel enough to elect him forced me to do some long-overdue white feminist Girlboss reflecting.
I was a 27-year-old who stayed up crying until 2 a.m. on election night, desperate to hear officials had found another 70,000 Democratic ballots in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. I wasn’t so surprised the country couldn’t elect her, butthe idea that America was cruel enough to elect him forced me to do some long-overdue white feminist Girlboss reflecting.
“Don’t blame me,” Atlanta housewife Kenya quips about our new president at one point. She’s joking, but not, because, Black women aren’t the reason we failed to make the thin, blonde, white lady president. As for white women, that’s another story, but this Atlanta season features an all-Black cast. (Atlanta is, in fact, the only cityto feature anyBlack Housewivesfor the first decade the show is on television, apart from one woman on one season of the since-forgotten Real Housewives of D.C.) Still, the Atlanta wiveshad their own reflecting to do.
Phaedra sets the self-improvement tone early by making peace with Kenya—a woman she’d nicknamed Kenya Moore Whore two seasons prior—and declaring, “As women, it cannot be acceptable to call each other hos and bitches and prostitutes… We have to make a conscious effort to change.”Then the message explodes in her face at the end of the season.
But first, Shereé and Bob. We spend much of this season rooting for Shereé to get back with her ex, Bob, only to later learn that Bob previously abused her. This comes to light when Bob jokes(!) on a group vacation that maybe he “didn’t choke [Shereé] hard enough” years ago. In a confessional interview, Shereé says she didn’t want to cry because that would give a man power while ruining everyone else’s day. I know Shereé thinks she’s being the strong, feminist woman we were all supposed to be now, but in practice, that Strong WomanTM is just another way we teach all women to stay small and quiet, now under the guise of having power—and for Black women, this trope comes with bigger consequences.
Meanwhile, Porsha and Kandi are fighting. It starts when Kandi says Porsha hooked up with one of her exes, and escalates all season until Porsha says she heard Kandi wanted to drug and sleep with her. Which, yes, would constitute rape. Porsha accuses Kandi of wanting to rape her. Kandi vehemently denies it, while Porsha stands her ground, saying her source is sure. Then at the end of the season, Porsha’s source admits she made up that rape rumor after all. That source? One Miss Phaedra Parks: The woman who told us to make a conscious effort to be better.
Watching the women digest this news, I felt like I did on election night: Unprepared for how cruel we could be. It’s in that moment, though, that Phaedra’s message feels more necessary than ever. It is time for us to commit to changing.
The world had hurt us. Men had hurt us, women had hurt us, and we had hurt other people, other women. But we couldn’t go on like this. Something had to change.
Still, it’s hard to be better when you’re so angry: At the man who hurt you, the woman who lied about you, the people who voted for that new president (not to mention the ones who didn’t vote). I was 27 years old and had spent a lifetime trying to be the “right” kind of woman. Just when I thought I’d figured out how to be an empowered, feminist Girlboss, the country elected a man credibly accused of rape to become its next president. So yeah, I was angry. Every woman who’d been hurt by a patriarchal society was angry. Finally, we were ready to put our anger into action.
Support women. This was the decided way forward. Not Black lives matter, or trans women are women. Just, support women. #WomenSupportingWomen. Sure, some of us thought these other mantras were implied by our support women cheers, though if we’d looked at who was chanting with us, we might have known better. Alternatively, we could have watched The Real Housewives of New York City, noticed that a show taking place in one of the most diverse cities in the country included just one woman of color in 10 seasons, and no one who wasn’t straight, so maybe we needed to be more explicit about inclusion when trying to solve the problems of women. But we didn’t notice. We were busy being women supporting women.
In 2017, as I entered my late twenties, we marched in pussy hats, took down Harvey Weinstein, and shared our stories of MeToo, a movement I’d say maybe half of us knew was started by Tarana Burke, a Black woman, years earlier. We combined that work with more emotionally symbolic victories, like buying t-shirts proclaiming “The future is female,” “Nevertheless, she persisted,” and “Girls just want to have fun-damental rights.” The Merriam-Webster Dictionary made “feminism” its 2017 word of the year. Imagine, a word I’d personally shunned five years earlier now the word of the year.
At that moment, I thought we were going to do it. We were going to make life materially better for women. The winds of change were on our side.
We didn’t notice. We were busy being women supporting women.
In reality, everyone seemed to be on our side—a clear sign that our side had problems. “Support women,” after all, didn’t draw distinctions over what support looked like or who deserved supporting. So while Ithought we were going to listen to the problems of women we’d long ignored and try to do something to fix them, not everyone agreed, including some women of the 10th season of The Real Housewives of New York City.
The season aired in 2018—a peak year for proclaiming support of women—which is probably why Ramona and future union matriarch Bethenny both race to accuse one another of not living up to the standard. It begins when Bethenny calls Ramona to tell her she’s being mean to other women (specifically, she’s being mean to Bethenny). But Ramona beats Bethenny to the punch, screaming from a New York City sidewalk, “You don’t support other women!” Ramona’s reasoning has nothing to do with Bethenny becoming rich off of her brand SkinnyGirl, a name that doesn’t at all support women. Instead, Ramona drops this bomb because Bethenny made fun of Ramona, gossiped about Carole, and wasn’t happy when fellow housewife Dorinda gifted her a human-sized nutcracker for Christmas.
At the risk of stating the obvious, one rich white lady’s right to be thanked for gifting another rich white lady a toy nutcracker is not what feminists meant when we said support women. None of the behavior Ramona mentions is because it doesn’t contribute to the systemic unfairness we wanted to stop—though, here’s a behavior that does: Voting for the accused rapist to be president, which Ramona almost certainly did.
No housewife mentions voting records when Ramona yells at Bethenny. Neither do viewers. Viewers turn the moment into a GIF and buy t-shirts with Ramona screaming “You don’t support other women!” Then in September of 2018, a few months after this fight and one week before my twenty-ninth birthday, we watch Dr. Christine Blasey Ford tell the world Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her—receiving support Anita Hill could’ve only dreamed of. We are emotionally shattered when it doesn’t matter.
Toppling powerful predators is hard; it can’t happen every day.
Clearly, the support women mantra had been co-opted by bad actors—by Ramona and others. (A predictable outcome given white women’s aforementioned 2016 voting record.) But those of us who wanted systemic change needed to accept that our problems ran deeper. As 2018 became 2019, the marches and takedowns of men like Harvey Weinstein slowed. That’s not our fault—toppling powerful predators is hard; it can’t happen every day. But we could wear spunky feminist t-shirts whenever we wanted, and increasingly, it seemed like that was the only goal we consistently worked toward. It was as if we’d decided feminism was easy, gender equality one “This pussy grabs back,” t-shirt away.
But feminism isn’t something you wear or even proclaim. Feminism is paid maternity and paternity leave. Feminism is recognizing housekeeping and childcare as work. Feminism is a world that respects, protects, and grants the same opportunities to everyone, regardless of race, sexuality, and gender identity—and making that abundantly clear in the work you do. Feminism is work—massive work—that involves reconstructing our political and social systems. Pretending it’s easy won’t keep alleged sexual predators out of the White House or off the Supreme Court. It just put a shirt quoting AOC in my dresser. And ones quoting Ramona in the drawers of others.
There is only one way to make the world better for women: You have to make the world better foreveryone. You have to care as much about violence against Black men and trans women as you do about violence against young white women—and recognize the latter is a lot less common. By 2020, society seemed ready to do that. Having failed in every other attempt at world-betterment, we finally understood the need for intersectional feminism, considering how class and race and wealth and other factors impact a woman’s experience in the world. (So, yes, broad swaths of women “discovered” in their early thirties the ideas queer and trans writers and writers of color had raised during the Girlboss era of my early twenties—ideas that weren’t new then, either.)
Our move toward intersectional feminism succeeded on one metric: We transformed the idea of a woman on The Real Housewives.Admittedly, we made little progress in queer inclusivity—17 years in, there’s two openly LGBTQIA+ housewives, despite legions of queer fans. The franchise has, however, made a serious commitment to casting non-white women on the show, including Garcelle, the first Black housewife on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. The problems came when the white women needed to be as serious in their commitment to the new wives.
The 11th season of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills aired in 2021 and opened with Garcelle telling Kyle, a white housewife, why it matters that Kyle accused Garcelle of not donating to her charity after pledging to do so. “I don’t think you realize the effect it has on me as a Black woman,” Garcelle says. “There are stereotypes that people think we don’t pay for our rent, that we don’t tip.” Kyle later recounts this conversation to Sutton, another white housewife, and Crystal, Beverly Hills’s first Asian-American housewife. Crystal begins articulating the pain of experiencing racist stereotypes, until Sutton interjects to say this isn’t a race thing; everybody deals with stereotypes. And with that, the cracks in a white woman’s allyship come into view.
“Are you one of those people that [doesn’t] see color?” Crystal responds. “Tell me you’re that girl. [The one who says] I don’t see color.” Cue the dramatic music added in post-production. Cue Sutton tearfully declaring, “I really don’t see color. I don’t see race.”
“Race exists,” Crystal responds. “I’m proud of my race.” But Sutton and Kyle don’t hear her. “The word ‘racist,’ to me is like a virus, worse than COVID… To even get into this upsets me,” Sutton declares, to Kyle’s agreement. The women are defensive now, seeming more afraid of being labeled a racist than of engaging in racist behavior. Like too many white women before them, they want to correct the problem until it turns out they might be part of it.
Life was better before we had to think about how to be fairer to everyone.
Maybe The Real Housewives isn’t the best medium for informed discussions on race. “I feel like most people watch these shows for the escapism and to laugh at it? The race stuff is depressing and stressful,” one Reddit user wrote, echoing posts I’ve seen online. But inside these comments is more than a request for a venue change; it’s Sutton and Kyle’s desire to not have the conversation at all. And inside that refusal is an admission that intersectional feminism is too much work, that life was better before we had to think about how to be fairer to everyone.
But it’s no coincidence that the fall of Roe and disintegration of reproductive freedom coincides with the removal of accurate Black history from classrooms and the eraser of queer and trans rights across the country. When you don’t care about advancing all people forward, you put others’ rights and lives in jeopardy.
That was where my Real Housewives re-watch ended until Bethenny gave it an epilogue. By moving to create a union for The Real Housewives, she gave those women—yes, those rich, straight, and cis, but slightly less white women—a chance to win. Public support for labor unions, after all, is high. The popularity of the WAG and SAG-AFTRA strikes, both of which secured labor-rights wins, are testament to that. And if as The Real Housewives go, so go women; if as the rights of women go, so go the rights of every overlooked and underprotected person, then we should all want a Real Housewives union win. Yet every day, I’m more convinced it will turn out like all those other things we failed to achieve for the last 17 years.
Vanity Fair recently published an article about The Real Housewives’s behind-the-scenes. It contains some damning details, including #WomenSupportingWomen bad actor Ramona using racial slurs. But the most memorable moment to me came from Eboni, New York City’s first Black housewife. According to the article, “Presented with the idea that she might participate in Frankel’s organizing, [Eboni] said, ‘Fuck Bethenny Frankel. You think I’m going to let some white girl speak for me with my experience with a multibillion-dollar corporation?’” I’m not exactly trying to call out Bethenny’s intersectionality here, though the quote is telling. It also shows how much work is left to make life better. I’m still convinced The Real Housewives reflects how we treat actual women, but I understand that connection isn’t random: What society accepts from its least-respected pop culture is alwaysa barometer for how we treat the least-respected people. To the extent The Real Housewives has let us down with its representations and treatment of women, and, frankly, anyone, it’s because society has let us down, too. I want to believe the world can be better. So I’ll keep watching and looking for answers. I’ll keep hoping one day that it will be.
The world within Nathan Hill’s newest novel Wellnessreflects and refracts parts of our own: the firehose of Facebook posts veering toward conspiracy; the research studies that offer insight into the development of adolescents or how to sleep better or how to eat; belief in the power of manifestation; articles that beg us to click with their claims that this one trick might save you from x, y, or z; the turmeric shots or crystals we might incorporate in the hopes of healing; and smartwatches that tell us, well, everything we might want to know about a body. Wellness pulls back the curtain on the illusion that anything we could possibly want is within reach, if only we tried the right supplement or study or routine.
Hill, who previously authored national bestseller The Nix, returns with another sweeping tale, one that follows the marriage of Elizabeth and Jack, who first meet because they live in apartments whose windows face one another. The image of them both separately looking through glass to peer in and imagine the other’s interior life captures many of the questions that this novel raises: How much can we really know about another person? What role do stories have in our perceptions of ourselves? Of love? Of the lives we build? How do we find happiness with ourselves, our bodies, and the ones we love when we are navigating life in a world telling us that things could always be better?
I had the opportunity to speak with Hill via Zoom about intuition versus information, the coldness of algorithms, and the ways our relationships can be shaped by the narratives we give them.
Jacqueline Alnes: Was there a defining moment that sparked the start of Wellness, or more just the collection of all these technologies and powders and tinctures that are sold to us?
Nathan Hill: It was that era, like 2014-ish when people started getting weird on Facebook, but we weren’t used to that yet. I had this creeping sensation that people were doing things and believing things and I was like, Where did this come from? My friends and I were all doing this stuff and now, looking back on it, I’m like, why was I tracking my macros? Why were we spiralizing zucchini instead of just making pasta? It started to feel like some people I knew, who were otherwise reasonable people, were living in completely different fact universes from me. We’re used to this feeling now, that we can’t decide on the same facts or the same reality.
JA: I am similarly obsessed with the 2010s. I was in college at the time and I was deep into apple cider vinegar and so many other diet “hacks.”
NH: It was this moment of optimism, I think. Look at all this new stuff we’re discovering! Look at all this information we now have! That optimism was leveraged by capitalism into clickbaity stuff that made us all constantly worried and afraid.
JA: I was laughing at “The System” watch that Jack wears, that measures literally almost everything you can about a human body. I wear a running watch and there’s this level where the information is too much. Like, did I sleep well? I can answer that myself when I wake up; I don’t need a watch to tell me. How much information do I need about my body when I’m living in it?
NH: Exactly. I feel like we’re all sort of coming out of it now, but for a while there we imbued those measurements with meaning. Technology is really good at counting your steps. But is that really all that meaningful? I also had an app on my phone, for a little while, that I would leave running in the night and it would listen to me tossing and turning and establish how much REM sleep I got. Eventually, I could find no pattern between what the app was telling me and how I felt in the morning, and sometimes it was weird because I’d wake up feeling great and the app was like, you slept like shit last night. And then my mood would plummet. It was paradoxically controlling my mood.
JA: Information is obviously so valuable. Elizabeth reviews a slew of studies in an attempt to understand her toddler. But there’s this line between information and intuition. From writing this novel, did you come to a conclusion about what that balance might look like for people?
NH: The issue of misinformation and disinformation is very well established. I think we can be misled by true things as much as we can be misled by false things if the true things are coming at us like a firehose of information and we don’t have time or perspective to contextualize them or apply any kind of wisdom to them.
All of my friends had babies about exactly the same time, so I was watching them go through this. They are very thoughtful people whose parenthood they wanted to be informed by the best practices. But there are so many best practices that they started thinking they were bad parents. I’m watching them be amazing parents and they felt they were failing every day. You can never live up to all this information.
We live in a media ecosystem where, because these stories get clicks, we keep seeing these stories about some study, somewhere, with thirty participants where they learn something about a molecule. Suddenly, there’s a new health fad. That’s not how it’s supposed to work. It’s supposed to be very incremental. We’re not supposed to make big, rash decisions based on small sample sizes. There needs to be a reevaluation of health science communication and maybe, also, from a consumer’s point of view, taking everything with a grain of salt. If there’s a study that says, “We all need to do turmeric shots,” maybe look at the methodology.
JA: Something I felt while reading the book was that Elizabeth is a reasonable person, doing research that is well-founded. On the other side, you have Brandie, who I loved, who is just manifesting her life, but to a delusional point where she’s unable to see the reality of her life. I usually think of these types of people as polar opposites, but the book allowed me to see that they are connected in that they are all people reaching for answers, and both methods can become harmful, in a way.
Sometimes the stories impact you more than the turmeric or the juice cleanse.
NH: It struck me that any idea, even a good idea, when believed in too rigidly, too ideologically, too inflexibly, can turn into error. Brandie’s original thought, which is if you have confidence and intentionality about your life, then good things are more likely to happen, seems reasonable. But when you believe that so hard that you begin to think your good thoughts are sending good vibrations into the universe, or I’m actually changing the universe with my thoughts, then you might start to believe anyone who’s down on their luck it must be their fault –– they must be low-vibration people. I’ve heard of people who believe in the manifestation stuff thinking, Why would I get insurance? That’s me thinking bad things that might happen. She’s believing in it way too hard, and it’s curdling into error.
Elizabeth, too, is trying to make her parenthood informed by all the best scientific practices, but if you do that too much, it drives you crazy. There’s a line late in the book where Elizabeth’s mentor says something like, believe what you’re going to believe, but believe with curiosity, believe with humility. I think if there’s a moral of the story it’s probably that.
JA: You did so much research for this book. I know this is not going to cover even a slice of it, but what did you learn about social media, conspiracy theories, and misinformation that interested you?
NH: I read hundreds of pages of Facebook patent applications. Facebook is very hush-hush about the algorithm but they’re all patented and in that you have to describe what the algorithm does. That’s all public information. What struck me is how the algorithms are literally speaking a different language. That sounds obvious, but they’re taking us, the human person, and abstracting us into various mathematical values and then establishing relationships between other mathematical abstractions. And that’s all we are.
What was surprising to me was understanding that we are a node in a system, and all the algorithm really cares about are these relationships to other nodes, and whether those connections are brittle or robust. The robust connections then implies that they might be interested in the connections that those nodes are connected to. In none of this incredibly brilliant genius-level math is anyone thinking, Are they having a good time? Is this good for them? Are they happy doing this?
I was struck, in 2017-2018 by how many friends I had to ignore or unfriend on Facebook, how many people were going down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory. I would message them and say, Hey, I don’t think this is right, and talk it out with them, and Facebook would keep showing me more of that content. I realized that I was losing this certain friend because I was fighting all the time, and Facebook would show me something he had posted three weeks ago that I had missed like, hey, do you want to fight about this now? It didn’t care whether I was fighting; it cared that I was engaging. It’s coldly, unemotionally mathematical. It cares about engagement and it does not care whether it makes you happy or not. It should have been obvious, but it was most surprising as I was doing the research.
JA: I feel like as a user of social media I so often tell myself it’s a platform where I can tell my story, like it feels personal and human. You get that in the book, too, with Brandie telling a version of her marriage on Instagram and then you get the reality which is sad. It’s interesting to think about the disparity between what social media might be and the algorithm that it really is.
NH: I do not disbelieve people who say that they find some of the social media platforms valuable to them. If they’ve been able to carve out community in these places that feels intimate and good to them, that’s fantastic. I think you’re running uphill if you try to do that, but I do think it’s possible. My sense of it, and my experience with it, is that anything that goes on the platform just feels like “the platform.” When I post something on Facebook, it starts to feel like an ad rather than a sincere thing that I’m saying. There’s some kind of alchemy that happens whenever you post on social media, it’s a little separated from you, it’s a performance of you—almost necessarily. I think there’s a kind of Marshall McLuhan “the medium is the message” kind of quality to social media and the way we use it.
We don’t live in a world that offers a whole lot of care. But when you go to a spa, they’re listening to you. They are filling a gap, and sometimes grifters are coming in to fill that gap.
I think I understood a long time ago that Twitter was just bad for me. There was this joke account, Cormac McCarthy as if he were on Twitter, and it was funny only because you would never put this stuff on Twitter. I’m reading these tweets thinking, this is what I want to be reading, and if this is antagonistic to the platform’s ethos, then why am I on Twitter?
JA: There’s such a powerful thread of storytelling throughout this novel, and how time can shape memory, like you meet someone ten years ago and you have this story of your meeting and years later it’s not what you kept it as in your mind. How do we tell ourselves true stories when there is so much influencing our perceptions? When the power of story erodes, who are you? Are you the story you tell yourself?
NH: There’s this old thought experiment that I love and I was thinking about a lot when I was writing the book. It’s the Ship of Theseus. I think it was first told by Plutarch in one of his histories. The story is that the hero, Theseus, returns to Athens, and every year thereafter, the Athenians take his famous ship for a sail. Over time, the ship needs to be repaired—an oar here, a plank there—and after two centuries of this, every bit of the Ship of Theseus has been replaced. The question is: Is this still the Ship of Theseus? Is this still the same ship even though everything that’s made the ship has been replaced?
I was thinking about friends of mine who were going to Phish concerts in their hippie garb who are now corporate lawyers. I was thinking about friends of mine who were completely straight-edge, didn’t touch a drop of chemicals in high school who are now LSD shamans. People can really, radically change. The thing about having a storytelling brain is that we will tell ourselves a story about why it makes sense, no matter what happens. I think we are really capable of fooling ourselves with that story.
JA: Speaking of marriage, because of this book, I asked my husband this morning, Do you think that love is a story we tell ourselves or is it real? And he was like, What are you doing? To think about how much you built on your first time meeting someone or how much you’ve evolved, and to have two people telling stories at the same time, hoping they stay linked, it’s wild. Through writing Elizabeth and Jack’s story, did you learn anything about love or relationships that stood out to you?
NH: By the way, did your husband have an answer?
JA: He said love is real, so we’re in it for another year.
NH: Good answer. My wife and I have a great origin story. We had been flirting over email for a very long time and then finally she was like, I’m coming to visit you. I was driving to the airport to pick her up and got into a car accident on the way. It was a really rainy night and I spun out and hit another car. It was before cellphones so I had no way to reach her; she was waiting at the airport, thought she had been stood up, and on the side of the road I got talking to the guy whose car I had hit for a very long time and I was telling him how she was coming to see me. The tow truck took my car away and I convinced this guy to bring me to the airport as proof. We have told that story so many times that I’ve heard people telling it for us, just because they’ve heard it so many times. We have completely mythologized ourselves, chapter and verse, people can repeat it.
But your question was about love. There’s this interesting research out there that talks about how emotions are simply the names we give to certain bodily sensations. Somewhere along the way, when we feel a certain way, we learn to call that anger, or we learn to call that hunger. I think if you think that love is that fluttery feeling you get inside at that first high romantic moment, then that might be disappointing ten years later when that fluttery feeling is a little more rare. But it’s replaced by something else and that feeling is not necessarily something inside of you. If people think of it as something that happens within themselves, it can curdle into something selfish, but if you think of it more as a practice, as a thing that’s mutually built and given, you can get that feeling back but it’s given instead of taken. That’s not anything new. bell hooks defines it that way in All About Love, Dan Savage has something very similar with his campground rule that in any relationship you leave it better than you found it. This all implies action.
JA: It brings me back to thinking about wellness. Sometimes we think of it as the sparkly turmeric shot you think is going to heal you at the grocery store or the really expensive chlorophyll stuff that you can sprinkle on stuff and you’re like, wow, I did my job today. In reality, it’s deeper than that; it’s more of a practice. It’s rooted in how we feel about our bodies and how we’ve been conditioned to feel about illness.
There’s some alchemy that happens whenever you post on social media, it’s a little separated from you, it’s a performance of you—almost necessarily.
NH: We live in a culture where you’re one nice, forever home away from happiness or one chlorophyll whatever away from never needing to go to the doctor again. I understand it. The last time I went to the doctor, I filled out stuff in triplicate even though I’d already filled everything out online and was seen an hour past my appointment time and saw the doctor for eight minutes and she couldn’t remember what she told me last time and then I got charged $200 and had to fight my insurance company to pay for it. That’s just a normal experience, you know? If there’s an influencer who’s saying if you take chlorophyll you’ll never need to see the doctor again, that’s tempting. I understand the impulse. We don’t live in a world that offers a whole lot of care; we don’t feel listened to. But when you go to a spa, they’re listening to you. They are filling a gap, and sometimes grifters are coming in to fill that gap.
JA: What do you hope readers take away from reading Wellness?
NH: I was having a fight with a friend once, he was doing a turmeric smoothie cleanse and doing crystal therapy and I was like, dude, none of this is real. And he was like, What does it matter if it’s not real if I feel better? That question haunted me. It’s not a secret that a lot of wellness stuff doesn’t perform a lot better than placebo, but it turns out that placebo can be sometimes pretty effective. Sometimes we are medicating ourselves with stories, with belief. What I’ve started really thinking about, as a result of this book, is the stories that are entering my brain. Sometimes you should pay more attention to the stories entering your brain than the chemicals entering your body. Sometimes the stories impact you more than the turmeric or the juice cleanse.
The two brothers met by chance near the ice machine in the hallway of the seventh floor of the Marriott Hotel on Liberty Avenue.
Liberty, if followed north for eleven miles, led to a squat stone building, two hundred yards from the main prison campus, in which was contained the chamber, the apparatus, and the drugs used to put prisoners to death. The two-lane road was colored by hardy wildflowers growing through cracks in the median, and was lined with street signs warning travelers not to litter or drive drunk or pick up hitchhikers.
Tomorrow, the two brothers would travel this road, in separate cars, at separate times.
Gerald and Tom Hoefler had not seen each other in five years, since Tom’s marriage to Abigail in 2003, and the brothers were not expecting to see each other until tomorrow, during the viewing, and then only for an hour or so. Running into Tom at the ice machine with the hand-written OUT OF ORDER sign stuck on with a Band-Aid made Gerald feel cheated, as he had no desire to see his brother at all.
“Gerald.”
“Tom.”
They tucked their respective empty ice buckets under their arms, and shook hands.
“No fuckin’ ice,” said Tom. “Huh.”
“Yeah.”
“What you up to these days, Gerry?”
Three minutes of conversation, and it was over. Gerald trudged back to his room. He tried to call Miriam, but cellphone reception was poor in the hotel room, so Gerald was forced to call on the room phone at God knows how many cents a minute.
“He looks like he’s been roughnecking,” said Gerald, sitting on the edge of the queen bed, the polyester rustling as he moved. “Or something like it, anyway, he’s all burnt and leathery and Marlboro Man and full of himself. Miriam?”
“I’m here.”
“He had a crushing handshake,” continued Gerald, studying his right hand in the low light. “The bastard. Nothing like that limp, week-old celery stalk he used to shake with, way back when he was making trillions at Polk & Sons. Do you remember that? Mariam, goddammit, why are you being so quiet?”
“Tomorrow is a lot larger than just seeing your brother, Gerald. You only have to tolerate his company for a little while, then you’ll be on your way home.”
“Wrong, Miriam. I’m having dinner with him tonight, in the lobby restaurant.”
A brief but steep silence, like the sound of space between the stars.
“Why’d you agree to that?”
“I invited him. And I don’t know why.”
Gerald had done it out of guilt. A spasm of compensatory fraternal obligation had taken him over in the hallway by the ice machine. Gerald had been a rotten older brother, a bully and a shamer, before and after Faye had been killed. Something about seeing Tom unexpectedly made him feel an instant of compassion and regret; it was during this instant that he invited Tom to meet him at The Corral, the bar and grill attached to the hotel.
“Gerry,” said Miriam, as if her husband had dozed off at a dinner party.
Gerald stood up, juggling the phone while pulling on a clean pair of jeans and tucking in a button-down shirt. He swallowed two fingers of warm gin from a dented silver flask he’d won in a game of poker in high school, and declared to his wife that they better have goddam steak in the goddam restaurant. And ice.
“And I’m gonna pay for dinner, no matter what.”
“He’ll get the check if he has to stand up and pluck it out of your hand. You know that.”
“Well, listen to this: I’m gonna go down early, give the restaurant my credit card first, tell them to just add 25% to whatever the total is when the meal’s done, run the charge, and bring me my card back. He’ll never even see the check. Ha!”
“You’re behaving like a twelve-year-old.”
“I don’t give a goddam goddamn.”
“Remember, he lost a sister, too.”
Miriam rarely ever referred to Faye, and almost never to her death. It was one of the first things Gerald came to love about Miriam—she always created a place where the tragedy and all its poisons were forbidden. But Gerald slowly came to resent this. He began to interpret her reticence not as a protective shell but as a product of an indifference that had always been there: an indifference whose first and most signal manifestation came as her decision to sleep in different bedrooms, a separation that soon extended to most aspects of their lives. It seemed the only times they ever engaged in a substantive conversation was by telephone while he was away.
“You make me feel like I’m back in family therapy, Mir, for Christ’s sake.”
Gerald listened to the interstellar silence on the other end of the line.
“Miriam?”
Gerald could tell his wife was holding her breath.
“Never mind,” he said. “Call me later. Room 714.”
Tom was already sitting at a table, looking at the plastic stand that contained a list of The Corral’s beers and cocktails.
“What’s it like still being in high school, Gerry?” said Tom, standing up to give his brother another mangle of a handshake. Gerald resisted the urge to roll his brother’s knuckles around and make him yelp. He could do it. He’d always been stronger. But he didn’t want to embarrass the man so openly.
“Well, students don’t change much,” said Gerald.
Tom gave his brother a big smile. He’d gotten his teeth fixed; the old yellow picket fence, almost brown at the gumline, had been rebirthed as a row of Styrofoam-white implants that reminded Gerald of slammed front doors. Tom may have renounced his former, stock-brokering life, but he’d obviously held on to some of the fortune and vanity he’d acquired living it. Hell, let him pay for dinner.
“Nice and stable,” said Tom, returning to his study of the drink menu. “Like you.”
“What can I get for you boys,” said their waitress, a young woman that Gerald thought bore a slight resemblance to what he imagined Faye would have looked like had she been alive the last twenty-nine years. The waitress’ brown hair, like Faye’s, fell in shallow waves to her shoulders where it rested in lazy whorls, and the end of her nose was dimpled with the same tiny pock that would disappear when she smiled. The waitress was half-smiling now, because Tom had asked her if she wanted to come up to his room after her shift to see his etchings.
“I’m up la-a-ate,” Tom said to her, elbowing her on the hip.
Gerald wanted to hit him hard enough to knock all the money out of his mouth, but instead he ordered a double gin and tonic. Tom put his hand near the crook of the waitress’ naked elbow, looked up at her blushing face with what Gerald thought was subtle mockery, and ordered a shot of Bulleit and a Budweiser. She left, not smiling.
Gerald wanted to hit him hard enough to knock all the money out of his mouth, but instead he ordered a double gin and tonic.
Tom, it turned out, was not a roughneck, but a road-construction crew member, working long hours busting asphalt for the Nevada Highway Department.
“I’m the only white guy,” said Tom, inscrutably.
“That right,” said Gerald.
The waitress brought drinks. Tom completely ignored her. There was no steak. Gerald ordered pork tenderloin. The menu offered half a rotisserie chicken. Tom ordered two. Gerald gathered up the menus, handed them back to the waitress, and looked at her with a smile that he hoped was invested with suitable apology for the actions of his brother. She did not return it.
As they ate, Tom told his brother about his life, the deals he’d made, the pussy he’d scored, the jobs he’d had, the adversity he’d beaten, the money he’d squandered. He never mentioned his wife. Faye did not come up, either. She never did.
“What’d you quit Polk for, anyway?” said Gerald.
“You know, to get out there and experience real life, to say adios to that office and the two-thousand-dollar ergonomic chair and Darren Chiu, that waxed prick.”
Gerald suspected there was more to it than that, and that the law might be involved, but he didn’t really want to know what it was, and besides, he was sure his brother would deny any suggestion that anything outside his realm of control could possibly have happened.
He waited till Tom’s mouth was full, then asked a question to which Gerald already knew the precise answer (which was 5:25 PM):
“Any idea what time we’re supposed to be there tomorrow?”
“I don’t know,” Tom said, through a clot of rotisserie chicken. “Around five. Which is a pile a crap, because afterwards I’m gonna have to drive nonstop to get back to work on time. Why can’t they have it at dawn, like in the rest of the fucking country? Everybody knows they put assholes to death at dawn in the United States. It’s the American Way. Anyway, we’re digging up a section of old frontage road off US 9 near Darrow. It’s gonna be 116°F by afternoon, and I gotta—”
“What do you think about tomorrow?” said Gerald.
“—drive all night, so tomorrow’s bullshit better be over within 30 minutes—”
“Tom.”
“—because if I’m not there that bitch Marisol, the only chick on the crew, big, like two kegs stacked up, lots to prove—”
“Jesus.”
“—will be in charge, and she always fucks shit up.”
“Maybe you ought to skip it altogether, then, Tom.”
“Skip what?” said Tom, a greasy knife in one hand, the other clenched like the fist of a newborn.
“Tomorrow, Jesus.”
Tom put his knife down, cracked his knuckles.
“Maybe I will.”
A different waitress came to the table and asked if they needed anything.
“Where’s our waitress?” said Tom, raising his lip like a theater curtain to reveal his teeth; his slur of dentition.
“She’s, um, no longer with us.”
“Serious? said Tom, grinning. “Dead?”
“Coffee, dessert?”
“Peach crumble and a drip,” said Tom.
Gerald ordered another gin and tonic. The waitress brought it, and the check. Tom pinched it right out of her hand, and immediately handed it back along with a black American Express card, even before she could finish saying Thank you for dining with us.
After dinner, Tom went up to his room while Gerald sat at the bar and drank gin until it got close to midnight, then paid his tab and went upstairs.
Miriam hadn’t called. He called her.
“Gerry, Sorry I didn’t call, I fell asleep—”
“No you didn’t, but it’s all right.”
He told his wife about dinner, about how his brother had come early and fucked up his plans to pay the bill.
“What did he say about . . . your sister and everything?”
Gerald could not think of a time his wife had ever spoken Faye’s name aloud. He tried to unscrew the lid on his silver flask of gin without making a sound, but it squeaked in a telltale way that filled the hotel room, the space between his ears, and the air in the phone receiver. Miriam heard it, he knew, he knew.
“Nothing,” said Gerald, almost shouting, to drown out the echoes of the telltale flask. “He didn’t say shit.”
“He never has.”
Neither have you.
It was exactly ten months after five-year-old Faye vanished from her bed one night, that Michael Lee Farris, an unemployed crane operator, confessed to kidnapping Faye and later led investigators to her remains. It was another year, at his trial, that photos were displayed that Farris had taken of Faye after he’d raped and asphyxiated her; photos that Tom was forced to look at—three-foot color enlargements pinned to big rolling bulletin boards—because he was to be called to the witness stand that day; photos that Gerald was spared because his testimony was never needed, as it had been Tom—not fast-asleep Gerald—who had seen a long-haired figure in the yard carrying a bundle into the cone of the streetlight, and who Tom pointed out in court as the man he’d seen.
Alone in their section of the viewing room—other relatives of more of Farris’ victims had their own sections, each separated by mobile partitions of large sheets of plywood painted white—Tom sat in the front row, an arm’s length from the lowered curtain, and Gerald sat in the center of the room.
Tom turned around.
“Gerry, you won’t believe this, but that waitress, the one that was ‘no longer with us,’ you know I was only messing with her at dinner, but I guess she took me seriously because she banged on my door around two in the morning, and I was dead asleep, she was kinda drunk, and she wanted to talk about something, I couldn’t tell what, because she was crying like a whupped child the whole time, but she eventually quit and let me fuck her, saying some incredibly dirty stuff in my ear. She was gone before I woke up.”
Tom turned back around to face the curtain.
Gerald studied the room. He was wondering where his parents would’ve sat, had they not ultimately succumbed to grief in their own ways when the curtain raised, revealing a small beige room, in which were eight people: two men in white coats, three guards, a man and a woman in dark suits, and Michael Lee Farris, who was strapped to a table, one arm stretched out at a 45° angle and battened to a narrow length of greenish-blue Formica attached to the table.
A crackle as a microphone turned on. The woman produced a wrinkled piece of paper and read a summary of the warrant for execution. She asked Farris if he had a brief statement he would like to make. He said nothing. He closed his eyes and turned his head away from the viewing room.
Tom stood up. He said fucking coward, with a low, clenched ferocity. In another section of the viewing area, crying could be heard, and in another, a woman yelled something Gerald couldn’t understand. Tom sat down again. An IV was inserted into a vein in Farris’ arm. One of the technicians injected a liquid into the IV, waited a moment, then injected another. Farris faced the ceiling and opened his eyes. He turned red in the face and opened his mouth, as if for a dentist. He remained in this posture for a full minute, then appeared to shudder, and, finally, to relax. Fourteen minutes passed, and the other technician listened to his heart for a moment, then nodded. The curtain lowered.
Someone came into the viewing area and asked if Tom and Gerald wanted to speak to the media. Tom ignored the question, staying put, his back to the room. Gerald declined an interview and left.
Four years later, during lunchtime in a crowded line at a Korean grocery on Greenwich Street in Manhattan, Gerald found himself standing behind a woman who he realized after a moment was Tom’s wife, whom he hadn’t seen since their wedding nine year earlier. She was examining an array of various slaws in a glass case. She caught Gerry looking at her in the reflection and turned to face him.
“Please keep your eyes to yourself,” she said.
“Uh, Abigail?” said Gerald. “It’s Tom’s brother, Gerry.”
She stared at him for a moment, then smiled, and hugged him unexpectedly.
“Oh, Gerry. Gerry! How are you doing? Still in Chantilly with . . . .”
“Miriam. Yes. I’m in town for a teacher’s conference.”
“You were always so stable,” said Abigail, stepping out of the line, pulling Gerald along by the elbow. “I’m so sorry I never wrote to you or anything, especially when that man’s, um, death, was, you know, happening, but I . . . .”
Something about the timbre of her use of the word “stable” suggested that things with Tom were not. Abigail was so close to his face he could see the ruff of fine wrinkles under her eyes. Gerry had always thought she was attractive, but now even more so. He imparted himself a delectable moment where he imagined she would come to his room at the motel, and he’d tell her everything she’d ever wanted to know about her ex in-laws, about Faye, about Tom, about Miriam, about Michael Lee Farris, about the execution, about himself, and afterwards they would have sex, and more sex, all through the next day, pausing only to feel again what it was like to be falling in love.
He imparted himself a delectable moment where he imagined she would come to his room at the motel.
“That’s okay,” said Gerald, sensitive to Abigail’s hand, still on his elbow.
“Did it give you, you know, a sense of closure?”
Gerald especially hated that phrase.
“Not really.”
“Tom would never talk about it,” said Abigail, letting go of Gerald’s elbow. “He wouldn’t talk about family either.”
“Yeah,” said Gerald, fighting the urge to touch his own elbow, where Abigail’s hand had been.
“We’ve been separated. A long time now. Years. But you probably already knew that.”
“I didn’t.”
“Yeah, well, after he got out of prison for that embezzling thing at Polk, he started taking on these low-paying physical labor jobs to say screw you to the Man, but we ran out of savings, and he moved us back here so he could try brokering again. He figured enough time had passed for him to make a fresh start. Within a couple months he was making tens of thousands a week and sleeping with a floor messenger who evidently had sexual habits he hadn’t encountered before, and which pleased him in ways I never could.”
Embezzling. He should have guessed.
Tom felt absolutely no cold, righteous glee at this news. He just felt empty, like a fresh-dug grave.
Abigail, possibly upset with herself for going into such personal detail with someone she’d met only a couple of times, looked down, then accidentally backed into a shelf of analgesics. Gerald reached out to steady her.
“He’s still here, in Hell’s Kitchen,” she said, holding on to Gerald’s forearms. “Tom, I mean. I never see him. I’m on Chambers, a little spot with a shaft of sunlight for my orchids in the morning. And how long are you in town?”
“Two more nights, early flight out Saturday.”
Gerald had nothing more to say. He tried to think of something, but nothing came to him except his lessons at school, and the words I want to fuck you.
“Where are you?” said Abigail.
“Warrington Inn, at York and 75th.” After a moment he added, “Room 307.”
Abigail reached up and kissed him on the cheek, close to his lips, the corners of their mouths intersecting for an instant.
“It’s nice to see you, Gerry.”
After that day’s round of conference meetings, on the long walk back to the hotel, Gerald picked up two bottles of not-inexpensive wine, an Italian red and a South African white, plus a fifth of Bombay Sapphire. Restless, he wanted to take a walk, but he was afraid he would miss Abigail on the outside chance she chose to come by. He watched the Weather Channel, carefully poured gin into his old poker flask, and sipped it right back out, flask after flask, until early evening, when Miriam was due to call. She did not. He slept, but lightly, starting awake whenever he heard what he thought was a knock, and then falling back to sleep when he realized it was not.
The next day he woke with the sharp, well-defined hangover that attends costlier spirits—a keening, polished awl pushed through his optic nerve. He skipped the conference altogether and stayed in the hotel all day, the bottle of red wine on the luggage counter, the white in a bucket of ice that he renewed every few hours. Miriam again did not call.
It wasn’t until 3:30 in the morning that Gerald gave up the last shred of hope that Abigail would visit, or at least telephone. Around 4:15, Gerald called his wife.
“Gerald, what’s the matter for god’s sake? Are you all right?”
“Why didn’t you call me?” he said. He would not open his flask right now. “Tonight or last night?”
“I wasn’t feeling my best,” she said. Gerald knew she was waiting for him to ask her why, and he also knew that she knew he never would.
“A phone call was going to exacerbate your symptoms?”
“Don’t drink and dial, Gerry,” said Miriam.
“Where did you learn that phrase? And I’m not drinking, goddammit.”
“You’ll never change,” said Miriam.
“Everybody else calls that ‘stability.'”
“Who everybody?”
Gerald—wondering if somehow his wife had intuited his subtle but open invitation to another woman and his desire to make the most of it should that invitation be answered—paused.
“Nobody!”
“Jesus, Gerald,” said Miriam, with what to Gerald sounded like fragile mirth. “Is there someone there with you?”
Gerald laughed, a bitter snort that was really about Abigail’s never showing up, but which he hoped sounded to his wife like an incredulous snigger.
“I’m not even going to answer that.”
Miriam didn’t bother to suppress a sigh this time.
“Oh, Gerry.”
“Oh, Gerry what,” he said.
Miriam hung up.
Three weeks later, on a late Sunday afternoon back in Chantilly, while Miriam was out getting their Subaru inspected, Gerald powered up his Mac, and googled CUNY Law Staff Directory, where he found an email address for Abigail.
Dear Abigail,
I’ve been thinking about you. With apologies for being blunt, I’d like to come back up to New York to see you. Maybe we can get dinner. Let me know your thoughts. I can come anytime.
Gerry
Gerald hit send. He received an immediate response.
Gerald,
I must have somehow given you the wrong idea. I’m sorry, but I’m not interested. I wish you well.
Abigail
Gerald struggled to compose a response, one in which he seemed outwardly contrite, but between whose lines a careful reader could see that he blamed her for misleading him. Gerald worked at it for hours, but finally just deleted everything.
Miriam was not yet home. Maybe the car had failed inspection, and she was out getting it fixed. Gerald admitted to himself that this was unlikely on a Sunday evening. Gerald thought about calling her, but instead he sat on the couch to watch the Weather Channel and drink gin from his little high-school flask. A few hours later, near midnight, and still no Miriam, Gerald called her. But she didn’t answer, and he left no message. He considered calling around to the hospitals, but in the end did not. As he was falling asleep, he tried to convince himself that he really hoped she would be home sometime soon; that he was worried about her, but he knew the truth.
He woke early the next morning, alone. He wandered through the house to verify that his wife was not home, peeked into the driveway to make certain the car wasn’t there, then thought about calling the police. Instead, he called in sick to work, saying he’d be out for the next few days, poured himself three fingers of gin in a frosted tumbler (the flask had gone missing, like it had run away, a beaten dog finally fed up), and searched for pornography on the internet.
The next day, still alone, he googled old girlfriends, finding Facebook pages for two of them and an email for another. He wrote to all three, one of whom responded with a confession that she still thought about him sometimes, and might like to get together, but that she was living in Los Angeles with a man whom she didn’t want to deceive, and who might react with thorough violence should he discover any shenanigans.
Later in the week, his wife still gone, some of Miriam’s friends began calling. But Gerald didn’t answer, or listen to their messages. On Friday afternoon, the phone rang, and it was with a mixture of despair and fury that he noted it was Miriam herself calling. She left a message less than fifteen seconds long. Gerald did not listen to it.
Early Saturday morning, he gathered what the gist of her message must have been when he noticed through the living room window that a Penske moving truck had backed into his driveway, and that three men, two unknowns in dark blue overalls, and Miriam’s father, Barry, were making their way up the walk.
Gerald stood in his robe, a frosted tumbler of gin in one hand, a remote control in the other, and listened for the clangor of a key in a lock.
The short story is an entirely different pleasure than the novel. For writers, the form demands precision and intense scrutiny of craft choices. The short story is constrained by its brevity but remains limitless in the opportunities it presents to challenge notions of craft. The short story collection, then, is an art form in and of itself. In conversation, stories produce something new and thrilling. We are let in to linger and marvel at the writer’s world, to listen to its chorus of voices telling us something urgent.
This interview features three writers who published their debut short story collections this year: Ada Zhang, the author of The Sorrows of Others; Nishanth Injam, the author of The Best Possible Experience; and Alexandra Chang, the author of Tomb Sweeping. I called Zhang, Injam, and Chang to learn about their writing processes, relationships with the short story form, and experiences publishing their first collections.
Ada Zhang:The Sorrows of Others is a deep, long glance into other people’s lives. It’s playing with this idea of what the other is in relation to who we are and in what ways we are others to people. There’s this unknowability to each person and I think language and storytelling help us mitigate those gaps and bring us closer, but even they can never really take us all the way. We’re all on our own little islands and this book was my attempt at reaching out.
I think imagination is powerful in the way that it can build our muscles when it comes to connecting. The point of the stories isn’t whether or not the characters are successful in connecting. I try not to make any judgments about that. But I think that in writing these stories, it was me trying to grapple with the essential loneliness of being a person. How are we supposed to move forward? It can feel really damning. Through writing these stories, I was able to comfort myself and hopefully comfort readers.
Brandon J. Choi: Can you speak to your relationship with the short story and the particular joys and challenges that come with it?
AZ: I love a big novel as much as anybody else but there is something about the short story that is just ungraspable. There are so many ways to write a short story and innovate within the form. I think that the form is actually really flexible. It allows for a lot of play. Everybody has taken and made the form their own and put their own fingerprint on it. I think that’s ultimately the goal. My favorite short story writers have all re-imagined what the form can do—and the form can do a lot.
I think that a good short story transcends the form and transcends craft altogether. Craft helps us talk about writing in terms of point of view, character, or plot, but I think any true work will always go beyond craft to a point where these words start to dissolve. What is point of view, is plot, is character? People talk about the short story tradition sometimes as though there is one aesthetic but I don’t think that there is.
BJC: When thinking about what you want to write about or who you want to write for, how do you think the story form enables you to do that?
AZ: I think that the main constraint of the short story is that it’s short. It’s not long like a novel. I say this to my students a lot: constraints in writing are a really good thing. That’s why people like prompts. It gives you a framework to work in and if you go for it, you can subvert that constraint, challenge it, flip it on its head and make it work for you.
I have noticed that because of this inherent constraint, the fact that the short story is short and therefore somewhat contained, I try to glimpse the end at the beginning. It is important to me to be able to see what the ending is going to be at least halfway through the story, even if what I “see” is just a feeling and even if I don’t quite reach it in the first draft. There’s always revision! Still, I never know how I’m going to get to the end. I have to write toward that image or feeling. I really think that the ending is not tricksy; it shouldn’t be a punchline or a bow, and I’m suspicious of a big reveal. People will often think, how am I supposed to end? I think the ending is not separate from the story. It’s just part of the story. It should be able to pass as just another detail, just another line, just like any line from the middle or beginning of the story. It’s like what I think about time. What is plot? In any story, it’s just time and the way it moves and the way we experience time is linear; we have one day, the next day, the next day, until we march right up to death. But time is actually cyclical. We are always living in the present and because of memory, we also are always in the past, and because of imagination, we are always in the future. So the way we experience and move through time is linear, but time is actually not. Being able to glimpse the ending early demonstrates my view of time.
BJC: How do you know when a story is done?
AZ: When you start a story, the whole story already exists. You’re the one who’s going to pull it out of the ether and put it onto a page and share it with other people. The story is out there, independent of you, that’s how I think of it. The moment a story begins is terrifying because just one paragraph in, you’ve already set some rules and expectations for the reader and therefore for yourself which means you’ve already determined in a certain sense how things are going to end. So I think it just helps to have the ending in your mind. Not what it is, but that it exists and is waiting for you.
In terms of knowing when a story is done, I keep returning to what I heard a writer say once. I was young at the time and he said that the work is never finished, only abandoned. At a certain point, it is about letting go. When you can see the piece objectively and see why someone would think it’s a good story and also why someone might overlook it, and you’re okay with both outcomes, it’s a complete story. You know that this is a story for someone out there and maybe it’s not for others. I imagine that’s what it’s like with one’s children. They teach you a lot about yourself and you hope that they find people who are going to love them but you also know that you can’t protect them. They’ve got to go out there and find their people. A lot of it is letting go.
In my first drafts, it’s very clear what tools I’m using to make things happen. In the later drafts, I try to leave craft behind and journey the last leg alone. You have character, point of view, and place, all the great fiction angels, guarding you, marching with you into the story, but you have to be willing to leave them behind at some point. Craft gives us tools, not rules. They should not be constraints that hold you back. The real constraints are the ones that are unique to you, unique drafting problems that you have, that you have decided to face in the story. If you do that, that’s when your story becomes unlike anybody else’s story.
BJC: Beyond writing individual stories, can you talk about how you approached assembling them? Do you think your work lands differently when put together?
AZ: You know what? I actually do. I didn’t think that they would have a cumulative effect but that was naive of me because every time I’ve read a story collection, that’s what has happened to me. With individual stories, it’s like dropping singles and then the collection is the album. The most pronounced way that I felt this was when I listened to my audiobook. Of course the performances were incredible and the experience made me realize that the whole is something different from its parts. It’s greater, bigger. The story is a form, and the collection is a form in and of itself, which is great because your story gets to be itself and also be part of a family.
Craft gives us tools, not rules. They should not be constraints that hold you back.
I was rereading my collection to refresh myself. “The Subject,” the first story, was my attempt to up the ante for reading the rest of the book. I realized it was actually the last story I drafted. That makes sense to me because by then I’d written quite a number of stories about Chinese immigrants, Chinese citizens, Chinese Americans… There’s always discourse on representation and I started to feel a responsibility to engage in this conversation. I have my thoughts but I didn’t want to just shoot some tweets out into the world. All my questions about what we owe people we’re making art about live in that first story. It’s the last one I wrote because I had done all this work but began to question whether I had a right to be writing about these people. I don’t think there are definitive answers here, which is why I think we should let our stories do that rigorous and deeply imaginative work. That’s how “The Subject” came to be first in the collection. At one point, we wondered if “Compromise,” the last story in the collection, should be first but I think that would’ve changed the tone.
BJC: I’ve heard you talk about Chekhov, William Trevor, and Yiyun Li as sources of inspiration. Were there any books you found yourself returning to while writing your collection or any books or writers you wanted to be in conversation with? Who have you learned from and how have you been influenced when creating your own aesthetic?
AZ: Influences while writing the book: Mavis Gallant, Edward P. Jones, William Maxwell, Toni Morrison, James Alan McPherson, Denis Johnson. And all the names you mention. I love these writers. I guess what I’ll say about lineage is that by learning about your tradition you also learn how to break free from that tradition, meanwhile carrying the best parts of it forward. This might also be true of life.
Nishanth Injam: I wasn’t much of a reader or a writer when I was in India. It wasn’t until after I moved to the States and worked a tech job that the idea of writing occurred to me. I had moved to this new country where I didn’t know anybody and I had this keen sense that I was going to live a pretty narrow imitation of life. It felt like a deep loss. I was extremely lonely. I couldn’t switch my job and just hated it. I had all these obligations back home so I couldn’t quit. And I was desperate to create an alternative world in which I could be more in touch with myself, with the past and the person that I was before I had come to the States. I was building these stories to keep myself alive in a deeper sense. When I started writing, it wasn’t necessarily to achieve something. It was purely to help me live.
It also helped that I found out about MFA programs around then. I saw that they usually workshopped stories and I was trying to get better at my craft so it seemed like stories would be easier, but I was so wrong.
Brandon J. Choi: Can you speak more to the pleasures and difficulties of the form?
NI: The pleasure is that you could be done quickly and you can take on a voice that might not be immediately accessible to you. For instance, I could take on the voice of a tailor, even though I’ve never worked as a tailor or have significant experience being in close proximity to one. I can become this person who mimics somebody’s consciousness and their patterns of behavior enough for the length of the story and still make it convincing. Whereas, I think that inherent lack of knowledge comes through in the span of a novel because it’s too many pages for you to keep up that pretense. The other thing that I like about the short story is that you can really play with structure. With the novel, I think, because you have more room, the structure matters less. Then there are pleasures of language. You have less space so you can make every sentence count. With the novel, I think readers are less likely to spend time rereading a sentence. You always want to keep moving within the space of a novel. As for disadvantages, there are difficulties with the form as it has traditionally been practiced in North America. If you’re coming at it from a different culture, it might be challenging to get your story to fit into the general perception of how a short story should work.
BJC: Can you elaborate?
NI: One general working definition of a short story is that a good short story should have two stories. There’s an over-story and there’s an under-story, and then both of them meet at the end. You think the story’s about X all along and then the story turns out to be about Y. Another definition is that a short story should be like a pinprick that you feel at the end of an injection. When you are being injected and then take out the needle, that’s when the emotions should have you writhing in pain. The other definition is that an ending of a good short story should always result in complexity of afterthought. I have issues with almost all of those. I think the form itself has been so contaminated by the world we live in and by capitalism that it seems weird to expect pleasure or a release of emotion only at the end. You can compare it to a masculine orgasm where it’s only pleasure when the man comes at the end. It’s also the sense that emotion is permitted at certain expected hours and any unmanageable or uncontrollable emotion is only seen as irrational or not valid. It’s also very capitalistic. It’s a value system that rewards atomization. Because thoughts by themselves are not as dangerous. You can construct a story with a point in mind and bring it out at the end, and that mode of storytelling is very safe.
There are other forms of storytelling. For instance, there are many oral storytelling cultures within India, in which there is no expectation for a short story to end in a certain way with everything neatly tied together. There’s no pressure to make every single sentence accounted for. It can be this loose thing but it can still have its own power and be its own thing. Growing up, I remember reading short stories which were like tiny novels. They didn’t have all these formal constraints. So when I moved here and encountered those definitions, I was shocked to see all these perceptions, which were actually held by people practicing the form and not clearly stated anywhere. I think that’s an experience many writers of color have. We are usually told that our stories are not correct in terms of craft. Matthew Salesses does a wonderful job of showing all the ways in which our writing gets marginalized in his Craft in the Real World.
BJC: I read that this collection was your MFA thesis during your time at Michigan. How do you think you changed as a writer during your time there?
NI: Before the MFA, when I wrote the initial drafts of these stories, the heart of the stories was there, but there was much to improve formally and linguistically. You have to know that when I started writing, I couldn’t even hold tense and had absolutely no idea what the past perfect was. I struggled with grammar. I used to write sentences with ellipses because I didn’t know what a sentence was, functionally or otherwise. I went from that to writing sentences that people were calling lyrical and beautiful. When I got into the MFA, I became more conscious of how every word choice contributes to the meaning of the story. This is not something that people usually talk about because a lot of writers are writing in their first language. People sometimes read a sentence and judge if you are any good. If you are able to write a really good sentence, does that make you a better writer than someone who’s gutting their heart on the page? My opinion is that you don’t exactly know where a writer is on their journey, and those kinds of judgements are silly. Even if you are somebody who grew up with English, you are still writing from your subconscious where you’re trying to find words. There is always an effort to translate the unsayable.
The MFA gave me the space to read and write and see how my work was being perceived by others and the ways in which I was falling short. The community and the friendships I formed there are invaluable. The MFA gave me friends I would trust with my life. If you can find friends whose work you can be excited about and who can similarly be excited about yours, then you can all grow together. That’s really the best thing you can hope for.
BJC: What do you want the readers to leave the collection with?
I was building these stories to keep myself alive in a deeper sense.
NI: When I read a book, I don’t always want to be just entertained. I want nourishment, something that will help me live a richer, more meaningful life. There are so many collections that come out every year and so many good books that are out there already. Why am I spending all this time trying to add something? Why am I contributing to this massive pile of good literature? Why do I write? Why do I think that I have the right to say anything? Finding my answers for those questions was challenging. When I arrived at my own particular answer, I knew I had a book. I wanted to tell stories, not for entertainment or pleasure. But to move me along in the path of greater love. I wrote the stories as a way of making meaning and holding onto and transforming the love that I have. I think a lot of that is in the title story.
BJC: When writing this collection, were there any books that you found yourself returning to or any that you wanted to be in conversation with?
NI: When I started writing short stories, I googled what the best short story collection of all time was and one of the answers was James Joyce’s Dubliners. I still stand by this when I say that when I wrote my collection, I was writing to be in conversation with James Joyce. It’s crazy, but it’s true.
We have this Western canon, of thinking and art, and I’m just a small individual from a faraway place, leading a nondescript life, and trying to make meaning from it. Who should I look up to for instruction? Obviously, I’m going to be looking at all the greats and seeing what I can learn from them.
I’m really interested in epiphanies. Nobody believes in epiphanies these days because nobody learns anything the first time. You have an epiphany but you keep making the same mistake. Sometimes, that epiphany is something that holds after multiple times. My sense of epiphany is different. It comes from transcendence, from trying to move out of limbo. I’m trying to elevate myself to a better place, to being a better person. I’m naturally attracted to books in which there’s a similar strain. I see that in Dubliners. If you are sitting there in Dublin a hundred years ago, writing these stories, trying to be artful and truthful to your vision of life in Dublin that you want to present, why shouldn’t I be, in my own small way, be similarly truthful, similarly artful?
Alexandra Chang:Tomb Sweeping is a collection that follows characters who are going through some sort of transition or dealing with loss. It’s a slice-of-life collection that focuses on the ordinary grief that ordinary people tend to experience, and the deeply affecting and moving moments in their day-to-day lives.
The collection likely started when I started writing short stories and thinking more carefully about short stories as a form. The oldest story is from nine years ago. That became the title story. At the time, I did not realize that it was going to be a collection because I was such a baby writer that I wasn’t really thinking in terms of books or even the possibility of publishing. I was thinking: What are stories? How do I want to write stories? And also, how do story writers I love do what they do? What resonates with me and how can I take what I learned and apply it to my own version of this form?
Brandon J. Choi: How has your relationship to the story form changed over time?
AC: We have this exposure to very canonical work, like Hemingway, Cheever, Carver… There are so many things happening in these stories that are moving, but maybe don’t necessarily reflect what I want to do as a writer. In an undergrad workshop (that I took after undergrad, when I was a staff employee at Cornell), I was exposed to flash fiction for the first time. I read Lydia Davis. I read a lot of very weird stories. My professor was J. Robert Lennon, and he is also a very strange and fun and experimental short story writer. That really opened up the possibilities of the short story for me. There are incredible things that you can do with structure and such a short amount of space, like two, three pages. The emotional effect can be huge. That really changed what I understood a short story could be and the limitlessness of a short story.
BJC: You have spoken about constraints in past interviews. Can you elaborate on what your writing and editing look like when working with constraints?
AC: Constraint is basically a way into a story, because for me, there are limitless ways to approach a story. To me, that is both exciting and very daunting. Having certain constraints like, for example, committing to writing a story in vignettes, helps. Or, for example, I’ll have a story take place in only one month of time or only one day. I wrote this one story that didn’t make it into the collection, but it had very long sentences to capture a tiny amount of time—the constraint being that I had to expand time as much as possible. Those kinds of directives/prompts/constraints—whatever you want to call them—can give me a lot of creative energy. They give me a sense of direction and a path to go down with a story that I may previously have felt paralyzed by.
BJC: It’s something to push on versus free falling in nothing.
AC: That really is how it feels, because there are just so many ways to do a story. Which, I mentioned, is also why I love stories. That there are so many ways to approach a story, but without constraint, I don’t know that I would necessarily finish very much. That’s why I find novels so hard, too. Talk about a form that’s incredibly capacious and very flexible. There are no constraints on it in terms of length or anything.
BJC: I want to talk more about revision. I imagine your stories with their various structures and constraints were very different to write but also very different to edit. Can you speak to your editing experience for this collection?
AC: It was hard, not only because each story has its own mechanisms that I recognize and want to honor, but also because my relationship to each of the stories was so different. Some of them felt very old and then some of them still feel extremely fresh to me.
One thing that I hadn’t really considered before I started actually putting all the stories together was ordering. How does a story move into another in terms of what it’s about, or even an emotional state? What would I want to leave a reader with as they enter a new story? That definitely took up a lot of time for me, more time than I probably needed to spend on it.
Still, even with the older stories, it was exciting to re-enter each and see something new I wanted to change in it, even if it was as small as wanting to change a comma to an em dash or changing a word like “home” to “house.” Those small moments as a writer can breathe a lot of new life into a story and give a writer a new relationship to it. And then, of course, there were the huge revisions. “Cure for Life,” for example, was told in a completely different perspective before.
It goes back to a sense of play for me. I want to write about stuff that is important and moving, at least to me. But in the writing itself, I also want to remain playful. With each new revision, I approached it open to discovering something new about the story that I hadn’t seen before.
BJC: Though this is your debut story collection, this is not your debut book. How is the experience of editing a story collection different from that of a novel?
AC: I have this new analogy for writing and editing a short story collection versus a novel. Writing the novel felt like having this huge, open expanse of land and thinking, what do I want to build here? It can be any kind of building. It can be a corral for horses. It can be a skyscraper. Whatever. The beginning is just this empty plot of land. Because of that, the novel was a very lengthy and difficult process because I just had no idea what I was doing. But it was also kind of exciting because I had no idea what I was doing. It was a lot of constructing and then destroying and reconstructing and tearing down again. I think I wrote 50,000 words across two summers and then immediately cut 30,000 when I started revising.
Stories feel more like stepping into an empty room and thinking, what do I want to put into this room?
The stories in this analogy feel more like stepping into an empty room—but it’s already a room that’s there—and thinking, okay, here are these four walls and a floor and a ceiling to work with. Or maybe it’s a circular room. I’m stepping into a space and now I’m thinking, how do I decorate this particular space? What do I want to put into this room? Now rearrange the furniture and the decor I’ve put in there. It felt more manageable to write each individual story and it felt lower stakes in the sense that I could experiment and play and it wasn’t ever going to be a waste of time if it didn’t work out.
With the novel, after spending so much time writing, writing, and writing all these words, I felt like I had to stay committed to the project. The novel also took a lot more of me in a shorter amount of time. The stories were these fun things that I was working on over a longer period of time. I was following whatever impulses I had. I think short stories are where a lot of writers really learn to be writers. And because of that, there’s so much love and respect for the form. I don’t think that I could ever let go of writing short stories. There are definitely writers who only write novels, but there are so many of us who are deeply invested and tied to the short story.
BJC: When writing Tomb Sweeping, were there any books you found yourself returning to, any books or writers you wanted to be in conversation with? Thinking in terms of literary lineage, I am curious who influenced you and your aesthetic.
AC: Some of my stories are in direct conversation with specific writers and stories that, after I read them, inspired me to write. That’s something that I need to constantly remind myself of too: reading other writers is a huge source of inspiration. If you’re feeling blocked or down on writing for whatever reason, return to these story writers who you love, who have inspired you before.
Some examples: Maile Meloy, Stephen Dixon, Lucia Berlin. I think I carried A Manual for Cleaning Women around with me for two years. Yiyun Li. I’ve read every single one of her books. I read Gold Boy, Emerald Girl when I first started writing stories, and Lan Samantha Chang’s Hunger.
There are so many new writers I feel in conversation with as well, like Asako Serizawa’s Inheritors and Shruti Swamy’s A House is a Body. Shruti talks about writing stories that are deeply feminine and emotional, almost in opposition to this very canonical male, everything-is-subtext, minimalist style. Shruti’s stories are so dreamlike and disorienting, but in a way where you can tell that she’s very purposefully taking you on this journey. I really admire her work and it inspires me to write in new ways.
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