Celebrating What We’ve Accomplished in 2023

Posted on by Jo Lou

Dear Reader, 

Each snow globe in this illustration by Alli Katz depicts one of Electric Literature’s achievements this year. We reached important milestones, launched new projects, and continued to expand the ways that we connect with over 3 million readers and advocate for our writers (536 published so far in 2023).

Over the next few weeks, my colleagues and I will be sharing more about each of these achievements, but a brief summary is included below. We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished, and we’ve got even more in store for next year.

Please take a moment to support our work by making a year-end gift to Electric Literature. Our goal is to raise $15,000 by New Year’s Eve, which will allow us to balance our budget for this year, and start 2024 strong. 

Thank you for spending the year with us! Whether you’re on our homepage every day, an occasional visitor, or a contributor, we’re so very grateful for your time and support.

Yours, 

Halimah Marcus
Executive Director, Electric Literature

P.S. One third of Electric Literature’s annual budget comes from individual donations: we rely on our community to publish every day, to pay our writers, and to keep EL free for readers. Please give today.

Inside the Snow Globes

The Commuter, our home for poetry, flash, graphic, or experimental narrative debuted in January 2018. "Replying All on the Death Announcement Email" by Janessa Abrams is the 300th issue.

The Masquerade of the Red Death is still the literary party of the year, honoring the legacy of Edgar Allan Poe and paying homage to "The Fall of the House of Usher."


Both/And, the first essay series of its kind, published 15 essays written and edited by trans writers of color.

Electric Lit announced our new creative nonfiction program, and received 500 submissions in 36 hours. We will begin publishing CNF essays every Thursday in January 2024.

Electric Lit partnered with Paul English and Joyce Linehan to launch Banned Books USA, which sends free banned and challenged books to Florida residents for only the cost of postage.

Our fiction magazine Recommended Reading which debuted in May 2012, published its 600th issue, an excerpt from A Nearby Country Called Love by Salar Abdoh.

Best American Short Stories selected three stories from Recommended Reading, an unprecedented feat for an online literary magazine. Best American Mystery and Suspense featured two.

For the first time, Electric Literature offered in-house manuscript consultations to writers of all experience levels. Writers received a comprehensive draft review, with detailed notes, and a video call with one of our editors.

We achieved all of this in addition to maintaining our regular publication schedule, which includes author interviews, reading lists, and robust literary coverage, five days a week. 

Please make a year-end donation to support our work, and help spread the word!

Exclusive Cover Reveal: Cally Fiedorek’s “Atta Boy”

Posted on by Wynter Miller

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the novel Atta Boy by Cally Fiedorek, which will be published by University of Iowa Press on April 2, 2024. Preorder the book here.

In December 2018, we meet Rudy Coyle, a bar owner’s son from Flushing, Queens, in the throes of a major quarter-life crisis. Cut out of the family business, he gets a Hail Mary job as a night doorman in a storied Park Avenue apartment building, where he comes under the wing of the family in 4E, the Cohens.

Jacob “Jake” Cohen, the fast-talking patriarch, is one of a generation of financiers who made hundreds of millions of dollars in the cutthroat taxi medallion industry in the early 2000s, largely by preying on the hopes and dreams of impoverished immigrant drivers. As Jake tries to stop the bleed from the debt crisis now plaguing his company, clawing back his assets from an increasingly dangerous coterie of Russian American associates, Rudy gets promoted from doorman to errand boy to bodyguard to something like Jake’s right-hand man.

By turns a gripping portrait of corruption and a tender family dramedy, Atta Boy combines the urban cool of Richard Price with the glossy, uptown charm of Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Here is a novel richly attuned to its time and place, but with something for everyone—high-wire prose and ripped-from-the-headlines social realism with the warmth, angst, and humor of its indelible voices.

Here is the cover, designed by David Litman.

Author Cally Fiedorek: I was a big fan of David Litman’s design before ever thinking he would agree to work on my cover. I had a little “mood board” going, which was fun to assemble; there were a few comps of David’s own recent work, including the cover for Sam Lipsyte’s latest book, plus the cover of a Weegee photo book, Naked City, that I liked. I wanted something pointedly urban, with some big-city glamour to it, but not too on-the-nose—neither self-consciously gritty, nor too cute. Especially with a motif as iconic as the New York City taxicab, there are many opportunities for cheesiness. 

David sent me three options, all of which I loved, but in the end I went with the most straightforward of the three. It just felt the most assured and most itself, somehow. I love how unfussy it is. If “unfussy” sounds like faint praise, it is not! The instinct to overdo it is so strong, especially for me, in my writing, and it feels like such a win when you bombard someone with twenty-five references and ideas, and they somehow manage to distill them into something natural, simple, and convincing. Thank you, David! 

Designer David Litman: Cally had some great suggestions at the outset that were very helpful. Atta Boy has dual perspectives, as it is both a New York crime story as well as a coming-of-age story, so we wanted to toe the line between gritty noir and youthful or playful. I designed a type treatment that felt mid-century noir but not too on-the-nose. Torn newspaper alludes to the periodicals that occur at intervals throughout the book. The imagery and color scheme hints a central element of the plot: the taxicab industry.

9 Books About the Aftermath of the Balkan Wars

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

All wars have their own brutal logic, but only a few manage to make an entire country disappear.

The former Yugoslavia was still a one-party socialist country under General Tito when I came to Macedonia from Australia in the 1980s to learn Balkan and Romany folk music. When I returned two decades later, this time as a playwright guest of Belgrade-based theater artists and anti-war activists Dah Teatar, the wars had broken the country into pieces. Hundreds of thousands of people were dead; millions more were displaced.

In researching my novel Nadia, about a young queer Bosnian refugee living in London who fears her co-worker may be a Serbian ex-sniper from the war she fled, books such as U.K. war reporter Misha Glenny’s The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War and Laura Silber and Allen Little’s Yugoslavia: Death of A Nation provided historical context. But the hyperreal, terrifying and tragicomic experience of surviving a melting world, in a war zone and in exile, could only be absorbed imaginatively through conversations with friends and colleagues, and through fiction, memoir and poetry.

Here are nine books—funny, tragic, absurd, harsh and beautiful—about the aftermath of the Balkan wars. While they’re different in tone, style and approach, certain strands recur: Ironic humor as bitter and dark as black coffee; absurdist or fabulist elements, born of the dissolution of reality in the acid of murderous politics; moments of simple observation, when certain details burn themselves into the eye; the use of formal juxtaposition to convey the epistemic shock and grotesquerie of war’s collision with ordinary life.

The Book of My Lives by Alexsandar Hemon

Alexsander Hemon’s extraordinary memoir-in-essays interweaves memories of his life in Sarajevo; reflections on war’s aftermath, food, football and friendship; the divided condition of the immigrant; love, family and heartbreak; and the attempt to rebuild a sense of home in his new city-of-exile, Chicago.

Briefly in the US on a writing fellowship, during Hemon’s absence the looming war engulfed Sarajevo. On May 2, 1992, the day after he canceled his return flight, the last trains left the city and “the longest siege in modern history” began. At first unmoored and unable to comprehend American space, Hemon writes about the need to find in Chicago what he’d lost through exile from Sarajevo: a “geography of the soul.” He builds this, block by block, through walking the city and finding: a café, a bar, a football game in which he can anchor himself.

Hemon’s book is a mosaic made from such maps and stories, the ironies and impact of which are only apparent from absorbing the whole. The essay “The Book of My Life” is about Hemon’s Sarajevo literature professor, who told his students about the book his five-year-old daughter was writing. “She had titled it ‘The Book of My Life,’ but had written only the first chapter. She planned to wait for more life to accumulate, he told us, before starting Chapter 2. We laughed, still in our early chapters, oblivious to the malignant plots accelerating all around us.” Later, the professor joins the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) “headed by Radovan Karadžić, the talentless poet destined to become the world’s most-wanted war criminal.” When the SDS is involved in the bombing of the Sarajevo library, Hemon writes, “The infernal irony of a poet (bad though he may have been) and a literature professor causing the destruction of hundreds of thousands of books did not escape me.”

It was only on finishing the book that I was struck, in turn, by the infernal irony of Hemon naming his own book by adapting a title (“Life” to “Lives”) invented by the young child of a book-burner and mass-murderer.

The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien

The collapsing black hole at the center of Irish novelist Edna O’Brien’s book is a lightly fictionalized Radovan Karadžić—the “talentless poet” and “war criminal” Hemon references. Dr. Vladimir Dragan has reinvented himself as a mystic shaman and sex healer, hiding out from retribution for his genocidal crimes against Bosnian Muslims in a conservative Irish village. Fidelma, a lonely villager who longs to conceive a child and cannot foresee it happening with her older husband, becomes pregnant by the charismatic outsider. But when the village discovers that Dragan is “the Beast of Bosnia,” Fidelma is reviled, violated by a group of local men, and driven out.

In Fidelma’s subsequent displacement and new life of exile in London, her own experience connects in unexpected ways with that of other refugees from catastrophes large and small. The story is told from multiple viewpoints and ranges from flat, spare prose to hallucinatory insights, and skewers the simple labels and easy cruelties, large and small, that create scapegoats for both misogynist violence and genocide. Yet it is also a story of hope and survival, as Fidelma travels to the Hague to attend the war crimes trial of her prior lover in search of answers. Her world expands through personal loss into a wider grasp of the deadly consequences of following charismatic leaders.

Girl at War by Sara Nović

The Deaf Croatian American Sara Nović’s novel toggles in spare and elegant prose between two periods in her fictional protagonist’s life: Ana’s war-shattered young childhood in Croatia, and her present life as a war adoptee and college student in the US. Like The Little Red Chairs and The Book of My Lives, this evokes the impossibility of fitting a war-shattered past and an oblivious present landscape into a single frame. Nović writes poignantly of the incomprehension of Americans, who mean well but can’t begin to grasp what happened in the Balkan wars; Ana decides simply to shut down that part of her life. Her attempt to do so falls apart when the attacks on the Twin Towers on 9/11 land on her new home city, New York, shattering her fragile inner equilibrium.

Ana spirals back into a barely-buried past full of horrors that resulted, at ten years of age, in her temporary muteness and her becoming “a child with a gun.” She returns to Croatia to trace the remnants of her family’s life. Accompanied by Luka, her childhood best friend, and the book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (Rebecca West’s 1930s travelogue and cultural-historical commentary on the Balkans), Ana sets out on a tour to revisit scenes of loss and violence. Through descriptions of burned houses and overgrown forest massacre sites, Girl at War evokes the imperfect and unfinished work of bearing witness to obscured atrocities. “I looked out at the gilded mountains and thought of the centuries of war and mistakes that had come together in this place. History did not get buried here. It was still being unearthed.” In the book’s gorgeous final image, the moon fills the gaps in a wounded wall, layering memories of past wholeness over current broken-ness through Ana’s attentive and longing gaze.

The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht

In Téa Obreht’s heralded debut novel, the buried past literally poisons the soil: A group of sickly diggers return to the site of an orphanage to find, exhume and lay to rest one of their number who was improperly buried. This strand of the story recurs in the present-day of the narrator, the young doctor Natalia, who has traveled to the orphanage to inoculate the children. At first skeptical of the diggers’ resistance to Western medical solutions to their malaise, she slowly comes to empathize with their search.

The Tiger’s Wife revolves around Natalia and her grandfather’s close relationship in the present and in Natalia’s childhood—also a doctor, he is a story-teller par excellence. Obreht avoids historical specifics of the wars, instead layering the 1990s conflict, its cruelties and unburied grudges and ghosts, over prior conflicts and the mythic stories her grandfather tells her. When her grandfather disappears, Natalia looks for answers by revisiting his stories.

In the novel’s boldest twist, what seemed a Grimm-style folk tale about a witch who marries a tiger turns out to be based on real events from the grandfather’s village childhood: a deaf-mute abused woman befriends a tiger who has escaped from a zoo, arousing deadly suspicions in the village. An innocent boy is tricked into delivering her death, in the disguise of medicine.

Death and medicine, rational science-based healing, and the deeper soul-sickness that only literal and metaphysical exhumation and ritual can heal—all are interwoven in this powerful coming-of-age tale to show that sometimes, only when truth is told slant through stories can certain histories unfold.

The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna’s novel takes place over a decade after the end of the exceptionally bloody conflict in the Krajina region of Croatia. At its center is a house, which an English tourist falls in love with and hires a local to restore. When Duro Kolak, the “hired man” (and narrator), begins renovations, he gradually uncovers the mosaic of a peacock hidden under old plaster, reviving the memory of the previous residents who were violently removed, and raising tensions in the village. The story, like the house itself, is a palimpsest, and Kolak both participates in and resists the slow scraping back of the present to reveal an ugly past. The compelling question posed is not the novel’s most obvious (how could people turn on their long-time neighbors?), but the thornier and more subtle problem of what to do afterwards—how to keep living next door to the perpetrators, drinking in the same bars, doing business in the same shops—when it’s your home and you have nowhere else to go.

Sarajevo Blues by Semezdin Mehmedinović, translated by Ammiel Alcalay

Poet and novelist Semezdin Mehmedinović remained in Sarajevo with his family for the duration of the siege while he played a vital role in the city’s renowned cultural resistance. This harrowing and beautiful book of poems and short prose juxtaposes small everyday moments, both tender (stroking a child’s hair) and horrifying (walking past corpse-eating dogs), with insights into the ubiquity of death and the persistence of beauty. The everyday and the world-rending are entwined.

In the poem “Iman Bey’s Mosque,” Mehmedinović writes, “Here’s what I think: there are neither major or minor tragedies. Tragedies exist. Some can be described. There are others for which every heart is too small. Those kind cannot fit into the heart.” Through the precision, gaps and collisions of his writing, Mehmedinović creates an imaginative space in which the kind of tragedies that “cannot fit into the heart” reverberate. He now lives in the US: prompted by surviving a heart attack and reflecting on his bifurcated life, his autobiographical novel, My Heart, was published in 2021.

The Bosnia Elegies by Adrian Oktenberg

The simplicity and spacing on the line of Adrian Oktenberg’s poems evoke a kind of thought punctuated and shot through with silence, on the border of the unspeakable. There is love, and a bed lit by sun. Roses. Scenes of public destruction; micro-moments of acute personal loss. These poems convey the psychic aftermath of war as inextricable from the ruinous politics of genocide.

“Memory persists with or without speech
Spoiled memory humiliated memory memory broken
into its heartbroken parts every strand shredded
Common memory deep memory
Ruined by this war.”

the form for it is a spiral

Me & My Multi-cultural Street by Jasmina Tešanović

Jasmina Tešanović’s book is a multi-genre mixture of personal essays, reflections, letters and political manifestos. Published by Feminist Publisher 94 in Belgrade in 2001, the book is split in the middle between text written in English, and—turned upside down and read the other way—in Serbian. Tešanović is an anti-war activist, feminist, translator, film-maker and pacifist whose worked for decades with Women in Black, a group who opposed all war and supported refugees. With Habiba Metikos and Julie A. Mertos, she also edited The Suitcase: Refugee Stories from Bosnia and Croatia, where through essays, letters, poems, photographs and personal testimony, refugees of all ethnicities from Bosnia and Croatia recount tales of forced exile.

Although Me & My Multi-cultural Street is unavailable in the U.S., I include the book for its formal inventiveness and moral force, and also simply to make its absence here visible. The book presents radical feminist and anti-war perspectives from former Yugoslavia that are often missing from patriarchal and Anglophone frameworks, and depicts the absurd and lethal results of forcibly sorting the inhabitants of a thoroughly intermarried and inter-ethnic country into “pure” ethnic groups.

The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugrešić

Dubravka Ugrešić was a Croatian literature professor and an ironic and scathing critic of the politics of ethnic division in her former country who relocated from Zagreb to Holland after the wars. A major international literary voice, she died this year.

The Ministry of Pain’s protagonist, like Ugrešić, is a literature professor who has fled Zagreb and finds herself teaching a class to her fellow exiles on a subject that no longer exists: the literature of Yugoslavia. Sensing her students are as lost as she is, Tanja Lucić changes the course to a therapeutic purpose, the collective reclamation of nostalgic memories. But language itself is now a minefield: For instance, Serbo-Croatian is now two separate languages, distinguished only by minute differences in dialect. When the course falls apart, so does Lucić; finally, she is shaken from numbness into rage and grief after reporting a degrading assault by a former student.

Lucić has a bleak and prescient view of the future of displaced Eastern European humanity that could equally describe the precarity of today’s American gig workers: Undergirding the emerging rhetoric of connection, fluidity, globalism, “[a]ll through the grey backwaters people will be eking out precarious livings manufacturing the goods the West European magnates are calling for […] They will sell their sperm, their kidneys, they will sell any organ that will fetch a price on the global black market. They will rent out fresh Eastern European sexual organs to the weary ones of Enlarged Europe […] And some of them will travel all the way to the shores of Western Europe, where the more fortunate will pick asparagus in Germany and tulips in Holland and the less fortunate will scrub toilets.”

And yet the numbness is broken; while retaining its ironic tone, the book concludes with Lucić walking through a landscape at once imaginary, flooded with nostalgia, and a toy-like Amsterdam which is, nevertheless, now her home.

Electric Lit’s Best Novels of 2023

Posted on by EL Assistant2

There’s no denying that this year has been an embarrassment of riches when it comes to truly extraordinary, life-changing novels. From books that quietly interrogate the nuances of life among the elite, to stunning panoramic works that imagine a more physically and spatially flexible world, the authors on this list took a classic literary form and reimagined it from the inside out, even bringing us tales from the future—some green lights, some warning signs. The books on this list tell family stories, love stories, stories of ambition and lust and power and greed, and stories of rest, relaxation, and meditation. All of them are important, and we’re grateful to have read and loved them. 

Here are Electric Lit’s top 5 novels of the year, followed by additional favorites below: 

The Top 5 Novels of The Year:

The Guest by Emma Cline

Emma Cline is masterful at subtle tension and heightening anticipation while dropping profound insight seamlessly throughout everything she writes. Her second novel, The Guest, reads like a short story—in its taut, tight, crystalline prose and plot—and Cline has even said that it was inspired by John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.” But The Guest manages to do something possibly even more magical and intensifying with that alluring idea of a drifter floating through the pools, parties, and private lives of the wealthy elite. For a summer in the Hamptons, 22-year-old Alex uses her freeloading talents to get by unemployed among the one-percent. But when she slips up, and she’s silently dismissed by her latest target, Simon, she waits out the week—on her own devices—with a plan to confront him once and for all at the annual Labor Day party.

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin

Greta is a 45-year-old transcriber for a New Age sex therapist named Om. Flavia is a 28-year-old patient of said sex therapist. While typing out her sessions, Greta becomes infatuated by Flavia, and to the point of obsession, invested in her life story while learning about all of her past trauma. One day at the dog park, Greta becomes starstruck when she hears Flavia’s voice but manages to introduce herself under a fake name, and their banter and instant chemistry quickly leads to a passionate affair built upon a lie. Set in Hudson, New York, this novel is part character study, part mystery, and entirely riveting. Beagin’s prose is beguiling with an absurd, witty tone that leaves the reader, like the novel’s characters, desperately wanting it never to end. 

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

In a near dystopian future, the most popular form of entertainment is “hard action-sports”—gladiator-style death-matches between incarcerated individuals within America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. If a contestant, known as a Link, survives for three years, a nearly impossible achievement, they are granted freedom. The Links team up in Chains to fight groups from other prisons all while being live streamed to the American public. The novel is layered with chapters from the perspectives not only of Links but also those of viewers, protestors who believe that action-sports are inhumane, and board members who oversee the regulations of matches. As Adjei-Brenyah told Electric Lit: “There’s a lot of suffering going around, and we don’t have the vocabulary or the ability to engage that suffering outside the terms of creating more suffering.” In this breathtaking novel, sprinkled with footnotes that provide facts and statistics on the prison system, Adjei-Brenyah places a critical eye—through a fictional lens—on the very real human costs of entertainment and the humane reasons for abolition today.

Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter

Based on the National Magazine Award winning story, Hilary Leichter’s profound second novel asks how far the mind can travel when it’s looking for something that’s gone. Annie, Edward, and their young daughter Rose live in a cramped city apartment. One night, when their friend Stephanie visits, a beautiful and spacious terrace appears in their closet. When Stephanie leaves, the terrace disappears, only to return when Stephanie returns. But Annie and Edward must learn that every bit of space comes at a hidden cost, setting off a seismic chain of events. Ultimately, Terrace Story is a love story that seeks to mend a broken-hearted world. Read an interview with Leichter here.

Forgive Me Not by Jennifer Baker 

From former Electric Literature contributing editor Jennifer Baker comes a searing indictment of the juvenile justice system. It takes one night, one bad decision, and one drunk driving accident for fifteen year old Violetta Chen-Samuels to cause the accident that kills her little sister. In the juvenile justice system, her future lies in the hands of those she’s wronged—her family. Denied their forgiveness, Violetta is forced to make one of two choices: to remain in detention, or participate in The Trials—no easy feat. But success might bring her freedom, and what she craves most of all: her family’s love. In the quest to win her family’s forgiveness, Violetta must confront her own grief, and consider that it might be more important to forgive herself. 

Electric Literature’s Other Favorite Novels:

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

Bodie Kane, successful film professor and podcast host is invited back to the New England boarding school, where she spent four miserable years, to teach a new course. While she’d prefer to let sleeping dogs lie, Bodie finds herself drawn back into the case of Thalia Keith, her classmate who died, and Omar Evans, the athletic trainer who was convicted for her murder. As the many flaws in the case, and a rush to conviction, become apparent, Kane begins to wonder if something from her past holds the key to solving the case. Read an excerpt of I Have Some Questions For You here. 

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee

When Jonathan Abernathy lands a job with a government loan forgiveness program, one that will absolve him of his debts if he is successful, he jumps at the chance. He can give himself a new life if he proves competent at entering the dreams of middle class workers while they sleep and removes the unsavory detritus from their daily lives. As he settles into his new job, reality and morality begin to collide, forcing him to confront the lines between love and hate, work and life, right and wrong, and even sleep and consciousness. Read an excerpt of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind here.

Land of Milk and Honey by C. Pam Zhang

In a world covered in smog and filled with disappearing food crops, a chef leaves behind her dying career in a dreary city for a mountaintop escape, a colony where the world’s troubles seem more like faraway annoyances. The sky is clear, elusive ingredients are plenty, and she is reminded of the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body. Sensuous, surprising, and alluring, Land of Milk and Honey examines the ethics of seeking pleasure in a world who’s days are numbered. 

Blackouts by Justin Torres

In the desert in a place called The Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul who’s haunted the margins of his life: Juan Gay. Juan has a project to pass along, a book: Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, and its devastating history. Hidden in buried and muted voices are the stories of early twentieth century queer life. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator regale each other with moments of joy and sadness, of love and loss. A book about storytelling, this National Book Award winning novel reminds us that the past is with us, beside us, behind us, and ahead of us. 

Holding Pattern by Jenny Xie

In Jenny Xie’s debut novel, Kathleen moves back to Oakland and back in with her mother, Marissa, after a recent heartbreak. To distract herself and to get out of the house quite frankly, she applies for a job as a professional cuddler at the tactile therapy startup, Midas Touch. Marissa, meanwhile, is recently engaged and in the midst of planning her wedding. Holding Pattern—with its mesmerizing prose and endearingly authentic mother-daughter relationship—is about connection in all its many forms and fashions. Get a taste of the poignant novel by reading this excerpt published in Recommended Reading earlier this year.

People Collide by Isle McElroy

When Eli wakes up alone in the cramped Bulgarian apartment he shares with his wife, Elizabeth, who’s more organized and successful, he discovers that somehow he’s in her body. She, in his body, has vanished. As he searches throughout Europe for his wife, he embarks on an exploration of gender and embodied reality. People Collide is rich, rewarding, and a tender portrayal of ambition, desire, and shared lives and bodies. Check out Electric Lit’s exclusive cover reveal here. 

The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor

Set in Iowa City around a group of acquaintances—some friends, some lovers, some strangers—this mosaic of a novel alternates perspectives each chapter to dissect and discover the complexities as well as tragedies of being human. Eventually leading up to a dramatic weekend in a cabin, the central ensemble of artists, café-workers, poets, dancers, writers, and mathematicians are all haunted by societal expectations, cultural notions of art, Capitalism, their pasts, and perhaps each other. As Taylor probes the tension between individuals, communities, and contemporary America, he surely displays “the rhythms of living in the world” with this lasting, memorable novel. 

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

Yellowface follows two friends, June Hayward and Athena Liu, who are both writers but have had drastically different career outcomes. While Athena has become a bestseller, June’s books continue to go unnoticed. But after June witnesses Athena’s death, she steals her friend’s latest manuscript about Chinese laborers in World War I. June, who is white, changes her name to sound more ethnic and edits, plagiarizes, lies, then publishes Athena’s manuscript under the racially ambiguous “Juniper Song.” Unsurprisingly, June, or Juniper, is haunted by the threat of getting caught. The tension is high, and so are the stakes in this literary thriller, as Kuang develops her characters into ultra-real people and insightful commentaries on today’s publishing industry.

A Quitter’s Paradise by Elysha Chang

What holds a family together when the fallout seems inevitable? After Eleanor’s mother passes, she quits her PhD program, lies to her boyfriend, and continues down a path of questionable choices to distract herself from her own feelings. In hopes of confronting the present, Eleanor looks to the past and soon finds family secrets in every corner. Told through interwoven narratives from varying perspectives, eras, and continents, Elysha Chang’s debut is a sharp, intimate, and poignant investigation of grief, family dynamics, and selfhood. 

Mrs. S by K. Patrick

Mrs. S is an atmospheric slow burn of a novel. Taking place at an all-girls English boarding school, the titular character is the wife of the headmaster and the narrator, an unnamed 22-year-old and new matron hired to supervise the girls, is obsessed. What follows is a story of utmost yearning in the sense of queer desire, the attempt to understand one’s self, and a simple longing to be understood. The prose in this novel makes it stand out immensely—filled with poetry and melancholy around every corner and a hypnotic voice that conveys the intensity of youth and infatuation exquisitely. 

Sea Change by Gina Chung

Ro, having entered her thirties, her mother estranged, and her boyfriend having recently left to join a mission to Mars, is feeling stuck. She spends her days working at the aquarium, where she befriends Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus who is also Ro’s last remaining link to her father, a marine biologist who disappeared on an expedition. When Dolores is sold, Ro is left to wade through her memories and trauma, and finally come to terms with her history while finding her place in the ever-changing world around her. 

Where There Was Fire by John Manuel Arias

When a lethal fire burns evidence of a cover up at the American Fruit Company’s most lucrative banana plantation, a Costa Rican family is forever changed. What unfolds is a story of forgiveness, of a mother and daughter, of trying to cope with family mysteries and forces not fully understood. Brimming with ancestral ghosts and spirits, John Manuel Arias weaves a gorgeous tapestry of love, loss, secrets, and redemption in this debut National Bestseller. 

All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby

When former-FBI agent Titus Crowne returns to his hometown in Virginia as the newly-appointed sheriff, he’s faced with a tragedy and trail of secrets. The town, he finds, is torn apart and coming undone by Confederacy statues and flags on every street. And at the heart of the novel is a school shooting with the serial killer still on the loose—unleashing more tension and drama until it all brims over in this dark, complex story. All the Sinners Bleed asks its readers to reckon with what’s been lost and what’s about to be.

Moonrise Over New Jessup by Jamila Minnicks

In 1957, Alice Young steps off the bus in the all-Black town of New Jessup, Alabama, where residents have rejected racial integration as a method of social advancement. When Alice falls in love with Raymond Campbell, whose community organizing challenges the status quo, she realizes their love could lead to their expulsion from the town they both so dearly love. Rendered in lush, exquisite prose, Moonrise Over New Jessup revels in the turbulent underbelly of the politics of love. 

Rouge by Mona Awad

To borrow phrasing from Chelsea Davis, who interviewed Awad for Electric Lit in September, “Rouge tenderly explores grief, the psychic damage wrought by Eurocentric beauty standards, and the fierce, fraught love between mothers and daughters.” When Belle’s estranged mother dies suddenly, she returns to California to settle the debts and the mystery behind the cause. Belle has always been addicted to the endless stream of YouTube beauty tutorials and skincare rituals (because who hasn’t been at one point?), but things are taken to the next level when Belle enters La Maison de Méduse—the culty spa her mother was supposedly a part of—and finds possible answers as well as secrets galore. 

The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng

Born in a fishing village amid the heat and coastal beauty of Singapore, Ah Boon is a gentle boy not much interested in fishing. He prefers to spend time playing with the neighbor girl, but when he discovers an ability to find beautiful islands that no one else can find, he feels an obligation to impress the girl he loves. Told amidst the backdrop of the Japanese army’s invasion, and the rise of resistance, The Great Reclamation is an aching love, and coming of age story that reckons with colonialism and the wounds of progress.  

We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White

Set in Brooklyn in the 1980s, Key, a charming and tender doula serving the Black women of East New York is enchanted with her world. Like her mother, she lives among the departed, learning to speak to and for them. Her untimely death leaves behind her mother Audrey, and her son, Colly, who soon learns that he, too, has inherited his mother’s gifts. As he moves between the living and the dead, he begins a journey of radical self-realization. Part supernatural family saga, part searing social critique, Tyriek White’s Center for Fiction First Novel Prize winning debut is a lyrical and potent work of art.

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad

Isabella Hammad’s second novel follows Sonia Nasir, an actress who leaves London and a ruinous love affair, to spend the summer with her older sister in Haifa—their family’s ancestral city. Sonia gets caught up in a production of Hamlet (in Arabic and premiering on the West Bank) that a friend of her sister’s is organizing. Through the narrator, the complexities, dangers, and haunting realities of contemporary Palestinian existence seep through the tightly-woven plot and beautifully moving prose of Enter Ghost. 

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell

When a young father and son set out on a roadtrip, devastated by the death of their wife and mother, they must confront her terrifying legacy: a family called The Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality. Moving back and forth in time, from London in the 60s to the Argentinian military dictatorship and its aftermath, Our Share of Night is a beautiful, arresting novel of love and longing. 

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey 

As Lauren Groff writes in her introduction to this excerpt published in Recommended Reading, “Biography of X is a ghost story in which the living haunts the dead; it is a doomed and obsessive attempt by Lucca to make contact with X through time and space, coming closer and closer, but—infuriatingly—never being quite able to touch her lost love.” Set in an alternative USA, Biography of X is at its surface a book within a book—a biography of the late enigmatic and shape-shifting artist X, written by her wife, the journalist C.M. Lucca—but it becomes so much more than that as secrets, unknown histories, and questions unravel themselves with an almost equal amount of force as Lacey’s breathtaking sentences.

Writing Desire in Middle Age

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Diana Whitney’s second poetry collection, Dark Beds, is a rich text built of the many narratives that comprise middle age for caregivers: the demands of young children growing into themselves, parents aging away from themselves, a marriage suffering from the stress of relentless obligations.

Through these poems, Whitney explores the ache of desire that is often the backdrop of these caregiving years—the desire to be on the receiving end of tenderness and to be witnessed as a whole being rather than attendant. In the poem “The Long Goodbye” the speaker asks, “How can you savor what you have when it demands so much of your attention?” 

Within these poems, Whitney builds a landscape that is at once realistic and dreamlike, filled with coyotes, frozen rivers, orchards. These poems attend to the natural world with the same care and grace that they bear witness to the unfolding of desire, as in this stanza from “The Same Earth”:  

All I want is April on her back—

ecstatic creatures hatching in the ice pond,

green frog moon waxing like a come-on,

the bulbs busting up through dusty grass.  

Whitney and I spoke over the phone—from opposite sides of the country— just before the official launch of her book, during a quiet moment away from the demands of work and family. 

Jennifer Berney: I wanted to start by acknowledging that you just lost your mom, and so it must be odd to be launching a book. 

Diana Whitney: Yeah, I’m really tired. It was about three weeks that she was dying, so I took a lot of time off to go be there. My mom is a big part of the book, so to have just lost her and to be bringing the book into the world is really weird. 

JB: Are you up for saying a little more about that? 

DW: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’ll say that I’m a late bloomer with book publishing and I consider myself a slow writer, but I’ve come to embrace that and not compare myself to authors who whip out a book every two years. But this book was a long time coming. I’ve been writing these poems over a long period of time, like over the past 10 years. So they range from when my daughters were young to the later stages of their adolescence. And the poems range through the stages of my mom’s Alzheimer’s. So when I think about the title Dark Beds, there are layers of meanings there. The beds are definitely the garden beds because I’m a gardener.  And then also the marital bed and the darkness that can happen there when distance and conflict and estrangement develop within a relationship. And then there’s the darkest bed, which is mortality and death. And the poems witness my daughters as they move into adolescence while my mom was declining with Alzheimer’s. That’s one of the big arcs of the book. 

I’m a late bloomer with book publishing and I consider myself a slow writer, but I’ve come to embrace that and not compare myself.

So now having it come out in the world at this moment—yes—it’s particularly poignant and strange and vulnerable. The poem that I wrote, The Long Goodbye: the long goodbye is another name for Alzheimer’s. I remember reading that somewhere and thinking, I need to fit that into something I write. I didn’t know that when the book came out, that the long goodbye would be over. It was a 10-year goodbye. But I have this feeling that she lives through me and my daughters and my writing even though the mother that I’m remembering now, the one before Alzheimer’s, isn’t quite in these poems. But it’s a weird juxtaposition, the book launch and the grieving happening at the same time, because you have to be external when your book is launching. And you have to be internal to properly grieve.

JB: You described yourself as a late bloomer just now, and I wanted to ask you about writing from the perspective of middle age. And, just to toss this out there, my personal experience of middle age is that it doesn’t feel late to me.

DW: I do use “late bloomer” in quotes because it’s not my word, it’s the culture’s word. Maybe because we live in this youth worshiping culture. My journey with writing has taken the time it needed to take. And the wisdom I’m stepping into is around trusting that my own journey was the right path for me. I’m actually finishing my MFA, and I’ll graduate in January. I had started in my twenties and I had to take medical leave because of a chronic pain condition that was really debilitating. And then I didn’t go back for a variety of reasons, including my father’s death and then having two babies. But it became important to me that I finish what I’d started and I had this deep intuitive knowing that it was something that I needed to do without apology and without a good practical reason. 

I went to my residency as probably the oldest writer there, and actually loved that role. I felt like a wise maternal figure there, like I had a lot of insights and knowledge and depth to offer to younger writers. And I don’t say that in a condescending way, just more like: I just turned 50 and I’m at home with myself right now. The older I get, the more loss I see. Life is short. In terms of writing, we have to celebrate even the smallest accomplishments. We really do! Like, there’s no more waiting around for the poem in the New Yorker or the Pulitzer Prize or the NEA grant—it has to be now! 

JB: I’m curious too about the thread of desire in Dark Beds. Did it come easily, or was it scary to write about desire in middle age? 

DW: The first thing I’ll say is that I had writing friends who thought I should write a novel, that I should fictionalize my story. I’m not a novelist. I had to write it the way it came out of me, which was in poems and a lot of the poems were written a long time ago. So a lot of the hotter, desire-themed poems in the book were written in 2013, which is 10 years of a 20-year marriage. The experiences that I had that shaped the book, they might have ended in a different way. The last couple of poems really wrestle with the questions of: what is fidelity? What is longevity? What are the boundaries that we need within a marriage? What does it mean to fall in love with somebody else? For me that was inextricable from the experience of mothering young children and the kind of abnegation of self that can happen. 

I did the full-time motherhood thing very intensively. I called it the Baby Cave. And a lot of these poems were written right as I was stepping out of the baby cave and this experience of limerence happened to me—which is a word I had to learn, but it definitely applies. And the poems came out of this thrilling intoxication,  an awakening of both creative and sensual energy. It was incredible to both get poems from that and to be able to work things out with my partner. I’m intensely grateful for both things. I said, I’m not going to apologize for the poems. The experience of longing and desire, that was temporary. It was a catalyst for the poems, but the poems exist and I did not ask permission either to write them or to publish them. That’s maybe scary, and maybe people who aren’t writers wouldn’t understand that, but that was really important to me. Actually, one of the ways that I could stay in my marriage was not to apologize and not to ask for permission. 

JB: I feel like the standard cultural narrative is that motherhood depletes our desire, but a thread through the book is that motherhood actually drives this longing. 

I went to my residency as probably the oldest writer there, and actually loved that role.

DW: It did, it did. And some of the trap I felt was the domesticity of being a wife and being a queer woman in a hetero-seeming marriage. And that’s actually something now, in middle age, I’m needing to work on: finding space to express my bisexuality and what does that look like within a committed partnership.  I’m writing poems about that. But at that point, I felt stifled by the institution of marriage, by this notion of wife and the expectations of being a good mother. But desire was this exhilarating freedom—and the place to come back to myself. 

Before getting married, when I was single and dating a lot of people—I used to call it the vixen days. I don’t necessarily write about those in a nostalgic way in this book, but I think that the emotional affair that I write about in Dark Beds was a way of reliving the energy of those younger days. It was actually very adolescent. 

JB: With limerence and desire though, there is something about those emotions that seems adolescent, but I want to second guess that association. Is that just our cultural narrative again? 

DW: It might be. I mean, I know for me, I started listening to the same music I had in high school. Actually there’s a playlist for my book that my wonderful editor and publisher asked for. And it’s: The Cure, The Smiths, Suzanne Vega— these songs that I associate nostalgically as songs of longing and that was the music I wanted to listen to. 

I think maybe we denigrate that period of time, but it’s also a really fertile and generative period of time. I mean, it’s full of tumultuousness and pain and all of that, but it really can be very charged and beautiful and, and creative.

JB: Well, it’s the time before we’re locked in, right? I wish I could take a vacation in my twenties but as my 47-year-old self, I would love to be simultaneously in my twenties and my forties. 

DW: I feel the same way. And sometimes I say, oh, am I just being nostalgic? But I think it’s much more nuanced than that, going back to the experience of adolescence. I remember being 16 or 17 and a friend’s mom saying “Oh, you’re in discovery mode.” She was probably in her forties.  She said “You know, discovery mode doesn’t end when you get older.” And I remember thinking that was so weird, and like, why was this old mom saying that to me? And I think that’s probably what I was longing for in the poems, to be in that state of discovery and possibility. 

JB: I’m curious to what extent desire is about wanting to be seen. So much of raising kids is about who you are to the person who needs you, which is different than being wanted for who you are. 

DW: Absolutely. Being seen was a huge, huge part of it. To be seen, to be recognized, to be desired as a goddess, as a force of nature, as someone who runs wild in the woods or  under the full moon—something totally separate from mundane daily life and the tasks of, say, feeding children. 

JB: It’s an incredible aphrodisiac to be seen. 

DW: That was a big, big part of it. Esther Perel has that book Mating in Captivity, which was so, so formative to me. She says that sex isn’t something you do, it’s someplace you go. And she talks about the unknown that’s in eroticism. It’s difficult to have that thrilling experience of the unknown with someone who’s been your partner for 10 or 20 years. That is what she helps couples figure out both in the books that she writes and in her couples therapy practice. 

JB: It sounds like some of the power in her work is in not shaming the need behind it. 

DW: Yeah, and normalizing it—talking about desires that are often unspeakable outside of a marriage or partnership. There are so many things that she wrote that opened my eyes and helped me also to be forgiving towards myself. 

JB: I want to make sure I ask you about all the wildness and nature and animals that appear in your poems.

DW: I spend a lot of time in the woods and I’m lucky to live in just a beautiful place in the hills of southern Vermont. So inspiration comes from being out in a remote place where no other humans are, and like hiking up a mountain and encountering wild animals or being under the moon or stars. I’ve come to understand that an essential part of my writing process is being out in nature; it’s not some “self-care” thing I have to make time for. I mean, maybe it’s also that. Mary Oliver said that she would get up every morning and walk and she would bring her little journal with her, and most of her poems arose that way. It’s not as direct for me, but my experience of being out in the wild—on the river, in the woods— is part of my writing practice. I’ll come back and jot images in a notebook, and they inevitably find them find their way into poems. 

I actually think that the page is a place that we can be wild and free in a way that we can’t necessarily be in the kitchen with our children or, you know, driving the carpool. 

JB: Yeah, that’s interesting to think of the page as its own wilderness, 

DW: Right? And a place of discovery or possibility. I ended up feeling like the experience of writing for me was more thrilling in the long term than like the experiences of a sexual encounter or the possibility of a sexual encounter. I don’t know if that sounds disingenuous, but the thrill of composition, especially of writing something new and almost channeling it—sometimes you can feel some wild, otherworldly energy moving through you. It’s powerful. So I really am grateful that I have both: I have my long partnership with the father of my children, and I have these poems that came out of that experience that I chronicle in dark beds.

Before 2016 I Dated Republicans Without Much Shame

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

As I watched Donald Trump win the presidency on November 8th, 2016, I didn’t know that it meant my days of sleeping with Republicans were over. Why? For a start, it took me a few days to even accept the election results. Furthermore, I’d never sought out Republicans for intimacy-related reasons—it was one of those things that just happened, from time to time. But if I’m being honest with myself, the real reason is that I didn’t even realize a line in the sand existed until someone else articulated it.

Before 2016, I dated Republicans without much shame. I didn’t agree with them politically, but I subscribed to the mathematically-sound belief that the wider your net, the more likely you are to get a boyfriend. Besides, I thought politics was private; how we vote is anonymous, after all. However, on a date in early 2018, when a man told me his only deal breaker was that he wouldn’t date a Trump voter, I responded with, “well, of course I wouldn’t date a Trump voter.” And I meant it. Which meant that somewhere along the way, something had shifted.

I hadn’t fully understood why until I read Cecilia Rabess’ phenomenal novel Everything’s Fine—the story of Jess, a young, liberal Black woman and Josh, a young, conservative white guy. They meet in college, get to know each other on the trading floor of Goldman Sachs, and begin dating while she works for him at a hedge fund. 

Everything’s Fine was flooded with bad reviews before it came out. Readers found the premise—that a Black woman would date a racist white man—racist. I’m a white woman; it’s not up to me to decide what’s racist, but I don’t condone reviewing a book before reading it. At the same time, I can conceive of a book description so racist that the book itself should be discredited—which is why this controversy made me curious. So curious, in fact, that I bought the book. 

I’m glad I did, because I loved it. The criticism isn’t unfounded; Josh makes insensitive and ignorant comments about race throughout, which qualifies him as a racist. And yet, I’m of the opinion that all white people in this country (myself included) have made insensitive and ignorant comments about race at some point—and in this case, I thought it was fair to leave it up to Jess to choose whether or not to forgive. 

Jess, for her part, isn’t perfect either. She feels guilty walking by Occupy Wall Street protestors on her way to her Goldman Sachs job every day, but she changes nothing. She benefits from Josh’s wealth and tolerates his behavior for years. 

And I related to Jess’ dilemma. Like her, I often find myself torn between an opposition to capitalism and the necessary acknowledgment that it benefits me. And I related to her romantic predicament: existing in a relationship that looks terrible from the outside (Jess’ friends describe Josh as “toxic” and even question if it’s ethical for Jess to date him), while knowing there’s something there my friends can’t see. But as Josh continued to offend, and as her political views developed, tested by the inequities of the so-called real world, I began to wonder: was she ever going to draw the line with him?

Readers found the premise—that a Black woman would date a racist white man—racist.

She reaches the end of her rope in Summer 2016, in a moment that’s very specific to their relationship, and yet so glaringly familiar. Searching for a lost item in their apartment, she discovers Josh owns a MAGA hat. And then, Jess is done.

And as she’s breaking up with him, Josh snaps too. He says aloud what Jess has been fearing for years: that she’s a hypocrite. He claims she’s a beneficiary of the same power structures she theoretically opposes. He’s not wrong, but at the same time, Jess is also a victim of these power structures—she’s the recipient of routine racism and sexism on Wall Street. Rabess asks us not to oversimplify oppression—a person can be on both ends.

More convincingly, Josh says it’s unfair for Jess to hold his Trump support against him, as he’s never hidden who he was. She already knew he was a registered Republican, that he’s always voted for Republicans. He voted for Mitt Romney, he works at a hedge fund, he owns a $4 million apartment, and he’s opposed to most social welfare programs. He hasn’t changed.

He’s once again not wrong; given everything we know about Josh, his support of Trump is expected. Here, I recognized the innate hypocrisy of my own line. Is a Romney voter much better than a Trump voter? They are largely the same people, and I mean that as a statistical truth, not a moral assertion. Most Romney voters voted for Trump, and the ones who didn’t were largely educated wealthy white professionals. Republicans vote for Republican candidates; that’s one of their defining qualities. To this very day, 91 charges later, 70% of registered Republicans are still with Trump.

We all like to think we can influence our partner’s political views, and sometimes we can.

And yet, even if Josh’s support is to be expected, even if it’s in line with everything he’s ever done, and even though I remember exactly what was happening in Summer 2016, I still gasped when Jess found the hat. But why? Why was it different? Why was this Jess’ line? Why is it mine?

On the one hand, it’s obvious. Because it’s Donald Trump. Trump is and was so blatantly racist and misogynistic that no Black woman should have to explain why they dumped their white boyfriend for supporting him. Nor any woman in general. Even though Josh was a Romney voter, Trump is so much worse. 

Furthermore, when Josh voted for Romney, he wasn’t dating Jess. Perhaps Jess wanted to think Josh had adjusted his views merely by osmosis, even though he never caved during any of their arguments. Here, again, I related strongly. We all like to think we can influence our partner’s political views, and sometimes we can. In 2014, I successfully convinced my conservative investment banker boyfriend that his time was too valuable to waste voting. That was the only time, though.

And Jess didn’t dump Josh when he told her he was voting for Trump, she dumped him when she found the red hat. Josh tries to argue it’s “just a hat.” But of course it’s not just the hat, it’s his show of enthusiasm the hat represents. As Rabess writes:

“It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation-wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings, and George Zimmerman, and the Central Park Five, and redlining, and gerrymandering and the Southern strategy, and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings and the growing fear of a nonwhite, non-English-speaking majority and the slow death of the social safety net….and Josh—now it makes her think of Josh.”

It’s not just me and Jess. Politics is a common line to draw in romantic relationships, in theory. I wouldn’t date anyone who I know definitely voted for Trump—and 71% of registered Democrats say the same. And even though I have more firm lines than I used to, it’s still my preference to know less about someone’s politics early on in the relationship. For example, I’m grateful I was already in love with my partner by the time he revealed he voted for Gary Johnson. Relationships are hard enough without adding politics in. 

But Jess’ line was with Trump himself, not Josh’s politics. And so—I had to admit—was mine. Did Trump change what it means to date a Republican? What you’re conceding when you do? 

On the one hand, Trump has said and done so many abhorrent things that it feels like a no-brainer. It would be impossible to date anyone who even tries to defend him. There’s a reason the 2017 Women’s March, the day after his inauguration, was the largest single-day protest in our country’s history. Supporting Trump feels like a hole so deep it would be impossible for a relationship to climb out intact. 

On the other hand, maybe I’m just using Trump’s specifics as an excuse. It often feels like “Never Trump” Republicans just want us to go back to a time when Republicans were polite about their tacit support for income inequality. Maybe I just want absolution for the Republicans I dated pre-2016. Maybe a more progressive person would tell me the same thing Josh told Jess: Republicans vote for Republicans.

Supporting Trump feels like a hole so deep it would be impossible for a relationship to climb out intact.

Everything’s Fine doesn’t end when Jess dumps Josh. He goes to great lengths to win her back—he shows up in her hometown, even though she’s ignored his calls for months, and at one point, he even offers to sacrifice his job to save hers. She remains on the fence. Indeed, she’s as undecided after their breakup as she was during their relationship. 

I don’t hold this indecision against her. I don’t hold it against anyone for breaking their own rules, for crossing their own lines. Whatever we say we care about when it comes to our partners’ politics often goes out the window in the face of attraction. I say I wouldn’t sleep with a Trump voter—and to my knowledge I haven’t—but maybe that’s because an attractive enough Trump voter hasn’t hit on me (it brings me no joy to say this, but some Republicans are hot). Dating may compel us to compromise our political values, but then again, so does politics itself. I could fill a book with abhorrent things Democratic politicians I’ve voted for have said or done; I regret none of those votes. It’s not as though I had infinite choices. 

Furthermore, it might not be helpful to draw political lines in romance. Sometimes, I feel like my refusal to date a Trump voter is self-indulgent, for the same reason I tend to roll my eyes when the privileged discuss how they’ll move to Canada if Trump is reelected; the people with the resources to move countries are exactly the ones who don’t need to worry. Maybe a white lady swiping left on moderates is false martyrdom; making it about me when it doesn’t need to be. Maybe choosing to let politics affect one’s personal voice is a privilege afforded to those for whom politics don’t bombard their personal lives against their will. 

So maybe there’s absolution for those who date people with abhorrent political views. Jess forgives Josh so many transgressions, but I forgive her for her forgiveness. Josh is funny and sweet and loves her very, very much. And there’s more to him than his politics. My favorite scene comes near the end, at a party thrown by Jess’ friends. Jess is annoyed at Josh for announcing he thinks eviction is fine. Moments later, she finds him out on the balcony, having rescued a stray kitten. Jess is both wholly charmed and deeply annoyed. She wants consistency, but Josh eludes easy labels of “good” or “bad.” 

Maybe a white lady swiping left on moderates is false martyrdom; making it about me when it doesn’t need to be.

The juxtaposition of the cruelty of his politics and the warmth of his affection for a kitten reminds us that everyone has a softness to them, everyone contains multitudes. The book is worth reading for the very reason people tried to cancel it before it came out—because it isn’t afraid to find the humane side of those we vilify, often for good reason. Everything’s Fine argues that it’s worth asking if a racist Trump voter is as worthy of love as anyone else.

Rabess’ choice of Trump as the demarcation, the point of no return, is apt, as he’s unintentionally moved the line many times. After each unspeakable transgression, he gives his old supporters a new chance at redemption; after each massive moral failing, a new crop of “Never Trump” Republicans were born. On the eve of Trump’s third nomination, is it time to ask if there’s redemption for 2016 Trump voters? Are those who voted for him in 2016, but not 2020, now dateable? Those who were with him until Charlottesville? Until the pandemic? Until he told the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by? Until January 6th? And if there is—could you be the one to give it to them?

On its face, Everything’s Fine asks us to consider where to draw the line. Zoom out slightly and the fundamental question broadens: do these lines benefit us? Does the very act of moving the line make you a hypocrite? If so, are we all hypocrites? I can’t reveal what Jess chose, but it’s a mark of Rabess’ phenomenal storytelling skills that I was left guessing until the very last page.

The Best Podcasts Engaged in Literary Activism

Posted on by Jo Lou

A lot of us talk the talk about what’s wrong with book publishing today—but who among us is walking the walk and actually effecting change in the world of literature? On Missing Pages, which I host for The Podglomerate, we look into past and present situations and processes (even scandals and trials!) that have different kinds of outcomes, some powerful and helpful, some scammy and disappointing, in the sometimes-secretive realm of publishing. We hope that learning more about the entire industry helps our audience understand that there are things that do need to change.

I’ve chosen the podcasts on this list not necessarily because they proclaim a mission dedicated to change, but because just by doing what they’re doing, by claiming space for their subjects, they are making changes in which books and authors and ideas we discuss. We’ve learned a great deal from social media in the past couple of decades: Hashtags like #WeNeedDiverseBooks, #OwnVoices, and even my own #FridayReads have helped authors and readers connect and share ideas and form communities that support new kinds of books and media around them.

The idea of “literary citizenship” is a good one—until it becomes something that excludes certain groups, for reasons that can range from class disparity to physical and mental challenges to racism. These podcasts help to break through stale assumptions about reading choices, literary events, and how underrepresented groups are portrayed in many genres.

Well-Read Black Girl hosted by Glory Edim

Anyone who doesn’t already know about Well-Read Black Girl should make this podcast a priority. Glory Edim began to build a community about Black women and literature in 2015, and she’s continued to build community as she’s published books, tried different kinds of publishing events, and oh, had a life, too! Whether her guest is Jacqueline Woodson, Deesha Philyaw, or Tayari Jones, Edim’s interview style is elegant, deeply engaged, and incredibly smart. It feels as if you’re just listening to girlfriends talking, and that’s because Edim actually is friends IRL with these authors – but she’s also read their work closely and carefully. You’ll want to spend more time with her and with these authors, but you’ll also want to pick up their books. The only problem with this podcast? That there aren’t oh, say, 100 more episodes already. Go, Glory, go! 

Ursa Short Fiction hosted by Deesha Philyaw and Dawnie Walton

Speaking of Deesha Philyaw, she and her longtime friend and fellow author Dawnie Walton (they actually went to high school together in Jacksonville, Florida) started the Ursa Short Fiction podcast as part of the Ursa Story Network, which is dedicated to supporting storytelling, especially storytelling from voices that haven’t had extended outlets in the past. With a guest list including authors Maurice Ruffin and Nana Nkweti, illustrators and composers Jiro Yoshioka and Halimah Smith, it’s a podcast that can continue for as long as its hosts can find great voices writing the kinds of relevant, passionate short stories that Philyaw (The Secret Lives of Church Ladies) and Walton (The Final Revival of Opal & Nev) also create. 

The Stacks hosted by Traci Thomas

Traci Thomas is a stone-cold literary celebrity at this point, and she deserves to be. Her last two episodes were with Jason Reynolds and Samantha Irby, and they are both hella fun as listens – but oh, how I wish I could have been onsite with Traci (I do have a photo with her from the 2023 LA Times Book Festival. . . ). One of the things that makes The Stacks especially powerful in its book pushing, especially of BIPOC authors, is that Traci takes time to add dozens, sometimes scores, of links to books, authors, blogs, creators, restaurants, bookstores, you name it, creating little solar systems for people who go to a city/neighborhood (not that anyone is talking any authors, no no Samantha Irby, that’s not me peeking around your Chicago corner with a drained Portillo’s cake shake in my hand). 

Deadline City hosted by Dhonielle Clayton and Zoraida Córdova

Dhonielle Clayton and Zoraida Córdova did not come to play. As authors, they’ve written a combined 40 books; as podcast hosts, they spill the tea on how manuscripts become books. While they focus on the YA process, most of it is applicable to any type of published book; they’ll talk to listeners about everything from whether or not to read your reviews to what happens when you need a new agent. They don’t shy away from big issues like social justice, identity politics, and sexuality. Clayton and Córdova understand that authors are public figures but also people with private lives who have lived for years in the digital space and through the global pandemic. They have regular features—“The Query Quarter,” “Agent Avenue,” —and also standalone episodes on different genres, careers, and forms. 

Big Gay Fiction Podcast hosted by Jeff Adams and Will Knaus

Yes, Big Gay Fiction Podcast is primarily for readers of gay romance fiction—but I believe that in itself is pushing the publishing industry envelope. Co-hosts Jeff Adams and Will Knaus (who are currently working on Episode 450, so there is a lot for new fans to catch up on!) aren’t just podcasters and authors; they’re also husbands who bring the joy, front and center, to queer lit. They also publish a newsletter, the Rainbow Romance Reader Report, for listeners who want more more more. Their guest list reads like a hall of fame for queer romance authors, including Lev A. C. Rosen, V. E. Schwab, and even Paul Rudnick. If that’s not enough content for you? They also have a book club podcast. The success of this podcast is especially meaningful because there once was no such thing as queer romance in publishing, so this podcast’s progress matters.

Books & Boba by Marvin Yueh and Reera Yoo

Marvin Yueh and Reera Yoo know great literature and they know great literature from AAPI authors especially well. They intersperse author interviews with episodes covering the latest books by Asian and Asian American authors. They’ve been around for seven years and are only picking up more and more steam as people in publishing (too slowly) realize the incredible market for stories from Asian authors. Their latest episode is an interview with Malaysian writer Tan Twan Eng, whose new novel “The House of Doors” is so good that it’s already been longlisted for the Booker Prize. 

Reading Women hosted by Kendra Winchester and Autumn Privett

Kendra Winchester and Autumn Privett host a long-running podcast about women authors, of all kinds of backgrounds. The episodes focus on themes such as incarceration, Black joy, and nature writing, as well as include author interviews. Their empire grew to include a team, a newsletter, and an award; I’m sad to say that in 2021, they shut down. However, their archives contain so much worthy material, including episodes on women in translation and working class stories, that I’m including the series here in hopes that it will encourage new and even more expansive podcasts about women authors. We hold up half the sky, after all. Publishing has tons of women working in it, but that doesn’t always equate to tons of books by and for and about women being released.

Lifelines: Books That Bridge the Divide hosted by Ann Braden and Saadia Faruqi

Ann Braden and Saadia Faruqi have a great manifesto on their pod’s launch page, and it includes the lines: “Together we believe… that books with diverse characters and settings can teach readers a lot about the world as well as about themselves… that books have the power to be a bridge across the cultural divide.” As I write, more bridges are necessary than ever, and this podcast focusing on children’s literature can help as many adults as it can their offspring/charges. Each episode includes show notes and book lists; the co-hosts are authors who are also parents; they speak with educators, community organizers, illustrators, and many other people who realize how powerful children’s access to books is, especially in service of helping young people to recognize difference and develop compassion.

The Mental Illness Happy Hour hosted by Paul Gilmartin

Paul Gilmartin is a comedian, actor, and musician whose long-running podcast consists of in-depth interviews with “artists, friends and the occasional doctor” about mental illness and mental health. Many of his guests (full disclosure: I’ve been one of them) are authors and writers who used their work to reach people and to change the publishing industry’s views on stories about depression, addiction, and more. Gilmartin cautions listeners that the podcast is “not a doctor’s office. Think of it more as a waiting room that doesn’t suck”, – in this waiting room, the magazines are never out of date and the person next to you has interesting stories to share. As more and more people willing to be open about neurodiversity enter the workplace, and that includes the literary world’s workplace, The Mental Illness Happy Hour provides a safe place.

The Moon Has Always Been an Alien

Posted on by Wynter Miller

Alien

Once, this stable hosted  
tens of thoroughbreds.

But this ranch has a history 
of lost riders

and now, there is
nothing else to ride.

Set free by forgetfulness 
rather than truth,

I am comfortable 
with my beliefs of the unseen.

Under the night sky, 
scars become spider veins—

like an atom
blurred for naked eyes.

There is migration 
anytime the sun coils 

into its cotton shell 
or when the ground cracks, 

because it thirsts for rain. 

Stalactites hang 
down the roof of a cave 

where shadows 
eclipsed the hieroglyphs.

Before the storm, 
sharks fled their nurseries  

for the abyssopelagic zone, where 
the moon has always been an alien.

Light

—	with a line from Kahf or the Cave
As the sea rises, it absorbs lights 
from the sky in packets.

A spider tents a web bridge 
across the well of oyster shells.

Inside the mirror are reflections 
of cities on water.

The window glasses in this house 
are old as toothed edges of cowries 

on the sea floor. A fisherman returned 
after a storm. In the past, disciples  

of this blue water sat on the beach 
with lungs filled with hot air, 

& thirsty for their wounds to be healed. 
Omi o ni ota, omi ni ìwòsàn ohun gbogbo.

Though we name what we can neither inherit 
nor mourn, man has never been most of anything.

The eye was cave enough to be a museum
for beams of wandering blue lights, 

until they vanished before it rained.  
The storm blew octopuses to the beach.

If the water breaks through, walk
into the fog until you touch the water, 

A smoke from a burnfire
dilates the cave’s entrances, 

hungered with grief, a new moon 
was sighted in a jar of salt water.

Electric Lit’s Best Nonfiction of 2023

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

When it comes to nonfiction, this year featured some truly stellar writing. This was a year in which we’ve seen the expansion of what this genre is, and who writes it. Our truest stories, sometimes molded in the form of poetic lyricism or sensational public spectacle, yielded a larger than life impact. Questions of displacement and longing, and the desire to root oneself in a chosen community, were widespread themes, alongside love, loss, and the practice of creating art—much of it told with humor and acerbic wit. There’s no doubt that some of our most crucial, vital storytellers are not only writing the stories of their lives, but of our lives, too. 

Here are Electric Lit’s top five nonfiction books of the year, followed by additional favorites below.  

The Top 5 Nonfiction Books of The Year

A Living Remedy: A Memoir by Nicole Chung

A searing memoir examining the intricacies of familial bonds, grief and class, A Living Remedy chronicles Nicole Chung’s journey out of her largely white Oregon hometown to middle class stability. However, she is unexpectedly drawn back to her roots by her father’s death from diabetes and kidney disease at the age of sixty-seven and her mother’s cancer diagnosis a year later. Exposing the deep inequalities at the heart of the American healthcare system, A Living Remedy is also a moving meditation on overcoming hardship and the strength of familial love. Read an interview with Chung here.

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer

Claire Dederer tackles the moral complexities of separating the art from the artist, questioning if we can knowingly enjoy the work of problematic or harmful male artists and if female artists can be considered monstrous too. Interrogating her own responses to creators whose difficult behavior disrupts our enjoyment of their work, she prompts her readers to consider these questions for themselves. Ambitious, nuanced and morally considered, Monsters interrogates the ethical implications of loving problematic artists. Read an interview with Dederer here.

Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir by Lamya H

Hijab Butch Blues narrates the story of Lamya, a queer South Asian teenager growing up in a Muslim family who feels displaced in a Middle Eastern country. Following Lamya’s journey as she immigrates to the United States and explores queer dating, the memoir interweaves stories from the Quran with her deeply personal experiences. This is a bold, humorous and unflinching look at one woman’s navigation of her sexuality, faith and relationships while forging a path of her own. Read a conversation with her here.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

Poet and author of “Good Bones” Maggie Smith examines a heartbreak that led to the disintegration of her marriage. Expanding outwards, this memoir confronts labor under the patriarchy and the gendered dynamics of heterosexual marriage that exist even within progressive families head-on. An emotionally honest and searing memoir about one woman’s enduring love for her children and struggle to regain her own voice and identity, You Could Make This Place Beautiful reveals how we move forward in the aftermath of loss. Read an interview with her here.

Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby

Samatha Irby’s hilarious new essay collection takes us on a behind the scenes tour of her dynamic career as a comedian, essayist, blogger, and television writer. Navigating the ins and outs of both Hollywood fame and everyday life, she narrates amusing anecdotes about subjects as wide-ranging as dress codes, dog adoption and emails. Quietly Hostile is an uproarious account of the relatable gory details underlying Irby’s entertaining online presence.

Electric Lit’s Other Favorite Nonfiction Books 

Sink: A Memoir by Joseph Earl Thomas

Growing up in a tumultuous home where his family struggled with hunger and the consequences of crack addiction, Joseph Earl Jones found solace in geek culture. Faced with hostility and indifference at home and at school, he began to escape into the respite of virtual and fantasy worlds. Sink is a heart-wrenching coming-of-age story about Jones’s quest to find salvation on his own terms that is also a celebration of all things nerdy.

The Book of (More) Delights by Ross Gay

This charming follow-up to The Book of Delights is an exquisite, genre-defying catalog of small daily wonders. Gay investigates wide-ranging sources of delight, from hearing his favorite song on the radio to baking cookies to the enduring beauty of the natural world. Searching for connection and meaning yields in this moving and cheerful collection on the power of looking for wonder in everyday life.

The Heartbreak Years: A Memoir by Minda Honey

In 2008, Minda Honey made a cross-country trip from her hometown in Kentucky to begin a new life in California. Navigating the treacherous waters of early adulthood, she confronted breakups, hookups, complicated relationships and a new wave of political change. This unflinching memoir focusing on a Black woman coming of age and falling in and out of relationships in her twenties examines the complex dynamics of gender, sexuality, race and class. Learn about the book’s cover design here.

Pageboy: A Memoir by Elliot Page

This much-anticipated memoir from the acclaimed actor and activist traces the arc of his journey as a queer and transgender person grappling with the perils of fame. The success of his movie Juno launched Elliot to worldwide stardom, but he struggled with the pressure to perform the part of a movie star and endured a barrage of criticism from both Hollywood and wider society. An intimate behind the scenes exploration of love, sex, trauma and fame, Pageboy is the moving story of what it means to overcome societal expectations to embrace who we really are.

Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

Ordinary Notes is an inventive collection of 248 brief notes exploring profound questions about loss, beauty, memory, art, and everyday Black existence. Artifacts from the past are interwoven with contemporary realities and distant futures to evoke the presence of the author’s mother Ida Wright Sharpe and explore a new way of seeing. Sharpe’s practice of “beauty as a method” and examination of memorial sites forges a bold and sparkling new literary form underlying her multifaceted constructions of Blackness.

Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation by Camonghne Felix

After the author undergoes a traumatic breakup resulting in a hospital stay, she attempts to grapple with her early childhood trauma and mental health during her healing process. Framing her childhood mathematical learning difficulties, dyscalculia, as a metaphor for her miscalculations in romantic relationships. Dyscalculia explores the consequences of heartbreak and realities of misaligned expectations in an achingly familiar way.

bell hooks: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations by bell hooks

bell hooks was a trailblazing feminist and anti-racist author whose work as an activist, cultural critic and professor laid the foundations for contemporary conversations surrounding race and gender. In this collection of interviews spanning from her early career to just before her death, hooks discusses her views on feminism, masculinity, religion, politics, love, sexuality and cross-cultural communication. This new collection is essential reading for both longtime readers of hooks and new fans seeking to learn more about her groundbreaking contributions to cultural and intellectual movements.

A Man of Two Faces: A Memorial, A History, A Memorial by Viet Thanh Nguyen

In A Man of Two Faces, Viet Thanh Nguyen brilliantly expands the genre of memoir by intertwining his own life story with a critical exploration of colonization, family history and fatherhood. After Nguyen and his family fled Vietnam as refugees and settled in California, he continued to contend with his legacy of family trauma, Vietnamese identity, political convictions and heartbreaking tragedy. A Man of Two Faces mines the power of cultural memory to narrate the exceptional life story of a brilliant and original writer. Read an interview with Nguyen here.

Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice by Cristina Rivera Garza

A finalist for the National Book Award, Cristina Rivera Garza takes a painful journey back in time to seek justice for her sister, who was murdered by an ex-boyfriend thirty years ago. Both a celebration of life and an interrogation of domestic abuse, this memoir honors a woman whose story ended tragically and seeks accountability from perpetrators of violence.

The Loneliness Files by Athena Dixon

Can you build human connection behind a computer screen? In this memoir-in-essays, Athena Dixon examines loneliness under a microscope, revisiting the isolation at the height of the pandemic and exploring the impact of the Internet on our relationship with solitude. Read an EL interview with Dixon on the epidemic of loneliness. 

Black Women Writers at Work by Claudia Tate

This thirty-year-old collection by Claudia Tate encompasses interviews of celebrated Black women writers, including Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and more. Previously out of print, this new edition of Black Women Writers at Work brings the crucial words of icons across Black literature to a new audience. 

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

Upon indirectly meeting her “doppelganger,” who is an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist, Naomi Klein reckons with a loss of identity as she faces notoriety after being mistaken for someone else. A personal and meticulous examination of the Internet post-pandemic, Klein’s memoir tackles AI-generated content, the spread of misinformation, and the permeation of conspiracy theories.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

By now, Palo Alto seems synonymous with Silicon Valley and the “next big idea” from its eager entrepreneurs. But this dive into the history of Palo Alto from Malcolm Harris leaps 150 years into the past, mapping the city’s colonialist origins and examining how it became an epicenter for technology and capitalism. 

The In-Betweens: A Lyrical Memoir by Davon Loeb

A poetic memoir-in-essays, The In-Betweens traces Davon Loeb’s adolescence between two identities: Southern Black, like his mother, and Jewish and white, like his father. Often one’s family and culture is not so easily defined, and this introspective coming-of-age memoir offers a voice to everyone interpreting life in the in-between. Read an EL interview with Loeb on navigating identity and masculinity as a biracial boy in America. 

When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era by Donovan X. Ramsey

Longlisted for the National Book Award, this meticulous analysis of the crack cocaine epidemic of the ‘80s and ‘90s lends a voice to survivors of addiction and brings unflinching insight into the destructive impact of the “War on Drugs.” When Crack Was King, a debut from Donovan X. Ramsey, ignites a conversation about decriminalization, mass incarceration, and the trauma of the crack epidemic on Black and brown communities. Read Fred McKindra’s essay about the book.

All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive by Rainesford Stauffer

Suffering from burnout, Americans struggle to keep up with ever-looming expectations to succeed, thrive, and endlessly grind. In All the Gold Stars, Rainesford Stauffer offers an alternative: reconnect with yourself and your community and navigate ambition on your own terms (outside of a capitalistic lens designed to overwork and individualize). 

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell

Is it healthy to monetize every minute of every day? (Short answer: no). Rather than living by the whims of a clock, Jenny Odell encourages us to slow down, embrace the natural cycles of the Earth, match the rhythm of our own bodies, and see time as something to be shared with one another. Read an EL essay on Odell’s books Saving Time and How to Do Nothing and viewing time and attention as “collective goods.” 

Tabula Rasa: Volume 1 by John McPhee

Pulitzer Prize winner John McPhee’s Tabula Rasa: Volume 1 engages with fraught ideas and unpublished drafts that span his decades-long career. A prolific icon of literary nonfiction, McPhee provides an honest and clever retrospection on his own work while revisiting projects initially left behind. 

A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again by Joanna Biggs

Joanna Biggs struggles to start over after the unraveling of her marriage and finds solace in the words and unconventional lives of women writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Virginia Woolf, to name a few. A Life of One’s Own is both an interrogation of stifling societal expectations of women and rich biographical accounts of history’s beloved women writers. 

Eyeliner: A Cultural History by Zahra Hankir

The pen rolling around the bottom of a makeup bag is so much more than just eyeliner. Zahra Hankir, editor of Our Women on the Ground, explores the lasting impact of eyeliner across history. From being a cultural and religious custom, to a political statement, to a modern eye-catching look, Eyeliner: A Cultural History reveals the power of this versatile cosmetic.

7 Memoirs About Addiction by Women Writers

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

My most transformative reading experiences have been ones in which I see the worst parts of myself in full display on the page. From the time I was a teenager, I’ve gravitated toward women characters and writers whose behaviors, addictions, and ailments were at odds with their “potential.” Esther in The Bell Jar, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Tove Ditlevsen, to name a few, spoke and continue to speak to me. Because I was the girl who got scholarships and hid empty magnums of Yellowtail in her childhood bedroom. Because I’d sneak into my bedroom at 5 in the morning after destroying my body and drive to school at 7:30 am as if nothing had happened. Substance abuse, secrecy, and masking are salient themes in my first book, a lyric essay I’m still not comfortable calling a memoir, The Hurricane Book: A Lyric History. They are also an important feature of being a woman living with and around addiction and mental illness.

My Catholic inner child considers this attraction to femme addiction narratives perverse. The older, agnostic me considers it somewhat narcissistic. There might be some truth to both. As a writer dealing with shameful topics, there is the risk of character annihilation, alienation from those we want to love and be loved by. So why do we do it? I honestly have no idea.

None of the books on this list have provided a definite answer for me, but they do offer the reader (and writer) a variety of answers to the question of how, if not why, we write candidly about the unfeminine, scandalous upend-your-life decisions our bodies and minds make to help us cope. They also expose the insidious ways in which addiction can unfold in the most unlikely places and at the most inopportune times. They are also full of hard-earned grace and/or humor, two things we all need more of when we look in the mirror.

Smile, Please: An Unfinished Autobiography by Jean Rhys

Best known for penning the woman-in-the-attic-focused prequel to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, English writer Jean Rhys was always a little out of step. She was intimately acquainted with displacement and battled an inner duality since childhood. As a privileged girl from a family of colonists in early 20th-century Dominica, she clashed with her environment, her peers, and her parents. She was neither here nor there, but spent most of her life looking for a place to belong to. In her posthumous (and unfinished) autobiography, Rhys recounts her early years in the Caribbean, her time as a chorus girl in England, her experience as a wealthy man’s mistress, and her chaotic entanglements in bohemian 1920s Paris. We see her fall into the arms of the wrong men, debilitating alcoholism, and, despite all this, writing.

The Chronology of Water: A Memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch

Formally masterful and inventive, The Chronology of Water features poetic, non-linear prose that flows in and out of Yuknavitch’s experiences with parental violence and neglect, child loss, unmet expectations, and drugs and alcohol. The author, once a promising competitive swimmer with a scholarship, leaves behind a dysfunctional home only to fall into known destructive patterns, experimenting with self-destructive forms of escape. Reeling from a bad relationship and the loss of a child, the author enrolls in school and finds herself in a writing workshop that changes the course of her life. More than anything, this is a book about art, how the love of it (and the right people) can bring us back to ourselves.

Whip Smart by Melissa Febos

A brilliant, nuanced study in desire, self-actualization, and recovery, Melissa Febos’s debut focuses on her time as a dominatrix in NYC while studying at The New School and battling a heroin addiction. One of the things I admire most about Febos is her generosity, the palpable love with which she writes about herself, her gentle self-awareness. Here is a beloved daughter from a supportive home, a talented student. With measured curiosity, she challenges the notion that a woman like that can’t abandon herself and others, that she can’t be a sex worker, that she can’t be an addict, that any of these is guaranteed to beget the other.

Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher

“If my life wasn’t funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable.” Yes, it’s a celebrity memoir. Yes, maybe it’s one of those things you’d pick up at a Hudson News. But beyond the Princess Leia-Paul Simon-Elizabeth Taylor-Eddie Fisher-Debbie Reynolds of it all, you can’t deny that Carrie Fisher wrote a memoir about painful family dynamics, public life, bipolar disorder, and addiction that can make you laugh (if you have the patience for this kind of thing). It’s voice driven, shiny, and a little indulgent. After years of keeping her battle with substance abuse under wraps, Fisher became an advocate for mental health awareness who spoke openly about her bipolar disorder diagnosis and her addictions, becoming sort of a den mother to unlikely celebrities and a beloved public figure. It’s easy to see why.

Lit by Mary Karr

The third in a memoir trilogy that includes the critically acclaimed The Liars’ Club and Cherry, Lit introduces Mary Karr as a full grown woman, poet, wife, and mother struggling with alcoholism. In her musical, no-nonsense style, she shows us how this disease, passed down from her own gun-toting, charming, erratic artist mother, almost wrecked her own life, following her on a quest for the stability she didn’t know as a kid. We see how through hard spiritual work, brutal self-effacement, hospitalization, community, and grace, she found a way through. This is also one of the first memoirs I ever read that included habitual disclosures about the haziness of memory, which made me feel safe as a reader and writer.

Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls by Nina Renata Aron

In an interview conducted while she was at work on the memoir, Aron said, “There’s this long history of, often women, living alongside this disease. But women’s experiences are seen as this secondary emotional corollary to the much more important story of male alcoholism and all the storminess that it entails.” At the center of her book is this secondary emotional corollary as it pertains to codependency. She had ample experience with it. At a young age, she became both protector and cop to her sister, who was addicted to drugs. After leaving home, marrying, and having a child, she reconnects with a charismatic man from her past, and the two begin an obsessive drug-filled affair that perpetuates a cycle of enabling and mutual destruction. Aron uses this as a springboard to talk about the psychology of codependency and even the roots of the temperance movement.

Drunk Mom by Jowita Bydlowska

Shortly after the birth of her son, Bydlowska relapses after three years of sobriety. She felt like a God, so she thought, why not keep that feeling going. Fast forward a bit and she’s sneaking drinks at the grocery store, waking up in a hotel with no panties on after a blackout. It is harrowing. She gets sober. After the book published, Bydlowska was celebrated for her bravery. She was also criticized for her seeming disregard for her child. In 2022, nine years after the release of the book (and six years after another relapse), she wrote, “Readers still write to tell me that this book helped them—to stop drinking, to stay sober another day, to feel less alone[…] I love every message. But the truth is, whatever the book does for people was never intentional.” Her initial motivation was only to write it. The truth is, that should be enough.