I met David Ryan in his faculty office at Sarah Lawrence College, about an hour before he was to give a reading from his new short story collection, Alligator, published by a recently-founded small press, Cash 4 Gold Books (the creation of Harris Lahti, Jon Lindsey, and Nathan Dragon). After I finished checking out the pile of free books outside David’s office, stashing two collections of Cynthia Ozick essays in my bag, we sat down to talk about Alligator, the contents of which I had read, mostly, as they were published in various magazines over the preceding decade.
David is hard to keep up with—his stories appear at a regular clip in outlets, like Fence and Conjunctions, that appreciate his far-reaching formal experimentation—but the new collection stands as a cohesive sequence of stories to be read together. Floating fluidly between states of consciousness—waking experience, dreams (including those of animals), visions from the precipice of death—these 21 stories, few of them over 10 pages long, constitute a morbid investigation into the darkest mysteries of everyday existence.
Characters often appear in moments of stasis—staring at the conveyer belt of a grocery store’s checkout, sitting in a darkened movie theatre during a Robert Bresson retrospective, lying half-conscious on the floor after a fall down the stairs—while, in their minds, memories blur together with the present moment, surrealistic visions of animals and cosmic phenomena appear before their eyes. And then at the end, sometimes, it all recedes into a dream inside of a remembered dream.
What I wanted to learn from David, above all, was how he navigates the construction of his stories, which proceed under the logic of the unconscious, yet are as perfectly and precisely fashioned as an airplane. Their constituent parts fit together just right—not always in a way that’s rationally explicable, but never random, arbitrary, or out of place.
Seth Katz: Did the guys at Cash 4 Gold come to you with the idea of doing another story collection?
David Ryan: No, they were looking at a bunch of different things, and a story collection just made sense because I had so many. They’re pretty wildly open to whatever, which is something that I like about them—they’re not tied into any one thing. They weren’t interested in a thematic collection or anything like that. They just wanted the good stories that seemed to have something tonally that registered with them. Which let me get rid of some of my weirdest stuff.
SK: And it did turn out to be a thematic collection, in a subtle way.
DR: Everything has gotten so taxonomical. But the truth is, a collection of stories by Salinger is thematically tied, whether you want to believe it or not. It’s just nuanced in that way, it’s not hammering people over the head with it.
SK: One thing that interested me about the story “Pickpocket” is that, even though at first Bresson’s film (of the same name) doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the internal state of this character, sitting in the dark thinking about her lousy father, by the end they seem inextricably woven together. I’m wondering how consciously you construct your stories, and how much of the process is intuitive.
DR: That’s the fun of it. As you know, I’m a big fan of Bresson, and Pickpocket is such a strange movie about alienation. Actually, tonight I’m gonna read “Warp and Weft,” which “Pickpocket” came from—
SK: —the woman in “Pickpocket” hears the sound of the crane that crashes down in “Warp and Weft.” It feels like a deleted scene from the story.
Sometimes the best thing you can do when you’re writing is let something happen that feels spontaneous in the way reality is spontaneous.
DR: So, here’s the story about that. I was doing a lot of readings, and they give you certain time frames—five minutes, ten, twenty. And I thought it would be an interesting exercise to come up with a single story in vignettes, sort of rhizomatic maybe, that are each written to be self-contained, but also feed into each other.
So I free-wrote an opening and it was about a construction worker falling from a high-rise and seeing his wife and son in the windows as he passes. Then I used that as a model for a bunch of free-writes each subsequent day for a week, with the rule that each vignette that followed had to have something falling and something rising, and it had to deal with parenting in some way. And each one had to be punctuated with a sound that had happened in the opening vignette, like a simultaneity all across the city. It was inspired by 14 Stories by Stephen Dixon, about a gun going off in an apartment complex.
“Pickpocket” was just one of those. It was a spontaneous thing, another morning at 5 a.m. where I got up and was like: “Type!” Maybe I had been thinking about Pickpocket. And maybe I had my mom on my mind—she was born in Brazil, and her dad was a missionary, but I changed it to Nicaragua, and Nicaragua necessarily brings in other details from other things I know about.
I find that if you have a throughline of some basic idea, or if you let yourself daydream your way through it, the elements will come together, the subconscious will take care of it. Like at the end of “Pickpocket,” where the credits are described rolling up the screen with the black background as if descending—that was spontaneous. That was my unconscious, part of the free-write.
SK: How was it that “Pickpocket” came to be a separate story, then, from “Warp and Weft”?
DR: I sent the whole thing out to The Harvard Review, and they asked if I could think of something to cut because it was too long. So, I took the “Pickpocket” section and sent it to Threepenny Review—who I knew would reject it in a day or two—and then wrote back to Harvard and sent them the excised draft, which they took. Then, much to my surprise, Threepenny took “Pickpocket.”
SK: And even though “Pickpocket” is now a separate story, you decided to leave in the moment where the woman in the theatre hears the sound, the boom. Reading it in your book, I made the connection immediately because it comes a few stories after “Warp and Weft,” but otherwise that moment would be even more mysterious.
DR: This is a great trick that I’ve found. Sometimes the best thing you can do when you’re writing is just let something happen that has no bearing on the story necessarily, but feels spontaneous in the way that reality is spontaneous. It’s a little dose of realism. And the noise triggers a response in her mind. If it were just a sound, it might easily be excisable. But it also was reflective of her mindset in this movie theater and what she’s thinking about, which I think were probably my own thoughts at the time. That theater was the Waverly, by the way.
SK: Which is now the IFC Center. I recognized it because you mention Sixth Avenue in the story. Definitely a theatre where you might hear street noise.
DR: That was two addresses down from my old apartment, which is also the apartment in “Warp and Weft” where the couple has hooked up. I’m describing my bedroom, basically. It’s all in that little locale.
SK: There are these little details from your life littered throughout the book. Are there any stories that are more directly autobiographical?
DR: “The Shirt” is an entirely true story, in that someone lent me a shirt, and then I left town and lost the shirt. Years passed, decades, and we were still connected through some mutual friends on Facebook, but I had lost contact with that particular guy. I always felt like a jerk for losing his shirt and never owning up to it. Of course, you change the story to make it dramatically interesting, so there are elements that are confabulated. But the way the story ends is pretty accurate. When I found out he died, what was killing me was that I had never resolved this situation with the shirt, which felt really big to me. It was representative of something larger.
SK: And then, of course, in “Alligator,” you have your wife’s name, Susan. The end of that story feels like you pulling back the fictional curtain to reveal yourself, the author, in the process of working through a specific, overwhelming feeling of dread, a fear of loss.
If it flows naturally, you allow an unexpected genius to rise up.
DR: “Alligator” is the truest thing I’ve ever written. That was originally going to appear in a series that I’m working on called The Book of Lasts—I’m writing a bunch of lyric essays that play with the idea of a terminal moment. But then I did a reading of that story, and this incredibly bright student in the audience—when I explained that I’m working on this thing, The Book of Lasts—he raised his hand and he hit on something that I hadn’t admitted: “The thing about ‘last’ is it’s a verb, too.” It’s a duration. And so ironically, you have this idea of a terminal point, the last moment, but you also have its lasting. It just opened up a lot of possibilities for how to write a collection of these things. Now, “Alligator” ended up in a short story collection so I’ll have to write other things to take its place.
SK: Was writing that story as intuitive a process as the writing of “Pickpocket”?
DR: I had this image of an alligator stuck in my head and I couldn’t figure out what it was. And so you’ll hear me thinking out loud in parts of it where I’ll go, “No, that’s not it.”
SK: Right, it keeps negating itself. Actually, this is the story of the alligator.
DR: That’s literally me, as I’m writing it, talking to the text. Starting off, I wanted to get at this anxiety I was having, waking up in the middle of the night and imagining a day when I was alone, or my wife was alone. It’s a terrible thing to wake up thinking. I wasn’t trying to torture myself, it just seemed to be happening more and more. And so I picked a scenario that wasn’t at all true and just stepped into it like a daydream and started typing it. Which then started increasingly leading to associative things that were getting closer and closer to the truth until it was just the truth. I was really excited about that as a process, so that’s probably going to be more of what I do from now on.
I might plan out metaphors if it’s an ambitious idea and I want to figure out what the incision point is, but for the most part I try to rely on spontaneity because I don’t feel like I’m very smart when I’m thinking consciously. I’m constricting possibilities, and I feel like—maybe this is a product of teaching, where I can see from someone’s story when they’re thinking it out, muscling their way through something—if it flows naturally, you allow an unexpected genius to rise up that I don’t have when I’m trying to think.
SK: There are a lot of animals prominently featured in your stories. It’s possible that one of the most sympathetic characters in this whole book is the owl in “Reliquary.” Why are animals so central in your writing?
DR: I think animals are my access point for things that I don’t have the words for, and yet they represent things that are very human. They represent vulnerability, for instance. You can get at vulnerability by using a dog in a way you cannot with a human being. It just has a magical property. You’re taking a trait that one associates with a creature, and you’re allowing it to exist on its own separate terms from humanity, and yet it’s invariably going to tie into that humanity.
In “Reliquary,” the owl is the star, for me at least. At the time I was reading—and probably drawing a little too much from—Rodrigo Rey Rosa and his novella The African Shore. That owl represents something that I don’t know how to write. And the idea of the dog having a dream, then the owl stepping into the dream because they’re lying next to each other in a darkened barn—it creates a feeling of empathy between creatures that are stuck in the same situation. Animals represent something that is, of course, wordless, and yet has all of the emotional freight that we carry.
SK: Your first collection, Animals in Motion, came out just over a decade ago. What’s changed for you between then and now?
DR: I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence and I had never had a book published. I was sort of there accidentally, I think because I was an editor and I had been publishing a lot of stories. That gave me something. But it was kind of a miracle that I got this job. It was through Nelly Reifler, who wonderfully recommended me when she knew that she was gonna need to take a couple of sessions off.
Animals are my access point for things that I don’t have the words for.
The book deal was with Roundabout, this small press, but I remember thinking that at least this will give me a book so I’m not this weird outlier as somebody who’s teaching and who’s never actually published a book. And then a lot of stuff happened from that that I couldn’t have predicted. I try to emphasize to students that it’s not like you’re going to just get a book deal and then ABCD follows, right? The stuff that happens is sometimes better than your anticipated ABCD, but it falls from the sky.
SK: Such as?
DR: For instance, Rick Moody and I did a thing for the book at the Center for Fiction. A year later, someone from Colgate called and asked if I’d be interested in coming and doing a summer workshop. And it happened that somebody had been upstairs at the Center for Fiction, using one of the writer studios, and had come down and stopped because she could hear these voices, and she watched. And from that, a year later, when they asked her, “Can you think of anyone we can get,” she remembered me. How would you ever know that that was going to happen?
SK: Are there specific things that you find your students can do really well that you can’t do, or wish you could do?
DR: Almost everything. I have to remind myself sometimes that everyone’s starting from a certain spot. It may have been that they kept a diary from when they were five years old, and they just practiced this idea of accessing memory and things. Every once in a while there’ll be a student who just seems to have access to something that’s naturally beyond just being a good writer, and I think that’s usually of a piece with how loosely they play with consciousness. Sometimes it’s a troubled person who’s dealing with that and able to really write well. Sometimes the ability to control it is not so easy. I have a great class right now. There’s just a lot of life, a lot of energy and interest. It’s good.
In 1975, 90 percent of Icelandic women went on strike, though they did not call it that. They called it Kvennafrídagurinn, or Women’s Day Off. A day off from factory work, from housework, from care work, from all kinds of vital work that often goes unacknowledged and unpaid to this day. In the fifty years since then, Iceland has become the global leader in gender equity and the first country in the world to elect a female president. Its government is currently led by women, who serve as prime minister, president, a majority of the cabinet leaders, and nearly half of the members of Althing, the world’s oldest operating parliament, continually running since 930 C.E.
Much work remains to be done. In the fiction and poetry collected below, Icelandic women writers invoke the incongruence of living in a country with gender balanced policies alongside high rates of domestic violence, persistent pay disparities, and other forms of misogynistic disregard.
Literature can catalyze change. Stories embolden readers to plumb the tectonic plates of interior lives and social forces. What paradigm shifts are made possible by friction and fissures? To what extent can the Icelandic love for literature be credited with making their country more welcoming to women?
Below you will find twelve books which form a very contemporary canon of feminist Icelandic literature translated into English. Written by women who will continue to publish for decades to come, this list is by no means complete. As celebrated poet, novelist and playwright Kristín Ómarsdóttir told me, “The story of literature is long. It did not begin ten years ago.” Takk fyrir.
Miss Iceland by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, translated by Brian FitzGibbon
Ask any Icelandic writer to recommend a feminist novel, and Miss Iceland appears on their lips first. There’s a good reason for that. In this spare, affecting novel set in 1960s Reykjavík, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir creates characters of sympathy, verve, and steely self-determination. Hekla moves to the capital to build a literary life, only to find herself trapped between the patriarchal prospect of two fates: to endure misogyny as a waitress or as a married mother. Taking refuge in her writing and the friendship of her roommate Jon, a queer theater aficionado forced by circumstance to work on fishing trawlers, Hekla pursues her chosen destiny against the odds and despite daily harassment by men who confuse her beauty for availability. Will she be allowed, let alone encouraged, to flourish? Winner of the Icelandic Bookseller’s Prize and the Prix Médicis Étranger, Miss Iceland delivers unabashed insights into the costs of freedom for women.
Called “the writer I feel can best express the female psyche of now” by Björk, Oddný Eir uses postmodern fragmentation to portray her narrator’s restless search for steadfast care. Land of Love and Ruins finds an author roaming the countryside of Iceland and streets of Paris, Strasbourg, and Basel, seeking to live in greater connection to the land and her own mind. In this diaristic collage, Eir crafts an intimate conversation with the reader through lyric passages that range from romantic yearning to ecological passion and socioeconomic ire. Anchored by an ancestral commitment to nature, she grieves the capitalist paradigms which gave rise to the 2008 financial crisis that collapsed Icelandic banks and identities. Yet as an artist and political philosopher, she plumbs her own erotic and intellectual energy to sight a liberatory horizon. Winner of the European Union Prize for Literature and the Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize, Land of Love and Ruins is the culmination of an autofiction trilogy whose first two books have yet to be translated into English.
Quake by Auður Jónsdóttir, translated by Meg Matich
Quake begins in crisis. On a sidewalk, a woman named Saga opens her bloodied eyes to learn her three-year-old son is missing. Where did Ívar go? And what happened? In the urgent, meditative novel that follows, Saga pieces her life back together as she spools through the memories which led to her latest epileptic seizure. Fragmented and fatigued, she struggles to reestablish her claim on motherhood while figuring out how to relate to her family of origin. With Quake, now also a film, the acclaimed novelist and journalist Auður Jónsdóttir examines how human memory shapes our behavior even when we seek to deny our own pasts. She asks, “Is there a way to escape inevitability? To be other than what we are?” Winner of the Icelandic Literary Prize for The People in the Basement and the Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize for Secretaries to the Spirits, Jónsdóttir brings tender pathos to understanding why we try to protect ourselves from what we already know.
Magma by Thóra Hjörleifsdóttir, translated by Meg Matich
In her debut novel, accomplished poet Thóra Hjörleifsdóttir channels the youthful impulse toward love that drives her 20-year-old protagonist Lilja into despair during an increasingly abject relationship with a brutal, boyish vegetarian. Yes, you read that right. Abstaining from eating meat does not a good man make. Wielding his lengthy education while withholding real affection, this nameless boyfriend manipulates and undermines Lilja into isolation and sexual exploitation with cruel comments. Like the psychological abuse it so deftly depicts, Magma is iterative and episodic. Hjörleifsdóttir makes excellent use of compression, that most vital source of literary tension, to relate how Lilja breaks down under the pressure of partnering with a man who weaponizes her longing into self-loathing. Inspired by the collective outpouring of grief on comment boards during the #MeToo movement, Magma is a stunning indictment of systemic failures—whether social, psychiatric, or carceral—to recognize the profound violence of interpersonal cruelty.
A Fist or a Heartby Kristín Eiríksdóttir, translated by Larissa Kyzer
There is no escaping the past, only the deferral of its reckonings. In her first novel to be translated into English, award-winning novelist, poet, and playwright Kristín Eiríksdóttir presents an obstinate elderly woman, Elín Jónsdóttir, whose craft—making film and theater props—stops acting as a stave against the memories she has long elided. An outcast by design, Elín had always managed on her own. Long live unruly women. That is, until she attempts to befriend a young playwright with an ill mother, an absent and famous father, and an undisclosed shared history. Grappling with the ravages of age and her tenuous grasp on reality, Elín lures readers into a haunted journey through the veiled traumas which shaped her tenacity. Winner of the Icelandic Literary Prize and Women’s Literature Prize, A Fist or a Heart depicts the stubborn intellect and creative determination of women, reminding us of what we might yet make once we get free.
The Mark by Fríða Ísberg, translated by Larissa Kyzer
It is a rare novel that can successfully pair nuanced character development with a big plot and expert pacing, but Fríða Ísberg pulls it off in The Mark. In near future Reykjavík, Iceland is on the cusp of a major vote: whether to require that its citizens take a psychological test to determine if they have enough empathy to be accepted into society. Already used to winnow out potential sociopaths from political, corporate, academic, and other social settings, the empathy test has become a source of anxiety and discord. At the same time, it brings a measure of comfort and safety for women who have experienced domestic violence and sexual assault, and thus can choose to live in apartment buildings that do not allow unmarked people to enter. Such is the case of Vetur, who fears the return of her stalker. The Mark is made more interesting by the fact that Vetur admits her complicity in the dynamics which led to her unhappiness, having seduced a man whose faults she could plainly see, as well as how her trauma leads her to treat others—even another survivor—harshly. Ísberg also shows real compassion for the case of Tristan, an unmarked and housing insecure man whose thievery and drug addiction were brought into being by his father’s violence, his brother’s troubles, and other forces beyond his control. By stress testing the presumptions that empathy can be measured and enforced for civic means, The Mark challenges the liberal tendency to perform inclusive values while extruding those who don’t measure up.
The Creator by Guðrún Eva Mínervudóttir, translated by Sarah Bowen
In The Creator, no moment of serendipity is wasted as two lonely beings entangle. Lóa, the grieving mother of two wayward girls, gets a flat tire in front of the home of Sveinn, who lives alone but for the sex dolls he makes for sale, “a ruler between their ankles” to keep their legs appealingly parted. Sveinn just had his picture printed alongside an article about a man who committed suicide after mutilating one of his dolls, but he disavows responsibility for sowing violence with dehumanized, portable vaginas. Lóa is also in a tough spot: Her father just died, and the flat tire occurs on her way to seek psychological help for her daughters Margrét and Ína, who aren’t doing so well after her divorce. What would decent people do? Sveinn plies Lóa with wine, changes her tire and fondles her hand while she is passed out. Upon waking, Lóa pees in his utility sink and steals one of his dolls to give to her anorexic daughter, for “What was troubling Margrét but an irrational aversion to her own body or a dread of life?” From there, The Creator unfurls in a series of gleaming sentences that illuminate the human condition.
Karitas Untitled by Kristín Marja Baldursdóttir, translated by Philip Roughton
First published in Icelandic in 2004, Karitas Untitled begins in the Westfjords in World War I. Fending for herself after her husband is lost at sea, a mother moves her six children to town to be educated so that they will not be subject to the whims of subsistence farming. The youngest daughter, Karitas Jónsdóttir, has artistic talent. Fortunate enough to find a patron who sends her to the Danish Royal College of Art in Copenhagen, Karitas was also born in a woman’s body. Her creative trajectory is knocked off course by an unexpected pregnancy. Driven by a need to paint, she marries and keeps having babies within a fishing community whose male providers disappear for long swathes of time, leaving the women to support their families and each other through the ceaseless work of rural life. When to make art? Does being a mother mean you must sacrifice who you are for who others could be? Timeless questions hang in the balance of this historical novel, whose concerns for female liberation presaged Embroidery by Sigrún Pálsdóttir, translated by Lytton Smith.
The zany genius of Kristín Ómarsdóttir is apparent across genres. With an alien consciousness akin to that of Anne Carson, Ómarsdóttir traces mycelial connections between imagery and meaning such that each line becomes a portal to a perception both estranged and familiar. I would be remiss not to mention her shimmering novel Swanfolk, a deeply weird modern folktale, but I encountered her verse first. Drawn from seven collections published over three decades, each odd and playful poem of Waitress in Fall is a surreal puzzle that resists being fixed into place. Take “Ode”: “…in a lightless girlhole / I met a mirror that deep-voiced said: / ‘see your beauty!’/ later it drew me a yellow line on the floor: / ‘come no closer!’” The patriarchal structures of lust and power are floodlit by Waitress in Fall, whose insights—bizarre and tender, deeply felt and sensual yet resistant to any common sentiment—are “clear as water in a truthpond.”
Herostories by Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir, translated by K.B. Thors
Much has been made of the intrepid settlers chronicled in Icelandic sagas. Yet when poet and historian Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir sought folkloric glory in the annals, she turned to Íslenskar ljósmæður I–III, which depicted Icelandic midwives from the 18th through the 20th century. Through the process of erasure, she found documentary poems among their triumphs over the limited roles allowed to women and the severe weather and landscapes they braved to bring babies into the world: “she was greatest/when most tested.” Forbidden to become doctors until 1911, these women often proffered their midwifery for as little as a cup of coffee. Winner of the Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize, Herostories brims with portmanteaus that evoke the harsh conditions which midwives endured to claim a place in history for themselves and future generations: Using “bodilyendurance” to conquer the “impassableslog” through “blindingblizzards.” What meaning can be salvaged from being undervalued? Independence requires risk and courage, which the midwives of Herostories exemplified to become ljósmæður, or “mothers of light.”
Bloodhoof by Gerður Kristný, translated by Rory McTurk
Poet and journalist Gerður Kristný scoured the Poetic Edda for insights into her mythological namesake Gerður of Jötunheimar, a giantess abducted into serving as the god Freyr’s bride. Though Kristný studied the eddic poem Skírnismál, preserved within the 13-century Codex Regius, she could not find Gerður’s perspective. Kristný decided to rectify the situation with Bloodhoof. Winner of the 2010 Icelandic Literature Award, her stark retelling of Gerður’s ordeal is an epic poem which refuses misogynist impositions of meaning. Instead, Kristný takes readers into the fierce mind of the giantess whose beauty drew such unwanted attention. When Freyr, the god of fertility, admired Gerður’s shining arms from Óðinn’s throne, he sends his vassal Skírnir to bring her to him by any means necessary. “Love had indeed come / armed to the teeth / with an envoy brandishing / a hateinfused sword / its haft carved in cruelty.” Sacrificing her own wellbeing for the life of her father, who was threatened with death, Gerður endures rape and births a son; for both of their sakes, she plots revenge and escape. A feminist reclaiming of an old Norse legend, Bloodhoof earned its place within millennia of the Icelandic canon.
Elaine Castillo’s fiction brings the Filipino diaspora into sharp focus. She populates her novels with the working Filipino (perpetually) underclass, whose precarious labor under capitalism reveals more than a century of intertwined histories between the United States and the Philippines.
In Moderation, Castillo’s sophomore novel, the main character, Girlie Delmundo, descends from a long line of immigrant nurses and caretakers—“her mother was a nurse, her aunts and distant cousins all nurses and maids and cleaners scattered everywhere”—which might explain her aptitude for her job as a content moderator at a social media conglomerate. Content moderation is still care work after all. Girlie moves through the internet like a triage nurse, excising scenes of sexual assault, pedophilia, and other extreme material, absorbing the psychic damage that no algorithm can process. Her moderation team is mostly other Filipinas, after “none of the white people survived” the role’s emotional toll for more than a year. Such are the familiar trajectories of Filipino women who have long stood at the center of the global care economy, crossing oceans to nurse and to clean, to tend and to soothe. By always locating her characters within history—tracing Girlie and her family back through Spanish and American colonization—Castillo opens up new ways of understanding how empire and globalization have shaped contemporary stories of exploitation and lost potential.
Yet Moderation is not a novel about despair—Castillo refuses to linger there; after all, melancholy is boring. Instead, through Girlie’s sharp perspective, she writes with verve and mordant wit, exploring what shapes a life in all its complexity. Castillois attuned to the small, collective details of Girlie’s world: The quiet romance that blooms in an unlikely place and the choices she must make to survive work, reckon with her history, and allow herself to love.
Castillo and I spoke over Zoom about writing happy endings, Melville, eldest-sibling fiction, and her wonderful book cover, which recently made it to the finals of Electric Literature’s Best Book Covers of 2025 contest.
Evander Reyes:Let’s start with the cover. Could you talk about how it came about and what ideas or tensions you hoped it would evoke?
Elaine Castillo: I knew early on what I wanted. I submitted a painting to my editor and the design team and said, “I want this, but glitchy.” Lynn Buckley, the cover designer, came back with this exact version plus five others that were equally amazing. It was the shortest meeting in Viking Press history—we all agreed immediately that she’d nailed it.
The painting is Admiration by Vittorio Reggianini, who belonged to a school called the “Satins and Silks painters.” He depicted Regency-era romance, so if you search images from Pride and Prejudice or Regency romance, his work often comes up. But while he painted that era, he wasn’t alive for it—he was looking back and romanticizing it.
Reggianini died in 1938, meaning he lived through Italy’s rise to fascism. So, here’s this extremely romanticized historical vision being painted during a period of political upheaval, war, and the rise of fascism. That tension—between a nostalgic image of history and the dark realities of the present—connects directly to the book’s themes of how history and romance are reimagined, especially in relation to the tech industry’s collusion with authoritarianism.
ER: In paintings, there’s often some secret history lurking beneath the surface, and the same is true of your fiction. I find it fitting that you interrupt the image of the painting with a glitch. A glitch, after all, disrupts the illusion of normal functioning—it forces us to look at what’s usually concealed, what remains invisible. In many ways, this book operates through a kind of glitch politics, constantly drawing attention to the hidden structures that sustain our world. Why did you choose to center the novel on the invisible content moderators whose labor undergirds our social media lives?
EC: When I started writing this novel, even though I knew I was writing about content moderation, I always thought of it as a novel primarily about labor.
In my research, one of the early articles I read was Adrian Chen’s 2014 Wired piece, “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed.” At that time, it identified so many content moderators as Filipino. When I realized how much of this labor was done within the Filipino community—and even possibly within my family—I started linking it to other forms of racialized labor in my diaspora, like nursing. My mom was a nurse. My dad worked as a security guard for computer chip companies. It was easy to see the connections: Who does the cleanup work for an industry, who carries the burdens of that labor, both materially and psychically?
I always thought of it as a novel primarily about labor.
That’s where my thinking on content moderation came from. I also knew I had no desire to write a novel centering a tech oligarch or someone part of the C-suite. I didn’t want to critique the tech industry from the top down. What interested me was illuminating the lives of tech’s most anonymous laborers. And when I was researching, most of the articles I found were understandably harrowing, with a tragic bent, because this labor is so punishing. But the job of fiction is to imagine people as more than just the worst thing that ever happened to them.
ER: Some readers might be surprised by the fact that in this industry, in such a brutal role, Filipinos are so present. But your book tells this history so well: how the Philippines and Filipinos often find themselves both at the center and at the margins of these accelerated processes of late-stage capitalism.
EC: Absolutely. I mean, Cambridge Analytica rehearsed how to dismantle democracy in the Philippines before applying those tactics to elections in the UK and the US. Concerning content moderation, exploitation under capitalism is constantly evolving, but the links remain clear: Working-class labor that upholds entire industries is still connected to colonial and imperial structures, and it’s still the same groups who are exploited to maintain the center. That narrative hasn’t changed.
ER: The book’s engagement with tech dystopia and the effects of global capitalism kept bringing me back to the opening epigraph—the Melville quote from Moby Dick about New Bedford as a queer, or uncanny place. In that section, Melville writes about a beautiful, prosperous city whose wealthy veneer is built on the violence and exploitation of the whaling industry. Why start with this Melville quote?
EC: Fewer people ask about this epigraph! Everyone always asks about the second epigraph, the Terminator 2 quote. I love the playful contrast of Terminator with Moby Dick because it signals the sensibilities the book is playing with. I had just finished Moby Dick when I returned to this novel after pausing it in 2018 to write a book of essays, How to Read Now. Moby Dick is sort of America’s first workplace novel, or at least an early great workplace novel. That quote stuck out to me because it’s such a succinct and perceptive description of the labor that undergirds American society. Melville imagines all these patrician houses as being dragged up from the bottom of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, made possible entirely by the backbreaking labor of whaling.
And in a way, it’s similar to the end of another novel, one of my favorites: Émile Zola’s Germinal. It’s a French novel that follows a mining community and their struggle to organize a strike in the post-industrial revolution era. At the end of the book—spoiler alert for something written in the 1800s—the revolution ultimately fails, and the main character walks off, but as he walks across the field, he imagines all the well-made French towns above being supported by the miners underground. Their work literally sustains the towns, but Zola frames it as seeds waiting to sprout, a potential revolution in the making. That’s where germinal comes from—seeds germinating. That connection, how both Melville and Zola imagines the way labor sustains society, is what I’m drawing from in my novel.
ER: I found Moderation to be an enormously hopeful book—even amid a world dominated by tech, oligarchs, and capitalism. Even as Girlie’s life is shaped by these crises, there’s still a sense of possibility. Did you set out to write a hopeful novel?
EC: There were different possible endings for the book. At one point, it was even a direct sequel to my first novel, America Is Not the Heart, because I thought I had to be explicit about the destruction of that community. There was also a version that was much more politically explicit, one that would’ve satisfied my critical or political impulses. But I realized I was also using these different endings as a way to avoid doing the vulnerable work the book was really asking of me. And deep down, I always knew I wasn’t going to write an unhappy ending. Spoiler alert.
Something that bothers me about how stories of resistance or revolution are usually depicted is that they’re almost always grim. They suggest you have to sacrifice love and connection for the cause, or they end in tragedy. And then, in contrast, happy endings or romance get dismissed as pat.
I remember giving a craft talk where I was making the case for the politics of the happy ending, and I could see students getting uncomfortable. They’d been taught that happy endings are simplistic. But I told them: If you write about someone who lives a tragic life that ends tragically, it can also be pat depending on how it’s written. There’s no inherent moral value that makes a tragic ending more serious or hope and optimism less so. Still, it’s funny how we absorb this idea of what counts as serious and what doesn’t.
ER: Your work is in some ways writing against a certain kind of woman, usually white, that’s become very familiar terrain in fiction and television in the last decade or so. She is this unmoored depressive figure who is self-sabotaging and reckless. This character might be found in Girlie’s younger sister Maribel, but Girlie is none of those things. Can you talk about the extreme competence of Girlie?
EC: I like to joke that this book is for eldest siblings. It’s an eldest daughter book. I’m tired of messy fiction—it’s younger sibling propaganda!We need more repressed, highly competent, parentified eldest sibling fiction. This book is my contribution to that genre.
There’s no inherent moral value that makes a tragic ending more serious or hope and optimism less so.
That said, I do love a lot of that messy fiction and art. I only just watched Fleabag—because I’m late to everything. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s character is the kind of messy character that is representative of this genre, but as I was watching I kept thinking we need more of the older sister Claire’s story. The sister who’s just martialing her way through life. To me, Claire feels very Girlie-coded. I don’t see this type of woman in fiction as much. I certainly see her in my life—or in the mirror. But sometimes I just think: Life is messy enough.
The narrative for Girlie, of course, is that she might be messier inside than she admits. But I think the other big source of drama for Girlie and her love interest, William, is that they’re people who self-identify as fixers. They’re like, I’m the one who handles everything, I’m the one who keeps it all together. And that can be a really convenient way to avoid looking at your own life. At some point it’s like, look at yourself, bitch.
ER: Girlie and William both sound like Virgos.
EC: Oh my god, I was just about to say that. This book is definitely about Virgo problems. Girlie is absolutely a Virgo—same as me. They both have a lot of Earth. They might both be Capricorn Moons. I think William’s sun sign is Aquarius though, and I have a lot of Aquarians in my life, so that tracks.
ER:We have to talk about virtual reality. In this novel, VR plays two strikingly different roles. On one hand, it offers simulations of ancient civilizations that gamers explore for entertainment. On the other, it serves a therapeutic purpose where immersive VR experiences actually reprogram the nervous system, reshaping the body’s relationship to reality in ways that can lead to healing. In what ways did you want these very different approaches to VR to interact within the story?
EC: When I started writing the early kernels that eventually became this novel, it wasn’t necessarily about content moderation. It was more of a sci-fi novel in my mind, thinking about speculative forms of therapy, formative harm, and related ideas. When I started reading about content moderation, I wanted to take that labor and imagine it in a more speculative context. I also knew I was writing about virtual reality.
The VR in the book is not the VR we have now. But for the therapeutic side, I wanted to respect the clinical science. In my research, I found real work on virtual-reality therapy. It’s a legitimate science, and the book by Brennan Spiegel, Vrx: How Virtual Therapeutics Will Revolutionize Medicine, is cited in my book’s acknowledgements and was really influential. His work explores how VR is used in clinics to treat things like depression or chronic pain. Many of the VR therapy sessions I wrote about are closely modeled to what Spiegel describes or what I read in other articles. I wanted that science to feel grounded, even though the VR in the book is far ahead of current technology.
I’m tired of messy fiction—it’s younger sibling propaganda!
One reason I wanted to write about this is connected to what we were discussing earlier. I was interested in exploring the dystopian aspects of tech without writing a straightforward tech dystopia. I don’t want to immediately surrender to technophobia. Yes, the tech industry repeats exploitative cycles that have existed for hundreds of years. It’s extractive, colonial, environmentally destructive, and harms people around the world. But if that were the only truth, it would be easier to divest from it. I was interested in the push and pull: how technologies can seduce us, connect us, and what draws us to them. I wanted to explore how someone can be seduced by a technology while simultaneously being exploited by it. Part of the thematic focus of the book is exploring how complex our relationships with technology are, how it acts on us viscerally, and how those forces intersect with labor, exploitation, and the possibilities of repair.
ER: Your first book, America’s Not the Heart, clearly nods to the classic Filipino text America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan. How do you think about the literary inheritance of the Filipino novel, and which works do you see Moderation being in conversation with?
EC: Honestly, sometimes I can only see these connections after having written the book. You have this vague sense of influence while you’re working. Though I knew I’d been shaped by William Gibson. My dad bought me Idoru when I was around 13, and I didn’t reread it while writing because I thought, “It’s already in my brain; I don’t need to revisit it.” But after Moderation was published, I looked back and realized, yes, it’s literally about a rock star who wants to marry a VR idol. Anyone writing about virtual reality is inheriting everything Gibson wrote about.
At the same time, because of the romance aspect and the way love is repressed in the novel, I realized I was riffing on Jane Austen too. I had written a bit about Austen in How to Read Now, especially how people add political and social context to her novels. While writing, I started thinking, “If I were to write an Austen-esque novel today, what would that look like?” I didn’t plan it explicitly, but that’s definitely what was happening. So, in a way, it’s like Gibson and Austen are in conversation. It’s genre-jumping, yes, but Gibson’s novels always have romance in them, so these genres coexist naturally. I knew I was writing both a sci-fi novel and a love story, so those were the lineages I was consciously drawing from.
The letter, on top-quality paper bearing a letterhead, came from a notary public in a small rural town. The name of the town meant nothing to him. The contents of the letter, however, were so unexpected that he caught himself groping through the air behind him in search of a chair.
An island . . . He had inherited an island. . . . He who owned nothing more than a few books and prints—and whose rent had been overdue since January. But there was no doubt; the text was clear: “. . . approximately 1.7 square miles, including the woods and beaches contained therein, situated seventeen miles from the coast of . . .”
He telephoned the notary public and confirmed the news with the head officer, a soft-spoken lawyer. His great-uncle, the source of this miracle, a relative he hadn’t even heard from in twenty years, had died a few weeks before.
A small island . . . Would it have electricity and safe drinking water?
Inheriting an island at age fifty produces peculiar fantasies in the mind of a man without ambitions. He actually dreamed there might be a treasure chest buried under palm trees. And he was reminded of his childhood, when the greatest joys were always preceded by a certain uneasiness.
The legal formalities took about a month. When the day arrived, he went by bus to a village on the coast. The owner of a banana boat, after carefully inspecting his map, introduced him to a fisherman, who, in exchange for a modest sum, agreed to detour his normal route along the coast and take him to his domain.
His domain . . .
They left that same afternoon. In spite of the ocean’s calmness, the boat rocked a little. Low clouds covered the coastline, and islands went by one after another: bigger, smaller, inhabited, apparently deserted, sometimes no more than a pair of rocks. A light drizzle began to fall.
After two hours, the fisherman came over and pointed to a greenish spot on the horizon. He felt an unexpected surge of tenderness for that parcel of the universe, the destiny of which the gods had so casually deposited in his hands.
Was it really deserted, as the lawyer had said? Judging from his conversation during the trip, the fishermen didn’t frequent these parts. They preferred the open sea, or trawling along the coast. At most, they had glimpsed an occasional sailboat anchored in the island’s cove to shelter overnight.
In another half hour, they arrived. The island was much larger than he had imagined, though two small hills kept him from evaluating its size accurately. It would take a whole day, at least, just to explore it.
He was taken to the beach in a rowboat. It was agreed that he would be picked up in three days, a length of time that suddenly seemed a little excessive. But the quiet elegance of the bay, contrasting with a wild and varied abundance of vegetation, and the warm breeze that had replaced the drizzling rain completely eliminated any doubts he might have had about this adventure.
Because really, that’s what it was. An adventure . . . with roots in childhood and a random flavor. Except for the cold, gritty sand under his bare feet, everything in this story seemed unreal.
Besides a small tent and a lantern, he had brought two canvas bags. In the first were food, three bottles of drinking water, two of wine, towels, a blanket. In the second, clothes, a few books, notebooks, pens, a pair of binoculars, and the manuscript of his latest short story.
Once his things were unloaded, he said good-bye to the boatman. For an instant he again hesitated. Nothing remotely akin to fear: a sense of vulnerability, if anything, in the face of the unknown. For the first time in his life, he found himself truly isolated—in a place from which he couldn’t return on his own.
But the birds began to sing so cheerfully that he felt welcomed. He breathed deeply and looked with confidence at the man who was rowing back to the fishing boat. A little later, the throttle of the engine, dry and measured, fell on his ears. They waved to each other.
“Don’t forget me!” he yelled.
Had the fisherman heard? The boat disappeared around the curve of the island, leaving behind a small plume of black smoke, which soon faded, as well.
He pitched his tent in an elevated spot covered with grass, between the beach and the thick woods. He wanted to get settled before nightfall, which was approaching fast. This spot, he thought, would be ideal for building a house, if he ever had the means. He collected some kindling to build a fire. The damp wood resisted his efforts, so he lit the lantern and set it on a rock. Leaning against a tree trunk, he opened his manuscript.
The page was spattered with blood. Surprised, he glanced up, as if the red droplets might have fallen out of the sky. Then he realized he had cut his finger; there was blood on his shirt and trousers. Licking his wound, he glanced about him and saw the kindling lying on the sand. That was it, he decided, a thorn.
The blood had stained the last two sentences of his text: The only freedom left to him consisted in frequenting his wife’s nightmares. At night, under the sheets, she tossed among the ghosts of imaginary infidelities—and he must appease her jealousy when she awoke.
He reread the passage, under the asphyxiating spell that had marked the end of his marriage. He closed the notebook and walked down to the beach, wetting his feet in the white foam. The coolness of the water encouraged him. Taking off his clothes, he plunged into the sea.
With a few strokes he was beyond the waves, floating. The cold, however, forced him to go on swimming. Not wanting to stray too far, he veered toward the cove.
He was tired when he reached it. With some difficulty he pulled himself up onto a rock. Rubbing his hands over his dripping body, he hopped up and down on the wet surface. He intended to return as soon as he got his wind back.
In the distance, the flickering light of his lantern sprinkled gold flecks on his tent. The prospect of a dry towel appealed to him. He considered going back on foot, over the rocks, but they were moss-covered and slippery.
Just as he was about to dive back into the water, he heard a sound from far away. Instinctively, he crouched. A breath of air and, again, the sound. A melody . . . carried by the breeze, coming closer and closer. Suddenly, the music stopped. And on his left, almost at his side, a large white sailboat appeared, crossing the space directly in front of him.
Three masts cutting the silence, their sails flapping against the wind with a half-ghostly elegance. A phantom ship . . . But at once he distinguished a figure maneuvering the craft from the stern. Beside the central mast was another silhouette. That of a woman, he noticed when she moved.
On the beach, the wind had put out the lantern, plunging his campsite into shadows. The darkness reduced him to an intruder, a feeling his nudity intensified. The couple had by now dropped anchor and fastened the sails.
He left his rock, entering the water without a sound. He swam back to the beach, plagued by doubts. Not that the couple threatened him; on the contrary, the sailboat signaled well-being and security. But it was impossible not to associate its arrival—coming, as it had, on the very heels of his own—with an invasion.
His teeth chattering, he gathered his clothes up from the sand and went into the tent. Vigorously, he rubbed himself dry with the towel. As he dressed, he heard the clinking of dishes, silverware, and glasses in the distance, then a bucket of water being thrown into the sea.
By the time he left the tent, the music had started up again. A baroque piece—Vivaldi, possibly. A table was being set up on the stern as the couple prepared for dinner. Anchored about fifty yards from the beach, the sailboat offered itself up for his inspection. He remembered his binoculars.
Yet, for a moment, he remained motionless. Except for the intriguing coincidence of this meeting, nothing had occurred on either side, up to that point, that would suggest real intrusion. But if he gave in to the temptation to spy on the couple, the precarious balance would be broken. Better to sleep. With any luck, the sailboat would be on its way by morning.
He considered facing his manuscript again. Could the blood have injected new life into his words? Impossible to know without lighting the lantern. His resistance weakened second by second. A desire—intense, secret, dangerous—contaminated him with an almost youthful energy. He found himself rummaging feverishly through his bags. That intimacy, soon to be violated, would become his treasure.
He looked through the binoculars; the tips of the masts appeared in his lenses. Slowly he lowered his angle, adjusting the focus. As his field of vision descended, the light filled it with details of every sort. He passed over them all without pausing. Above all, it was the couple he wanted to see. At the bottom of the mast he stopped, his heart pounding fast.
The music seemed to be louder now. Or was it an illusion, induced by the closeness of his lenses? The refined melody dominated the air with the clarity of a live performance. The woman had disappeared inside the cabin. On the bridge, the man was calmly opening a bottle of wine.
He, too, calmed himself. Time was his ally. Better yet, his accomplice. He turned the binoculars toward the bow, trying in vain to read the boat’s name. The woman was coming back; immediately, he focused on her.
He was surprised she had dressed so formally for dinner. She wore a pearl necklace, a white tunic that swept down to her sandals, and a turquoise-blue stole, which slid off one shoulder. Her casual, almost careless gestures as she approved the wine, one hand on her waist, the other holding a glass up in the air, suggested complete affinity with a world of sophistication and refinement.
They sat on opposite sides of the table, both in profile to him, the woman to the right, the man to the left. The slight elevation from which he watched permitted him a privileged view. Wrapping himself in a blanket against the cold, he once again leaned against the tree.
He studied the woman first. She was young, barely thirty. Blond, slender, with a short hairdo. More than the freshness of her youth, he envied the shower she had just taken. The sailboat undoubtedly possessed generous facilities with plenty of fresh hot water, the only luxury he missed so far—his skin, saturated with salt, chafed under his shirt. He imagined her to be lightly perfumed. The man, in his forties, was tall and stout. His tanned skin suggested a healthy outdoor lifestyle, which the very dimensions of the sailboat seemed somehow to confirm. In shorts and a T-shirt, he savored the wine, tilting his head back toward the sky.
Suddenly hungry, he remembered the chicken sandwich he had prepared for his first night. He took it out of its wrapper, embellished it with two leaves of lettuce, and opened a bottle of wine, raising a toast to his visitors’ health.
The three of them dined, united by the melody. From time to time, he consulted his binoculars. At one point he heard them laughing. He felt an enormous desire to get closer to them, the way a stranger in a tavern draws near the fireplace, rubbing his hands together. If it weren’t for the cold and his fear of being discovered, he would have swum over to the sailboat, just to listen to them.
It was then he noticed something. Something so unnerving that he lowered the binoculars, as though needing to confirm with his naked eyes what the lenses showed: a pistol.
It was under the table, on the woman’s lap. A silver-handled pistol, half hidden under her napkin. He focused on the man. He was laughing happily.
Jumping to his feet, he upset his glass of wine. He took a few steps forward. On the deck of the sailboat, the man had also risen, and was going down toward the cabin.
Alone at the table, the woman lit a cigarette. She turned her eyes toward the island. It was improbable that she could distinguish the beach or the forest in any detail. Nevertheless, his hands tightened on the binoculars, as if her gaze could pierce him.
My God, he thought, his breath short. She was going to shoot. Any minute now. Those eyes didn’t suggest bitterness or ferocity, only determination. Between one remark and another—after dessert, before the liqueur—she would shoot.
The man returned with another bottle of wine, already open. Standing with a napkin draped over his arm, he bowed ceremoniously to his companion, serving her with the rapture of an adolescent. For the second time, she approved the wine.
What if he yelled? If he tore the night with a bloodcurdling scream?
The cold water at his feet brought him up with a start. Without realizing it, he had strayed toward the beach. With the change of angle, however, he could no longer follow the woman’s gestures. The music stopped; neither of them seemed disposed to change it. A dangerous silence weighed down the air. His heart was beating out of control. From the bottom of his chest, he heard his voice rising like a wave gathering in the dark.
“VIVALDI!” he yelled.
The woman startled in astonishment. The man, jumping up, bent over the rail. With surprising agility, he ran to the other end of the deck and put out the lights on the sailboat.
“Who’s there?” he bellowed.
A strong voice, but hesitant. He said something to the woman, who went down to the cabin. Again he called out, more irritated than alarmed. “Who’s there?”
The woman reappeared, carrying something in her hands. A powerful beam of light flashed across the beach. Waving his arms, he shouted, “Good evening!”
Still waving, he repeated his greeting. “Good evening! Welcome!”
And when the searchlight finally hit him, he called, “I heard music.”
Blinking in the harsh glare, he felt the most pathetic of men. Once again he shouted, “Welcome!”
He kept the binoculars behind his back, fastened to his belt. Now it was the couple who examined him, with lenses sure to be powerful. Never did he cease waving or smiling. He added additional information to his speech. “I’m the owner of the island! Make yourselves at home.”
The searchlight played over him, scanning the night. A voice echoed, this time lower, almost tired. “What a scare!”
An enormous pause followed.
“We always stop here. We’ve never seen anyone before. Do you live here?”
“No. I’m just camping. I was over on the other side of the island when you arrived.”
He couldn’t seem to lower his voice, in spite of the difficulty of maintaining a dialogue at the top of his lungs with any degree of naturalness. He added, “Beautiful sailboat.”
The man, relaxing a little, repeated what he had said before. “What a scare.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, that’s all right. . . . Are you a fisherman? Is this island really yours?”
Instead of answering, he asked, “Was that Vivaldi?”
“What?” the other yelled back, surprised.
“The music. Was it Vivaldi?”
“Corelli,” said the woman. And again, louder, “Corelli.”
He latched onto the name like a drowning man would a life ring.
“Corelli! Of course, Corelli.”
The man cut him off. “Well, good night, then. See you in the morning.” The light went out abruptly.
Lost in the darkness, he replied, “Good night.”
Sweat was rolling off him in streams and his legs trembled. He thought of the gun. Once more he called, “Hey!”
“What is it?” asked the man almost roughly.
“Your sailboat! What’s her name?”
“Albatross.”
“Albatross . . .”
“Good night!” It was her voice this time.
Had she left the pistol in the cabin when she went down? Or was it still wrapped in the napkin?
“Good night!” he called back.
He sat down on the sand, completely exhausted. A cold breeze blew over him. I’m leaving, but I’ll be back, Death whispered in his ears. He breathed with difficulty. I know, he thought. I know.
A night . . . He had gained a night. Maybe a day or two. He crawled back to the tent and relighted the lantern. On the sailboat, two lights came on also, one inside, the other, weaker, on the stern. The music started again: jazz, this time.
I’m leaving, but I’ll be back, Death whispered in his ears.
Piano, bass, percussion, saxophone . . . He moved around outside the tent, with the express purpose of being seen. Then he strolled toward the trees, as if to urinate. Protected by the vegetation, he took out the binoculars again.
In the kitchen, the man was busy doing the dishes, his body swaying to the rhythm of the music. Directly above him, the woman was smoking, leaning over the rail as she watched the island.
She could not possibly see him. Even so, he felt he was being observed. For his part, he couldn’t discern her features in the shadows, only the lighted point of the cigarette and the outline of her figure, arms crossed.
Vivaldi . . . she must have been thinking.
Vivaldi . . . A single despairing cry had landed him in the tangled center of someone else’s labyrinth. The man hadn’t even noticed. How could he, if he didn’t know what was at stake?
But the woman suspected something. And there she stood, smoking, watching him, wondering. Somewhere in the firmament, Death drummed its fingers impatiently on a barroom countertop. It would be back, surely. But when?
Unless . . .
He felt assailed by a strange force. Back at the tent, fully illuminated by the lantern, he deliberately fixed the binoculars on the woman.
She moved back two steps and looked in all directions, as if a thousand demons were spying on her.
In the kitchen, the man was now drying his dishes in sync with the music. At the bow, the woman threw her cigarette into the sea, as though she had come to a decision, and strode quickly toward the rear of the boat. Was she going to denounce him?
When she reached the stairway, however, she stopped and came back to the rail. Placing both hands on the varnished wood, she stayed there directly in his line of vision, as though to defy him.
He lowered the binoculars and turned his gaze away, overtaken by a weariness bordering on disgust. There was nothing to be done. Now it was only a question of time.
Seeing his glass overturned on the ground, he refilled it with wine. He lifted it in a toast to the sea without looking at the sailboat. Have a great trip, he thought. Kill each other, devour each other . . .
But somewhere else, far away. . . He hadn’t landed in his new domain that precise afternoon for nothing. The gods hadn’t entrusted the destiny of that island to him by chance. Discounting the few drops that had fallen on his manuscript, blood wouldn’t be spilled here.
After a few more minutes, he raised his eyes to the boat again. The music had now stopped for good. The woman, her back to the island, was completely still.
Something in her attitude had changed. Something almost imperceptible. He grabbed the binoculars. Her body had lost its rigidity. Head down, she seemed to be sobbing.
He put out the lantern, leaving the couple alone. So they could tally up the scores, without violating the natural order of things. It was asking too much, he knew.
Just before sleep overtook him, however, he heard the music begin again, and he identified the piece. This time there was no doubt: Vivaldi. He slept.
The next morning when he woke up, the Albatross had left.
The three days following those first hours spent on the island passed slowly. No matter how rich the vegetation around him, or how varied the number of butterflies and birds flying overhead, he thought only of the woman. Not even the discovery of a tiny coral beach surrounded by palm trees, directly across the island from his hills, could distract him from his obsession.
His memories of her blended into the perfume of the sea breeze and the shades of the evening colors, insinuating themselves into every fold of his imagination. What was her relationship to the man? Was she a wife, lover, friend, sister?
We always stop here. We’ve never seen anyone before.
The remark suggested a degree of familiarity with the region. She had obviously participated in other sailing trips at various times, possibly happy ones. What was she doing now as she skirted an abyss?
The abyss had been hers; the vertigo was now his. Would she honor the terms of her promise? Suggestion, really, more than promise. Validated, at most, by a few measures of music.
He spent a good part of the second night sitting on the grassy hill, his eyes on the sea. The third night found him swimming toward the cove in the dark.
Over and over he recalled the first glance she had given the island—the glance he had immediately captured in his lenses. As time passed, he retrieved from the depths of those pupils a dimension of sadness that had at first eluded him.
Had it really been there?
The doubt, uncomfortable and relentless, began to occupy an ever-greater space in his thoughts. Had the episode originated from a coolly designed plan, motivated by greed? Or had the whole drama been rooted in fear or despair?
He spent his nights revisiting every word of the conversation they had had.
“Vivaldi!”
He saw the silhouette jumping up from the chair, the man’s shadow sliding toward the stern, the beam of light slicing the darkness.
“Who’s there?”
Each of them had played a different instrument in an improvised score. He had shouted firm notes imbued with certainty, which reverberated like those of a trumpet. The man had deflected each one, as if they had been dull bullets ricocheting from his cymbals. Until the woman had brought harmony to the scene: “Corelli.”
In that baroque mirror they had found each other. From that point on, they would proceed together, on the same score, she vulnerable in her waiting, he powerless in the dark.
“Corelli! Of course.”
His decision to search for the woman matured gradually, as he came to feel responsible for her destiny. Without defining precisely what form this affair might assume, he counted the hours left until the fisherman’s return.
They finally passed. And the little fishing boat came back, preceded by the syncopated drumming of its engine. He said good-bye to the island.
On the return trip, he felt he was being observed. Was it his imagination? Maybe . . . In any case, the fisherman respected his silence, limiting his remarks to comments about the weather and the duration of the crossing.
It was raining when they got to the village. He walked on the wet cobblestones toward the bus stop. His bus wouldn’t be coming for a while, so he went into a bar and ordered a cup of hot coffee, which he savored as he planned his next moves.
“We always stop here. . . .”
The adverb implied they had not come from too far away. He would concentrate his search—at least initially—within a radius of one hundred miles along the shoreline, to the north and south of the island. Unclear as to the probable outcome of his investigation, he wavered between a boyish excitement and a sense of anguish—the contours of which he preferred to leave undefined.
At home he took a long shower and fell into bed, exhausted. He dreamed about his island, and woke with the sails of the Albatross beating the wind amid the curtains of his window.
The inquiries he made during the next two weekends produced no results. No one had heard of the sailboat in the places he visited. It didn’t matter; in a way, he actually preferred to postpone a discovery, the consequences of which he still had no way of ascertaining. In spite of the long bus trips over potholed roads, he sighed with relief at every dead end. And he wrote avidly, as if the deeper background of that episode had fertilized his ideas.
But as time went on, he started to get impatient. He even began to cultivate the illusion that the Albatross was avoiding him. This sensation grew even sharper on his third trip, when a boy promised to take him to the boat—and led him instead to a plain fishing vessel beached on a sandbank.
He finally paid a visit to the port authorities—an alternative that, till then, he had chosen to avoid. It bothered him that dusty old registry books might facilitate a reencounter he would have preferred, as much as possible, to leave to chance.
He discovered two vessels registered under that same name, both in private marinas situated between ports he had visited. The first was a yacht, the second a sailboat.
The following weekend, he rented a car. The day was bright, and there was little traffic on the roads. He arrived at his destination within three hours. At a gas station, the attendant pointed out the side road that would take him to the property.
The narrow road descended toward the shore. After driving a short distance, he left the car hidden among the trees and walked to the edge of a cliff. In a small bay, moored at a pier, stood the Albatross.
It was the same sailboat, without a doubt. So still, however, it looked more like a domesticated animal. Its sails rolled up under canvas covers and fastened to the masts, its hull against the wooden pier, the Albatross now seemed part of a setting that included the ocean and the thick woods beyond. The sailboat shared the stage with a colonial-style house and a beach of reddish sand—both deserted.
The house, one story tall, was surrounded by an ample lawn. Its ivy-covered roof projected out over a veranda. Five blue window frames were outlined on the white facade, and closed venetian blinds highlighted the loneliness of the sailboat in the morning sun.
Suddenly, very close, he heard children laughing, and immediately afterward the barking of a dog. He walked a little way through the trees. Almost at his feet, a second house appeared. It was much smaller, rustic, and a circle of banana trees grew around it. In the bare yard of beaten earth, half a dozen chickens pecked at the ground. A little girl ran outside, followed by a smaller boy. Laughing, they scampered up the hillside, the dog bounding after them. When they saw him, they came to an abrupt halt. The dog began to bark furiously. A woman appeared in the yard, wiping her hands on a dishcloth.
“Good afternoon!” he called.
“Good afternoon,” replied the woman.
The dog stopped barking. A silence loaded with curiosity fell on the scene. Before their surprise could turn to suspicion, he gestured vaguely in the direction of the road.
“My car broke down,” he said quite naturally. “Is there a telephone around here?”
As he spoke, he went down the path, the children backing away, the dog growling. He asked the girl playfully, “Does he bite?”
The woman was sorry, but there was no telephone here. The closest one was back at the gas station. Right along the main road, about a mile away.
He sat down on a rock and shook his head, feigning good-humored discouragement. A mile! He sensed that his city clothes imposed respect, and that his graying hair would inspire confidence. He patted the dog.
“It’s not so far, really,” said the little girl, trying to cheer him up.
“And there’s a mechanic there,” added her brother.
Smiling at both of them, he commented, “I saw a house from the road up there . . . and a sailboat.”
“In the boss’s house, there’s a phone,” the little girl said, interrupting, “but we can’t use it.”
“It’s out of order,” the mother added quickly.
“That’s all right,” he reassured her. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll walk to the gas station.”
For a few seconds, he looked at the shabby house. The woman was watching him closely, the children beside her.
“Nice-looking boat,” he commented in a conversational tone.
“It’s sailed all around the world!” exclaimed the boy.
“They’re selling it,” said the girl excitedly.
“Selling it?” He couldn’t disguise his shock. For the first time, his voice sounded real. The details all around him came into sharper focus.
“Yes, it’s for sale,” confirmed the mother.
“Then I’ll buy it!” he joked.
The woman giggled, hiding her wrinkles in the dishcloth. The dog wagged its tail, pleased with the children’s happiness.
“It must be very expensive,” he went on, more at ease.
“Millions!” cried the boy, stretching his arms wide into the sky.
“But why sell such a beautiful boat?”
Here mother and children exchanged awkward glances.
“It’s ’cause the lady died,” the boy said, scuffing the ground with his foot.
“The boss is very sad.” The girl sighed.
“He may even sell the house,” added the woman resignedly.
Their sadness turned to apprehension as his shadow suddenly swayed menacingly over them.
“Are you all right, sir?”
The boy huddled close to the mother. The girl clapped her hand to her mouth, as though stifling a cry.
“It’s just the heat,” he managed to mumble as he sank down on the rock again.
The woman went into the house and came back with a glass of water.
“Died? But how?” he asked with such a feeble voice, he could barely listen himself.
“Drowned, poor thing.”
Still pale, he drank the water.
“She was very nice. She liked the children.”
“She gave me a doll,” the girl said. “Want to see it?”
He smiled at the woman as the girl ran inside the house. She smiled back, full of sympathy for his shock.
The little girl came back, bringing the doll, accompanied by her brother, who carried a toy car. The four of them sat there in the yard examining these treasures. Little by little, he distanced himself from the desire to know more. He only wanted to sit there, lost in the contemplation of the toys. Above all, he wanted to forget. He had been part of a story—which had changed course. And from which he now felt excluded.
Perhaps for that very reason, the facts came to him in a natural and calm manner, as though his silence generated a vacuum that sucked in all the details and regrouped them at his feet. Pieces of information emerged delicately, none of them requiring any immediate reaction on his part.
He had been part of a story—which had changed course. And from which he now felt excluded.
The woman had slipped on the wet quarterdeck and fallen from the sailboat in the middle of the night, three weeks ago. A few days later, her body had washed up on the beach not far away. “Her face was all eaten by the fish,” the boy added, taking advantage of a pause.
They spoke slowly, in soft voices, each solemnly bringing back a fragment of the past. The words hurt him—he had no way of assimilating them. He thought about the woman, whose flesh by now was rotting beneath the earth.
“We heard about it from the boss. That same night. He came to get the spare key to the house, you see. My husband gave it to him.”
“He was shaking from head to toe.”
“They found the other key in her pocket.”
In panic, the man had radioed for help from the sailboat when he realized she was missing. Various boats had spent hours combing the waters in vain, over a radius of several miles.
“She wasn’t a good swimmer.”
“She drowned fast. It was very dark.”
That was true. On that night, he remembered well, he had spent hours sitting on the grass, gazing into the darkness, redrawing the silhouette of the woman on the Albatross. Meanwhile . . .
“He cried so hard!”
The mother bent over her son.
“Cried?” she asked, puzzled.
“First he talked on the phone. Then he cried. He banged his head on the table.”
The boy hadn’t been able to sleep. He had crept outside, gone down the path to the big house, and peeked through a window. Now he confessed his mischief.
“And he didn’t see you?”
“He was drunk.”
The man had guzzled two bottles and then passed out, slumping onto the table. The boy had only left the window in the wee hours of the morning, when the police arrived.
The inquiry confirmed the accident. The woman had been buried in the city.
“My husband went. There were lots of people. Lots of flowers.”
Three weeks . . . So it had all happened on the trip back from the island. Three weeks . . .
She must have changed her mind. She must have tried to kill her husband.
Only she had hesitated. A struggle, a bullet that missed the mark—and she had fallen overboard. Or had she been thrown into the water?
Had she screamed?
The boat had sailed away, disappearing in the night.
Worse, it had stayed just out of her reach, sails furled, rocking in the water.
So many hypotheses . . . and they all made sense. Except that none of them sounded real. They paled before the emptiness that overwhelmed him.
He had no reason to judge the husband, or to incriminate him. Suppose a wave hadn’t thrown the woman off balance—then he might have disappeared into the sea. With a bullet through his forehead and an anchor tied to his feet. Perhaps that was why he had drunk so much that night, why he had wept in despair.
He considered taking a closer look at the sailboat but couldn’t find the strength to do it. He said good-bye to the woman and children and went up the hill, walking away from the questions he left behind.
Six months went by. When summer came, he began to feel an intense desire to return to the island. This time, he decided, he would stay longer. He wanted to look over the collection of stories that consumed his nights, and catch up on his reading. He might have other reasons for going back to his domain. But he had long ceased thinking about them.
At the small port, the fisherman he knew was having problems with his boat’s engine and couldn’t take him to the island. But the man introduced him to a friend, who agreed to do the job. The fellow even left him the dinghy he was towing as a bonus, fruit of a spontaneous camaraderie developed during the crossing.
Thanks to the dinghy, he gained mobility. He paddled daily around the island, uncovering all sorts of details from various angles. On his first visit, he had familiarized himself with the physical dimensions of the landscape. Now he had the luxury of courting the island from a distance, discovering its bends and cliffs with renewed enchantment. He spent hours floating in the water, reading, half asleep, his fishing rod propped at his feet.
One day, to protect himself from the sun that had been beating down since early morning, he improvised a tent roof on his small boat. There he stayed, under its canvas, bent over his book, waiting for the fish to bite. From time to time his line would jerk, though nothing much materialized on his hook. Twice he replenished the bait. Till he finally gave it up, he was so absorbed in his reading. After a length of time he couldn’t have estimated precisely, he heard, behind him, a dull thumping sound.
A keel beating hard against the water, he thought. He turned around and saw the sailboat. So close—almost on top of him—that it seemed about to cut his dinghy in two. A line of letters, painted on the leaning bow, paraded before his eyes. And the Albatross, in a salty cloud, passed within a few inches of him.
He struggled to get up, losing his balance in the waves. The canvas shelter and the oars fell into the ocean. Gripping the seat of the fragile boat, he saw the man waving at him.
So it hadn’t been sold. . . . The Albatross hadn’t been sold! Lifted by a luminous flash, which in one fell swoop eliminated all and every hint of melancholy from the face of the Earth, it again put his island on the map.
The woman was back. With all the honors bestowed upon her by ghosts from countless seas, she was back for a last sailing trip.
He fished the oars out of the water, collected and folded up his canvas, and returned slowly to the beach. He pulled the dinghy onto the sand, leaving it under the bushes, as was his habit. For a moment, he stood motionless, looking at his hills.
He thought about the man who, on the other side of the island, was busy anchoring his sailboat on the little coral beach. It seemed natural that he should come back. This route was familiar to him. One could even say that there was something predictable about this reencounter. It was the way it had happened that worried him.
They had almost collided. . . . With great dexterity, however, the man had managed to avoid the worst. Steering the sailboat away, he had waved an apology and disappeared around the bend of the cove.
The sequence of events hadn’t lasted more than a minute or so. But it had left in its wake a sensation bordering on uneasiness. As if the episode fulfilled a function that he failed to grasp.
He had a bite to eat, without much appetite, and settled down under the trees, book in hand. Sooner or later, the man would show up.
Hours passed. He had a long swim; the afternoon fell. When the sun went down, he lit a fire. The green wood gave him some trouble, and he blew on the coals for a long while. He was still squatting down, puffing, when the man approached, carrying a bottle of liquor. He had come by way of the trail that twisted among the trees to the right of the hills.
Drawing closer, the visitor nodded with a somewhat studied formality, and produced a remark calculated for effect.
“My respects to the owner of the island.”
Owner . . . The greeting, spoken in a jovial tone, transported them offhandedly into the past, and reinstated the woman between them.
“You are the owner of the island?” the man insisted good-humoredly.
“Yes, I am,” he replied in the same tone.
“I’m sorry I startled you today,” the man said, holding out a hand.
Another echo from the past. Wasn’t it he who had startled the couple on that remote night?
“It was a bit close,” he admitted, shaking the man’s hand.
He offered him his folding canvas chair, and went to get some glasses. His feet felt like lead. The man poured them drinks.
“Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
Brandy . . . Two men drinking brandy on a deserted island.
“An inheritance,” he commented vaguely, with a gesture that embraced the island, the ocean, and the stars.
The other didn’t react to this explanation. He was examining the tent with interest. Was he thinking about his wife? Had he been witness to, or agent of, her death?
“I still don’t really know what to do with it,” he went on, aware that he spoke with the express purpose of filling the silence. As if the island were a painting he couldn’t decide where to hang, or an old piece of furniture acquired at some third-rate auction. In a last attempt, he added, almost to himself, “It’s a shame there’s no drinking water.”
“Drinking water?” The man turned to face him. “But there is. And lots of it.”
The man’s tone was attentive, almost solicitous.
“Where?” he asked, surprised.
The other laughed and replied, “In the pirates’ cave.”
“The pirates’ cave?” He laughed, too.
To his surprise, however, the man wasn’t joking. Drawing in the sand with a stick, he explained where the place was. The entrance was hidden by vegetation, and in the afternoon the tide rose to cover it. But in the morning it was visible. The springwater came from a pit below the rocks. It was fresh and abundant. Taking another swallow, he added, “It was my wife who discovered it. By accident.”
He shuddered at how effortlessly the wife had entered the scene, and wanted to change the subject, out of fear or shame. It was too early for her to take shape between the two of them. But the man continued.
“She was lying on the floating mattress, half asleep. The current took her there.”
He seemed determined to bring her into the conversation. He was creating a stage setting for her, rich in suggestive detail, almost forcing the other to visualize her drowsing in the sun, one arm trailing through the water.
What had she been thinking about as she floated on the clear sea? The death of the husband who was now recalling her to life?
He examined the man closely. He wore a scuffed pair of tennis shoes, shorts, and a T-shirt. The man was older than he had imagined a few months ago, when he had framed him in his lenses. He decided they were about the same age.
The man pulled his chair closer to the fire, poured himself another shot, and passed the bottle to his companion. He then asked how he spent his time on the island, and what he did for a living. Learning that he was a writer, the man seemed interested. His gaze, however, remained distant, veiled.
So he told him about the book of short stories he had just finished, knowing full well that his words were being lost in the shadows of the night. As he spoke, he thought about the woman, and how best to bring her back into the conversation.
For a moment, she had allowed herself to appear, exposing her warm, salty skin and graceful body to the universe. Then, as if by magic, she had left the scene again. Now she swayed between fire and breeze, life and death. Waiting.
At some point they would have to face her. But when? The man was gazing at the ocean. There before them, in the space the moon was just beginning to illuminate, they had dined together for the last time. Did he remember in detail what had happened that night?
An unexpected thought flashed through his mind: The caretaker had talked.
The caretaker had talked. . . . Alerted by his wife and children, he had mentioned to his boss that a stranger had visited the property. Odd, his interest in the sailboat, the caretaker had probably said. Odder still, the intensity with which he had reacted to the news of the accident involving the boss’s wife. And what about the lie regarding the car’s breakdown? His kid had followed the stranger all the way to the main road—the car was fine.
Intrigued, the husband had asked around. At the gas station near his property. In the marinas where his boat sometimes docked. He had grown convinced that someone was on his trail. Who could it be? And why?
At first, he must have thought it was the police. Maybe an extra zealous inspector or a private detective. But as the months went by, he had discarded that possibility—and gone further back in time. He had returned to that night on the island when he and his wife had dined on the deck of the Albatross. Gradually, sifting through every detail of that night, he had come to the singular cry that had pierced the silence.
The man’s eyes were fixed on his. He heard him murmur, “I always did like short stories. . . .”
His words sounded calm enough, conspiratorial, almost sleepy. But they came from far, far away. “Even as a boy I liked to read.”
The other woke from his torpor, realizing that they had both been silent for some time. The man was in no hurry. But now he was inviting him to continue.
“Well, I didn’t,” he replied casually. “I wasn’t interested in literature until I was much older.”
Night was falling, the bottle almost empty—it was time for the woman to reappear. He decided to escort her through the wings and bring her onstage.
“I started writing through the influence of a girlfriend. Later we married. When she left me, many years later, the passion remained.”
“For your stories.” The other chuckled.
“For my stories,” he confirmed.
And mentally he thanked his ex-wife for coming to his aid. In her honor, he added a specific detail. “Her name was Regina.”
“Was?” the other asked.
He hadn’t blinked. Nothing seemed to escape his attention. Depending on the role he had played in his wife’s death, it was entirely possible he was bent on violence.
The discovery, softened by the brandy, made him dizzy. The feeling was not altogether unpleasant. Could he be drunk? He felt somehow invulnerable. His island had become a huge parchment, where many stories could be written in arabesques of fire. If the man chose to postpone the rituals ordained for that particular night, he would insist the man continue. He would force him to, if necessary. He wasn’t afraid of death. Moreover, he had an advantage over him: He had saved his life. Surely the gods couldn’t be indifferent to that.
Taking a deep breath, he repeated the verb that still echoed between them. “And your wife, what was her name?”
The words hung suspended in the air. His heart was pounding. He swallowed the rest of his drink in one gulp.
The other, shaking his head pensively, seemed not to have heard. Was he leaning over the ocean once again, watching his wife disappear under the waves?
He stared hard at the man, knowing that he was witnessing a decisive moment in the life of a human being. As he watched, an emotion sprang up from the ground between them, almost palpable. A second theory took shape in his mind, less dramatic, more complex.
Then he understood. And when he saw tears running down the other’s face, he was not surprised. The man knew nothing about him. He had come back simply to relive, on the island, the last night he had spent with her. This was the cloak he had chosen for the occasion—this mantle of sadness. Whatever had happened on the sailboat, the man was innocent. The despair the caretaker’s son had witnessed, now clearly written all over the wrinkled face, was eloquent proof of that.
“I’m sorry,” the other said finally, his trembling hand wiping the tears from his face.
He, too, was deeply moved. So much so that he hardly understood what happened next. The man had drawn a pistol from his pocket.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated sadly, as if he deeply regretted what he was about to do.
They stood up slowly, each haunted on opposite sides of the fire. He turned toward the sea, aware that the woman awaited him. An instant before the shot, he heard her voice.
“Corelli . . .”
The bullet hit him. Smiling, he slumped slowly down as the man fired again.
Writing about the South is difficult; it requires perceiving truth where truth has been obfuscated and redacted, and it requires research—whether personal, communal, or historical—to capture a region that is more rooted in its specific “placeness” than most places are. In his essay entitled “Southings,” Thomas Dai writes that “Southern identity is perceived by most to be marooned in the before times, somewhere betwixt Civil War and Civil Rights.” This stagnacy in the perceived identity of a region that sprawls across eleven, twelve, even sixteen states (depending on who you ask) ultimately means that writing about the South requires the desire and ability to peel away a film that flattens the textured beliefs, experiences, and desires of Southerners–those who bear the brunt of negative stereotypes about the region.
But writing about the South isn’t just about addressing the misconceptions of outsiders. One must also possess the ability to see beauty, worth, and humanity where we have been taught that these qualities do not exist. As a result, the books on this list contain varied evocations of life in a largely misunderstood region: dark soil fertilized with bodily fluids, mouthfuls of tea sweetened with heaping spoonfuls of sugar, women wielding other-worldly knowledge, tourist-clogged beaches, fragrant thunderstorms rolling in over mountains, floodwater rising and swirling, the slap of sandals on simmering pavement, protests rippling through city streets, kitchen windows peering out over nourishing gardens, thick tendrils of fiery religiosity all slithering up toward the same God. These books, each of which adds a new texture, layer, and contradiction to the story of what the South really is, will resonate with readers who love and live in deeply complex, complicated places.
In Carrie R. Moore’s debut, Black men and women work to understand painful histories, repressive traditions, and find belonging. Through stories dealing with religion, pregnancy, marriage, and ancestry, Moore builds a collection of characters and ideas that represent the unique experiences of Black Southerners. The narratives in Make Your Way Home are tinged with social, cultural, and environmental horrors, but they take time to revel in the complexity and diversity of the South.
A poetry anthology orchestrated in response to the repression, brutality, and segregation cemented in the foundation of Louisville, Kentucky, Once a City Said uplifts poetic voices to tell the multifaceted story of a Southern city. These poems are exacting meditations on the way it feels to live in a unique, diverse place that values tourism and status quo over the wellbeing of its citizens.
Garth Greenwell calls Southernmost a “novel of painful, finally revelatory awakening, of fierce love and necessary disaster.” Opening in the midst of a flood of biblical proportions, Southernmost is a story about destruction, prejudice, and forgiveness that follows Asher, an evangelical preacher, as he endures a crisis of faith. As the narrative unfolds, it demonstrates the propensity for change that is possible in the South, how it has the potential to become a place that celebrates and protects its most vulnerable populations.
Revival Season opens as the Horton family, armed with the word of God, travels toward Georgia to lead healing services for the sick and injured. An intricate novel about the complications of religion, money, power, and faith, this debut is propelled by a profoundly interesting narrator and captivating writing. West investigates and analyzes the treatment of women within an evangelical, Southern space and crafts a depiction of the Bible Belt that is both critical and compassionate.
Men We Reaped is Ward’s memoir about how and why five Black men in her life died in just four years. It’s a narrative about the way the lives of Black American Southerners are thoroughly tainted by the systemic deaths of Black men. The book offers a powerful perspective on the dilemma of loving a place while being irreparably hurt by it. Ward writes: “I knew there was much to hate about home, the racism and inequality and poverty which is why I left, yet I loved it.”
This novel is a stunning exploration of colorism stemming from the traumatic legacy of slavery. How do societal forces shape our understandings of ourselves and others? What does it mean when a Black person is not perceived to be Black? The Vanishing Half follows the separate journeys of light-skinned twin sisters born in the Jim Crow South. With deep consideration of the intricacies of racial identity, Bennett’s second novel is infused with compelling themes, lush prose, and a valuable discussion about passing.
In the preface to Gay Poems for Red States, Carver writes that he hopes to make a space for dreaming through storytelling. This poetry collection comes from the desperate hope for a stable future harbored by so many queer individuals from the South. It is hope that allows these heartfelt poems to confront the homophobia that simmers beneath a veneer of Southern hospitality.
For writers and readers, time is an essential commodity. As our world shifts ever further toward optimization and productivity, taking that time back can be vital work in maintaining a creative practice. When there’s no time to spare, where can we look to find fulfillment in the world of writing around us? For writers of novellas, concision is essential and exacting. For readers, novellas present an opportunity for transportation within the time constraints of our contemporary world.
An oft-neglected format in commercial publishing, the novella offers the interior world of a novel with the added advantage of brevity. The form also presents a unique challenge to writers: How can one create a work that is both expansive and succinct? These authors bring the turbulence and uncertainty of the past decade into brilliant relief in under 200 pages. Whether you’re looking to transport yourself during a train commute, or while waiting in a doctor’s office, or on an hour layover, these eleven books, recommended by the staff of Electric Literature, can be devoured in a single sitting.
Editor’s note: The literary guide below was recommended by Electric Literature staff and interns and written collaboratively by Grace Gaynor, Evander Reyes, and Lennie Roeber-Tsiongas.
The narrator of It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over is both untethered and paradoxically conscious as she drifts through the afterlife. She holds onto sparse remnants of memories—her previous life and the longing that characterized it—while heading West, accompanied by a sentient, loquacious crow that may or may not be a figment of her decaying imagination. As humorous and absurd as it is devastating, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over offers a poignant meditation on memory, mortality, and the persistent force of love.
Silvie, a repressed teenager, experiences the grind of the Iron Age while living alongside her brutal father, subdued mother, and a group of curious archaeology students. As Ghost Wall touches on age-old issues of gender, tradition, class, and family, the narrative becomes a thrumming rumination on history, culture, and ancestry. The book asks and attempts to answer the question: What separates us from our “primitive” past?
The Employeesby Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken
Corporate lingo intertwines with dream-like lyricism to underscore this haunting depiction of humanity ruled by pseudo-productivity. A narrative held together by questions of life, labor, and technology, The Employees is a sharp, satirical 22nd-century tale that manages to ground readers in the dark expanse of outer space.
The Premonitionby Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Asa Yoneda
Translated into English for the first time in 2023, The Premonition offers an idiosyncratic portrait of memory and familial connection. The titular “premonition” follows the narrator, Yayoi, as she grapples with the absence of her childhood memories. In response, she moves in with her aunt, whose peculiar lifestyle seems to spurn the domestic idealism that has characterized Yayoi’s life thus far. Between sleeping on the floor and eating flan for dinner, Yayoi follows both her aunt and her intuitions towards an unpredictable chasm of truth.
Open Throat is a modern folktale about a mountain lion navigating a life marred by territorial disputes, environmental degradation, and human carelessness. The lion, whose name is “not made of noises a person can make,” is undeniably feral and equally lovable–characteristics admired by the young girl who takes them in. Henry Hoke’s unique narrative transcends the goals of traditional storytelling while blurring the lines between human and animal worlds.
Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches
Boulder follows an unnamed Catalan woman who flees her monotonous life in Barcelona for South America, drifting from job to job as a cook in summer camps and on ships along the Chilean coast. She finds freedom in the simplicity and solitude of her work, yet gradually feels the absence of companionship. When she meets Samsa, a woman who brings both passion and disruption, her nomadic independence collides with the expectations of partnership, home, and motherhood. Eva Baltasar, a celebrated poet before turning to fiction, infuses the novel with a visceral lyricism that captures the tension between desire and confinement, the raw immediacy of the body, and the quiet unease that can underlie intimacy and routine.
Winner of both the Nebula and Hugo Awards, Binti follows a young woman who must bridge the divide between her familial and acquired knowledge . . . the fate of the universe depends on it. Binti is the first of her people to attend Oomza University, a prestigious intergalactic school that has made a powerful enemy. In order to reach the university, Binti must travel into danger, armed only with her ancestral knowledge, inherent wisdom, and the courage to embark on a remarkable interstellar journey.
“Such Common Life,” a novella within Yiyun Li’s collection Wednesday’s Child, traces the delicate relationship between Dr. Edwina Ditmus, an 88-year-old retired scientist, and Ida, her younger Chinese caregiver. Set mostly within the confines of Dr. Ditmus’s home, the story unfolds through their quiet conversations and introspections, revealing two lives shaped by solitude, aging, migration, and memory. Their “common life” exists both in what they choose to share—memories and reflections—and in the quotidian rhythms of caretaking and daily routines. With Li’s characteristically spare, luminous prose, the novella transforms ordinary moments into a meditation on what endures—and what quietly fades—over a lifetime.
The Strangersby Jon Bilbao, translated by Katie Whittemore
The Strangers is a tense, unsettling novel about Jon and Katharina, a couple whose quiet, routine-bound life in a coastal house in northern Spain is disrupted in disturbing ways. One rainy evening, strange lights appear in the sky above their town in Cantabria. The next morning, two enigmatic visitors, Markel and Virginia, arrive. As Jon and Katharina probe the truth behind their guests’ motives, unexpected developments and hidden motives turn every interaction fraught and uncertain. Bilbao masterfully blends the ordinary with the uncanny, crafting a slow-burning psychological drama in which the couple’s melancholic domestic life is transformed into something paranoid and unsettling—an experience that forces them towards each other.
While barricaded inside the Westbrook Correctional Facility’s computer lab, an unnamed narrator—also the editor-in-chief of the prison’s literary journal—liveblogs a confessional and memoiristic final Editor’s Letter. The narrator discusses his varied past and considers his impending death; he acknowledges that his fate will most likely be inflicted by his fellow prisoners. Tense, surprising, and riotously funny, Riots I Have Known is a boundless, satirical novel about an incarcerated literary citizen.
Equal parts intimate revelation and journalistic study, Information Age holds a mirror (or maybe a magnifying glass) to our modern world. The book follows a young journalist as she contends with asymmetrical relationships, job losses, and the quiet disorder of life in your twenties. With sharp wit, snippets of delightfully weird observation, and a last sentence that lingers, Lewis portrays something true about life in just under 200 pages.
A few weeks before we were set to film season eight, I made an account on a dating app. I had been dumped on national television at the beginning of the summer (they put the dumping in the season finale), and I thought it’d be a good idea to start off the new season with an exceptionally attractive and mature rebound.
Our show was called Hotel California. They called it that because for the first handful of seasons we all worked at the Hotel Bel-Air. I was in reception. Derek ran the bar. Riley and Maya were hostesses—although they both left the show after season three. (Maya met some billionaire who started a “voluntourism” business. He took her to Costa Rica to save the turtles, or whatever, and ended up buying the whole beach town and naming it after her. Riley went to Vegas. Last I heard she was waiting tables at the Ramsay’s Kitchen in Harrah’s.) There were eight of us in total. Around season five, we grew a little too recognizable, in certain circles, to continue working at the hotel. People—fans, crazy ones—started booking rooms just to be near us, and management wasn’t psyched about that. Plus, we didn’t need the minimum wage anymore. So production filtered a handful of new cast members in and out over the next few seasons, waiting to see who stuck.
By season six, Derek and I were the only original cast members left on the show. This gave us a lot of clout. We got paid more than everyone else. This was also because we had real chemistry—people liked to watch us. We’d met while working at the hotel, before the show started, and became instant friends. I’d pop into the bar when my shift was over at reception, and Derek would make me vodka sodas on the house while I gave him all the dirt on the guests. Once, when a certain newly single and extremely famous actress was staying at the hotel, I’d put in a good word for Derek at check-in. She came to the bar that night, got completely wasted on champagne and showed us her facelift scars and gave us each two hundred dollars and called us cute. Then she took Derek back to her room. They texted for a little while after that, but the fling fizzled when she went on location in London. I think she married some guy over there and then divorced him a few months later. Anyway, Derek and I always knew how to turn a normal, dumb day into a time.
I didn’t meet Gemma until season six. We’d been filming at a bar on Sunset late into the night (Derek’s birthday), and she came out of nowhere.
“I think I’m in love with you,” she said. She was at least a full head taller than me, and she was kind of hovering over me in a way that would have looked desperate had she not been beautiful. Her face was perfectly angular, her skin smooth and lightly freckled. She looked glass blown. But she smelled like cigarettes. “We should make out.”
The kiss made it into the episode. I never watched it, but I remember her running her hands through my hair. I remember she tasted like lime. And I remember my whole body going a little numb afterward. In the moment, I hadn’t been thinking about the cameras, but Gemma had noticed them. She’d pop up occasionally wherever we were filming, usually at a bar or a restaurant in West Hollywood, and find her way to me. She didn’t try to be coy about it. She said things like “I was hoping I’d find you here” and “I’ve been thinking about you,” which would have sounded psychotic coming from anyone else, but she was so good at flirting, so comfortable in her clean, glossy skin, that it actually turned me on. I mean, it was like being hit on by a celebrity. Derek thought she was sketchy.
“I don’t even think she’s a real lesbian,” he said one morning at my apartment. We were drinking mimosas and eating animal-style burgers to cure our hangovers. We did that a lot back then.
“So? I’m basically not a real lesbian.”
“If you weren’t completely gay, we would have fucked by now.”
“Ew. Can you not?”
“I’m pretty sure I saw her making out with that asshole bouncer.”
“When? Who?”
“Like, a few months ago, I don’t know. The guy who kicked you out of the bar for stealing french fries.”
Derek snorted, and I laughed. “I hid in the bathroom for like two hours.”
“He literally held your hands behind your back like a criminal.”
“You’re just jealous she likes me instead of you.”
“That’s probably true.” Derek’s mouth was full of burger. “Even more reason not to trust her.”
I knew Gemma wanted to get on TV, but that didn’t bother me. Everyone in L.A. wants to get on TV. I was drawn to her. She had an aura that couldn’t be ignored.
“That’s the cigs,” Derek said.
The first time Gemma and I got together alone, I invited her to go with me to the five-dollar psychic on La Cienega. It wasn’t my idea—production wanted me to do it. The psychic read our palms and told us we were soulmates and said something about eating cantaloupe to strengthen our bond. She made us hold hands and gaze into each other’s eyes. I remember feeling afraid to blink, like if I closed my eyes for even a split second, Gemma might disappear. I actually started crying, which made Gemma cry, and she somehow looked even more beautiful with tears streaming down her face. After that we were a couple, and she officially joined the cast a few weeks later.
That season, I became desperately obsessed with her. Everyone would mock me in their confessionals. Gemma and I aren’t eating sugar right now. Gemma says yellow makes my eyes pop. Gemma says if I spin in a circle three times while moaning her name, bubble gum will shoot out my ass. Nobody could stomach me—not even Derek, who once referred to me, on-screen, as a “sickening, wide-eyed little Furby.”
It went on like that for two seasons. Gemma moved into my apartment. We bought an expensive couch. We talked about eloping in Cabo. Sometimes, we shared a toothbrush. Until one random night after filming wrapped for season seven, I was home alone, and I got a call from Jimmy, our producer.
“We’re going to film at your place tonight,” he said. “Be there in thirty.”
“What happened?” I assumed someone had been arrested. I was so stupid with love I couldn’t see what was about to happen to me.
“Just buzz us in. I’ll explain when we get there.”
Moments after the cameras were up, Gemma and Derek walked through the door together, looking all solemn and pitiful. They sat down on the couch, legs flush against each other, hands intertwined, and told me that I was moving out.
So I spent the summer reinventing myself. I hired a personal trainer and started working out in an EMS suit. I stopped drinking on weeknights and tried to wean myself off Adderall. When that didn’t work, I upped my dose and lost fifteen pounds. I got Botox in my neck, which made me look like a fairy princess. I hadn’t heard from Gemma or Derek all summer. The last time I spoke to them was at the reunion. I was proud of the way I’d handled it.
“You two have a reckoning coming your way,” I said. “The worst of your lives is yet to come.”
Chilling, I know. Everyone loved it. They wanted more of me. They invited me onto their podcasts. They wrote articles about me, about the justice I deserved. They sent me messages begging for me-themed merch, so I put my face on sweatshirts and coffee mugs and sold it to them. A few months later, I had enough money for a down payment, and I bought a house in Beachwood Canyon. A new relationship would round me out nicely before we picked up cameras.
I didn’t want someone to go out with me because they had seen me on TV. I wanted someone to go out with me because I was an extremely chill person, and if they had seen me on TV, they might have suspected the opposite. So I set my preferences to “men” in the hopes that most of them had never watched reality TV. Then I filled out my profile as plainly as I could.
Age: 28
Height: 5’6”
Location: Los Angeles
Occupation: Entertainment
Looking for:
I had no idea what I was looking for. Someone to die with, maybe, or at least someone who could fall in love with me immediately.
Looking for: Love, or equivalent
I started matching with people, but a lot of them knew me already. They sent me messages:
Are you as nuts as you seem on TV?
I bet you’re hotter on TV than you are in person.
You seem like a fake bitch. I’ll pass.
It’s crazy, the things people will say to you. I ignored all of them, except for one: Cleo. I thought his name was sexy, and I liked his thick black hair, which he wore shaggy and tousled in a way that didn’t seem strategic at all. I thought he was probably Italian or Spanish, and I’d always wanted to have a fling with a European.
Hey Mel, I’d love to take you to dinner sometime.
Adorable. I responded right away.
I’d like that.
We agreed to meet at a little martini bar that also served lamb souvlaki and shrimp scampi in Los Feliz. Derek and I had been there a few times together off-season when we wanted to get wasted extravagantly. It was a small, amber-lit space, its ceiling decorated with crystal chandeliers. Tiny candles lined the bar, and you had to hold them to the drink menu to read the cocktails. It was the perfect place to go if you didn’t want to be noticed. I got there exactly seventeen minutes late, which was perfect timing. I saw Cleo sitting at the bar beyond the host stand. He hadn’t noticed me walking in, so I pretended to fiddle with something in my bag for a few moments before looking up at him again. When I did, he was smiling at me. I smiled back. He waved me over.
“I almost thought you were going to make me drink alone.” He stood up from the barstool and wrapped his arms around me. He was a lot taller than me, and his embrace was firm but not aggressive. His shirt smelled like laundry detergent. I made sure to pull away first.
“Who, me?” Gemma had turned me into a fantastic flirt. I knew when to talk, when to laugh, when to pause for effect. This also made for great TV. “What are you drinking?”
He sat back down, and I took the seat next to him.
“Bulleit on the rocks.”
“Oh, not for me. Brown drinks make me crazy.”
“Crazy how?”
“Hopefully you’ll never know.” I looked at the bartender, who was standing on the other side of the bar, watching us. “I’ll have a vodka martini.”
She nodded, and her eyes lingered on mine a little too long.
Cleo and I spent the next twenty minutes totally engrossed in each other. He was asking me questions I would never have answered had they come from some other, less magnetic person. Who’s your favorite family member? What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever done? Do you remember the best day of your life? I mean really psychotic questions. I kept searching for clues that he knew who I was, but his eyes were too curious, too lasered in on mine, not bouncing around my face like he was distracted by some preconceived notion he’d had of me.
The bartender poured us our second round of drinks. She kept letting her eyes drift toward me, then snapping them away when I made eye contact with her. Cleo sipped his drink, then paused, the rim of the glass still in his mouth. He put the drink down.
“I have to ask—why are you single?”
I felt like I’d been caught. How had I not prepared an answer to this question?
“Honestly?”
“Yes, of course.” He had this bashful smile that made me want to tell him everything.
“I haven’t quite figured out what I want.”
Cleo’s gaze darted off to the side. I was worried that I was losing him.
“I mean, I know what I want now. I just didn’t know until now.”
He looked back at me, half distracted. “What’s that?”
“Normalcy, I guess.”
“Sorry,” he said, his eyes trailing away again. “It’s just . . .” He nodded toward the bartender. I turned to look at her. She was staring at me so awkwardly. She looked like she might cry.
“Is everything okay?” Cleo asked her. He cocked his head and furrowed his brow like a confused dog, which was a cute look for him.
She nodded, then scurried to the back of the house somewhere, embarrassed. I felt relieved to not feel her breathing so close to us.
“What was that?” Cleo said.
If he was going to be my season eight boyfriend, I’d have to tell him eventually.
If he was going to be my season eight boyfriend, I’d have to tell him eventually.
“It’s me. I swear this never happens. Barely anyone watches my show anymore.” A lie, obviously, but I didn’t want to scare him off.
“Your show?”
“It’s not my show. I’m on a show.”
“You’re an actress?” He looked betrayed.
“Not exactly.” I fiddled with the stem of my martini glass. “It’s a reality show about me and my friends.”
“Like one of those dating shows?”
I was almost impressed by how little he knew about reality TV.
“Sort of. But it’s not a competition. The cameras just follow us around and document our lives.”
Cleo looked around the room as if he were seeing it with new eyes. “Are there cameras here right now?”
“God, no.” I didn’t want to talk too much about the show. I wanted to talk about future vacations we’d take together to Nantucket, Amalfi, Marrakech—romantic places. I reached out and touched the top of his hand and felt comforted by its warmth. “We don’t start filming again until next month. Look, you don’t have anything to worry about. I don’t let the show affect my real life.”
“You said the show is about your life.”
“It’s about one part of my life. I’m actually looking to get out soon.” It was a thought I’d never had before, and I was surprised by how easily the words escaped.
“Why?”
“The whole group is pretty toxic. We used to be close, but now everyone’s turned into monsters. We fight a lot.”
“Oh, man.” He stared at my hand on his. “People watch you fight?”
After two drinks and a handful of olives, I was drunker than I wanted to be on a first date. I realized that I barely knew him, and I’d done a weird thing there with my hand. I removed it.
“Not me, specifically. But sure, I guess so. People love to watch you make a mess out of yourself. It makes them feel better about their own messes. It’s all very scientific, very anthropological.”
He thought about this. “You make it sound like a battleground.”
“That’s what it feels like, sometimes.”
“Then why do it in the first place?”
Money. Fame. The high you get when a group of strangers screams your name with tears in their eyes. The ability to strut around L.A. like you really belong there (most people don’t), like you landed in the exact right spot. That rush of adrenaline—a floating sensation, actually—that comes when the cameras start rolling. The bowling-ball-size sense of relief you feel when you slap your ex across the face, and the vindication that comes with all the comments after the betrayal was broadcast nationwide. Gemma and Derek are snakes. Mel should get her own show. Justice for Mel. The tingling sense of accomplishment when you negotiate your contract up 200 percent. I mean, it’s really something.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
The bartender reemerged from the back of the house and shuffled toward us with the expression of someone who’d just been scolded. She leaned over the bar so her face was in between ours.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, looking at me. “My manager says you have to leave.”
“What?”
She gave me a pleading look. “I tried to explain, you know, you’re not the one to blame. It’s the other guy who caused a scene, but he didn’t care. He’s a dick, my manager. He wanted to come out here and do it himself, but I told him I’d handle it. I don’t want to embarrass you.”
Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. I was too afraid to make eye contact with Cleo, so I just stared down at my drink.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Last time you guys were here . . .” She glanced at Cleo. “Not you two, sorry, you and the other guy. And, uh, remember, my manager asked you not to come back?”
“No, I don’t remember that.” I couldn’t decide whether to be apologetic or defensive. “Do you know who I am?”
I meant it genuinely, but it came out like a threat. I felt Cleo’s eyes on me.
“Oh, um. Yes? I know you’ve been here before. It’s just that last time, the guy you were with, he stole a bottle of Casamigos. Or, I mean, he tried to. You were both pretty wasted.”
“I don’t think that was me.”
“Well, it’s just, I was here that night. Your hair was longer. You were ordering vodka martinis, remember?” She leaned in closer and whispered, “You had, like, six of them.”
I held my hand up to stop her from further incriminating me in front of Cleo, who by now certainly never wanted to see me again. “Okay, thanks. I remember.”
I still didn’t remember, but I had ended so many of my nights out with Derek in the bathroom with my shirt off, wrapped around the toilet while he held back my hair. I would have lost more of those nights had it not been for the cameras, one cameraman in the bathroom with us, Jimmy on the other side of the door. Watching those episodes made me want to take a potato peeler to my skin. That’s the thing about reality TV—most of the time you can’t stand to look at yourself.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“No, don’t worry about it. It’s fine. I’ll go.”
“Wait.” She backstepped away from us toward her POS system. “One second.”
She came back and handed me the bill. “Sorry.”
I dug through my bag for my wallet. Cleo sat still beside me.
“Thanks,” she said, after she ran my card. Then she looked at Cleo. “It really wasn’t her fault.”
“Just stop,” I said. “I’m pretty sure he’s already come to his own conclusion about that.”
She stood there like a dumb little rodent, waiting. I tipped her one hundred dollars, then put the receipt down on the bar in front of Cleo. When I tried to make eye contact with him, he was staring blankly at the bill.
“I had a great time,” I said.
“Oh, yeah. Me, too.”
I felt him growing afraid of me.
“It’d be really great if you could not tell anybody about this.”
Cleo exchanged glances with the bartender, the two of them sharing the same panicky thought. As I watched their eyes meet, I felt like I might throw up. I wondered how long he’d stay at the bar, if they’d share notes once I was gone, if they’d get drunk and go home together. I took out my phone to call myself a car. There were three texts and a missed call, all from Derek.
Can we meet before filming?
It’s about Gemma.
Don’t ignore me.
There had been one night, just before we filmed season seven, that Derek, Gemma, and I decided to go to the movies. We had wanted to do something wholesome before descending into the chaos of a new season. I don’t remember what we saw, but I remember Gemma sat in the middle. We snuck in a bottle of wine to share and passed it back and forth during the previews. An older couple was sitting behind us, and the woman kept whispering loudly to her husband about the whole place reeking of alcohol, or something. Gemma turned around and got into it with her. The woman got so worked up she went and got the theater attendant, who asked us to leave and said he’d refund our tickets. I remember Gemma grabbing my hand, lacing her fingers into mine, and, cool as ever, telling the attendant that we weren’t going anywhere. The older woman hadn’t known that she was fighting a losing battle from the beginning. Gemma always got her way.
She held my hand throughout the movie, and I remember thinking I had everything I’d ever wanted. It was during those moments of affection when the cameras were down that I knew Gemma loved me. I hadn’t been thinking about Derek on her left. I hadn’t looked at her other hand.
Fuck off, I wrote.
My eyes were heavy on the drive home from the bar, which took all of five minutes. I fell asleep anyway and woke to the driver tapping me on the foot.
“This is the address, miss.”
It was dark, and I was drunk, but when I opened my eyes, I could see my adorable Spanish-style home, tucked into the hill behind a pair of peppermint trees. It was so big. It was mine.
“I win,” I said.
When I reached my front door, I realized my keys were gone. Maybe they had fallen out of my bag in the car, but the driver had sped away, so I walked around the side of my house and checked for open windows like an intruder. The guest bathroom window was unlocked. The soaking tub sat on the other side of it, and I climbed through the window and stepped into the tub. I thought briefly about sitting down and falling asleep there, curled up in the tub. There was a fresh towel hanging that I could use as a blanket. Instead, I got out of the tub and drank from the sink. I opened the medicine cabinet. There was a bottle of Adderall, some makeup wipes, and lip gloss. I dabbed some of the gloss onto my lips and stared at myself in the mirror. My face had responded well to the breakup. I was way more beautiful now than I was when I was dating Gemma. Mainly, all the weight I’d lost had hollowed out my cheeks in a very on-trend way. Plus, the Botox I’d been getting in my neck was slimming it down nicely. I looked like a ballerina.
“Drinks,” I said. “We need drinks!”
I gave myself a little kiss on the mirror. Then I headed toward the kitchen for the half-empty bottle of wine that was in my refrigerator. But on my way there, I heard a knock on the front door—it spooked me, and I jumped. It was almost eleven at night, a totally unreasonable hour to be showing up at someone’s door unannounced. It was probably the driver returning my keys. I pivoted toward the front door and made my way down the hall. He knocked again, and this time the knock sounded more desperate, more like a pound. It occurred to me, suddenly, that the person knocking might not be the driver. It was possible, after all the media attention I’d gotten lately, that the desperately knocking person was maybe, potentially, my first stalker. I felt both afraid of and excited by this alternative. I was the most famous I’d ever been and probably would ever be—it was important to take a moment to acknowledge and appreciate that. A stalker was a new milestone for me, and that was something to be proud of. But I also needed a weapon of self-defense. I ran to the kitchen and grabbed a knife from the knife block. Then I opened the refrigerator door and took a congratulatory swig from the bottle of wine. It tasted sour and stale. There was another pound on the door. I held the knife behind my back and tiptoed back toward the front door. The adrenaline made my legs and arms tremble.
A stalker was a new milestone for me, and that was something to be proud of.
“I am not afraid,” I whispered. Then, louder, I said, “Who is it?”
Nobody answered. There was another pound on the door.
“I have a gun,” I lied. I’d heard women say this in movies when they were about to be attacked. Usually in the movies the women still got attacked, or some hot actor came to save them in the nick of time. Nobody was coming to save me.
“Where the fuck did you get a gun?”
I recognized Derek’s voice immediately. I let my hand with the knife fall to my side.
“I’m not opening the door for you.”
“Mel, please. It’s an emergency. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t.”
“How did you get my address?”
“From Jimmy. Open the door. I have to piss.”
“Definitely not.”
“If you don’t open the door, I’m going to piss on it.”
He had a lisp that got worse when he was drunk, and I could hear it now. I knew he really would piss on my door if he’d been drinking, and that was not something I wanted to deal with in the morning. I opened the door.
“Jesus, thank you.” Derek looked me up and down. His eyes landed on the knife. “That’s not a gun.”
“I thought you were a stalker.”
“What was your plan? Saw me in half with a bread knife?”
I glanced down at my hand. It turned out I had, in fact, chosen the bread knife.
“What do you want?”
Derek shoved past me into the house. “First I need your bathroom.”
I went back to the kitchen and let him wander around my house in search of the bathroom. I wanted him to take in all the rooms, all the furniture and art and taste I’d acquired since he blew up our friendship. There was a promotional photo of me, wearing a long black dress with cutouts on the sides and a high thigh slit, hanging above the mantel in the living room, and I wanted him to see it. A few minutes later he came sauntering into the kitchen.
“Thanks.” He sat down on a stool at the kitchen island.
“So?”
“Can you put that down?” He pointed to the knife, still in my hand.
“No.”
He rubbed his cheek with his hand, a move he used to do when he was trying to find someone to sleep with. Girls love a jawline, he once said.
“I haven’t heard from Gemma in a week. Nobody has.”
I got the wine from the fridge and took another swig. “I don’t see what this has to do with me. She’s your girlfriend.”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Oh, just your lover.”
“Don’t say lover.”
I gave him a good stare. I had expected him to look awful, but he didn’t. He looked like he’d been starting his mornings with mushroom-infused teas. I realized he wasn’t drunk after all, but his eyes were swollen and red as if he’d been crying. Or maybe he was ridiculously stoned. Above him hung a ceiling rack adorned with a bunch of pots and pans I’d never used, and I hoped one of them would fall on his head.
“Maybe she left you.”
He was quiet for a moment in an introspective way that I’d come to understand as acting. He did this thing where he focused hard on one particular spot and tried to make himself cry. More often it would make one of the blood vessels under his left eye explode.
“It’s been bad, Mel. She’s still getting death threats. And now nobody has heard from her.”
“She probably went to one of those wellness retreats. She was always talking about them. Or else she’s in Cabo popping enough Klonopin to remain comatose until her call time next week.”
“This is serious.”
“I don’t need you to tell me what is serious.”
“Forget about me. I’m telling you Gemma is missing. She could have been kidnapped or killed.”
“Or abducted by aliens.”
I took a swig from the bottle and instinctively offered it to Derek. He shook his head.
“Oh, don’t tell me you’ve gone sober?”
He giggled kind of sadly. “I’ve had paparazzi all over me for the last three months. The last thing I need is a bunch of photos of me drunk off my ass circulating. Do you have any idea how bad it’s been for us?”
I drank the wine. “Frankly, I don’t give a shit.”
“I never wanted to hurt you,” he said with the same solemn look he’d had in my apartment the night Gemma dumped me. “I miss you a lot.”
I still hated him, I could feel it, but enough time had passed to dull the rage, and I had to imagine Derek’s and Gemma’s hands intertwined as they sat on my couch together to stand my ground.
“You ruined everything.”
“I know.”
With each swig of wine, I felt my shoulders relaxing. “I went on a date tonight.”
His face perked up. “With who?”
“His name was Cleo.”
“A dude?”
“Yeah, I don’t know. I think I was looking for a friend.”
I decided not to tell him how the date had ended, how humiliated I’d been. After all, I still wanted him to envy me. I wanted him to know I’d come out on top.
“I’m still your friend,” he said.
I glared at him. “Did you see my living room?”
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “Your house is cool.”
His tone made it difficult to decipher if he was being genuine or just trying to placate me. But it felt good to hear the words. I reminded myself, again, not to trust him.
“I’m sure Gemma is okay,” I said, in the same tone.
“Would you consider”—he took a dramatic breath in, then let it out slowly with his lips pursed, a move I was sure he learned in some discount acting class—“sending her a message? You might be the only person she’ll respond to.”
“You have to be joking.”
“Mel, this is real. I need your help.”
“I have no reason on earth to help you.”
His eyes shrank into two tiny slits, a look he made whenever he was plotting something. Derek was always scheming. It was so obvious to me now. Everything he did was for the sake of entertainment, his own or everyone else’s, and I felt stupid for never having seen it before.
“You aren’t completely innocent, you know.”
“I know one point seven million people who’d disagree with you.”
“They don’t know the whole story.”
“Oh, and you do?”
We were trapped in some kind of sinister staring contest that I couldn’t help but feel deserved to be on TV.
“I know more than you think.”
“Yeah, right.” I could feel the rage building in my chest. I was used to this feeling in the weeks before filming picked up. “Have you two been bonding over how crazy I am? How clingy and manipulative and poor, poor you?”
Derek broke eye contact with me and stared down at his feet. “I know you threatened her.”
A dull numbness crept up my limbs toward my head, and I started to feel a floating sensation that I hadn’t felt since the day Gemma dumped me.
“I didn’t threaten her.” My voice quivered with rage, and I tried to steady it. “Although I’m sure you two have spent the last few months perfecting that narrative for season eight.”
“Mel, you totally lost yourself. You were possessed. You told her you’d kill her if she ever tried to leave you.”
My legs went numb. I leaned back against the refrigerator to keep from falling over.
“I never said that.”
“Yeah, you did. She recorded you. And the only reason she hasn’t released it is because I told her not to, because I knew you didn’t mean it, because despite your insane behavior, I know you’re not insane, so you’re welcome.”
I wanted to speak but I couldn’t feel my face. I looked at my hands. I was still holding the wine in one hand and the knife in the other.
I raised the knife in front of my face. “You need to leave.”
Derek scoffed, “Oh, so you are going to stab me? Look at yourself.”
“I mean it.” My eyes were blurry with tears. I pointed the knife at him.
Derek sighed, then stood up and began backing away. “Just text her, will you? I’m doing a wellness check at her apartment tomorrow morning with her landlord. I’ll be there at eight, if you care at all.”
“Get fucked” was the only ridiculous thing I could think to say.
He turned and walked down the hallway and out of sight. I heard the front door close behind him. The knife fell from my hand and clanged against the tile floor. Tears slid down my cheeks and neck and soaked the neckline of my shirt. I was shaking.
Even in her absence, Gemma was still pulling all the strings. Wherever she was, she’d stay there long enough to build up public sympathy, and then, once everyone was good and worried, boom—she’d reappear in front of the camera, all thin and victim-y. I mean, she was remarkable. After seven seasons, I couldn’t believe how naive I’d been. Had I really thought I could go out on top and not come crashing down? Had I really thought Gemma would let me win? When I closed my eyes, Cleo’s face, his eyes glazed with fear, flashed across my mind.
I took out my phone and typed out a message:
Gemma missing. Doing a wellness check tomorrow morning at my old place.
I got a response moments later.
Jimmy: Time?
8am
Jimmy: Thx. We’ll be there.
I didn’t sleep, my insides vibrating at a low enough frequency to keep me dizzily awake all night. I kept thinking about Cleo and the bartender—the look they exchanged, like they were two hostages plotting their escape, had felt so familiar.
In the morning, I drove to my old apartment from memory, changing lanes and making turns absentmindedly. I felt like I was driving back in time, like once I arrived, I’d see a former version of myself through the window, curled on the couch next to Gemma, our legs tangled like vines. Or maybe I’d see Derek, opening and closing all of our kitchen drawers as he searched for a bottle opener, eyeing the nape of Gemma’s neck as she pulled her hair into a bun.
I parked the car in the lot and looked at myself in the rearview mirror. I felt around for the mascara in my center console and flicked some onto my eyelashes. I blinked a few times and forced a smile. Beyond the mirror, Jimmy and a few cameramen were walking toward my car. Behind them, Derek sat on the ledge outside the building’s front door, smoking a cigarette. We looked at each other briefly. He broke his gaze and spit onto the sidewalk. I steadied my breath.
Jimmy motioned for me to roll my window down. It was a beautiful day. “Let’s get you mic’d up,” he said. “We’re rolling.”
I first heard of Gilmore Girls from the promos airing during the commercial breaks when I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Even at twelve, I was not impressed. I was already tired of the formula followed by popular family dramas like 7thHeaven in the 90s and 2000s, blending themed episodes on hot parenting topics, like peer pressure or teenagers having sex, with didactic, conservative messaging and saccharine moments. The WB’s Gilmore Girls promos made the show seem like it followed the same, worn-out model.
One shows Rory dancing with her boyfriend, Dean, at a school dance while a deep-voiced narrator teases, “Rory Gilmore may repeat her mother’s past.” The screen flashes to Rory asleep on Dean’s chest. Then Emily and Lorelai fight about whether Rory will get herself in trouble like Lorelai did. Rory runs shoeless through the snowy streets in a fancy dress. A Gilmore Girls Christmas, appears on the screen in sparkly text.
The next promo starts with clips from the fight in the previous episode. The narrator says, “A family argument is overshadowed by crisis.” Then Lorelai follows her father, Richard, as he’s wheeled down a hallway in a hospital bed. Emily says she didn’t sign on to watch Richard die while she fights back tears. Lorelai says, “I wonder if he knows I’m here. I wonder if he cares.” Then Lorelai cries. And the drama continues until the same sparkly text appears.
So, when my stepfather, Russ, stood up from the dinner table one night before Mom, my sister, Jamie, and I finished eating and said he had to go because Gilmore Girls was on, I didn’t understand.
“You watch Gilmore Girls?” I asked. How could a man whose main interests were collecting baseball cards and watching sports and war documentaries care enough about the show from those melodramatic promos to not only watch it—which would be understandable if nothing else was on—but to leave dinner early to catch the latest episode.
“It’s a good show,” he answered.
“Even I don’t watch Gilmore Girls,” I mocked. Mom and Jamie laugh. But Russ was used to being teased by us and only shrugged. He grabbed the insulated mug he drank Diet Pepsi from day and night and retreated to his bedroom.
Three years later, Jamie bought the Gilmore Girls DVD box sets, and I needed to watch for myself to see what had my stepfather and sister so transfixed. It only took two episodes before I realized the show was nothing like the promos. The WB’s marketing department clearly didn’t know how to handle a family drama that deviated from the formula and had tried to entice the regular viewers of those types of shows. But Gilmore Girls was like nothing else on TV at the time. The characters were wacky. The dialogue was quick and clever. Heartfelt moments weren’t overly sentimental.
I was hooked and started binge watching the DVDs before bed each night. I don’t remember watching the show as a family, but I often heard the theme song playing behind the closed doors of Russ’s and my sister’s bedrooms and knew, even if we didn’t watch it together, it was a show we’d all come to love. And we weren’t alone. My friends and their families watched it, too. By the time I started college a few months after the original series finale, students joked someone was always watching Gilmore Girls in the dorms, day or night. It had become a cultural phenomenon.
I needed to watch for myself to see what had my stepfather and sister so transfixed.
But with each rewatch, my love for the show transformed into kinship with its characters. When a fellow student took offense at a feature I wrote as a staff writer for my college’s paper, I was consoled by Rory’s cafeteria faceoff with the ballerina in the ballet she reviewed for The Yale Daily News and felt grateful I had only been lambasted by email. When I interned at the local newspaper, I tried to learn from Rory’s mistakes so I wouldn’t be humiliated by a Mitchum Huntzberger. When I became editor of my college’s newspaper, I delusionally dreamed of turning our office—which was empty when our editors weren’t laying out one of our biweekly issues—into a busy hub like The Yale Daily News. When I graduated and became a manager at Target, I identified with Lorelai, balancing a challenging job in customer service with the demands of her friends and family.
The show’s meaning morphed, offering me something new at each stage of my life. But when my stepfather died and I rewatched the show for comfort, I realized my love for Gilmore Girls had never been just about the quirky citizens of Stars Hollow, the fall vibes, the show’s strong women, or its enviable mother-daughter relationship; my love had also grown because I saw my stepfather in the men who filled the role of Rory’s father in Christopher’s absence.
Although Rory and I both grew up without our biological fathers, the reasons differ. My father wasn’t a scared trust-fund teenager like Christopher when his girlfriend became pregnant. No, my father was a member of a notorious outlaw biker gang who had just moved back to his family’s ancestral holler in Kentucky from Detroit to care for his ailing parents. I don’t know what happened between his return and when he met my mother, but I do know he struggled with addiction.
Mom said they met at an Anonymous meeting—she was there for alcohol, and he was there for heroin and other drugs. I was conceived soon after they met. My parents, who barely knew each other, married, and Mom moved to the holler. Once there, my father’s violent, controlling nature emerged. He sold her car for drug money and trapped her in the holler where they lived in a trailer in his parents’ backyard surrounded by neighbors who were all his relatives. There was no escape.
It took five years, at least three attempts to leave, and extended stays in two women’s domestic violence shelters before Mom was able to divorce my father. The nuns and volunteers who ran the second shelter set us up in a government-subsidized apartment in a small town half an hour from the holler. Like Lorelai, Mom used her newfound freedom to create as normal a life as she could in between our visitation weekends with our father. Charities and her friends helped us buy used furniture and clothes and donated food and school supplies. She volunteered in the library at a private school run by the nuns from the shelter so Jamie and I would have a better education. And on her weekends with us, she often drove us to Tennessee to stay in the basement of an elderly couple she knew in order to put as much distance as possible between us and my abusive father.
Mom also took us to church, and before long, our pastor, Russ—who was divorcing his wife—fell in love with Mom. Like Lorelai and Jason, they began a secret relationship, but theirs was hidden from my father because he had threatened to drown Jamie and me if another man raised us. But in the spring of 1995, my father moved back to Detroit, and Mom and Russ, relieved with the distance, married in our living room one night while Jamie and I slept. The next day, Mom explained Russ was joining our family, and we were moving to Tennessee.
Though Christopher is absent, Rory is never without father figures in Gilmore Girls. Through their shared interest in literature, Rory and her grandfather, Richard, form a closer bond than most grandparent-grandchild relationships. He tries to protect her from boys he thinks are bad influences, even at the risk of a fight. And he is one of her biggest supporters, avidly reading every article she writes for her school papers and attending all her major school events.
Mom used her newfound freedom to create as normal a life as she could in between our visitation weekends with our father.
When Lorelai dates Rory’s English teacher, Max Medina, he and Rory form their own relationship. Max asks Lorelai how he should parent Rory and takes offense when Lorelai says he shouldn’t, highlighting how little thought Lorelai puts into Max joining their family and how seriously Max takes his role in Rory’s life. After Paris assigns Rory a feature on Max for The Franklin, viewers see how much they mean to each other when Rory stops recording and tells Max, “I just want you to know, I really wanted you to be my stepfather.”
And Max responds, “I just want you to know, I really wanted to be your stepfather.”
But most of all, Luke Danes supports Rory even before he’s in a relationship with Lorelai. When Rory dates his nephew, Jess, Luke gives Jess rules for dating Rory despite him being Jess’s guardian and not Rory’s. During Rory’s high school graduation, Sookie, Jackson, and Lorelai try not to cry and fail, but Luke cries hardest and says, “I’m blubbering. You’re freaks!” Luke helps move Rory into her dorm at Yale, and when she drops out, he plans to force her to return not just because that’s what Lorelai wants, but because he feels a parental obligation to do what’s best for Rory.
And the relationship is reciprocal. Rory still visits Luke at his diner when she and her mom are fighting. When Luke attends Rory’s twenty-first birthday party, he gives Rory a necklace that belonged to his deceased mother, and when one of the women at the party asks to see it, Rory smiles and introduces Luke not as her mother’s fiancé, but as her “soon-to-be stepfather.”
Luke’s love for Rory is so central to the plot of Gilmore Girls Lorelai tells Sookie she proposed to Luke because of how much he loves Rory. And when Luke needs a character witness for his custody battle, Lorelai writes in a statement so powerful it ends her marriage to Christopher, “He’s always been there for [Rory] no matter what… Luke has been a sort of father figure in my daughter’s life.”
There are many more examples throughout the show and A Year in the Life, but through it all, Luke is always there to support Rory.
Growing up, none of the depictions of stepparents I saw matched my experience with my stepfather. Most shows and movies with stepparents portrayed them as villains, like Cinderella or The Parent Trap. A few movies showed a loving stepparent, such as The Santa Clause, but the stepparent is treated as competition for the absent biological parent. My biological father wasn’t a hero, and my stepfather wasn’t replacing him; Russ was my father. And though there were a couple movies with stepfathers and stepsons who came together, like Man of the House, or stepmothers and stepdaughters, like Stepmom, I never saw any media with positive stepfather-stepdaughter relationships.
Even in the real world, friends whose parents divorced when they were older (and for less violent reasons than my parents) complained about their stepparents and schemed to annoy them, just like in the movies. When my elementary school guidance counselor created a group called “Banana Splits” for children of divorced parents to talk over ice cream, I signed up so I could skip class for an ice cream party. But in the first meeting, our counselor only talked about how it was normal to feel sad when your parents were divorced and asked us to repeat the group’s slogan, “It’s not my fault.”
I never attended again. I knew my parents’ divorce wasn’t my fault. I wasn’t sad because I only saw my biological father a handful of times after the divorce. I didn’t mind when he often forgot to send birthday cards or gifts, nor did I mind that he always mixed my birthday up with my older half-sister’s. I didn’t care because from the time mom and Russ married when I was six, Russ became a constant presence in my life.
Russ was my Richard, a stoic intellectual with whom I bonded over literature, science, and history. He read to me before bed when I was little and saved to buy presents for my birthdays. He questioned my choice of friends and boyfriends and encouraged me to do well in school. When it was my turn to read a story I’d written in my first-grade class’s “Author’s Tea” event, I was nervous looking out at the crowded classroom until my eyes found Russ and he winked at me. After I finished, he hugged me and told me how proud he was. And when I told him I wanted to be a writer when I was in college, he didn’t try to talk me out of it. He asked for copies of every article I wrote.
Luke’s love for Rory is so central to the plot of Gilmore Girls Lorelai tells Sookie she proposed to Luke because of how much he loves Rory.
Russ was my Max, a man who stepped into a family without fear, ready to parent even though he knew nothing about raising girls. He fearlessly tried to style my hair before school when Mom worked the early shift at McDonald’s—an effort I appreciated, even when he used so much hairspray my hair felt like a crunchy helmet. Though he joined our family because he loved my mother, I know he loved being my father, too, because he often told me, “I couldn’t love you any more if you had been my biological daughter.”
But most of all, Russ was my Luke. He was there for me no matter what happened in his relationship with my mother. When Mom and Russ separated for a year, I still visited Russ’s apartment to build a model of the lunar lander. And when my tonsils were removed, he brought me a stuffed black cat with an orange ribbon around its neck, which was so precious to me I slept with it every night for nine years.
Shortly after Mom and Russ reunited, Mom’s mental illness worsened, leading to hospitalization. Russ took care of Jamie and me while she was away, and over the years, as Mom’s mental instability and alcohol and pill addictions grew, Russ became our main parent. We were homeless when I was fifteen because Mom didn’t pay the mortgage and hid the foreclosure notices until a sheriff changed the locks, and we moved into a run-down motel with only the few possessions we could carry in our car until we could find a place to live. Although I was sad to lose our home, I was never afraid because I knew Russ would figure out our situation.
When we learned my fiancé’s mother wouldn’t survive long enough to see our wedding due to cancer, Russ married us in the back yard. Just before the ceremony, he pulled me aside to tell me he was going to use vows that didn’t require me to promise to obey my husband, because he never wanted me to feel like I had to obey a man. And when we held the church wedding we’d planned three weeks later for friends and family, Russ walked me down the aisle. I didn’t bother inviting my biological father.
Gilmore Girls was the first show or movie I’d ever seen with a relationship like the one I had with Russ. Seeing what it looked like onscreen gave me perspective to understand what a great parent my stepfather was. And this depiction came to mean even more to me as Russ’s health failed.
During those binge-watching sessions, I realized how much each of Rory’s surrogate fathers reminded me of Russ.
Like Richard, Russ battled heart disease for years. In 2013, he suffered a massive stroke and transformed into a six-year-old in a sixty-one-year-old man’s body overnight. He no longer read or watched documentaries. He couldn’t discuss science or history. He thought Mom was his mother, asked to be excused from the dinner table, and talked about Frosty the Snowman like he was a real person. He even forgot the names of everyone in our family—everyone except me.
I was so heartbroken when he died a year later, I had no room left to feel anything else. Even when one of my half-sisters from my biological father’s first marriage messaged me five weeks later to tell me our father had choked on a quarter and was braindead, I felt nothing. I didn’t travel to the hospital where my older sisters, who were closer to our father, sat with him as his life support was removed and he died, and neither did Jamie. We’d just lost the stepfather who raised us, and I couldn’t spare any grief for the violent man who was never there.
When both of my fathers died, I was a full-time freelance writer struggling to make a living. Grief turned into insomnia, and instead of sleeping, I spent those long, awful nights watching Gilmore Girls for comfort. During those binge-watching sessions, I realized how much each of Rory’s surrogate fathers reminded me of Russ. And seeing all the ways they had supported Rory inspired me to process my grief by writing about how much my stepfather had meant to me.
When Netflix released A Year in the Life two years later, I watched and was sad Russ would never see it. But I noticed uncanny parallels between my life and Rory’s. In the revival, she is also a struggling freelance writer whose grief keeps her awake at night. And just as I did, she gets her life back on track when she writes the story of her life with her mother and the people who supported.
Now, nine years later, I’m still writing about what Russ meant to me, and I still rewatch Gilmore Girls every fall like millions of other viewers. But I also start the show again every March near the date of Russ’s death, and I never tire of it. Watching Gilmore Girls helps me remember what it felt like to have a man love me like I was his own daughter, even when he had no biological imperative to do so. And each time I watch the show, I wish I could ask Russ if he loved Gilmore Girls because he saw his relationship with his daughter in it, too.
In the final weeks of the year, there’s no better feeling than getting cozy and delving into your winter reading. It’s the perfect time to revisit old favorites and discover new ones along the way! Fortunately, Electric Literature has a wealth of festive work—our archive includes holiday-themed reading lists, reviews, and even a handy chart that you can use to craft your own merry adventure.
Amidst so much wintry spirit, the holiday story holds a special place. It’s a time honored tradition, delivering family drama, unexpected generosity, and tinsel-laden tension, all set against a snowy backdrop.
This year, we’re collecting our favorite holiday stories from Recommended Reading and The Commuter to bring you a cozy, winter-themed lineup of short fiction for the last days of December. These pieces resonate for their alternating specificity and familiarity, for their ability to interweave the warmth and wrath, contention and communal celebrations, gratitude and familial dissolution that characterize this time of year. These stories manage to capture the holidays without falling into Hallmark cliches (not that there’s anything wrong with indulging in a Hallmark movie every now and then).
“Another Christmas” places us in the warm, rustic home of older Irish Catholic couple Norah and Dermot, and then shows us the hidden tension—strung up like so many ornaments—within their home. The couple discusses their friend and landlord Mr. Joyce, disagreeing about whether or not he’ll come for Christmas after an argument the year before. As the conversation escalates, the story presents Christmas as a stage upon which to examine our values and allegiances, political inclinations and resentments, and the role of empathy—or its absence—in affecting our long term relationships. By the end of the story, the inviting setting remains the same, but Norah’s feelings for her husband have shifted irrevocably.
“Charades” carries all the hallmarks (pun intended) of a Lorrie Moore classic: dynamic characters, relational acuity, and, of course, the humorous absurdity of daily life. The story zooms in on a family gathered together for the holidays; the titular “charades” is a reference both the game itself (which takes center stage) and the antics that develop around Moore’s idiosyncratic cast of characters. As recommender Susan Minot puts, “The large and profound is forever appearing alongside the trivial and the small, i.e., as it does in life.”
Drew Nelles’s “Iceland” takes place during the “perineum of the year”: that stretch of listless, empty days after Christmas and before New Years, which, depending on one’s outlook, can be either stifling or reassuring. The narrator of “Iceland” is spending those days in New Jersey with his father, contemplating the collapse of a friendship and the absence of his mother and sister. Although he’s initially discomfited by all the unburdened time, the story chronicles a shift in his perspective. “Iceland” captures not only the restlessness of this particular stretch of the year, but the excitement it inspires; the hope for change that lies just around the corner.
“Charity” follows Kate, a college freshman who is home with her mother and sister for the holidays. This is the kind of holiday story that revels in familial dysfunction: as they get deeper into the festive season, Kate must act as the mediator between her mother and her other relatives, all while sustaining her nine-year-old sister’s innocent excitement. As recommender Kirstin Valdez Quade observes, “Adams captures the precarity of this family gathering: the determined festivity, the barbed ritual of gift-giving, the way tiny hurts swell and even kindness can sting. And running beneath every prickly interaction is the love these difficult people feel for one another.”
In her introduction to “The Little Restaurant Near Place des Ternes,” recommender Jessica Harrison draws a distinction between two kinds of Christmas stories: the “glorious narrative of redemption” à la Dickens and Truman Capote, and the more stark, unforgiving portrayal of the holiday season. Harrison places Simenon’s tale in the latter category, the kind of tale “in which want, greed and loneliness are the dark twins of the season’s comfort and joy.” On a dreary, snowless day, an inspector shows up to investigate a death at the restaurant, and must piece together what happened through a cast of unreliable witnesses. With characters that defy their festive archetypes, Simenon’s story begins to resemble a murder mystery. And yet, the familiar themes of redemption and generosity are still at work in this sparse, brutal piece, surfacing unexpectedly in the story’s resolution.
Genevieve Plunkett’s “A Bone for Christmas” is haunted by the specter of winter. The story follows Petra, who arrives to conduct a wellness check on an elderly woman and ponders the instabilities in her own life–particularly her tortured husband and sensitive, curious son. For Petra’s son, Christmas is a force of anticipation. He’s fixated on the next and the next, unable to consider or appreciate the present. With tonal unease and a stark, wintry setting that harkens to Shirley Jackson, the story contends with the intimacy of the home, the expectations that arise through place, and the patterns of thought we develop to cope with life’s unsettling moments.
“We Live in a Tree for One Month Every Year” is a graphic narrative from the POV of a boxful of Christmas tree decorations. Accompanied by whimsical illustrations from Sara Lautman, Hardy’s language rings with excitement, rendering the delightful, purposeful logic of the ornaments and their “feeling of being all lit up and beribboned and becoming a world ruled by an angel!” The resolution here is bittersweet; a reminder—like every holiday season—that we’re in store for another ending.
The first poem in this set from TC contributor Stine An doesn’t mention the holidays directly. Instead, it renders frenetic warmth, the revitalization that can arise while sharing a meal with family. An’s family isn’t sitting around a hearth feasting on roast turkey, they’re crowded into a green four door pontiac eating fried chicken. Somehow, this claustrophobic little world captures the holiday spirit best; the peculiar traditions and rituals we develop alongside the people we love.
You always looked back, she thought. You looked back at other years, other Christmas cards arriving, the children younger. There was the year Patrick had cried, disliking the holly she was decorating the living room with. There was the year Bridget had got a speck of coke in her eye on Christmas Eve and had to be taken to the hospital at Hammersmith in the middle of the night. There was the first year of their marriage, when she and Dermot were still in Waterford. And ever since they’d come to London there was the presence on Christmas Day of their landlord, Mr. Joyce, a man whom they had watched becoming elderly.
She was middle-aged now, with touches of grey in her curly dark hair, a woman known for her cheerfulness, running a bit to fat. Her husband was the opposite: thin and seeming ascetic, with more than a hint of the priest in him, a good man. “Will we get married, Norah?” he’d said one night in the Tara Ballroom in Waterford, 6 November 1953. The proposal had astonished her: it was his brother Ned, heavy and fresh-faced, a different kettle of fish altogether, whom she’d been expecting to make it.
Patiently he held a chair for her while she strung paper-chains across the room, from one picture-rail to another. He warned her to be careful about attaching anything to the electric light. He still held the chair while she put sprigs of holly behind the pictures. He was cautious by nature and alarmed by little things, particularly anxious in case she fell off chairs. He’d never mount a chair himself, to put up decorations or anything else: he’d be useless at it in his opinion and it was his opinion that mattered. He’d never been able to do a thing about the house, but it didn’t matter because since the boys had grown up they’d attended to whatever she couldn’t manage herself. You wouldn’t dream of remarking on it: he was the way he was, considerate and thoughtful in what he did do, teetotal, clever, full of fondness for herself and for the family they’d reared, full of respect for her also.
“Isn’t it remarkable how quick it comes round, Norah?” he said while he held the chair. “Isn’t it no time since last year?”
“No time at all.”
“Though a lot happened in the year, Norah.”
“An awful lot happened.”
Two of the pictures she decorated were scenes of Waterford: the quays and a man driving sheep past the Bank of Ireland. Her mother had given them to her, taking them down from the hall of the farmhouse.
There was a picture of the Virgin and Child, and other, smaller pictures. She placed her last sprig of holly, a piece with berries on it, above the Virgin’s halo.
“I’ll make a cup of tea,” she said, descending from the chair and smiling at him.
“A cup of tea’d be great, Norah.”
The living room, containing three brown armchairs and a table with upright chairs around it, and a sideboard with a television set on it, was crowded by this furniture and seemed even smaller than it was because of the decorations that had been added. On the mantelpiece, above a built-in gas-fire, Christmas cards were arrayed on either side of an ornate green clock.
The house was in a terrace in Fulham. It had always been too small for the family, but now that Patrick and Brendan no longer lived there things were easier. Patrick had married a girl called Pearl six months ago, almost as soon as his period of training with the Midland Bank had ended. Brendan was training in Liverpool, with a firm of computer manufacturers. The three remaining children were still at school, Bridget at the nearby convent, Cathal and Tom at the Sacred Heart Primary. When Patrick and Brendan had moved out the room they’d always shared had become Bridget’s. Until then Bridget had slept in her parents’ room and she’d have to return there this Christmas because Brendan would be back for three nights. Patrick and Pearl would just come for Christmas Day. They’d be going to Pearl’s people, in Croydon, on Boxing Day—St. Stephen’s Day, as Norah and Dermot always called it, in the Irish manner.
“It’ll be great, having them all,” he said. “A family again, Norah.”
“And Pearl.”
“She’s part of us now, Norah.”
“Will you have biscuits with your tea? I have a packet of Nice.”
He said he would, thanking her. He was a meter-reader with North Thames Gas, a position he had held for twenty-one years, ever since he’d emigrated. In Waterford he’d worked as a clerk in the Customs, not earning very much and not much caring for the stuffy, smoke-laden office he shared with half a dozen other clerks. He had come to England because Norah had thought it was a good idea, because she’d always wanted to work in a London shop. She’d been given a job in Dickins & Jones, in the household linens department, and he’d been taken on as a meter-reader, cycling from door-to-door, remembering the different houses and where the meters were situated in each, being agreeable to householders: all of it suited him from the start. He devoted time to thought while he rode about, and in particular to religious matters.
In her small kitchen she made the tea and carried it on a tray into the living room. She’d been late this year with the decorations. She always liked to get them up a week in advance because they set the mood, making everyone feel right for Christmas. She’d been busy with stuff for a stall Father Malley had asked her to run for his Christmas Sale. A fashion stall he’d called it, but not quite knowing what he meant she’d just asked people for any old clothes they had, jumble really. Because of the time it had taken she hadn’t had a minute to see to the decorations until this afternoon, two days before Christmas Eve. But that, as it turned out, had been all for the best. Bridget and Cathal and Tom had gone up to Putney to the pictures, Dermot didn’t work on a Monday afternoon: it was convenient that they’d have an hour or two alone together because there was the matter of Mr. Joyce to bring up. Not that she wanted to bring it up, but it couldn’t be just left there.
“The cup that cheers,” he said, breaking a biscuit in half. Deliberately she put off raising the subject she had in mind. She watched him nibbling the biscuit and then dropping three heaped spoons of sugar into his tea and stirring it. He loved tea. The first time he’d taken her out, to the Savoy cinema in Waterford, they’d had tea afterwards in the cinema café and they’d talked about the film and about people they knew. He’d come to live in Waterford from the country, from the farm his brother had inherited, quite close to her father’s farm. He reckoned he’d settled, he told her that night: Waterford wasn’t sensational, but it suited him in a lot of ways. If he hadn’t married her he’d still be there, working eight hours a day in the Customs and not caring for it, yet managing to get by because he had his religion to assist him.
“Did we get a card from Father Jack yet?” he inquired, referring to a distant cousin, a priest in Chicago.
“Not yet. But it’s always on the late side, Father Jack’s. It was February last year.”
She sipped her tea, sitting in one of the other brown armchairs, on the other side of the gas-fire. It was pleasant being there alone with him in the decorated room, the green clock ticking on the mantelpiece, the Christmas cards, dusk gathering outside. She smiled and laughed, taking another biscuit while he lit a cigarette. “Isn’t this great?” she said. “A bit of peace for ourselves?”
Solemnly he nodded.
He arrived at a conclusion, having thought long and carefully; he balanced everything in his mind.
“Peace comes dropping slow,” he said, and she knew he was quoting from some book or other. Quite often he said things she didn’t understand. “Peace and goodwill,” he added, and she understood that all right.
He tapped the ash from his cigarette into an ashtray which was kept for his use, beside the gas-fire. All his movements were slow. He was a slow thinker, even though he was clever. He arrived at a conclusion, having thought long and carefully; he balanced everything in his mind. “We must think about that, Norah,” he said that day, twenty-two years ago, when she’d suggested that they should move to England. A week later he’d said that if she really wanted to he’d agree.
They talked about Bridget and Cathal and Tom. When they came in from the cinema they’d only just have time to change their clothes before setting out again for the Christmas party at Bridget’s convent.
“It’s a big day for them. Let them lie in in the morning, Norah.”
“They could lie in for ever,” she said, laughing in case there might seem to be harshness in this recommendation. With Christmas excitement running high, the less she heard from them the better.
“Did you get Cathal the gadgets he wanted?”
“Chemistry stuff. A set in a box.”
“You’re great the way you manage, Norah.”
She denied that. She poured more tea for both of them. She said, as casually as she could:
“Mr. Joyce won’t come. I’m not counting him in for Christmas Day.”
“He hasn’t failed us yet, Norah.”
“He won’t come this year.” She smiled through the gloom at him. “I think we’d best warn the children about it.”
“Where would he go if he didn’t come here? Where’d he get his dinner?”
“Lyons used to be open in the old days.”
“He’d never do that.”
“The Bulrush Café has a turkey dinner advertised. There’s a lot of people go in for that now. If you have a mother doing a job she maybe hasn’t the time for the cooking. They go out to a hotel or a café, three or four pounds a head—”
“Mr. Joyce wouldn’t go to a café. No one could go into a café on their own on Christmas Day.”
“He won’t come here, dear.”
It had to be said: it was no good just pretending, laying a place for the old man on an assumption that had no basis to it. Mr. Joyce would not come because Mr. Joyce, last August, had ceased to visit them. Every Friday night he used to come, for a cup of tea and a chat, to watch the nine o’clock news with them. Every Christmas Day he’d brought carefully chosen presents for the children, and chocolates and nuts and cigarettes. He’d given Patrick and Pearl a radio as a wedding present.
“I think he’ll come all right. I think maybe he hasn’t been too well. God help him, it’s a great age, Norah.”
“He hasn’t been ill, Dermot.”
Every Friday Mr. Joyce had sat there in the third of the brown armchairs, watching the television, his bald head inclined so that his good ear was closer to the screen. He was tallish, rather bent now, frail and bony, with a modest white moustache. In his time he’d been a builder; which was how he had come to own property in Fulham, a self-made man who’d never married. That evening in August he had been quite as usual. Bridget had kissed him good night because for as long as she could remember she’d always done that when he came on Friday evenings. He’d asked Cathal how he was getting on with his afternoon paper round.
There had never been any difficulties over the house. They considered that he was fair in his dealings with them; they were his tenants and his friends. When it seemed that the Irish had bombed English people to death in Birmingham and Guildford he did not cease to arrive every Friday evening and on Christmas Day. The bombings were discussed after the news, the Tower of London bomb, the bomb in the bus, and all the others. “Maniacs,” Mr. Joyce said and nobody contradicted him.
“He would never forget the children, Norah. Not at Christmastime.”
His voice addressed her from the shadows. She felt the warmth of the gas-fire reflected in her face and knew if she looked in a mirror she’d see that she was quite flushed. Dermot’s face never reddened. Even though he was nervy, he never displayed emotion. On all occasions his face retained its paleness, his eyes acquired no glimmer of passion. No wife could have a better husband, yet in the matter of Mr. Joyce he was so wrong it almost frightened her.
“Is it tomorrow I call in for the turkey?” he said.
She nodded, hoping he’d ask her if anything was the matter because as a rule she never just nodded in reply to a question. But he didn’t say anything. He stubbed his cigarette out. He asked if there was another cup of tea in the pot.
“Dermot, would you take something round to Mr. Joyce?”
“A message, is it?”
“I have a tartan tie for him.”
“Wouldn’t you give it to him on the day, Norah? Like you always do.” He spoke softly, still insisting. She shook her head.
It was all her fault. If she hadn’t said they should go to England, if she hadn’t wanted to work in a London shop, they wouldn’t be caught in the trap they’d made for themselves. Their children spoke with London accents. Patrick and Brendan worked for English firms and would make their homes in England. Patrick had married an English girl. They were Catholics and they had Irish names, yet home for them was not Waterford.
“Could you make it up with Mr. Joyce, Dermot? Could you go round with the tie and say you were sorry?”
“Sorry?”
“You know what I mean.” In spite of herself her voice had acquired a trace of impatience, an edginess that was unusual in it. She did not ever speak to him like that. It was the way she occasionally spoke to the children.
“What would I say I was sorry for, Norah?”
“For what you said that night.” She smiled, calming her agitation. He lit another cigarette, the flame of the match briefly illuminating his face. Nothing had changed in his face. He said:
“I don’t think Mr. Joyce and I had any disagreement, Norah.”
“I know, Dermot. You didn’t mean anything—”
“There was no disagreement, girl.”
There had been no disagreement, but on that evening in August something else had happened. On the nine o’clock news there had been a report of another outrage and afterwards, when Dermot had turned the television off, there’d been the familiar comment on it. He couldn’t understand the mentality of people like that, Mr. Joyce said yet again, killing just anyone, destroying life for no reason. Dermot had shaken his head over it, she herself had said it was uncivilized. Then Dermot had added that they mustn’t of course forget what the Catholics in the North had suffered. The bombs were a crime but it didn’t do to forget that the crime would not be there if generations of Catholics in the North had not been treated as animals. There’d been a silence then, a difficult kind of silence which she’d broken herself. All that was in the past, she’d said hastily, in a rush, nothing in the past or the present or anywhere else could justify the killing of innocent people. Even so, Dermot had added, it didn’t do to avoid the truth. Mr. Joyce had not said anything.
The crime would not be there if generations of Catholics in the North had not been treated as animals.
“I’d say there was no need to go round with the tie, Norah. I’d say he’d make the effort on Christmas Day.”
“Of course he won’t.” Her voice was raised, with more than impatience in it now. But her anger was controlled. “Of course he won’t come.”
“It’s a time for goodwill, Norah. Another Christmas: to remind us.”
He spoke slowly, the words prompted by some interpretation of God’s voice in answer to a prayer. She recognized that in his deliberate tone.
“It isn’t just another Christmas. It’s an awful kind of Christmas. It’s a Christmas to be ashamed, and you’re making it worse, Dermot.” Her lips were trembling in a way that was uncomfortable. If she tried to calm herself she’d become jittery instead, she might even begin to cry. Mr. Joyce had been generous and tactful, she said loudly. It made no difference to Mr. Joyce that they were Irish people, that their children went to school with the children of I.R.A. men. Yet his generosity and his tact had been thrown back in his face. Everyone knew that the Catholics in the North had suffered, that generations of injustice had been twisted into the shape of a cause. But you couldn’t say it to an old man who had hardly been outside Fulham in his life. You couldn’t say it because when you did it sounded like an excuse for murder.
“You have to state the truth, Norah. It’s there to be told.”
“I never yet cared for a North of Ireland person, Catholic or Protestant. Let them fight it out and not bother us.”
“You shouldn’t say that, Norah.”
“It’s more of your truth for you.”
He didn’t reply. There was the gleam of his face for a moment as he drew on his cigarette. In all their married life they had never had a quarrel that was in any way serious, yet she felt herself now in the presence of a seriousness that was too much for her. She had told him that whenever a new bombing took place she prayed it might be the work of the Angry Brigade, or any group that wasn’t Irish. She’d told him that in shops she’d begun to feel embarrassed because of her Waterford accent. He’d said she must have courage, and she realized now that he had drawn on courage himself when he’d made the remark to Mr. Joyce. He would have prayed and considered before making it. He would have seen it in the end as his Catholic duty.
“He thinks you don’t condemn people being killed.” She spoke quietly even though she felt a wildness inside her. She felt she should be out on the streets, shouting in her Waterford accent, violently stating that the bombers were more despicable with every breath they drew, that hatred and death were all they deserved. She saw herself on Fulham Broadway, haranguing the passersby, her greying hair blown in the wind, her voice more passionate than it had ever been before. But none of it was the kind of thing she could do because she was not that kind of woman. She hadn’t the courage, any more than she had the courage to urge her anger to explode in their living room. For all the years of her marriage there had never been the need of such courage before: she was aware of that, but found no consolation in it.
“I think he’s maybe seen it by now,” he said. “How one thing leads to another.”
She felt insulted by the words. She willed herself the strength to shout, to pour out a torrent of fury at him, but the strength did not come. Standing up, she stumbled in the gloom and felt a piece of holly under the sole of her shoe. She turned the light on.
“I’ll pray that Mr. Joyce will come,” he said.
She looked at him, pale and thin, with his priestly face. For the first time since he had asked her to marry him in the Tara Ballroom she did not love him. He was cleverer than she was, yet he seemed half blind. He was good, yet he seemed hard in his goodness, as though he’d be better without it. Up to the very last moment on Christmas Day there would be the pretence that their landlord might arrive, that God would answer a prayer because His truth had been honoured. She considered it hypocrisy, unable to help herself in that opinion.
He talked but she did not listen. He spoke of keeping faith with their own, of being a Catholic. Crime begot crime, he said, God wanted it to be known that one evil led to another. She continued to look at him while he spoke, pretending to listen but wondering instead if in twelve months’ time, when another Christmas came, he would still be cycling from house to house to read gas meters. Or would people have objected, requesting a meter-reader who was not Irish? An objection to a man with an Irish accent was down-to-earth and ordinary. It didn’t belong in the same grand category as crime begetting crime or God wanting something to be known, or in the category of truth and conscience. In the present circumstances the objection would be understandable and fair. It seemed even right that it should be made, for it was a man with an Irish accent in whom the worst had been brought out by the troubles that had come, who was guilty of a cruelty no one would have believed him capable of. Their harmless, elderly landlord might die in the course of that same year, a friendship he had valued lost, his last Christmas lonely. Grand though it might seem in one way, all of it was petty.
Once, as a girl, she might have cried, but her contented marriage had caused her to lose that habit. She cleared up the tea things, reflecting that the bombers would be pleased if they could note the victory they’d scored in a living room in Fulham. And on Christmas Day, when a family sat down to a conventional meal, the victory would be greater. There would be crackers and chatter and excitement, the Queen and the Pope would deliver speeches. Dermot would discuss these Christmas messages with Patrick and Brendan, as he’d discussed them in the past with Mr. Joyce. He would be as kind as ever. He would console Bridget and Cathal and Tom by saying that Mr. Joyce hadn’t been up to the journey. And whenever she looked at him she would remember the Christmases of the past. She would feel ashamed of him, and of herself.
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