Back in the ‘80s, crack was a boogeyman come to life. It played on the minds of neighborhood kids like bible stories, seeming to make real the supernatural myths of demonic possession from Sunday School. It could animate the body with strange ticking motions, or deplete users into life-sapped stupors. It obliterated one’s sense of hygiene, which we all worked to perfect during our morning ablutions, infesting one’s clothes with stains and holes and funk, one’s body with dirt and sweat and ash. It infiltrated our classrooms, the D.A.R.E. officer sent to camouflage the government’s divestment from our schools and communities in his foreboding tone, toting his case of samples meant to signal the impending choice we’d soon be forced to make; it invaded our after-school TV programs, your brain frying in a cast-iron skillet. Perhaps users weren’t deserving of our prepubescent ire–the glee from that schoolyard taunt, “Your mama’s on crack rock,” born mostly of our fear. But the effect of that fear lingered, even after the boogeyman had gone, leaving a haunting in its wake.
You can hear it in the music. The Migos were still rapping about whipping up product well into the 2010s, long after the specter of the drug had dissipated from most Black neighborhoods. Throughout my life, the predominant soundtrack of my community, hip hop, has grown to seem both synonymous with the trade and ambivalent about its legacy, lionizing the production and sale of crack cocaine, and at times more demurely criticizing the federal government for its role in exacerbating the drugs’ deleterious effects. Before the crack scare, Black life seemed like a triumphal arc toward progress, communal uplift. “I came up on the we-shall-overcome tradition of noble struggle, soul and gospel music, positive images, and the conventional wisdom that civil rights would translate into racial salvation,” Nelson George wrote in the Village Voice in 1992. As the neighborhood tales I received as a child went, Black people in the ’80s had allowed themselves to be swept up by an insatiable appetite for pleasure and profit, or fallen victim to an innate tendency toward indigence, that only metastasized in the ’90s. In that same 1992 essay, George continued by writing, “Today I live in a time of goin’-for-mine materialism, secular beat consciousness, and a more diverse, fragmented, even postmodern Black community. The change was subtle, yet inexorable.” For this shift in communal identity, from honorable striving to equivocal profiteering, I nurtured a festering antipathy for many of the era’s relics–kingpins, OGs, street culture, ghettocentricity.
Near the end of his new book When Crack was King, Donovan Ramsey issues a challenge to inhabitants of the same communities once ravaged by the War on Drugs. He says, “…it’s past time that we reconcile the crack epidemic with the rest of Black history and identity. We must take its measure, make meaning of it, and incorporate that meaning into the greater story of who we are.” Critiques of America’s response to the crack crisis extend at least back to the 90s, in titles like 1994’s Cracked Coverage by Jimmie Reeves and Richard Campbell, 1997’s Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure by Dan Baum, Crack in America by Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine, 2010’s The New Jim Crowby Michelle Alexander, and Donna Murch’s 2022 Assata Taught Me. But those insights took some time to reach me, a native son of a working class Black neighborhood, born in 1984. Only recently has the volume of this discourse on the legacy of the crack era grown loud enough to counter the impressions left on me, ideas about pathological Black tendencies that warped some part of my cultural self identity.
I nurtured a festering antipathy for many of the era’s relics–kingpins, OGs, street culture, ghettocentricity.
I’ve long puzzled over what made the ‘80s and ‘90s so difficult to forget. Perhaps it was the music. I’d long resented the shape hip hop had given Black manhood, the weight of hypermasculinity America had forced Black men to shoulder. That silhouette had grown out of the gangsta rap years of the ’90s, an image and idea I as a gay Black man had felt excluded and menaced by throughout my teens and 20s. The Black masculinity I’d confronted and avoided most of my life grew out of that time. If there was something to diagnose about the burden of Blackness I’d inherited, it originated there.
But digging through the literature on America’s War on Drugs revealed a different boogeyman than the one I’d once feared. Whatever cynicism I carried for Black community was the residue of indoctrination taken in during those years, accepting the premise from a targeted and directed campaign of propaganda that a flagging sense of personal responsibility had engendered the drug firmament that had characterized Black life since my childhood. “The war on drugs…succeeded in defining social problems grounded on global transformations in late capitalism (deindustrialization, job migration, the vanishing ‘family wage’ of a vanishing manufacturing economy, the flexible exploitation of fragmented labor markets in a burgeoning service economy, the rise of transnational corporations, etc.) as individual moral problems that could be resolved by way of voluntary therapeutic treatment, compulsory drug testing, mandatory prison sentences, even the penalty of death,” Jimmie Reeves and Richard Campbell write in Cracked Coverage. Having come of age in a culture that valorized the meritorious industry of the individual, I’d been instructed by that same society to see drug abuse and the sale of narcotics as reprehensible self-abuse or the exploitation of that instinct for self-harm, both inborn features of Blackness, never looking to the larger scaffolding that all but predetermined the fates of would-be users and dealers alike.
Though thinking like Reeves and Campbell’s has been around since the early ’90s, it’s taken some time to reach its current decibel, loud enough to possibly determine the historical discourse around this moment in the history of Black America. “In terms of repression and resistance, it takes people and communities time to understand what is happening to them. Take the example of the modern civil rights movement: what became visible as the national civil rights movement emerged in the mid-1950s with Brown v. Board of Education. But the institutions and infrastructure for fighting that battle went back at least to the 1930s. Some would take it back to Reconstruction. There’s a similar dynamic going on with the carceral state,” historian Donna Murch told the Nation in 2022. “The way that we understand it now is very different. The level of criminalization and sensationalization and the definition of “monsters”—the language of ‘crack babies’ and ‘gang members’—were at the center of the spectacle of punishment, so much so that they occluded the enormous violence of the state. It takes time for people to figure out how to mount resistance to something that, at the time, they may not even recognize is happening. It’s very similar in the opioid crisis. Initially, these crises are understood as individual experiences, but to define them as a collective experience with culpable parties takes time.” As historians continue to work through the detritus of what until recently felt too close at hand to be deemed history, the War on Drugs has begun to feel like a third rail in the history of the struggle for racial justice in America, tantamount with Slavery and Jim Crow.
The writer Meng Jin recently wrote, “It is unnerving to know you are living in history. In the past decade, as words I’d first encountered in books erupted into my daily lexicon…then settled, with alarming speed, into the static of how things are, I have often felt dizzy and uncertain of how to live.” This sentiment comes close to describing how I felt in late summer of 2014. My fixation on the late ‘80s-early ‘90s had intensified, as if my mind were working to quell the feeling I had of being “hurled into the scary future.”
The War on Drugs has begun to feel like a third rail in the history of the struggle for racial justice.
By the time Michael Brown was killed in August 2014 in Ferguson, MO, I’d lived in Brooklyn for seven years. I was approaching my 30th birthday, passing the point where my Black maleness might have been viewed as threatening, though I’m not sure it ever was. Word of Eric Garner’s death had recently filtered through the news, so perhaps I was just blissfully naive on the point of Black masculinity ever becoming innocuous. Still, ascending from young Black manhood into Black manhood felt somewhat valedictory. Therefore, I remember finding it hard to empathize with the young brother, to summon what felt like the humane response, anger, toward overzealous policing throughout the country.
I remember my first thought upon reading about Brown’s death being, “Well, he must’ve done something.” In that sort of Damn, what we done done now sort of way, that became a reflex for Black people watching the nightly news during my boyhood, whenever news of a shooting was relayed.
I also remember knowing how wrong that response was—that it didn’t align with who I’d been raised to be politically. Still, the inertia I experienced between the poles of those two thoughts meant that I mostly received the news sedately.
I’d grown comfortable criminalizing Blackness, maintaining my distance from the associations I myself made between Blackness and criminality. According to Jimmie Reeves and Richard Campbell, the government had worked to “convert the war on drugs into a political spectacle that depicted social problems grounded on economic transformations as individual moral or behavioral problems that could be remedied by simply embracing family values, modifying bad habits, policing mean streets, and incarcerating the fiendish ‘enemies within.’” Even with my vague perspective decrying racial injustice, I still made the facile associations between the appearance of Black men and their propensity for criminal behavior. I’d begun to do the work myself, of consigning the “enemies within” to their rightful places, prison or death.
I even remember waving off a colleague’s copy of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow around then. The book reminded me of something my father would have recommended (sure enough it was selected for discussion at my family’s biannual family reunion). I remember thinking I’d reached a point of racial justice fatigue. I’d grown cynical with calls for the need for oversight or reform, let alone abolition. Political activism felt fatiguing to me. Direct action required too much organization and negotiating with other people, and by then I’d settled into a comfortable identity as a thinker and writer. Any agitation from me would come from comfortably behind a desk or between the stacks of a library.
“Even now, many of the worst myths of the crack era continue to distort the image of Black communities,” Donovan Ramsey has said. Ramsey’s recent book, along with the work of the aforementioned scholars, has helped me begin the process of remaking the meaning of this period in Black America and incorporating it into the narrative of my life and that of the community I come from. I’ve begun reinterrogating the stubborn struggles of Black communities, re-learning how they aren’t self-inflicted, or part of a persistent pathology, but have a perceptible chain of cause and effect, with culpability often lying with the erosion of necessary social service programs, spurred by the classic American value of individualism that casts these services as undeserved or unnecessary handouts.
I also remember knowing how wrong that response was—that it didn’t align with who I’d been raised to be politically.
But Ramsey takes us beyond the established veneration our culture lends drug kingpins, instead choosing to focus on more pedestrian dealers like Shawn McCray. Of Shawn, Ramsey writes, “Shawn, like many guys who sold drugs during that period, did so to afford a basic middle-class life, not to get rich. Hustling filled the gap between the low-income lifestyle they were born into and the one they believed they deserved.” Having carried a lot of animosity for drug dealers and their outsized impact on Black male identity, this keyhole opened a new means of insight into the motivations of a Black teenager in the community at the time.
Some of those young men from my own neighborhood are now old men. They’re fathers, OGs, old heads. And you discover that they surprise you, with their capacity to look you in the eye and smile, and love you beyond the exteriors they projected to the world decades ago. They’re lighter, some of them unburdened by fate—my late cousin Pago, who stayed with us in Little Rock for a few years, up from Texarkana, and Zeke, who didn’t make it past 14, and Terry Carroll, locked up on murder charges for 28 years and counting. Others by time—Jermaine and Courtney, and Rodney and Peemee and Jason from the Southend, and Arthur from Harlem—lightened of the pressure of wondering if they’ll survive the day, and whether or not there’ll be anything to bequeath you. Their presence is enough, better than the jewels or clothes or chains they used to believe the measure of their worth.
“What hasn’t yet happened…for most of contemporary African-America, is the emergence of voices that convey the relationship between, say, a homestanding Grandma Forbes and [her] drug dealing grandson Buddy…” Nelson George wrote of Compton, and of Black America in general, in the Village Voice in 1990. Perhaps we’ve begun fashioning those voices afterall, able to make sense of both their lives and legacies on the communities we all share.
For a long time, I’ve described my writing as “spooky literary”—the term that seems closest to the pulse of this genre-muddling category I love so much. “Spooky literary” books have ghosts or monsters or werewolves, and they also have complex characters and gorgeous prose. They have moonlit swamps or dark New England woods or shadowy basements, and they ask troubling questions about what it means to be human. They might elicit fear or conjure an unsettling atmosphere, and they might make us reconsider our conception of what is monstrous or what it means to be haunted.
I’m a huge fan of both horror and literary fiction, but my favorite books live in the murky space between the two genres. My debut story collection, Here in the Night, has been classified by reviewers and list-makers as horror, literary fiction, speculative fiction, thriller/suspense, and ghost stories. Even I am not entirely sure how to fit the book into traditional labels—all those categories feel right.
My other great reading love is the short story, so here are nine of my favorite spooky literary story collections, books that are best enjoyed on a stormy summer night or a late-October evening, when the shadows are just starting to stretch and the leaves are crackling outside.
This dark, feminist, brilliant book explores, with a fierceness and sharpness that is thrilling, the shame, desires, hungers, and complications associated with the female body. In the unforgettable stand-out story, “The Husband Stitch,” Machado retells the urban legend of the girl with the green ribbon tied around her neck from the perspective of the ill-fated wife. The collection also introduces readers to a writer slowly going mad at an artists’ colony, a metafictional account of dozens of fake Law and Order: SVU episodes, and an inventory of a queer woman’s lovers in a post-apocalyptic world.
I have been an avid Kelly Link fan for over a decade, and could have included any of her genre-bending books on this list. She is a wholly original writer, dedicated entirely to the short story form. The eight stories in Get in Trouble include a pretty terrifying ghost story that takes place on a spaceship, a tale about an Appalachian schoolgirl exploring a summer home full of magical and unpredictable creatures, and a tense domestic story about a gay couple on vacation, as they try to forget the medical horrors of their daughter’s premature birth. Link makes her enthralling short stories feel as large and spacious as novels.
This collection certainly isn’t horror, but it explores the darkness of humanity in stark, unassuming prose, placing unforgettable characters in suspenseful and unusual situations. My favorite story in the collection, “Old Mrs. J,” about a creepy widowed landlady who starts to grow carrots shaped like human hands, employs the uncanny with beautiful and understated precision. Another story introduces the reader to a museum that displays implements of torture; another is told by a lonely bag-maker tasked with making a pouch to fit the exposed heart of a nightclub singer; another describes the grief felt by a mother whose child suffocated in a junked refrigerator years earlier. The stories are linked in strange and tangential ways, with protagonists from one story making fleeting guest appearances in other stories. Each story is unpredictable, tightly structured, and powerful.
Like most of Chaon’s short fiction, the stories in Stay Awake focus on extraordinary moments in ordinary people’s lives. A recurring theme is how the past can haunt the present. In one story, a widower begins to find strange messages on scraps of paper everywhere she goes; in another, a father is distraught over his son’s night terrors and the memories of his own unforgivable behavior during a previous marriage; in another a man slowly begins to remember a shocking childhood trauma. The book includes my favorite contemporary ghost story, “The Farm. The Gold. The Lily-White Hands,” which is told from the perspective of a trio of Ouija board-obsessed sisters who were almost killed by their father when they were girls. As with all Chaon’s work, the prose in this collection is stunning, and each story comes to a startling and emotionally charged conclusion.
Enriquez’s tremendous new novel, Our Share of the Night, is getting all the attention it deserves, but I first discovered her through this stunning collection of eerie tales. There are abandoned houses from which children never return, a poor out-of-the-way neighborhood in Buenos Aires that hides Lovecraftian horrors, a deeply disturbing tale about a social worker overstepping her bounds, and women who set themselves on fire to protest domestic violence. These stories are full of supernatural terrors, but they also interrogate the fraught history and culture of Argentina, and thoughtfully explore the constraints of womanhood and girlhood.
Every story in this collection of cosmic horror delivers something original and interesting. There are understated ghost stories, traditional weird tales with monstrous gods, a raucous noir-style narrative with a heavy dose of the supernatural, and a story set at a horror convention that looks smartly inward at the genre. Many of these stories take the reader into the deep, dark woods, from a logging camp to a devil’s favorite haunt to a cabin nestled in the forests of upper Washington state. Barron’s prose never draws too much attention to itself, but it is rich and beautiful, and he knows how to write some of the best opening and ending lines in contemporary fiction.
Stephen Graham Jones is acclaimed for his novels, but his superb short stories often fly under the radar. They are unsettling, grotesque, daring, inventive, and full of empathy. This collection is unambiguously horror, but its stories are just as likely to fill you with sorrow or longing as they are with fear. The characters are fully realized, complex, and rendered with great tenderness. I will caution: this is not a book for those who dislike discomfort; it has a story about blood-sucking ticks that still makes me squirm whenever I think about it.
This fantastical collection draws inspiration from urban legends, Filipino folktales, and myth. There are so many wonderful and startlingly good stories in this book, but most memorable is the chilling and artfully told “Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez?” which interlaces a narrative about students at a Catholic school putting on a haunted house with several versions of an urban legend that explains how a former student—known to haunt various parts of the school—died. The final story in the collection, “A Canticle for Lost Girls,” about three lifelong friends who once drew upon dark powers on an overnight class trip, is suspenseful and genuinely frightening, but it’s also an extraordinarily moving exploration of friendship and womanhood and trust, and it left me in tears.
This collection of ten alluring speculative tales, presented in both Portuguese and English, has magical families, werewolves, merfolk who have been forcefully separated from their kin, a cat turned inside out, and a talking corpse. It also grapples with questions related to the brutality of colonial history in Latin America, what it’s like to navigate the aftermath of abuse, and the effects of intergenerational trauma. This is a whip-smart, mesmerizing, and challenging book that readers won’t quickly or easily forget.
Safiya Sinclair writes in her memoir How to Say Babylon, “The perfect daughter was nothing but a vessel for the man’s seed, unblemished clay waiting for Jah’s fingerprint.” The memoir, Sinclair’s first, is about her journey to shaping a future that isn’t limited by the idea of the perfect daughter or Rastafari’s tenets.
Raised in Jamaica in a strict Rastafari household under the watchful eye of a father obsessed with his daughters’ purity and keeping the corrupting influences of the Western world at bay, Sinclair knows the perfect daughter in her father’s eyes covers her body, treats it as Jah’s temple, remains obedient. At sixteen, a recent high school graduate, Sinclair is largely confined to her home with no direction or purpose and trapped by her father’s increasing paranoia and volatile behavior.
Sinclair discovers poetry and her voice and with the discovery comes the growing understanding that she wants to determine the woman she will become without the patriarchal views of her father’s brand of Rastafari. But Sinclair’s rebellion, which grows slowly, comes at a steep cost.
Sinclair, a poet who has won a Whiting Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Metcalf Award in Literature, writes with grace and a poet’s lyricism about a woman finding her voice and her purpose.
I spoke with Sinclair about the Rastafari culture that both strengthened her father and oppressed her and the burden of being the perfect daughter.
Donna Hemans: I don’t think Rastafari culture is largely understood either in Jamaica or outside of Jamaica. Matter of fact, I’m Jamaican and there’s so much I learned from your memoir. What’s one thing you most hope readers understand?
Safiya Sinclair: Most people have an idea of Rastafari that is broad, not very nuanced. I knew when I sat down to write the book that I would be tackling some of those stereotypes and widening the view.
Most people think Rastafari defines Jamaica, but the Rastas are historically a persecuted minority in Jamaica. The government historically, would kick them out of their homes, their families would turn them away. They weren’t allowed to have jobs. They were forbidden from walking along the beach side when it was being developed for tourists. The nation wasn’t always very welcoming or accepting of them or the movement. We had a prime minister, Bustamante, in the ‘60s who said, “Bring all Rastas dead or alive.” And this led the army to go on a weekend-long rampage of pulling Rastas out of their homes, forcibly shaving them, cutting their dreadlocks. And the government didn’t really make amends for this atrocity until as recently as five years ago. And this wasn’t taught in schools either. When I sat down to write the book, I had to go back and learn my own history, learn how the founder of Rastafari, Leonard Howell—who founded the movement in 1930 when Jamaica was still under British colonial rule—had his compound raided by the government and burned to the ground because the movement itself is an anti-colonial movement. It’s founded on a dream of Black liberation, which they thought was dangerous.
So Rastafari in Jamaica have always been on the fringes. They’ve been the pariahs, they’ve always found themselves at the other end of a gun or a baton or a heel. And all these policies that move against them are what they call Babylon.
DH: One of the things that most fascinated me is the Rastafari push for liberty and freedom for Africans everywhere. Yet while your father talked about freedom from oppression, he created his own little world where he oppressed his own family. How do you reconcile the two?
SS: I’m not sure if I even reconcile the two. I think I’m still trying to come to terms with it.
Most people think Rastafari defines Jamaica, but the Rastas are historically a persecuted minority in Jamaica.
When I traced the history of Rastafari and Howell’s movement, he had this idea of Black independence, of Jamaica being an independent Black nation, of Black liberation. And that all scattered to the wind when the government burned the compound to the ground and burned the movement to the ground. When the movement scattered, Rastas became very closed off from society and Rasta men in particular became the living God for their own households. And because there is no written tenet or scripture of Rastafari, each man could then just take what he wanted from the different tenets of Rastafari and basically make his own gospel in his own house. And so, I think that’s what happened with my family and my father. He kind of authored his own vision of Rastafari for himself and for us that didn’t always manifest itself in positive ways.
DH: And yet he wasn’t always like that. What do you think contributed to the change in him?
SS: It must be a conflagration of many things: having daughters and being scared of this idea of them being corrupted or ruined or getting pregnant. He was really obsessed with my sisters and me not getting pregnant before we graduated high school, which I think was a direct response to his own mother, who became pregnant when she was a teenager. So he had this idea for a long time that that ruined her life. That’s one element of it—this tight control, which seemed always to me an irrational fear, which only extended to his daughters but not to his son.
A lot of it was simply about just living in a postcolonial society in which he didn’t always feel like he had autonomy or agency. Home was a place where he felt he could have those things. As a Black man walking through a society where he felt that he wasn’t always seen or respected or as successful a reggae musician as he perhaps wanted to be. I think those things manifested themselves in the tightening control and the paranoia.
DH:Your book touches on many themes—agency, liberation, womanhood, abuse, faith, purity—but there are four strong women who emerge from this period your memoir covers. And there are a few moments when you begin to see that there is another way of life. Can you talk about the moment that was most profound for you, that showed you could break free from your father’s hold?
SS: The moment came through poetry. I grew up in a household where my voice wasn’t always encouraged. My opinion was not encouraged or allowed. A lot of the cultivating of myself and my voice came through reading and writing poetry. When I started publishing my poems and people were actually paying attention to what I said for the very first time, I began to realize that there was a world out there and there was room for me to envision myself outside of the household, outside of Rastafari—a place where I felt like I was perishing. In poetry, I felt like I was thriving. And it was through poetry that I left home for the first time and went away to Spanish Town and to Kingston to go and study with the “old poet.” That was the first time I was away from my father and really began to nurture and care for my own thoughts even more.
DH: Sticking with this idea of womanhood and control, “empress” and “dawta” are terms of endearment, synonymous with girlfriend and wife. And any woman walking on any Jamaican road will likely hear it. But the terms carry more weight than that, don’t they?
I think the book talks to all women who are fighting for their own voice and who live in homes and countries where that’s being chipped away.
SS: It’s really the Madonnification of the women in the Rastafari household and this idea of being silent. Through your silence you are most pure, and through your humility you are most holy. And so then you earn the honorifics of “empress” and “princess.” But if you think about it, a man calling his partner or his wife, his daughter what does that mean? It’s infantilization. So the term of endearment itself is an infantilization of the woman who has to be somehow less empowered than the man to be endearing. I had to reexamine a lot of these terms that were being used in the household and then when they’re used outside of the household, they’re also different. Inside the household and outside the household both names and honorifics carried different weight, but both of them were bending my back to make me smaller.
DH: What do you think it means to be the perfect daughter? Have you figured it out?
SS: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone should be striving for that. You are whatever person you are. And it was hard growing up in a household where you felt like you had to be perfect and pure and humble. It always seemed that it was an unachievable goal. I think I’m still trying to process and get rid of this idea of perfection. It’s something that I still struggle with in aspects of my life because I grew up being socialized that way.
DH: In your early teens, you concluded that “I would never be his perfect Rasta daughter. I was too headstrong, too curious. Too much of myself, and not enough of him.” But it would take some time for you to sever ties. How did you know for sure that you were done trying to be the perfect daughter?
SS: When I graduated, I felt like I’d done everything that was asked of me. And my life was in a bit of stasis. I was trying to get myself to college. I was trying to make something else of my life rather than just being a Rasta man’s wife and a Rasta man’s daughter, to define my future on my own terms. And I think the severing happened in the moment where my father said I was nothing but a Jezebel, and I would be nothing but a Jezebel because I don’t cook and clean. And in that moment, I said this is not how I ever want to be defined. My worth doesn’t rest on these things.
I had to break this cycle. As I looked at my sisters who were in the same kind of stasis, I could see their lives ahead of them because it was the one I was living. I wanted to burn that story down and write a new one for myself. So that for me was definitely the moment when I knew I was done with being silent and done with making myself smaller. I knew who I was and who I wanted to be. And I was ready to do anything I needed to do to get there.
DH: It was sometime before you sat down to write your memoir. Years earlier a professor suggested you weren’t ready. How did you know you were ready?
SS: That moment when I was in Charlottesville, I had just left home under really terrible circumstances and I was pretty sure I was never going to speak to my father again. He was right. I wasn’t ready. The hurt was still fresh. The wounds felt so deep. It seemed like the writing of the book would be a reaction because I was hurting and I didn’t want that. I wanted to feel objective enough to write the story because I knew writing the story meant I would have to understand my father and his childhood and his adolescence and why he chose Rastafari. I wasn’t there yet. I hadn’t processed everything. I wanted the book to be a positive act and not one born out of hurt. The moment I knew came to me through poetry. I gave a poetry reading at Calabash and it leads to a positive moment between me and my father that I didn’t think was possible. But when it happened I felt a release and I felt released. I felt okay, now I can write this story.
DH: And did the current efforts to roll back autonomy and agency for women have anything to do with your determination of the right time?
SS: I think the book talks to all women who are fighting for their own voice and who live in homes and countries where that’s being chipped away and taken away. I grew up in a household like that, where if I followed what my father and other Rasta brethren would have wanted for me, I would not be here talking to you today. I wouldn’t have a voice, a sense of being. My worth would be defined in a completely different way. I can only hope that the book joins the conversation in a positive way. And might give them some kind of fire and power to know they are not alone and another world is possible.
Like a dollar I am depreciating all the time.
Like a lighthouse throwing the net of my pretend moon
on the predator shoreline. Like an invasive boar
I have been known to root and roll in rain and dirt and roam.
Like the earth sometimes in love with turning away from all light
though never really leaving. Like a beach I have wanted
to spend years softening though not always wanting the footprints
which to ghost crabs are craters. Like a paleontologist
resisting always the impulse to ransack my skeletons
for drumsticks, though here is the gong, here is the timpani
like a bird bath full of absinthe before me. So so long
oblivion with your small dreams of silence. I am going
to the bank of myself with my pockets hanging out
like two ruined countries, like two broken and gorgeous wings.
Carrying Stones
On the grassy slope leading up to the overpass, someone
has spelled out LOVE in large, round stones, which is to say sometimes
love is a gray and heavy work. My exit lets off
at a cemetery. There too the trees are coming back
into their leaves like bodies returning to themselves
after long illness. I remember once catching a glimpse there
of a funeral—twelve suits and dresses, two black-clad children
chasing each other and laughing through graves, which is what I want
my love's work to resemble. So why end in a graveyard?
For those I love I will bake strawberry rhubarb pies,
muddle basil in gin and lime, cook pot roast and gumbo
and stay up after dark cleaning the kitchen so tomorrow
begins pristine. This life is little more than castaway stones
but I can carry stones. Where should we put them, what should we build?
Memory is a tricky thing. For one, not everyone will have the same memory of the same event. For another, you can do so many things with it—you can forget it, you can suppress it, you can warp it (intentionally or unintentionally) and so on.
In his memoir, A Man of Two Faces, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that his attempts at keeping a journal were “fitful and fragmented, written inconsistently over a few years in high school and college.” But if there are gaps in his memories, Nguyen is less interested in the missing content than the meaning of those gaps, both on a personal scale and a larger societal one.
A Man of Two Faces is at its core a memoir about the education of a refugee. Nguyen starts with his early days in the United States. But as Nguyen experiences the world as an Asian American, an academic, a writer, and, eventually, a father, he becomes attuned to the conditions and contradictions that make his life (im)possible—war, displacement, the American dream, and more.
The process affords him the opportunity to dissect his coming of age and to excavate his memories, particularly of his mother’s time in a psychiatric ward. The task is easier said than done. “You cared for this memory,” he writes, “but you never ask.”
The memoir is Nguyen’s opportunity to ask: What do we remember and what do we forget? If we forget, why do we forget and for whom are we forgetting? Ourselves? Our loved ones? Our country? And what about cultural memory, which is to say history?
To me, memory is a stumbling block. To Nguyen, memory is fertile ground.
Over Zoom, Nguyen and I met to talk about the politics of remembering, the American discourse, and justice.
Eric Nguyen: You’re best known for your fiction and you’ve also written nonfiction but for an academic audience. This is your first memoir. Why a memoir this time around?
Viet Thanh Nguyen: Hopefully, it’s my last memoir too. Why a memoir? This time around, I did not set out to write a memoir. My editor suggested that I do a nonfiction book composed of various essays that I published over the last few years. But as I set out to compile those essays, I felt that it would be much more interesting to write a book with a cohesive narrative.
I looked over all the many essays that I had written, but also the many speeches that I’d given over the last several years. As I toured the country, giving these talks to various audiences, the talks had taken on an increasingly autobiographical narrative about my life and the lives of my parents. The memoir aspect of those talks was interwoven with my takes on American culture and politics and the war in Vietnam and racism and colonialism and many other issues. So those talks along with the essays really then compelled me to feel that there was room for a book-length memoir, particularly because as I started to give those talks, I found myself exploring parts of my past that I had sealed off; I found myself shaken by what it was that I remembered. So, of course, as a writer, I felt that if I was being shaken by what I was recalling, this was a sign that I had to explore those things further.
EN: The problem with memoir is that it’s only as good as your memory. You write about forgetting memory, misremembering, the inability to remember, suppressing memory, the unwillingness to remember. How can memoirs deal with these issues?
VTN: I had read Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, which is a great book. In reading that book, I felt that it was such a beautiful recreation of these times in Nabokov’s life as a young person. It was so streamlined of a narrative that I wondered how was he able to recreate in such great detail this distant period of his life.
American culture wants us to dwell in our own guilt when the real guilt are the historical circumstances and the warfare that created our stories.
While I admired that seamlessness of his narrative, it was not something that I wanted to recreate for myself because I felt that a seamless recreation of my life and my parents’ lives, which would be the convention in American memoir, would actually be more fictional than nonfictional. I wanted to write a memoir that actually dealt with the shape of memory itself, or at least my memory. It is not linear, it is not whole.
It is fractured, it is fleeting. It jumps around. There are tatters and holes. If I were to attempt to fully fill in all of those holes, would I actually give myself and the reader a more accurate sense of my own life and my own past and my perception of it? Or would it be actually more fictional? Even if I did fill in those holes, would that illusion of wholeness actually be accurate or would the patching up of those holes only obscure more holes? I wanted to give in to the very texture of my own memory in the writing of the book.
EN: The same question could be asked about history in regards to society. We forget or disremember things, a kind of collective forgetfulness. What is often the case is that we misremember and we actively do. So how does a nation or society deal with this? How does the individual deal with this kind of societal misremembering?
VTN: I quote the poet William Carlos Williams from his book In the American Grain, where he describes American history as—in his words—”an orgy of blood.” I think most white Americans would be taken aback by that characterization of their country and their history. Other Americans not of white background might be more sympathetic to this idea that this country’s origins and history and present are soaked in blood.
The United States is not unique in any way in the desire of the people who live here and who have come here to engage in selective memory about their history.
Now, if you are one of the victors or descended from the victors, you have an investment in selective memory that would justify your existence as a conqueror or the descendant of conquerors. If you are not, let’s say you’re an immigrant or a refugee, the power of the mythology of the country you’ve come to is such that you can internalize that mythology so that you too engage in a selective remembering and forgetting because society is rewarding you for that.
The book takes on these larger questions of American history in the American dream, which is the most powerful mythology of all and which I characterize as a euphemism for settler colonialism. That’s the history that most Americans don’t want to remember or to recognize. For most refugees and immigrants, when we say we come here for the American dream, we are also saying we’re coming here to be a part of settler colonialism, whether we know it or not. The book connects the experiences of refugees and immigrants aspiring to the American dream to the very bloody history of this country, which also extends to the way that the United States has interacted with many of the countries from which refugees and immigrants come including, in my case, Vietnam.
Those of us who come here as refugees may not see any connection between our history as Vietnamese people and the history of this country outside of the war in Vietnam. But I recall how, when we first came to this country, my family and I, our settlement was in Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania, a state that, Benjamin Franklin said in 1752, was a state for white people and by white people he meant the English. Pennsylvania was a state where the white people there almost completely exterminated the indigenous peoples of the land on which I literally settled. What I put out in the book is that my parents bought their first house in Paxton Township in Harrisburg, PA, and the last remnants of the indigenous people, the Susquehannock, were massacred there in 1700 by the Paxton Boys, a white vigilante gang. Our arrival as refugees in the United States was compelled by the history of American warfare in Vietnam, in which American soldiers called the land around their fire bases “Indian country.” When we arrived in the United States, we were settled in a country that had been taken from indigenous peoples. That’s the orgy of blood that William Carlos Williams is referring to and that is part of the history that the book deals with.
EN: Your memoir is also the story of your parents and their experience during the war. Something that I can relate to is writing that story of one’s parents, especially, in my case, a child of refugees, someone who didn’t go through that refugee experience. You tell the story of your parents, specifically your mother’s story. What right do we have as writers to tell the stories that are not ours to tell the stories, that are our parents?
VTN: I have no right. None of us have the right to tell the stories of other people. This is the age-old dilemma of anyone who desires to write an autobiography or a memoir that incorporates the lives of others besides themselves. This is the age-old dilemma of the so-called refugee and immigrant story. When the child or grandchild of the refugees or the immigrants decide to tell the story of their parents or their grandparents; we have no right. Anybody who tells these kinds of stories has to grapple with the ethics, the aesthetics, and the politics of what it means to tell this story.
There’s no getting around it. This book confronts that. It tells the story of my parents or part of the story of my parents. It tells about my mother’s going to a psychiatric hospital three times, a fact that my parents almost certainly would not want me to tell. Then it confronts what it means to say these things. I have no right. I have to live with that.
EN: Is it worth writing stories of one’s ancestors and parents, or would you say it’s an act of vanity, something you’re doing for yourself or your ego or your sense of self?
VTN: I think I have to leave it up to readers to decide that. I will say that one of the reasons why the book is subtitled “A Memoir, A History, A Memorial” is that I did not want to treat this story purely as the story of my parents and myself, which is the standard pattern of the memoir, especially the memoir in the United States, especially the memoir of those who are classified as refugees or immigrants or others so-called minorities. In a way, we’re expected to write about our trauma, we’re expected to betray other people, we’re expected to betray our communities—but only our communities, only our parents.
This book is also about the betrayals of the countries in which my parents and myself have been involved. That’s why it’s also a history, and that, I think, is how I assuage my own feelings about the dilemma that you described: I don’t think this book is only about me; I think this book isn’t even only about my parents.
We as a country are deeply allergic to communism since capitalism is our fundamental religion. But I reject all of those assumptions.
Part of the typical gesture of the immigrant or the refugee who writes the memoir of their parents, it’s to say, “Look at how astonishing my parents are, look at what they’ve accomplished,” as if my parents, their parents, our parents are unique. Part of the gesture of this book is to say, “Yes, my parents are unique as everyone’s parents are unique, but they’re also not unique.”
My mother went to the psychiatric hospital three times. But why? Was her experience so radically different than that of so many other Asian women who became immigrants and refugees? And if we ask that question, then we have to ask all the other questions about why there was such a thing as an Asian Pacific Psychiatric Ward at the hospital where she went to, that there were so many Asian Pacific people in dire need of psychiatric assistance that there was a whole ward created for them.
One way to cope with the dilemma is to say, that is precisely what American culture wants us to feel, to dwell in our own guilt when the real guilt are the historical circumstances and the warfare that has created our stories. That’s what the book draws attention to.
EN: Given the political dimension of your book, you also write that perhaps writing can be an act of justice. How do you see writing doing that?
VTN: Writing, for me, is an act of beauty. It’s an act of power, it’s an act of mourning, and it’s an act of justice. It’s all those things at the same time. So yes, writing is fighting for me, and I want to use my writing politically.
However, I also want to write politically at the highest level of beauty. For me, these goals are not irreconcilable. I think in dominate American culture, there’s an allergy to the idea that art and politics can be expressed simultaneously, which is rooted in dominant American culture’s assumption that if you bring art into politics or vice versa, you must be a communist. We as a country are deeply allergic to communism since capitalism is our fundamental religion. But I reject all of those assumptions. This book is born from this idea that the person and the political and the artistic and art and justice can all be expressed simultaneously.
EN: You write about decolonizing writing. What does this look like to you?
VTN: Colonization is a globalizing and totalizing process, so decolonizing has to be a totalizing and globalizing process. Decolonizing writing, if it is removed from the general act of total decolonization, is not going to work. I think that’s part of the problem of the conversation around when people say, “Oh, how do we decolonize writing? Well, we’ll change aesthetics.” Yes, you have to change aesthetics, but you’re not going to decolonize writing until you actually decolonize everything else. That’s part of our problem and our challenge. You have to decolonize by understanding how aesthetic assumptions operate.
For example, in the book, there’s a whole section of the book about immigrant writing where I talk about how, in fact, as an immigrant or a refugee or a so-called minority writer, one is expected to talk about American racism—but only within certain limits so that it’s totally expected that you’re going to tell what Anthony Veasna So calls the sob stories of immigrants. That’s our currency.
I don’t believe in being a voice for the voiceless. I believe in abolishing the conditions of voicelessness.
But you’re not expected to question the American Dream. Now, you could question it in the book, but you can’t question it as a dominant mythology that we can’t escape from, so that the typical immigrant memoir, for example, is going to show how terrible things were in the country of origin and how difficult it was for the immigrant in the United States. But in the end, lo and behold, we have the book. The book itself is proof of the success of the American Dream. Even if the book is critical of the American dream, if the author cannot see that in operation, then the author has not decolonized the aesthetics of their work.
The dominant ideology of American society, which is a settler colonial society, infiltrates many kinds of aesthetic assumptions from the formal shape of one’s book to other things, such as translating orienting one’s book towards white readers or towards people who are not of one’s own community.
Beyond that, the impulse to accept the logics of settler colonialism as a writer manifest itself in seeing oneself as an individual writer. Now, every writer’s an individual writer. We all just write our books in our own minds. But I don’t think that I would’ve been the writer that I am if there hadn’t been more than a century’s worth of Asian American writers who had been writing before me. I see myself as part of a genealogy and a collective that’s been in operation since at least the 19th century. If you’re a writer who doesn’t see yourself as also part of a larger group, then you probably haven’t decolonized yourself.
If you’re a writer who aspires to be a voice for the voiceless, you have definitely not decolonized yourself because you don’t understand what Arundhati Roy said, that there was really no such thing as the voiceless; they are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard. Any writer who doesn’t see that and thinks that their art is only a manifestation of their individual voice rather than their individual voice against the silencing of other people is still colonized.
I don’t believe in being a voice for the voiceless. I believe in abolishing the conditions of voicelessness, which is really a gesture at this larger project of decolonization, which is about the abolition of all the structures of colonization, of which corporate publishing is only one component.
Craft is often thought of as the backbone of literature, the scientific and mathematical side of the creative process that examines an artist’s techniques. In prose, it often involves terms such as plot, pacing, point of view, characterization, scene-setting, structure, dialogue… It is the rational breakdown of those mechanisms that work behind the scenes in the stories we love and despise most—the ones we wish we’d written ourselves.
In literature, craft is fascinatingly unlike itself in any other subject. Instead of becoming more and more obvious as well as understood, it becomes subconscious, supposedly, once you’ve mastered it. But craft never ends. Even if it is turned on its head, that twist and distortion itself is a part of craft. It becomes a new and exciting way to design a story, to surprise a reader, to invent a structure that’s never been thought of before. This is the heart of craft and what the following seven books aim to describe each in their own unique way.
The titles on this list are at the forefront of contemporary literature, engaging with experimental structures, rebelling against the canon, and carefully pointing out the ways in which our assumptions delude us. Whether you are an aspiring writer, a Pulitzer-Prize winning memoirist, or a curious reader, these books on craft will change you and the way you think about the world—as well as literature—within the complex confines of beauty and truth.
In Craft in the Real World, Matthew Salesses—bestselling author and Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University—breaks down the meaning and implications of craft in fiction, redefines its terms, and elaborates upon the history and “rules” of writing workshops in the U.S. since 1936. He argues that literature should not exist in a vacuum and that the “responsibilities of actual life” also belong in the realm of art. Through thought experiments, examples, and anecdotes, Salesses masterfully upends the framework of many MFA programs and the way many writers have been taught how to approach feedback, revision, and cultural expectations in their work. This book is a must-read—as it significantly addresses the issues that have plagued white-centric literature for far too long and proposes alternative ideas and methods that will revolutionize contemporary fiction today.
“Craft is about who has the power to write stories, what stories are historicized and who historicizes them, who gets to write literature and who folklore, whose writing is important and to whom, in what context. This is the process of standardization… These standards must be challenged and disempowered.”
Body Work by Melissa Febos also goes against the tide of traditional craft books. In four essays, Febos beautifully gathers her own experiences, reflects upon what she’s learned from writing and from teaching, and analyzes specific examples from the historical canon while revolting against them through personal narratives. The award-winning essayist and University of Iowa Professor shows how navel-gazing and confession can still be moving without feeling overdone, especially for women who fear being cast out by a misogynistic bias in the industry. Febos encourages her readers to examine the assumptions they’ve inherited about writing, such as how to structure a sex scene, the scripts we follow in art and in life, and the true place for cruelty in literature.
Throughout the collection, Febos is unparalleled as she draws on the power of healing through art, makes philosophical arguments on the ethics of writing about real people, and shows just how deeply one must travel to eliminate the distance between the author and the nonfiction narrator.
“Writer was the only role I could see myself occupying in society… It offered the gift of self-forgetting, a transcendence on the other side of which lay insight.”
For those of you seeking further guidance on writing nonfiction, John McPhee is a flashlight in a pitch dark theater. The Pulitzer-Prize winning author, retired Princeton professor, and staff writer on the New Yorker since 1965, collected his wisdom, advice, letters, and anecdotes in a book that goes beyond lessons on craft. In Draft No. 4, McPhee describes his decades-long experiences with editors, the New Yorker fact-checking department, the art of omission, the key to escape from writer’s block, how to unravel secrets from an interviewee, and much more. The book is comprehensive and eloquent and has been called the written version of McPhee’s creative nonfiction course, which he taught for over forty years at Princeton University.
“Creative nonfiction is not making something up, but making the most of what you have.”
Alexander Chee’s manifesto on the beauty of crossed lines between reality and literature is not only for memoirists or nonfiction writers. As the title suggests, it is truly about the art of the novel and the way all stories penetrate, misremember, and influence truth. It is less a guide on how to write an autobiographical novel than it is an example of profound and life-changing essays in written form.
Chee’s essays examine how his identity as a Korean American developed and became hard to define while growing up, how he was shaped by reading fiction as much as by factual events and experiences, and also how identity is not a singular noun. Through the odd jobs, the headlines, the tragedies and comedies, and the elections of a lifetime, Chee writes. And with the essays in this collection, Chee also shows how being a Tarot-reader, bookseller, and cater-waiter for William F. Buckley can simultaneously support, inform, and expand the life of an artist who is also always an activist.
“Something new is made from my memories and yours as you read this. It is not my memory, not yours, and it is born and walks the bridges and roads of your mind, as long as it can.”
Jane Alison is a versatile and multi-talented artist, expanding beyond one genre—she’s the author of four novels and a memoir, a translator of Ovid, and a professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia. Meander, Spiral, Explode is her book on craft, and while it deals with specific canon examples and thinking about plot, structure, and pacing, it too is versatile and expansive—much like Alison herself. The book proposes a new way of framing our stories. Instead of the conventional narrative arc seen time and again in Western fiction, tracing back to Aristotle, Alison compares certain stories’ movements to paintings, music, gardens, houses, living creatures, oceans, and natural motion. She offers new and exciting ways of reading, writing, and designing stories while encouraging writers to experiment with the patterns that dictate fiction.
“Visual elements such as texture, color, or symmetry can open windows and let us design as much as write. Text comes from texere, after all: to weave. Next, we can be conscious, deliberate, innovative, in the paths we carve through our words.”
About Writing clocks in at about 432 pages. But trust me, by the end, you’re going to be wishing there were 432 more pages of Delany’s wisdom. The collection consists of letters, interviews, and essays encompassing a range of topics such as Delany’s philosophy of time, how to engage with the canon, whether to use flashbacks or not, how to build calluses against critics, the pleasure of language in science fiction, and so much more. Reading About Writing feels much like sitting by a fire, late into the night, listening to Delany spin tales about the writing life, the process, his youth in New York, and the truths he’s uncovered through it all.
“The sign that the writer has internalized a model deeply enough to use it in writing is when he or she has encountered it enough times so that she or he no longer remembers it in terms of a specific example or a particular text, but experiences it, rather, as a force in the body…”
Last but not least is Anne Lamott’s instructional guide that could be used for writing motivation or, more generally, for life at any time. She begins the book by telling an anecdote about her brother who once procrastinated an ornithological research project until the night before, and her father’s response was to “take it bird by bird.” Lamott uses this philosophy to guide the reader through the process and pains of writing and how to view it not so much as a chore, a routine, or a block in one’s schedule, but rather as a spiritual exercise that satisfies and uplifts the soul. Her humor and biting sarcasm throughout the book is another reason to dive into it and to enjoy the pages, above all.
“Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?”
When you hear the title Brooklyn Crime Novel, you might automatically think of genres involving mystery — whodunnit, noir, hardboiled, detective fiction, etc. — and plots driven by investigation. You might think of specific titles such as The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, The Black Dahlia, The Feral Detective, Gun, With Occasional Music, and perhaps even Motherless Brooklyn. No one would fault you for imagining that Brooklyn Crime Novel exists in these universes. Maybe it does. But more likely, you’ll find that it belongs outside of these realms. The narration proves to be omniscient, prismatic, and perpetually evolving. The voice behind the novel immerses tourists and locals alike into the urban myths and overheard phone calls that pass between kids and parents, as well as the secrets that are unspoken for decades yet somehow known by all. Through a range of fictional scenes, vignettes, muggings, walks, dances, and late-night conversations, Lethem investigates the physical and cultural gentrification of Brooklyn along with the undercurrents of the racial and sexual politics that have always been there, pulsing in its streets throughout history.
Through the novel’s eclectic cast of characters — including a spoiled boy, a millionaire’s son, a mediator named C., an antiquarian kid, the board-game obsessed, a Brooklyn novelist, the Brazen Head Wheeze, hippies replaced by hipsters, movie stars, and the elusive narrator himself — we become absorbed into the past lives of a borough that has been eroded but not yet erased.
Despite the kaleidoscope of characters within the novel, it is still Brooklyn that serves as the protagonist, and the propelling mystery at hand is: What happened to it? Returning to Dean Street after twenty years, Lethem brings with him a magnifying glass, profound retrospect, an open mind, and scintillating insight to find the true meaning of growing up — not just for the boys on the block, but for the city, for Brooklyn itself.
Kyla Walker: How do you think about urban legends in terms of what to believe and what to disregard? And how did they influence you growing up and now as a writer?
Jonathan Lethem: The book is partly about how some things that occur are translated, often rather rapidly, into something that could be called an urban legend, but they become very charged because of the element of the real that’s hiding inside the legendary part of them. Maybe this also connects strongly to the idea of street knowledge, but also of tabloid culture… In the treatment of true things by tabloid culture, they become legendary, whether or not they’re being spoken of truthfully. There’s the emotional, mythic, and implicitly political—often quite terribly racist—energies attached to them that turn them iconographic or totemic or overcharged with resonances. And this process is definitely a part of this book. But also, what kids or teenagers say to each other and how wrong and right they are when they’re exchanging information. They’re not cynical tabloid reporters, but they also have a powerful mythic impulse that’s transforming things into the legends of the street. This was a world that I experienced intimately and participated in. So, one more layer is that this book was written not in a pretend innocence of my own involvement and complicity in creating images and ideas around New York City in the seventies and eighties. It was written instead as an act of open engagement, a confrontation with, and a curiosity about what it meant that I knew I was also a propagator of myth.
KW: What was the catalyst that led to writing it at this moment?
Crime is fundamental in my perspective on how life exists.
JL: When I finished writing Fortress of Solitude in 2003 and then began answering questions about it in 2004, I would say and mean it that I was never going to want to write about that place again. I felt that I’d had my say, and there were aspects of what I’d done that were very satisfying, and others that might be puzzling or incomplete, but as an emotional journey, it was exhaustive and exhausting. I was done. I couldn’t imagine going back to it. People always ask writers, “Are you going to do something like this again?”
KW: Or a sequel…
JL: For so long, I would just lay that card on the table and say, “Oh, no, it’s someone else’s turn now. My utterance is complete.” I used to joke that it was the Fortress of Solitude listening tour because I would be made available in person, and I would say a certain number of things or read a little bit from the book. And then, I would start hearing this testimony coming back at me. “It was like this.” “It was like that.” Or “You got this wrong. You got this right.” Or “That’s me, that’s my brother. I know who that is, and here’s why.” “I can tell what you’re doing here.” In that sense, I was unconsciously beginning this process of conversations that I earlier described. I was already starting to research Brooklyn Crime Novelwithout having any idea that I would ever be writing it. Because all those voices, those post-publication Fortress of Solitude encounters on the listening tour, were the beginning of what I began to do very intentionally and with an enormous amount of desire and purpose. I acknowledged to myself in the last five years that I was going to write about Dean Street again. So, I was never off the Fortress of Solitude listening tour. It was the combination of my incredibly good luck at how that book was published and stuck around and the fact that it was adapted into a theater piece in New York City. A lot of people saw that which made them talk about it again and talk about it with me again. There’s also the fact of my own gregariousness, the fact that I’m not a shy person, and I do make contact with readers in many situations pretty readily. So, it was 20 years’ worth of conversation that led to Brooklyn Crime Novel.
And then, there was a pivot in the middle, which was the theater piece. When you make a story out of your own life and you throw it out into the world, it’s embarrassing and exalting in equal measure that anyone cares about these things that mean so much to you. It’s incredibly humbling too, but it felt like it was still in transmission for a long time, whether I attended to that or not. But when I went and saw the theater piece, it had been handed back to me in a strange way because musical theater is such a strange art form. There’s something uncanny in that form—turning stories into song, making characters and having them switch from spoken voices to singing, and then sometimes singing together in groups—it breaks into some kind of layer of emotional possibility… And it made me know how little I still understood about it all. You can write a 600-page book about a block, and you can turn out to still be only at the beginning of understanding what you feel, and why it’s so complicated for you. The musical shattered my certainties that just because I had typed for four years, I had figured everything out.
KW: That’s so interesting it was the musical that did that.
You can write a 600-page book about a block, and you can turn out to still be only at the beginning of understanding what you feel.
JL: It put me back at the starting line in a certain sense. Even then, I was still in denial that I was going to write about Dean Street again. But the funny thing about the musical was they also acted as if I was responsible for it. So, they put me on stage for a talk back to the theater audience at the opening night. Then the question came: “Will you ever write about Dean Street again?” And I started to haul out my usual, “No, no, no, I said it all. It’s done. Someone else’s turn.” Then, on stage in real time, I came up with a different answer, which I thought was a joke. I said, “Well, if I ever wrote about Dean Street again, I would do it from the point of view of a bunch of disgruntled characters who grew up on the street where someone wrote a very celebrated book and think that the novelist got it all totally wrong. And I would write a book about the people who think that Fortress of Solitude is a crock of shit.” So, there I was joking… And you can see where that joke led me.
KW: Definitely… You can feel the weight of all the different opinions and perspectives in the book. It was beautiful how it was done and came together. The metafictional aspect of it felt very Borgesian. I’m curious, how does it feel for you to read about Brooklyn by writers who you didn’t grow up with, or are part of a different generation? Does it feel like a different city you’re reading, or do you see resonances?
JL: Well, it is a different city. I’m not only 60 years old, but also, I have been living away from Brooklyn for almost 15 years now. But, even more than those two very important contexts, I am so overwhelmingly engaged with this memory palace—of what it was like in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s—that I can’t see Brooklyn now with real clarity. It’s easy to be condescending about this and to say, “Oh, you think it gentrified from 2015 until now? Oh, that’s pretty funny…” But actually, of course it did. It kept going. It kept changing. And the book is an attempt to accept that I’m trapped in time. I’m a reporter from another planet at this point. If I have anything to offer, it’s that I’m a Rip Van Winkle character or an H.G. Wells’ time traveler who’s shaking his fist.
KW: You’ve said in class before that you worked in bookstores throughout your twenties in Berkeley and San Francisco. How would you compare the bookstore culture/literary scene between San Francisco and New York after having experience in both?
JL: I did work in bookstores in New York City as a teenager. I worked in three or four before I’d even gone off to college, and I drew on that. There was a milieu of these kind of deep, arcane, cranky, irascible old guys still running bookstores that was very much like breaking into some green room where Borscht Belt comedians were still arguing about who had the better night on stage at some Catskills resort. It was like a magic carpet into that New York ethnic subculture—often Jewish or Greek—of a deeply irritable, knowledgeable but grubby subculture of secret codes and signals. It was still accessible a bit when I was a kid. It’s pretty much evaporated. But by the time I got to San Francisco and worked in bookstores, there were like four of those guys who’d moved West, and I worked for one of them. A great one: Moe Moskowitz. But this thing was moving quickly into the rearview mirror, and I accelerated that by going west, because there was less of it there to begin with.
KW: As someone who’s been a wide reader for so many years and a prolific writer, do you feel that fiction can be as transformative an experience as a real life event can?
JL: I’ve delivered so much of my life to this value system, and you used the key word. When I want someone to believe that I want them to read a book, not just that I have officially recommended it, I often use the word “experience”— meaning this part of your life when you’re reading this book is going to matter… But I do think also that prose fiction in the recent phase is under a certain pressure of skepticism and resistance that’s real. It doesn’t make any sense to ignore it. It’s a condition that seems remarkable to me that what I care about, like the coexistence of the past and the present, is still so vividly alive. People have joked, “Oh, the novel is always dead.” And the novel goes on living. Norman Mailer has this quip where someone said to him, “Is the novel dead?” And he said, “The novel will be at your funeral.” But with the present form of the novel, a lot of the new ones that work do so by injecting some degree of this resistance or skepticism into their bloodstream. Like a toxin. And then handling it. That’s what goes by the name “autofiction.” The Rachel Cusk variety and a number of other varieties. I think this is important. It’s not just to be thought of as a fashion or a phase. But this moment of this tension, put-upon resistance, or skepticism matters. And it matters partly because if you’re lining up the magic super villains of our present universe along with reactionary nostalgia, racism acknowledged and unacknowledged, the fascist longing for authoritarian clarity in a world of unclarity, then another villain in the last decade at least is narrative certainty. Stories that pretend they know everything and are totally absorbing and have every answer—those are causing enormous amounts of grief.
Storytellers are in a weird place because their gift is being openly, brazenly exploited for all kinds of monstrous purposes so storytelling that doesn’t stop and say, “Wow. Storytelling. What’s going on with this?” feels uncomfortable often now. Some people, without even completely noticing that they feel unsafe being fully absorbed in a seamless fictional space—a richly descriptive, all-encompassing fictional space. It isn’t just that readers’ attention spans are fragmented, and they happen to look at their phones and then they put the book down. Maybe also it makes them anxious to be so subsumed in a story… Maybe our stories are killing us.
KW: Can we talk about the title? Brooklyn Crime Novel comes with a certain set of expectations when you open to the first page. How did the phrase come up and stick for you?
JL: That’s a good last question because there’s a definite story to this. So, the publishing mechanics of this book were that it was the second book of a two-book agreement. One was The Arrest, which was well defined and partly written, and the other was this gigantic intention that was very inchoate and hard to name. And there were no pages. Zero. There also wasn’t a title, but I knew it was about Brooklyn. When the contract came back to me and my agent, the contractual people had to put something in the description. There was no title so they’d written in “Brooklyn Crime Novel.” I’d said nothing about crime. I just said Brooklyn.
KW: No way.
JL: My agent flagged it. He was looking through the contract and said, “So, I know a bit about what you intend to do, and I’m not sure this description should go in the contract because you didn’t say it was going to be a crime novel.” At first, I was ticked. Who do they think I am? Just some guy who writes the same book over and over again. I’m not writing another Motherless Brooklyn. And then, it struck me as funny because at another level, the only thing every one of my books has in common is: there are crimes in them. It’s resolutely true. I grew up in a world of criminality. And I write about crime, whether I’m writing “crime novels” or not, let alone the three that can be called detective novels. Fortress of Solitude has murder in it. Lots of others have crimes that have statutes against them, crimes of the heart, and crimes of the soul. Even as whimsical a book as my romantic comedy You Don’t Love Me Yet, the plot actually hinges on a kidnapping. Albeit, of a kangaroo. Point is, I never fail to write about crime. For one second, I was indignant that they’d inked in these words, Brooklyn Crime Novel. Then, as the years passed and I was working towards this goal, the weird thing was that the insight this mistake caused me to make was that I had to accept that crime is fundamental in my perspective on how life exists. That insight became influential on the book. Suddenly I started to see everything in terms of crime.
One of the things that I realized I was annoyed about with Fortress of Solitude was that it divided the characters too much into crime: criminals, perpetrators, and victims. The truth is we were all doing crime. Even the most bullied, the most frightened, even the most put-upon worm of a kid crawling down the sidewalk was also doing vandalism and shoplifting. This insight started to dominate my thinking as I worked on this book—the sense in which every single person is this complicit participant and on both sides, they’re victim and perpetrator. But crime saturates the sense of the book and the sense of this world. And then, when it came time to give it a title, I couldn’t stop thinking about that phrase.
On a balmy summer day in 2019, at the tender age of twenty-five, I left Los Angeles, that angel-less city of angels, with the intention never to look back. As the plane traveled at five-hundred and seventy-five miles per hour towards Barcelona, I muttered a quick prayer of thanks to the New Migrant Voices Fund for footing the bill in acknowledgement of my courageous literary sensibilities. In my mind’s eye, I was already disembarking, finding my earth legs, using them to cut across the glittery airport mall to the rickety train that would take me to Girona, my destination, a medieval city tucked in the shadows of the Pyrenees on the outskirts of Barça.
A year prior to moving, I’d become friends with a certain Beatriz E, a wealthy, frail woman from Madrid who was fifty years my senior and who spoke perfect English. We met at a virtual Death Café. Even though we were stuck behind our respectable Skype screens doing what people do at death cafés, eating lavishly decorated pastries and drinking fine teas while discussing death, the chemistry between us was so undeniable that it shut down the room. I admired her skeletal freckled hands and the dusty tomes that bulged out of her walls, each a brick of old words that could land a definitive blow to her head (she didn’t seem to care), and most of all her strange dinnerware: high-fired porcelain with a glossy eggshell finish and scalloped edges, decorated with illustrated insects—spruce beetle, grasshoppers, white satin moth. I said all of this out loud. I told her that I admired the way she lifted the pistachio marzipan petit-four with her bony thumb and index finger, sliding it into her mouth as if each finger were an arthropod leg she could use for walking. At this, the other attendees lifted their cheap discolored mugs to their mouths and disappeared.
After that, we met weekly on Skype. We learned everything we were meant to learn about each other. She lived in the center of Madrid in the same penthouse she’d lived in as a child. I’d never known such stability, such continuity. Was it stifling? I asked. No, she said, and threw her head back to laugh, exposing the rugged pink roof of her mouth. I gawked in delight. By our second date, we discovered a mutual obsession with the 1918 pandemic, a subject to which I’d flocked like a moth to a light. Perhaps it’s absurd to employ such a maxim, a moth to a light, since what I was attracted to was death, the eternal darkness where it seemed to me back then (when I was still alive) that one might finally get some rest. Now that I am dead, I know better. I can see more clearly. Alas.
The deeper my living-self delved into the subject of the 1918 pandemic, the more I came to believe that plague literature, literature produced in times of unfathomable collective crisis, was especially effective at exposing society’s corrupted exoskeleton, at revealing who was on the front lines of this war we call life; at revealing who was being sacrificed by whom and at what price, to what end, etc. I shared all of this with Beatriz. She was impressed by my line of inquiry. She told me that Spain, having remained neutral during the ravishing of the Great War, was the only source of reliable reporting when it came to the 1918 tragedy. She told me that I should begin my investigation with the greatest Spanish plague writer of that time: Josep Pla. A Catalan born and bred in the province of Girona. It was decided. I would start with Pla and work my way backward from there toward Bocaccio.
A writer is best read in their environment (this is as clear to me in death as it was in life). The plane landed and off I went, pursuing my literary hunch. The first few weeks in Girona were blissful. I saw the labyrinthian Medieval city through Pla’s eyes. I walked along the arcades. I drank café con leche four times a day. I killed many an Estrella beer in the sunny plazas that the narrow cobblestone streets deposited me into—out of the shadows and into the light! I ate more minis than I could count—miniature sandwiches on offer in between breakfast and lunch. Those shiny brown buns with a leaf of lettuce peeking out and a thin slice of prosciutto draped over the wrinkly greenery had my name written all over them. I bought a 1980’s rusted VW camper van. I drove it to the beach and into the hills surrounding Girona. I watched the vermillion sky settle over the lichen covered terracotta roofs every evening. I loved the river and all the bridges that crossed it. I loved the rude muscular sound of Catalan. And my roommate, a certain girl named Paz (an ironic name for a chaotic character!) minded her own business at first. She knew to leave me alone. But things went south as they always do.
Now that I am dead (actually dead!) and looking back on my life from an incorporeal dimension, an ethereal space of nothingness where there is in fact no rest for the weary (and no minis), I can see that I was possessed by a feverish obsession. That I kept asking myself the same inconsequential question: what does it mean to write when the world is on the cusp of vanishing? A miserable line of inquiry, really. Why exactly this obsession had taken hold of me, I had no idea. It hadn’t even occurred to me to take a step back and evaluate my state of mind (my mental health as the living like to say). I can see now, with the punitive retrospective gaze death abundantly provides, that my obsession had everything to do with living on the margins of society, alongside those who live in the kingdom of the sick.
My family suffered from a variety of chronic illnesses. Severe nerve pain, debilitating muscle loss, chronic fatigue, insomnia, skin prone to bruising, stubborn bleeds from minor cuts, fits of rage, bald patches, sore and blistery feet. They blamed all of their symptoms on the wars and revolutions we witnessed from afar in various parts of the Middle East: Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan. They experienced the wars as a symbolic annihilation, the coming of their second death. Who could blame them? They were born, lived, and breathed under the shadow of war in that same triumvirate of nations and when they got out it all started again, but this time they were paying taxes that helped fund the wars.
I was born in America. In that city bereft of angels. An unexpected late child. My siblings had twenty years on me. I was ignorant of the deep roots of their grief and they, in turn, resented me for being “healthy,” a clueless American citizen. Naturalized by birth. Truth be told, they were cruel to me. Aunts, uncles, siblings, parents. The whole lot. It’s awkward, being the sole healthy member of a cursed family. On good days, I was convinced I had simply been misplaced. That I didn’t belong with them, these imposters claiming to be related to me. On bad days, I wished I too was ill, so that I wouldn’t have to endure the bitter sting of the guilt they administered daily. They constantly threatened: “Keep acting like life is on your side and you will get the evil eye!” I spent my youth standing in perplexity before them, confronted with the looming possibility that reality as I had come to know it would vanish. That they would all die and that would be it. What, then, would become of little old me?
That’s when I met Beatriz. My savior. My heroine. My end-all be-all. Not even my death changes that. Sign of a true friendship.
In Girona, Beatriz and I took things to the next level. We began to communicate in a more old-fashioned manner: snail mail. We scribbled crooked lines impatiently in a thick black ink that often smudged, so that half of our messages were indecipherable. This archaic practice strengthened our love for each other. Our sentiments doubled and quadrupled. We became irreversibly bonded by our mutual interest in periods of mass illness and by our shared sense of foreboding that the pandemic of yore was on the cusp of making a comeback, or to be more precise, that it had always been there, lingering beneath the surface, waiting to force us into a state of reckoning. We studied the past as a means of facing the future.
Sometimes Beatriz sent me newspaper cut-outs of darkly robed men in beaked masks carrying a stretcher across a lone hill; warehouses converted into hospitals lined with rows of flimsy metal beds separated by white curtains; women in long skirts and gloves being fumigated as they stepped off trams, a muddy pool at their feet reflecting their sorry figures. Sometimes we jokingly called one another the tower of Pisa, eagerly leaning into our own demise. It’s no secret that we could count our combined friends on one hand. We had each been abandoned by family and former friends to rot in our limited view of reality, our supposed pessimism, our backward glance. But now we had each other. There was a secretive conspiratorial charge to our friendship, an electric attraction that I often compared to what I imagined it felt like for one UFO chaser to encounter another. Beatriz and I no longer had to keep quiet about what we each sensed would soon happen again: everyone on lockdown, forbidden from gathering, cafes and bars boarded up, masks, the stagnant stale air of a shut-down life. Sometimes we scribbled the death count of the various waves of the pandemic on the back of random postcards we purchased at the tobacco stand. I always picked the loveliest postcards. Ones that highlighted Girona’s architectural gems: the winding green river lined on both sides with peach, olive, and lilac-colored houses; the severe looking gray stone arcades of the old quarter; a view of a limpid blue sky with pink streaks and huge puffy clouds captured from the top of the Cathedral stairs.
We had each been abandoned by family and former friends to rot in our limited view of reality, our supposed pessimism, our backward glance.
I scribbled a line from Susan Sontag on the back of the first postcard I sent Beatriz from Girona: “Illness,” I wrote, “is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” I added that I had been surrounded by family who only had citizenship in the kingdom of the sick, people who couldn’t even get a temporary visa to the land of health and that I had inherited the opposite problem; I couldn’t get a visa to their kingdom either.
Thus, I wrote, we lived under one roof while engaged in a cold war, unable to recognize each other. I confessed that they had been remorseless toward me, manipulative to the extreme and that I had bent sideways and backwards, twisting my body into knots trying to help them, only to have insults hurled at me when I failed to relieve them of their individual maladies. Did they think I was the reincarnation of Mother Teresa? With that question I concluded my note to her. Beatriz wrote back immediately. A simple line penned with a cold hand: “You are depressed. You were a dual citizen all along, but you didn’t know it. You are the orphan child of war.”
It’s only now (in the limpid light of death) that I can see she was right. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the constant threat of war against Iran . . . it all pained me too much to admit. I had gone numb. And besides, I was only twenty-five. A novice. A newborn. My mouth still smelled of milk, as we like to say back home. Death can be very clarifying. It can help place blame where blame is due. I blame my family’s extreme emotional reactivity, their fragility, for my stoic behavior. My true character—tender, wounded, anxious, sensitive to the pain of others—was hidden, tucked away. It has only emerged now that I am dead. There’s no escaping vulnerability on the other side of life. That’s death’s lesson. It’s a nose-in-the-mud kind of place where you must take a long hard look at your sorry ass. Denial, dissociation, detachment—not a thing here. It’s like a therapy session that won’t end.
Back to the inimitable Josep Pla. He was born in Palafrugell, a small coastal town with square white houses and flat roads set back from the ocean. A sleepy town where children are taught to make clay pottery and straw hats and baskets. As a young man, he had gone to school in Girona, the regional seat of power. Later, he attended law school in Barcelona. But he dropped out during the pandemic and returned to Palafrugell, where, in his own words, he gave in to the diabolical mania of writing. He was twenty-one at the time. No sooner had Beatriz introduced me to his work than I started to believe I needed to live his life, to walk in his shoes. I was convinced this exercise in usurping his life, or allowing his ghost to usurp mine, would bring me some depth of understanding, a key that would unlock for me the strange destiny of my life. I was determined to experience his existence, to discover through his work the answers to my question regarding the relationship between collective crisis and writing. From Girona, I could easily drive to Barcelona, or go north to Palafrugell with my beat-up van. I could literally walk the streets he walked, order neat whiskeys at the same bars, buy my anchovies from the same stands. I could order drink after drink. Piss in the alley. Though I would have to squat because I am a woman. It wouldn’t have been enough to read his work in America, pontificate from afar. No. I wanted my life to mirror his to truly understand what it means to produce literature when the world is being annihilated, when people are dying on masse.
Now that I am examining these facts from a distance, from the bardo, so to speak, Beatriz’s comment seems self-evident: I was depressed. Lost. Disoriented. An imposter. A fraud. I had pretended to be healthy, making recognition between myself and my family impossible. No wonder they loathed me. But what’s the point of knowing this now, when it’s too late?
As I said, in Girona I lived with Paz (a Chilean expat) in a dilapidated house in the hills. She was a complete character. She had flawless brown skin, the most perfect pair of breasts, legs long and sturdy as tree trunks. She often admired herself in the mirror. I would walk into the bathroom (she never closed the door when she peed) to find her sitting naked on the edge of the tub and staring at herself in the full body mirror she had hung on the wall. Sometimes, she’d nostalgically say, “I used to be even prettier. You should have seen me when I was young!” She was forty, but she didn’t look a day over twenty-five, while I, actually twenty-five, looked like a child, an infant, a little chubby cheeked toddler. A nerd obsessed with words on paper. “You’re still gorgeous,” I’d say to lift her spirits, though I wasn’t lying. I thought she was perfect.
But she was odd and that oddness diminished her beauty. She spent most of her mornings sobbing furiously into her pillow, then she would emerge from her room tight lipped, looking defiant, triumphant even, and take a shower (with the door open) so all of the steam would crawl out and settle on the windows, and then she would return to her room and spend the rest of the day chanting mantras and lighting incense before putting on a short dress and heading out in the evening to prowl for men. There was a regular. Marco. An Italian. A skinny, hairy man with big brown eyes and a dimpled smile. And when he came around she seemed elated, high as a kite. I would hear her orgasm at night, at dawn, at midday. Clockwork. And then he’d be gone, out of rotation for a week or two. We didn’t exactly hang out, Paz and I. But we were kind to one another. Civil.
Until one day, while I was conducting my research, scrolling on my computer through digital archives of newspapers from the fall of 1918 and reading Josep Pla’s diary, she burst in and said loudly: “That’s it, I’m taking you contact dancing. It’s terrifying the way you’re always in your head!” I stared at her, astonished. She went on. Her teeth were exposed, her pupils dilated, her eyebrows raised in tension, two tightropes I couldn’t help but imagine Marco walking clumsily across, the hands he had gotten her off with the night before flailing in the air as he tried to grip the air for balance. “I can’t live like this!” she exclaimed. Her tone was more severe now, anxious and breathless. “With you next door,” she sighed while stomping across my room to the wall where I’d pinned my favorite quotations. She squinted in preparation to read out loud from them. “With you,” she repeated, “writing these bizarre things on the wall, like what’s this,” she said in a demeaning tone, her finger squashing the words as though they were gnats, “illnesses solipsistic grip, and what kind of question is this, what does it mean to speak illness?” Then she turned to me and said, “What do you mean, what does it mean?”
“What?” I asked, confused. She was on a roll.
“Or this, here,” she said, pointing her index finger at the latest note I had made from a book by Gay Becker, and which I planned to share with Beatriz in my next letter. “Order,” she read aloud, “begins with the body . . . our understanding of ourselves and the world begins with our reliance on the orderly functioning of our bodies. We carry our histories with us into the present through our bodies. The past is ‘sedimented’ in the body; that is, it is embodied.” To think of how much clearer my ex-life has become since I’ve shed my body! Alas. I could tell the quote had had an effect on her because her posture relaxed. “Akhh,” she finally said, “all this talk about the body and I haven’t heard you have sex once! No one has touched your body since you’ve lived here.”
“It’s only been four months,” I barked back.
“Whatever,” she said, “all I know is that this pent-up diseased energy is seeping through the walls and making me ill.” I wanted to ask her how she thought her constant weeping made me feel, not to mention her chanting; its incessant vibration was so loud I may as well have been living in the center of a beehive. But there was no time for a rebuttal. She’d put the key to the van into the palm of my hand and said, “We’re gonna be late, let’s go!” It was an order. And I obeyed.
The contact dance class took place in a simple rectangular room with low ceilings and laminated floors. There were fans sitting in all four corners, blowing the muggy air around. The stench of body odor kept slapping me in the face. The other attendees were all wearing loose linen pants and white T-shirts. Marco was there too. He licked his upper lip as soon as he saw Paz walk in. She floated over to him. There was an undeniable magnetic force drawing them into one another’s arms. They rubbed their pelvises against one another and sucked on each other’s mouths while I stood there, arms awkwardly dangling at my sides, forgotten. A second later, the instructor walked in. She was dressed like everybody else, only her shirt was peony pink and her hair was braided to the side, and she smelled like a jasmine bush. She pressed a button on the boombox and atmospheric lounge music filled the room. She bent her knees and let her shoulders hang loosely, her arms dangling limply from their sockets. She rolled her head around and her braid whipped from side to side. “Mimic me,” she ordered in Catalan, and we did.
When the instructor felt we had come sufficiently unhinged, she said “now dance off one another; rub, roll, move! Other people’s skin is a surface you can use to gain momentum in life! Balance off one another, lift one another up!” I was down with the second part, but the part about using other people’s skin put my nerves on edge and I was ready to balk when suddenly Paz and Marco, who had been growing off one another like the branches of a sun-kissed tree, appeared at my side and pressed their bodies against mine. I felt Marco’s head in the curve of my neck and Paz was crawling between my legs, pressing her hind parts into my vagina. I won’t lie. It felt good. Like a spontaneous whole-body massage delivered with excellent pressure by an inexperienced hand. I gave in and rolled around with them for a while. I raised my arms and let them nibble on my armpits. I went down on all fours so Paz could do a cartwheel on my back and land on Marco’s ass.
But after a while I grew bored and aware that were the night to carry on, from class to vermouths sipped on the riverfront to the sound of that delicate medieval music that always comes up from the ancient stones of Girona at dusk, the moon gliding across the dark river, flirtatiously following its curves, we’d end up in bed together, groping and mauling at one another like animals, and then I’d be faced with the pressure to join them every time Marco walked through our crooked door. So, I left. I don’t even think they noticed.
I drove the van to the sea. It puttered and wheezed the whole way up the winding coast. I thought the engine would give out on me, but it didn’t. I turned on a dirt road that led to a small cove hardly anyone knew about. I watched with delight as the headlights glided over the blond sand, the foamy lip of the waves, the puckered rocks of the cove that extended like two embracing arms into the water. I love nothing more than being faced with the ocean at night. That heaving purple beast with silver moonlit scales! What could be more beautiful, I wondered, over and over again as I parked under a lone marine pine and went to sleep to the sound of the waves.
When I woke up, the world was soaked in a lavender light. I sat on the beach—thirsty, hot—and thought about the limits to which this project of mine could be carried. What, I thought, will be the end result of all of this thinking about illness and writing? Or about writing while being witness to the rapid death and disappearance of one’s loved ones, neighbors, strangers, grocers, schoolteachers, nurses, bartenders, bus drivers, friends? Had the pandemic arrived on the heels of the Great War as punishment for our ancestor’s dreams of murder? Was there a sickness at the center of humankind that was incurable, devastating, selfish? Was the compulsion to live freely, to do as one wishes regardless of the needs and wellbeing of others, a uniquely human illness? What about the fish in the sea? And the reptiles in the bushes? And the apes we had mimicked while dancing? How did we compare to them?
All was silent. In that silence, I thought of my family. I hadn’t spoken to them since I’d arrived to Girona. What were they doing? I wondered if they were all still occupying their positions, lying catatonic in different corners of our house, our borrowed home, while watching on the television screen as missiles fired across a black sky in Iraq, one golden flashing sparkling necklace of death hovering above that distant horizon for ten seconds, or maybe fifteen, before crumbling a home or a school or a hospital onto the heads of innocent civilians. What was my role in all of this? Where was my place in the universe? I had no idea. I still have no idea even though I am, technically speaking, on the other side of things. I walked up to the sea and waded in the waves. I bent over and washed my face. I saw my reflection on that salinated surface. It was the face of a depressed person. A wounded face. I had not yet found my place in the grand orchestra of the world. I hadn’t found the note that would tune me back up and put me on good terms with my life. No. The good life was out of reach.
Had the pandemic arrived on the heels of the Great War as punishment for our ancestor’s dreams of murder?
To my relief Marco and Paz were nowhere in sight when I returned to the house. I made myself a pot of coffee and grabbed a roll of bread and some butter from the fridge, sat on the couch and kicked my feet up. I was running out of money. I hadn’t budgeted at all. I’d spent too much on the van. I’d eaten too many minis. Drank too much. I hadn’t told Paz that I didn’t have enough to pay rent next month. Once I run out of money, I thought, I can sleep in the van. It will be my home, a roof over my head. I could feel that day approaching.
The next day I received a reply from Beatriz. It was the gravest letter I had received from her thus far. It read: “I have gone through life without referring to or speaking about my body, in a kind of dissociative trance. When we are in pain, we can no longer deny our constant condition of mortality. In other words, disease forces us to address the body, to speak it. Yet, rendering legible the subjective experience of disease—the business of speaking illness—is a challenging one. I am not up for the task. I have decided to give up the fight. I have been ill for some time now and I feel with each passing day more exhausted, less capable of surviving this slow descent to my grave. I have decided to speed the process up, to take matters into my own hands. Who will deny me that freedom? The freedom to end this life I’ve bared and conducted to its limits? I have had very few real choices in my life. Our friendship is the best among those. Do not make the same mistakes I’ve made. I was taught as a young woman to be ashamed of myself. To enter into all of my relationships as a person whose role it is to service the needs of others, to anticipate them even. Now, my husband, is gone. He is no longer looming over me with that huge voice of his, those hands of his that seemed to me larger than the paws of a bear. And I am ready to rest. This decision, final, will be my own even if it is the only big, bold decision I ever made for myself. I will wait for you to arrive so that I can give you my papers. We should meet IRL as they say. What a strange world we are living in—in real life—who came up with that? Hurry, I am losing my grip.”
I stood in the middle of my room in a frozen rictus. Beatriz, my only true friend. My friend of the dark night of the soul. How could I have not known that she was ill? That she had attended the death café to discuss her own looming death, that I’d appeared and derailed her. I remembered telling her that her fingers were like the legs of an insect and felt ashamed of myself. I turned bright red. I felt hot. I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I stared out the windows at the distant hills covered in soft grass, at the hay bales rolled into perfect circles, left to rest in the fields that skirted those hills. I took in the big blue sky. The sun was shining brightly. I had the impression that Girona was lifting off into the heavens, hovering above the earth, shaking itself loose from its hold. Oh, how eternally painful life is on earth and, yet, how utterly pleasurable it can be. Death is more monotone, less extreme; at least it has that going for it.
On an impulse, I packed my belongings, I cleared the walls, my desk, my small collection of shoes. I left a note for Paz on the fridge. “Goodbye and thank you for taking me out the other night!” There was nothing else left to say. I got in my van and headed toward Beatriz’s house in Madrid.
I drove all day, stopping only to let the van cool off. I was terrified of arriving too late, of finding Beatriz immobile, lifeless. At night, I slept in fits and starts in a parking lot adjacent to the highway. I felt like a runaway, a prisoner who had broken loose. I drove down the highway for two days, at thirty, cars overtaking me on both sides, the engine strained by the soaring midday temperatures, the forbidding Spanish heat. I had the impression while driving that everyone’s lives were progressing while mine, like the lives of the writers whose days had been stalled abruptly by the pandemic almost a century ago, was coming to yet another halt. Now I can see that I was experiencing a premonition. Intuiting my own demise. Death has a way of illuminating the truth. And the truth was that when I’d thought I was lifting myself up by leaving life as I’d known it behind, I had only regressed further into darkness. I was only digging my grave. I’d ended up alone, in an unreliable rusty VW van from the 80’s on the other side of the Atlantic, chasing the papers of a friend—my only friend—who was on the cusp of taking her own life. What a terrible joke. Unrefined. Brute. A rude indelicate joke of cosmic proportions.
I finally arrived at Beatriz’s apartment. I stood at the gates of the complex, dehydrated, the sound of the tires rolling against the tarmac still echoing in my ears. I stared at the top floor of the building, flooded with dread. I kept searching the windows. I feared I would see her body hanging from a rope tied to the exposed beams in her ceiling. She had given me virtual tours of her penthouse. If that’s the route she’d chosen to go, those beams would have been the way to do it. But the sun was too bright and the windows reflected only a few fat clouds drifting lazily across the sky, grazing its wild blue surface. Perhaps, I thought, she’d waited for me after all. But I had my reservations: It had taken me too long to get to Madrid; she had already sounded simultaneously desperate and decided in her message, which had likely taken days to make its way over to me in the first place; what would she stand to gain from a face-to-face encounter with me, her devoted pen pal of death? I was at war with myself. Enter the gates, ride the elevator up to her penthouse, find her dead, call the police. That was one scenario. Turn back, return to the sea, live under a marine pine in the van. That was the alternative scenario. There wasn’t a third option. I didn’t even have enough money to buy a return ticket to America. I could teach English to Russians. I’d seen ads by Russian ex-pats searching for English tutors for their children all over Girona. What could be so terrible about teaching English to Russian children while their parents lounged by their infinity pools overlooking the sea, their shiny blond hair parted down the middle, their scalps burning, their whole bodies glistening with the waters of the world? No, I thought, no. I’d rather clean toilets for a living.
I walked through the gates. I went up the elevator. It jerked up to the top floor and spat me out violently. Beatriz’s door was cracked open. I poked my head in. “Hello?” I called out, “Hello?” I heard my own voice ricochet off the walls. I opened the door further and stepped in. The walls looked wet, like they had been sweating. I felt my heart galloping like a spooked horse in my chest: thud-thud, thud-thud, thud-thud. I knew then that she was dead. That she had done herself in. It was only a matter of finding her body, of going through the rooms. I began my search. The first three bedrooms were bereft even of furniture. I walked down a narrow long corridor to the back of the apartment and opened a pair of French doors that lead to her library. I saw her before I walked in: she was lying on a wicker day bed, her pale white arm hanging limply off the side of the mattress, her lifeless hand curled on the floor. I felt calm then. All the blood that had been assaulting my heart retreated back into my limbs. I walked up to her. She looked so peaceful. Her round, plump face, her gray eyes, her thin wide mouth, her chestnut-colored lashes . . . all still, motionless. I closed her eyes and let my hand rest on her face for a minute. I said the prayers for the dead I had been taught by my mother. May your soul rest eternally, I said. May you never be asked to return to this earth. I was saying those words again now, but for myself. I was begging for rest.
She had left her papers—her research on the 1918 plague—for me in a stack at the foot of the day bed. I retrieved the papers, then pulled up a chair and sat next to her. There was a post-it stuck to the top of the stack. It read: “To my only true friend. Did you know that Roberto Bolaño had retreated to Girona to write too? He was a fugitive, like you. I exchanged many a letter with him. What is left of those letters is in this stack I’ve left for you.” I had not known. Yet another thing I did not know about Beatriz. And no one had bothered to tell me that RB too had lived in that walled-in stony city that is always covered in a veil of mist. I would have felt so much less solitary living there had I known that he had lived there alone, too, in exile. But alas. He was dead now, too. And now so am I. All three of us are. Me, Beatriz, Bolaño. To think that we haven’t seen each other once in the Bardo. All those empty promises of reunion. No, you just get the one life, the one go. I held Beatriz’s note in my hand and stared at it. That’s when it happened. That’s when I began to disappear. When my turn was up. When I began to turn to ash along with her papers. To become words.
At first, I didn’t understand what was happening. I just noticed something terrible begin to take shape, something horrifying: a rash was working its way up my arms, there were blisters forming in the folds of my fingers. I looked out the window. The sky was blood red; it looked as though it had been set on fire, ready to sear the world. It’s my fate, I thought, catching up with me; the toxic waste of those wars that so consumed my family were blowing my way now too. A cross-generational inheritance. I sat there, calmly, silently, a little confused. I couldn’t have moved if I had wanted to. I felt heat curling up my legs. I felt the world melting in slow motion. I saw myself being swallowed whole. My heart was clamping shut. I was so young and yet so old. I saw myself fuse with her papers. Become as ethereal as language. The show, I thought to myself, quietly, is almost over. My prayers are being answered. I said to myself: you just have to hang in there for one more second, one more minute, another hour, maybe two.
We live in a moment where debt invokes the crushing weight of student loans, medical bills, mortgages, and all the other unsustainable systems that scaffold our world. These debts hang over us, invisible, exerting pressure and power over our lives, yet even in contemporary literature, with few exceptions, many fiction writers tend to overlook the subject of debt. This is why when I began writing A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens, I wanted Hugo’s debt to be abrasively visible—an entity that would fall into bed with him, caress him, poke him mid-conversation.
Early in drafting my novel, I revisited novels of the 19th century—a time when debt was a popular subject. Many writers, like Charles Dickens, underscore the perils of falling into debt; in their time, they sought to reform debt collection practices. What 19th-century fiction shows us is that if you overextend your finances, you’ll ruin your life, unless you can be saved or forgiven by a creditor. What comes through is a treatment of debt that squarely situates the debtor in a position where if they don’t work hard enough, invest smart enough, or come into good fortune, they are cast aside as other.
We see this sort of framework realized on the national stage. When student loan forgiveness comes up, what we often hear from those in the opposition is that borrowers should have made better choices. When folks discuss the challenges that a younger generation is having in affording a mortgage (due to debt-income ratios), the younger generation is accused of being lazy, difficult to work with, and irresponsible (too many visits to the café, or too many orders of avocado toast, or not enough hard work). The result, almost always, is that the debtor comes to experience regret or shame.
What I want to believe, however, is that we can expand the way we think about debt. The capacity to owe something to someone or something is a gift—the first step in nurturing a family, a community, a sustainable planet. The joy in writing A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens was exploring this idea: how Hugo’s desire to be free from his monetary debts conflict with his emotional attachment to what his debt represents. There are times when Hugo isn’t even sure he wants forgiveness; he wonders, does his creditor really have the power to forgive him?
Here’s a list of seven contemporary and somewhat contemporary stories, highly recommended, that complicate what it means to live having fallen into debt, each of which my novel is in conversation with.
Mean Spirit is a work of historical fiction set in the early 1920s when the displaced Osage Nation found oil beneath their new land. Overnight, a people accustomed to living sustainably and in communion with the land became millionaires, and this new kind of wealth brought many problems from within their community and outside. Told as a murder mystery, Mean Spirit follows Stace Red Hawk, a government official summoned to investigate the murder of Grace Blanket, a very wealthy Osage Indian survived by her daughter, Nola. Through Stace, we see that the surrounding colonizers, previously concerned with exploiting land, have shifted their attention to exploiting the Osage people by infantilizing them, murdering them, and marrying them. As the Osage people fall into debt, they must quickly become savvy in money management, at the same time that they realize they must find a path back to their roots—a powerful book, full of magic, that shows how debt was weaponized by the colonizers.
Brenda Peynado’s debut short story collection is such a powerful look of immigration, power, and resistance across sixteen stories that span a multitude of sub-genres, from literary realism to science fiction and magical realism. These stories explore what we owe to our histories and to one another. The story “We Work in Miraculous Cages,” most explicitly contends with debt. It follows a young woman saddled with student loans and credit card debt, consigned to a life working multiple jobs (at a hair salon and a veterinary clinic) as she navigates a relationship and tries to make a path toward being free from her financial obligations—a heartbreaking look into the way our debts can arrest us in an economic system masquerading as a community, while, simultaneously, making us all foreign to one another.
Set during the sub-prime mortgage crises, How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water is a novel that follows Cara as she sits through a series of interviews with an unemployment office—a requirement so that she can continue to receive unemployment checks. Through Cara, we hear stories about a larger community that is struggling to make a life, whether they’re priced out of home buying or pressured into taking on whatever job arises to simply make ends meet. In the process, we learn about Cara’s early life in the Dominican Republic, her complex familial history, and we catch glimpses of her love for the community in Washington Heights—a community that is at-risk of being replaced by a younger, wealthier, whiter population. Beautifully rendered, this novel presents working-class challenges while offering hope.
The Magic of Blood is a collection of working-class short stories set in the Southwest, with a razor-sharp focus on debt, labor, and power. The opening story, “Look on the Bright Side,” tells the story of a tenant who takes his landlord to court when the rent is raised beyond the legal limit, and though he wins the case, he ultimately gets evicted anyway. Many stories in the collection follow this theme, with protagonists that sometimes seek justice by resisting the systems that they live under, yet they are still crushed in the end. What The Magic of Blood shows is how characters negotiate their relationships and identities, while facing down the pressures of the labor market and working to affirm their lives.
In this hilarious satire, Gary Shteyngart offers a dystopic portrait of the United States in the “zero hour” of their economy, as Chinese ships enter New York Harbor to collect on US debts. Framed by an unlikely love story, we follow Lenny Abramov, 39-years old, a man nostalgic for simpler times—like when books were bound and made of paper. We also follow his partner Eunice Park, 24-years old—a young woman consumed by technology. They gravitate to one another for companionship and security; however, in a society brimming with security, surveillance, and creditors, they struggle to really connect and build a life together. This is a smart book that takes the logic of US dependency on technology and credit to its final conclusions.
As Kathy H. faces down her own mortality, she recalls her life in Hailsham, a school for cloned children, who as adults will be expected to donate their organs to the people who commissioned their existence. What starts out as a novel veering toward resistance and rebellion, becomes a story about finding dignity in settling one’s debts and coming to terms with the cost. This novel raises many ethical questions about the ways that money and power can create hierarchies that privilege some forms of life over others.
Thanks to the film, most people are familiar with The Neverending Story’s opening act, which culminates with Bastian giving the Childlike Empress a new name and stopping The Nothing. In the often overlooked second act, Bastian finds himself in a world that is a blank slate, and he is given the task of remaking the world by wishing it into existence. The catch, however, is that every time he makes a wish, it costs him a part of his memory. As Bastian brings the world of fantasy back to life, he forgets his friends, his family, and he loses his sense of self. Even when he recognizes the dangers of over-wishing, he cannot help but continue to spend his memories. Overextended in a currency of wish-making, Bastian loses his humanity and falls into anger, rashness, and a hunger for power. Bastian’s debt to the AURYN (wish maker) becomes unpayable until Bastian’s friends help. Michael Ende’s sophisticated play on narrative holds, at its center, a lesson about what we lose when we forget (or can’t see) what we owe our loved ones.
Reading Terrace Story is finding yourself delighted to be in the fairytale, even when you know the witch is coming for you. Charming and devastating in equal measure, this slim trickster novel asks questions of loneliness, enduring connection, and the multiplicity of self. Hilary Leichter, author of Temporary, plays with genre and form in this second book, leaping from a cramped city apartment, to stories of kings and queens and hermits, to “the tip of a [space] hub that keeps the suburbs in orbit.” Chapters feel like tessellations and plot arises as thought experiment, asking, How do we make space for one another?
In this novel, a house is too big and then too small. A cup doubles in size, and then a street, and then a national park. Two estranged sisters are kept apart by two worlds. People do the same verb over and over again until the end of time. Death is a fog over everything: a woman loses her family even though they’re only feet apart; a man wins his own death, fair and square. Parents “look absurd but also amazing.” An astronomer gives marital advice (“Beyond this, nothing.”). And Stephanie, one of the novel’s main characters, and certainly the one who takes over most of its pages, creates new space just by thinking about it. The strange ability starts in infancy, but it takes on darker, more sinister shades after she loses her sister.
Stephanie, “forever out of step with the whole world,” finds herself often alone, friendless and abandoned by her parents. Her magic, like Rumpelstiltskin’s, is one that takes even as it gives—and all is taken, not just from those who receive, but from the giver, too. Witnessing how the gift can become a curse, not just for Stephanie but for those close to her, one recalls Kierkegaard’s yawning abyss. Yet, there is so much joy in Leichter’s pages—and beauty, which settles in the chest, “transitioning from something seen to something felt.” We’re reminded that, whatever has befallen us, we can start over. The human experience, Leichter contends, is a weird, warped, malleable one—and often we are what is being remade.
Annie Liontas: Why do we need the trickster novel? What does it tell us about who we are and where we’re going?
Hilary Leichter: Trickster novels are the opposite of narrative manipulation, because the worst feeling—the thing I hate the most when I’m reading—is I can feel the emotions being pulled out of me. Paradoxically, the dishonesty of being a trickster on the page actually has a kind of truth to it that I’m interested in. The additional layers of misdirection and play perhaps call attention to the misdirection inherent in any narrative, even the ones that claim a kind of unimpeachable veracity.
What I’m most interested in is the kind of active engagement that allows a book not only to become a book that I’ve read, but an event in my life that I’ve experienced. For me, that’s only possible when the book requires something of me, and that’s risky because a lot of people read so nothing is required of them. But I want something to be required of me, I want to be an active participant in the text. With a trickster novel, you’re moving through a world that is closing and opening itself to you at various intervals. There are things there that can’t be seen until the end. There are things that can’t be experienced until the middle. And hopefully it’s something that expands in scope on a second reading. That feels honest, the way a text changes as we approach it again and again.
AL: How are time and grief tricksters?
HL: Time is one of my obsessions in writing. I teach a class on time travel and the uses of time in fiction at Columbia. It’s something that was constantly on my mind when I was writing my first book to a lesser extent, but Terrace Story for sure. Time is the unsung tool of the fiction toolbox. It’s this intersection where a reader, a writer, and a character can meet. It’s about the time that it takes you to read something versus the time that it takes a character to experience something versus the time that it takes me to write that thing. It’s this point of connection that is fascinating to me. And in writing about a terrace that appears and disappears, about space that appears and disappears, it felt only natural that time should collapse and expand, too.
Time is the unsung tool of the fiction toolbox.
Grief made its way into the novel without my permission. The book started as a short story I wrote in 2017, and it was published in 2020—and by then the world had changed profoundly. The story became something else. There was a communal grief that we were all experiencing, and then there was personal grief, too. I was thinking about people I had lost, and not just lost due to death but lost in the way that you lose people over time—that particular kind of pain of losing someone without them being gone.
AL: We follow two couples, Annie and Edward and Lydia and George, witnessing the forces that bring them together and pull them apart—sometimes, forever. Yet we sense that love in Terrace Story is enduring, even timeless. Is love to be trusted? Is it the only thing to be trusted?
HL: I don’t know that love is the only thing that can be trusted, but it’s something that’s worth sticking around to explore. It’s something worth finding out about. Love can be incredibly painful, and it’s not always worth it if the way we measure worth is by how much love we have in the end. The characters are wrestling with that conundrum—”I know I could lose everything, but I still want to feel this way.” And that’s beautiful to me, especially at a time when I think so many of us are thinking about what it means to continue existing in the world in this period that feels like a steep decline—what it means to continue loving, to continue bringing life into this world, and to continue choosing that way of living.
AL: Do you think it’s worth it for Annie?
HL: I do. You know, there’s this moment where she’s having a conversation with someone toward the end of the book at a time in the near or maybe not so near future, when there’s not much left of the world. There’s a system in place to preserve information and to preserve knowledge and to preserve experiences, and Annie asks this person, “Well, are you collecting information or are you collecting love?” And she goes on to say that there can be love even when someone is alone. Annie is someone who is very much alone for much of the book, but I think she still believes that love is not necessarily dependent on the presence of others. It’s something that can exist beyond life. And grief is an expression of that.
AL: We learn that Stephanie, who is at the heart of this novel, can create new space. This uncanny ability, however, cannot save her from a lifetime of grief. After she loses her sister, we see that this ability to make space out of nothing only brings distance between herself and others. How do both the reader and Stephanie grapple with this isolation and pain?
The world feels like an equation that doesn’t add up sometimes.
HL: The problem of space was a huge question for me in writing this book, because it’s about a couple living in an apartment with limited space, and then suddenly one day they have more of it. But then it became a question of, How do you experience space as a reader? How do you feel something is large or something is cramped when you’re reading a book. How do you feel empty or full? And so space was not only a physical problem, but an emotional one too—the idea of feeling vastness or looking at the night sky and feeling a sense of wonder, which can leave you feeling full or feeling claustrophobic. I was looking at how these emotions overlap with the physical constraints around the characters, but I was also thinking about how the reader would be able to feel the world getting bigger or smaller in the book. That was important to me. I didn’t want to use visual tricks like having the text run around the edge of the page because, while that’s really fun and I enjoy when books do that, I don’t think that’s how we experience space. I don’t think that makes you feel the depth or the limitlessness of something.
I also had questions about how we actually make room for other people in our lives. You hear people use the expression making space or holding space for someone else. What does that actually mean? Does that bring you closer to other people or does it add more distance between us? Stephanie, she’s catastrophically alone. She has this ability to make the world bigger and it leaves her world smaller. I’m curious about those contradictions, all of the ways in which there’s such disgusting abundance in the world that we live in, and such incredible need. The world feels like an equation that doesn’t add up sometimes. And it certainly doesn’t add up for Stephanie.
AL: Still, there is something powerful about making space, especially in a world where women aren’t supposed to take up any let alone claim it. How are you thinking about that as an act of power for Stephanie?
HL: Other women in the book find ways to claim space or take up space or even steal space or make room for the people around them—but Stephanie can do a little bit more. She can go beyond the limits of what people normally can do. So there is a political weight to it. I wanted to write an anti-superhero story for her. What if you could do something extraordinary that could potentially make the world different and even better, and it left you completely misunderstood?
Do you think she’s powerful?
AL: I really do. I think the loss and isolation are proof of that.
HL: There’s a kind of “extraordinary skill-set” narrative that we’re all familiar with, but I love the idea of a “special power” just being a part of a character’s daily life and their world. Not all of us can make an imaginary terrace appear, but we can do things that no one else can see, and they remain unseen oftentimes forever. There are no Avengers that knock on the door asking you to join because of the incredible roast chicken that you make. But that’s fascinating to me, the small, extraordinary things that people are capable of that get lost when they’re gone.
AL: Characters like Annie and Lydia are plagued by self-doubt because they can’t trust their own senses. Stephanie hides what others, if they’re looking, can plainly see. How do perception and reality function in this novel?
HL: Perception is the thing that makes the world feel bigger or smaller, and it became clear to me that the main way to make the novel contract and expand was through shifts in perspective. I was trying to blur the lines between what’s real and what’s imagined and what’s inferred and what we accept as reality. I think my work gets pegged as surreal or fabulist, but I think of myself as a realist writer. Our understanding of reality and the largeness of that understanding is the thing that allows people to be believed. There’s this great Julio Cortázar quote that suggests a version of reality that is “more expansive, more elastic, one where everything fits.” That’s how I approached the world of this book. It’s not that it’s surreal, it’s just that the world is bigger than we have agreed on it being.
AL: What would you make space for, if you could?
HL: More books! More bookshelves! More art! More time! Space and time go hand in hand, and I think making space is often making time for other people and for yourself.
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