If you want to be a likable person, one easy thing you can do is not murder anyone. I would go as far as to argue that not murdering people is indispensable to being likable. But we’re not talking about real life here. In fiction, we can explore the darker aspects of being human without the inevitable real-world consequences. A character can do harm without a corporeal person being hurt.
But even in fiction, we tend to like characters who share our values. As a rule, I root for the protagonist and rarely feel sympathy for the culprit. And yet, I occasionally find myself hoping that the killer gets away with it. It’s stranger still when this happens to me as a writer. In my novel, Imperfect Lives, two strangers are thrust into turmoil when a contract killer makes a deathbed confession. At heart, my novel is about murder, but I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if it’s about villains.
Deciding if the killer is a villain is half the fun of reading the novels on this list. If you read them with friends, don’t be surprised if you find yourself engaged in a killer debate.
When Joe Goldberg falls in love, he commits his heart and soul. Unfortunately, the world sometimes gets in the way of true love. Fortunately, or unfortunately (depending on who you are), Joe will do whatever he must to rescue his romantic entanglement. When murder is necessary, he may not like it, but he’s up for the task. He’s a rare individual who will do anything for love.
When Paul Phillips happens across a man in the woods beating a dog, a confrontation ensues, and Paul finds himself in a situation he’d never imagined. A carpenter living with his girlfriend Kate, a recovering alcoholic turned self-help writer, and Kate’s nine-year-old daughter, Paul is a man with a conscience who wants to be good. Is he good? Now, he has a toxic secret that is slowly seeping into every facet of his life.
Does the universe give us karma or is the onus on individuals to make it happen? Dark Things I Adore won’t answer that question, but it does give us Audra, a plucky and compelling heroine. When she invites Max, her art professor and mentor, to her home in rural Maine, an almost foreign land to Max, he has no idea that his past is stalking him. Filled with beautiful art and ugly deeds, dangerous twists and shocking violence, this novel offers many dark things, some of which you may even adore.
Dylan Moran is not a murderer. Of course, if he was, that would explain the untimely death of his beloved wife. In fact, in a parallel universe, Dylan Moran is a murderer. There are many Dylan Moran’s in many universes, and the one who lost his wife wants his life back. Traversing universes is a dangerous game and a thrilling one in this mind-boggling sci-fi novel.
What can go wrong when a research psychologist designs a study that enrolls seven psychopaths as students at the same college? Before you answer, you should probably know that Chloe, one of the psychopaths, is there to stalk and exact vengeance on an old friend. Everything goes wrong and college life turns deadly when one of the psychopaths is murdered. Can Chloe carry out her own murder plot while avoiding being murdered by a fellow psychopath?
Technically, no one is murdered in this novel, but there is a horrific accident followed by a desperate coverup. Leo Sheffield, a powerful businessman, is a complicated individual even before the dead body he must hide from his family. Corey Halpern, a Long Island local who resents the rich and their summer homes, witnesses everything. A mediation on social class and the insidious danger of secrets, this novel mixes literary writing with page-turning suspense.
John Keller is as ordinary as his first name. Except that he’s a killer for hire. His work typically involves travel, and things often don’t go as planned. Luckily, John is as skilled at extricating himself from tricky situations as he is at killing people as he is at blending in.
When a vampire kills a human to feed, is it murder? If not, is it murder when a vampire kills a human for sport? Lestat de Lioncourt, born a mortal in France in 1760, transfigured into a vampire in 1781, was thoroughly demonized by Louis de Pointe du Lac in Interview with the Vampire (the first book in the series and the proper place to start). In The Vampire Lestat (the second in the series), Lestat defends himself through the telling of his long and exciting history. A philosopher at heart, Lestat searches the world for other vampires, always seeking to discover the meaning of immortality.
I picture myself standing in the midst of a ruin. All around me there are mildewed canvases, rolled up crudely or crammed into drawers. The edges of the papers, mouse-eaten or worm-eaten, fall into heaps of dust.
As I work through the disorderly archive and chip away at the mountain of responsibilities, my mind is drawn back to this image of Turner’s studio, left in a state of Pompeii-like destruction after the painter’s death. That same atmosphere of decay permeates the Library in which I spend my mornings. On better days, disorder is forestalled, and there is only the linearity of the catalogue and the neat collection of books and objects. On days of anxiety, such as today, I find myself stranded in the wreckage. The dust that has gathered in the corners, the moldy papers, the shelves that bend under the weight of books and archival boxes, all these seem to be advancing toward me, millimeter by millimeter, until they overwhelm me.
September 2
A calmer start to the day. A thin column of sunlight shines down from above. Elsewhere, the Library’s underground storage space is illumined by a solar-powered lamp that is recharged daily on the desiccated lawn. I write by the light of this lamp and a pile of books serves as my desk.
Before I sat down to write, I spent some time admiring the flowers I keep in secret. The earthquake five years ago resulted in an irreparable crack down one wall of the Library. But plants have forced their way through the fissure and have begun to sprout in the space where books were once stored. Even now, as aridness eats through the outside world, the weeds and flowers that have flourished in the aftermath of disaster are protected by the shadows and nourished by the water from the broken pipe. I have not told anyone about this pipe, not even Aidan, as it would be fixed immediately, depriving the flowers of their sole source of water. This spot of green is the only place where I allow water to drip away unchecked; these flowers the only luxury I permit myself to keep in these days of want and longing.
It has been almost three years since it rained in this part of England. First came the floods, then came the droughts. Here at Mornington Hall, the one-thousand-acre parkland is parched, and the remaining leaves crumble between my fingers. Parts of the earth lie fractured, creating intricate webbing that spreads out like dark veins. I never thought I’d miss the cold, wet air on rainy days. We now count in milliliters, careful not to exceed the amount of water the government has allotted to the house. The small bottles Aidan and I pass between us are not merely tools of survival, but also mementoes of a past that recedes further and further with each passing month.
A nature diary composed over the past decade would read like a catalogue of losses. There was a time when catastrophe seemed far away. We glided through the seasons confident that each calendar year would yield the same degree of heat and cold, the same blossoms and migrating birds. Then change became visible. In aerial photographs, the earth, cracked, burnt, and striated by the lines of industry, resembled a painting, and some saw beauty. Nothing is certain, they continued to say. We’ll see, we’ll see. We have seen, yet the debates have intensified and some persist in believing the sky to be unchanging, the only immutable thing in a world of fluid truths.
Yesterday, I agonized over what to do with the boxes of newspapers I had collected at one point, news articles that detailed the progressive deterioration of the world we knew. I felt obliged, as an archivist, to keep a physical copy of everything, as though the collecting and preserving of these words could somehow stave off disaster. But a few months ago, during yet another heat wave that killed human and non-human animals alike, I stopped collecting the news. For the first time, archiving seemed futile. The heat encased us like a cocoon and we re-emerged into the melting world with fewer illusions about the future.
This morning, after confirming that the cedar tree I have loved for so long is indeed beyond saving, I started using the archived newspapers for packaging.
September 3
I left my childhood home and came here to Mornington Hall twenty-two years ago, at the start of my research fellowship. But now, in less than a year, this house, too, will be gone. The Long Gallery with its view of the park; the Conservatory with its surviving plants; the Library with its white columns—all these are to be demolished in about seven months.
Mornington, in its old age, has endured countless cycles of change and reinvention. It was once an aristocratic estate, a school, a hospital, and for a period of time after the Second World War, a cow shed and pigeon coop. When Aidan’s family purchased the estate decades ago, they restored it to its former self as a symbol of long-lost refinement.
We have now entered another phase of disrepair. The house has been falling apart for years. Rainstorms have inundated rooms; heat has dried and cracked the paint and plaster. Some days, Mornington seems uncommonly fragile. Pipes burst, windows break, and parts of the façade peel away in the wind. Since I first moved in with Aidan, we have attempted to avert decay by daily care, by the physical work of cleaning and mending, saving the house one piece at a time, and accommodating as many travelers as possible in the rooms that remain intact.
People once spoke of Ruinenlust, of the picturesque and melancholy beauty of abandoned buildings. On one occasion, Aidan joked that Mornington resembles the Villa Savoye, which had fallen into a state of complete dilapidation, filled with the stench of urine and excrement, its white walls smeared with graffiti. Even in that soiled state, Villa Savoye was still considered beautiful by some. But here, we know only the exhaustion of having to keep the house from collapsing.
The structural damage caused by the earthquake compromised much of the underground storage system in the Library. The robotic arms are broken, and we have to climb down a ladder to access the lower storage level. The flood from the burst pipes also damaged the collection. We have sold most of the valuable pieces to finance the repairs, including Turner’s A View on the Seine, once the gem of the house. Some artworks have gone to the national archives and museums; others to private collectors.
The items that remain in the Library do not have high market value: the books and objects that have sustained significant damage from the flood, and the ephemera I added during my time here. Before Mornington is dismantled, most of these artifacts must be reorganized and re-catalogued for potential online sale. Some items will be discarded. Others we might add to our own collection, which we will take with us when we leave in the spring. I also wish to keep a record of the objects that I find evocative, with a description of their physical states as they exist now, in my hands. This, then, has been my main task since early August: the building of an archive of remains.
Also in seven months: Julian’s scheduled return to Mornington, to visit the house one last time. And I will see, for the first time in twenty-two years, the man who forced himself upon me in the unbearable summer heat. I still remember the cries of the nightjar that evening, and the agitated glimmer of the lamp that arced over the painting of death hanging on the wall.
Photographs
Twelve black-and-white photographs, measuring 27 x 35 cm, depicting Mornington Hall, ca. 1920. Unbound, held in brown archival box. Photographer unknown. Toning and wear along the edges. Imperfections due to moisture.
September 12
The house in the photographs both is and is not the house I know. The first photo in the series shows the front façade. At the start of my fellowship, I first beheld this view in person: the pale stone, the central dome, and the long path lined with stretches of uncut grass. I remember how a breeze moved through the grass as I walked by, so that the undulating fields resembled a green sea bearing the barge that was Mornington.
The next photo shows the main entrance, flanked by Corinthian columns, with a marble frieze and intricate stone garlands above. When I reached the front door that first day, I found it wide open. My eyes scanned the colors in the vestibule—the black-and-white marble of the floor; the bronze of the sweeping staircase; and the pale-green panels on the walls. The house was silent and pristine, as if it had never known human habitation. An administrative assistant came out to greet me and led me to the Round Gallery, where I was asked to wait. She told me that the quiet was to be enjoyed while it lasted, because the renovations were to begin in a few days’ time. A new glasshouse was to be erected in the garden, and many rooms to be modernized, at the behest of the new owner, Julian.
Next in the box is a photo of the Round Gallery, an octagonal space topped with a dome and sky-lit through a glass oculus. Inside the semi-circular apses were marble statues of Roman gods; on the walls were some of the best paintings in the house.
On that first day, I tried to take a closer look at the Constable, but it was hung rather high up. As I stood on tiptoes to examine the landscape of a rural scene, a gust of wind blew in through the open front door, bringing with it a spiral of loose sheets of paper that spun around the gallery before the gust died down and the sheets settled on the floor. That was when I first met Aidan. He ran in after the papers with a stack of sheets in his hands. I still remember the warmth of his extended hand, which I held lightly in mine.
I wanted to welcome you when you arrived, he said, but I lost track of time. This place is temporarily in my charge.
He picked up the papers, covered with architectural sketches, and led me into the Hall, which was modeled on the atrium of a Roman villa. There were twenty fluted alabaster columns, with Corinthian capitals, standing on the patterned marble floor. A skylight lit the space from above. Gilded plaster ornaments filled the voids between antique statues and urns.
I know it’s a lot to take in at first, Aidan said. But these great houses are never what they seem. You see the faded silk wallpaper? I’ve been told to get rid of that. I also need to replace that tapestry. The moths got to it.
In the nineteenth century, I later read, Mornington Hall was famed for its seamless transition from interior to exterior, so that the man-made and the natural were interlaced in complete harmony. Large doors and windows opened onto the veranda lined with plants, beyond which were the flower beds and the velvety lawns, all replicated in the mirrors of the Long Gallery. Wallpaper was covered with trellises of roses, and ceilings painted with clouds and stars. The first owner, who had commissioned the building of the house to showcase his sugar wealth, held parties regularly. One party, mimicking a famous fête hosted at Carlton House by the spendthrift Prince Regent, featured an actual stream that coursed through the Dining Hall, stocked with goldfish and lined with real banks of moss and grass.
I sometimes wonder what Turner, the son of a barber, felt when he first stepped into Mornington. I wonder if he felt the same sense of unease that I, the daughter of a gardener, felt—still feel—when I came to this seat of opulence, the opulence that would not have allowed room for someone like me. I find greater comfort in the house’s current state of dereliction. It seems more honest, more aligned with the rest of the world.
September 15
Tonight, a simple dinner of vegetable soup and roasted potatoes. Aidan has just returned from a work trip, to survey a potential construction site. We decided to use candles at dinner, for the ambience, and the candlelight created haloes around the faces gathered at the table so that, for a brief while, we resembled the subjects of a painting. Aidan had on blue denim this evening, with the orange sweater that I knitted for him three years ago. The colors recall a Poussin painting, even though I don’t think he ever captured a scene by candlelight.
When I first stood before Poussin’s The Abduction of the Sabine Women, I was seduced by the intense colors. The ultramarine appeared to exert a physical force that leapt out of the frame and into the space of the gallery so that I was pinned to the spot, unable to move or avert my gaze. I was so transfixed by that blue that I nearly overlooked the violent nature of the subject.
The painting, completed in 1633–34, originally belonged to the French ambassador to Rome; then it passed to Cardinal Richelieu in Paris, where it stayed in several palatial residences before it was sold to a collector in Rotterdam. In the late eighteenth century it arrived in England, where it was housed for over a hundred years at the magnificent Stourhead. A few decades at Doughty House, in Richmond, followed, before the painting entered a museum collection in New York.
I try to imagine what the residents and visitors at Stourhead or Doughty—grand estates like Mornington—would have thought of The Abduction of the Sabine Women. I picture a party at Stourhead in the late nineteenth century, in the heyday of the English country house. All the elegantly dressed guests, wine glasses in hand, are scattered around the drawing room furnished with Chippendale cabinets and lined with Persian rugs. Outside the curtained windows: the sculpted gardens and the Wiltshire Downs beyond.
The male guests have returned from a hunt, the female guests from a walk in the gardens. The butler enters with drinks and hors d’oeuvres on a silver platter. The men discuss banking and the state of their companies in distant lands. They discuss art, for they are all collectors. Someone gestures to the Poussin, and the owner, proud of the acquisition, shares the details of the auction and the moments of anxiety when the painting was nearly lost to the other bidder, followed by the eventual relief and triumph.
The female guests join in the collective admiration of the masterpiece illumined by the chandelier. They comment on the composition, on Poussin’s expert rendering of ancient architecture.
Only one person turns away from the painting, an older woman, the sister of the owner of the estate, who is herself a collector and has written a few essays on art. She stands at the window and her gaze is drawn to the scenery outside, scarcely visible in the waning twilight.
A gong sounds. The butler announces that dinner is served. The group proceeds to the dining room. But the woman remains standing at the window. She looks at the Poussin through its reflection in the glass, its colors slightly dulled. As she studies the image of the abducted Sabine women superimposed on the layered landscape outside—on the woods emptied of a few more living beings after each hunt, on the remnants of the unsightly thickets that were burned, on the folly that was torn down after she herself, barely fifteen, was assaulted in its stony interior—as she contemplates all this, she understands, not for the first time, the true cost of all this beauty.
As she contemplates all this, she understands, not for the first time, the true cost of all this beauty.
Object
Claude glass, ca. 1800, small convex mirror, with dark tinted glass. Approximately ten cm in diameter. Circular bronze case, covered with leather; interior lined with silk. Cover scratched; mirror bears mark of mended fracture. Named for the French painter Claude Lorrain. Used by artists and landscape viewers to reflect the view or make tonal adjustments for painting.
September 21
Last week, while the solar panels were being repaired, a toolbox was accidentally dropped onto the central dome of the Round Gallery. The stained glass shattered. Thankfully no one was in the vicinity when it happened, but I cut my fingers as I helped clean up the multicolored glass fragments scattered across the floor.
I can’t believe this happened, Aidan said. They should have been more cautious. No, it was my fault. I should have supervised more closely.
It’ll be okay—I say this to him often.
That beautiful stained glass, he said in a low voice.
I know. But we can’t fix that.
Over the years, pieces of the house have slipped away from our hands, one by one, and loss has become commonplace. When we first began selling off the artworks in the Round Gallery, I grieved for the paintings. They left gaps on the walls, patches of brilliant color that contrasted with the ashen parts faded by sunlight. Each time I experience a sense of loss, I tell myself that none of this was mine to begin with, and none of it was as important as it seemed.
We cleared the broken glass, then Aidan, with the help of two of the men who have been staying with us, blocked off the Round Gallery using wooden planks taken from the empty bedrooms on the upper levels.
The money from the sale of the last batch of paintings has given us funds for repairs and a new backup generator. In order to conserve energy and better insulate the areas that are frequently used, Aidan and his colleagues from the architectural firm constructed plexiglass partitions to separate the living quarters from the disused rooms.
But at times, I still like to venture into those blocked-off areas, in spite of the cold. I’m particularly fond of the room at the top of the three-story southeast pavilion that extends outward from the front of the house. The roof of the pavilion collapsed years ago, during a season of storms. Initially, we panicked. But Aidan grew fond of that wound in the ceiling; he said it reminded him of the oculus at the Pantheon.
We adapted to the new space, just as the room itself adapted to the opening in the roof, taking in all the elements of the outside world. Birdsong, when it still existed, entered through the opening. Dust entered, and sometimes the smell of distant smoke could also be detected. Vines grew, puddles formed, and dead leaves carpeted the floor. When it rained, a column of water would materialize in the middle of the room.
The rain left dark streaks down the whole length of the walls and exposed the wormlike pipes. The colors of the walls changed, year by year. The blue faded into mottled green, and the green gradually became yellow. Dampness also created pockets of air bubbles in the damaged wallpaper.
Sometimes, when the sun shines directly into the room, a column of light appears. I like to set up a desk in this column, so that the sunlight envelops me. It is here, in the middle of this interior landscape, that I write today.
September 22
The house is quiet. There are twenty-one people staying with us right now. During the day, most of them are on the main floor of the central block, the corps de logis, which stretches from the Dining Hall on the northern end, through the Long Gallery and Conservatory, to the Green Writing Room, which has been converted into an office where I spend half of my days, overseeing the management of the house and grounds. Next to the Green Writing Room are the doors to the Library.
Aidan has been spending most of his time in the studio on the upper level, which faces west, offering a view of the sweeping vista designed by Capability Brown. All the larger bedrooms next to ours are currently occupied, and these, too, face the parkland. The group of younger travelers have little interest in such a view, perhaps not wanting to be reminded of all that had been destroyed. They have, instead, set up tents in the Hall. In the evenings, the tents glow from within when the inhabitants read or chat by the camping lanterns.
The northeast pavilion, which forms its own self-contained three-story block, has been repurposed to accommodate most of the other travelers. Some of them stay with us for as long as a year; others, mere days. Most stay for about a month before they move on to their next destination or to government housing. It is for them that we strive to keep the house intact. I call them travelers because not all of them are refugees. They are also not wanderers, for they have destinations, even if the gates might be closed to them. In all cases, though, they are bodies in transition, moving toward an uncertain future.
The plan to take in travelers was partly to do with my own internal shifts, and partly to do with Aidan’s work, his emergency shelter built using salvaged wood and construction waste. That summer when I accompanied him to the refugee camp near the Mediterranean was a pivotal point, and I think about it occasionally. When we returned from that trip, I applied for a non-profit license for Mornington. After the final residency program ended twelve years ago, and the artists departed, we refurbished the bedrooms and posted announcements online. We settled into a rhythm of preparing, welcoming, sending off, and reorganizing. This, then, became the work of my life.
The trip to the camp also marked the end of my academic career. Up until then, I had continued to apply for research positions, with little success, even as my belief in the efficacy of intellectual work was waning. At the refugee camp, it shocked and shamed me to realize that all of my research could not tell me what to do when money ran out, when the earth ceased to produce food. Ideas and theories could no longer hold together the disparate parts of the world. I rarely think back on my sojourn in academia. I cannot bear to remember the yearning for accomplishment, for prestige. The blindness of it all. I have retained the love of art, of Turner, disentangled from the obsession with accolades. This love sustains me, however naïve it might appear from the standpoint of scholarship. Looking back now, I doubt whether it was really knowledge I possessed, and not a very selective, rarefied view of the world.
September 24
In recent months, I have gotten to know two of the travelers, since both of them are staying at Mornington on a long-term basis. Miranda is here with her husband, Carlos, a carpenter, who has been working in the village nearby. Before coming here they lived in Spain, where Miranda taught English and ran an online shop selling cross-stitch and embroidery kits. The heat forced them to migrate north.
Celia is a painter. She stayed here years ago for one of the residency programs; I had invited her here after seeing some of her evocative pieces at a small gallery in London. She too had studied at the Slade, though she was a few years ahead of me. Her portraits of strangers and loved ones exude a deep sense of pathos, as though they offered a narrative about the subject, despite not presenting a single fact about them. She has painted Mornington too, but never in its entirety, only in parts—a column, a cornice, or a door handle, rendered in muted, autumnal tones.
Today Celia asked if she could paint my portrait. She has painted many of the people she met during her travels. Having never sat for an artist, I have no concept of what exactly I have agreed to do. But it was difficult to refuse her. Whenever I speak to her, I get the sense that she is someone who has surmounted untold obstacles, someone whose seeming fragility belies great resilience.
Book
Cicero, De Oratore. Published by B. et Gul Noyes, 1839. Chipped spine edge. Tan leather boards with moderate wear. Marbled endpapers, water-stained. Binding loose, but all contents intact. Significant foxing throughout.
September 26
I first came across De Oratore by chance, at an art exhibition in which the artist referenced Cicero’s tale of the poet Simonides, who was able to recollect the exact location of all those who had perished in a disaster by retracing the architectural space. The art of memory thus involves forming visual placeholders for objects, people, or ideas, and depositing them into an imaginary building erected in the mind.
Two houses serve as my memory palaces—Mornington Hall and the house I shared with Dad for the first three decades of my life. The latter was the same as countless such houses in the many boroughs of London. White doors flanked by white columns, with brick walls and small bay windows overlooking a tiny garden. Dad was proud of the fact that our house blended seamlessly into the neighborhood, without any details that stood out or drew attention. But I wished we had a mint-green door, which I have seen on a similar building in an adjacent street.
When I started university, I moved into the refurbished lower ground level, which used to be my mother’s dance studio and storage space. After she left us, when I was a few months old, Dad discarded most of her belongings, and the space remained empty. As soon as I moved in, I cleared away the dust and detritus, and lined the walls with pictures. I remember the few pieces by friends, all of which I lost in the flood: an oil painting of a glass vase filled with peonies; a portrait of a London street; pencil sketches of abstract shapes and lines. I also displayed copies of the artworks I have loved at one time or another, many of which I still keep with me. There was Rodin’s The Cathedral, with two stone hands turned toward one another, holding an empty space between them. Those hands intrigued me, and I always wondered whether they were on the verge of touch or separation. As a response to the Rodin, I pinned a postcard of Louise Bourgeois’s 10 am is When You Come to Me, consisting of twenty etchings of red, pink, and brown hands overlapping or clasping one another—a portrayal of friendship, of art as a meeting of hands. Below this was a black-and-white photograph of Joseph Cornell in his studio, hemmed in by pictures and miscellany.
I recall the thrill of being surrounded by these images. I remember how it felt to be captivated and confused by them, to be at a complete loss for words.
On the wall next to my desk was a framed print of Turner’s 1845 Norham Castle, Sunrise, the first painting I ever loved. I settled on Turner as my subject of study because of that painting. At a certain point, I wanted to spend my life in that landscape. By using a technique that he had perfected in watercolor, Turner applied thin layers of translucent paint which rendered everything luminous and diaphanous, the radiant forms blending into one another and melting into golden light. But the painting’s radiance belies its dark core, the ghostly blue ruins of Norham Castle, once the site of battles and death. This is what I love in Turner—the way violence is embedded in a gleaming landscape.
Next to Norham Castle, Sunrise I had pinned postcard reproductions of Turner’s marine disasters and stormy seas. I wrote my thesis on his works all those years ago, seated next to the images. During those research days, it was as though I, like Turner, had strapped myself to the mast of a ship in the middle of the storm and witnessed the raging of the sea and the tumultuous waves that swallowed the untethered human bodies. If I studied the disaster paintings long enough, I would experience the sensation of being thrown upon the wild waves, along with those frail human forms entangled in the white crests, their arms reaching out desperately for the chance to evade death.
If I studied at the disaster paintings long enough, I would experience the sensation of being thrown upon the wild waves.
Those images accompanied me during one of my most intense intervals of waiting. After I finished the doctoral program in art history, I spent a long stretch of time waiting. There were days when I would wake up early in the morning, then, after finding no replies to any of my applications, I would go back to bed and sleep until the afternoon, then attempt to continue writing in the garden. I waited for the desired response that never arrived. At the time, I found it ironic that I was named after the wife of Odysseus, the woman who waited. I learned that the only way to wait was to cancel out all thoughts of time until the days melted into one another. There is a boundary beyond which one ceases to believe that waiting will yield anything except the passing of minutes and hours. The only things that remained clear were the pictures on the wall.
All in good time, Dad used to say to me. He would bring tea down to my room, and we would have our evening chat in the little sitting area.
It took me ages to get my job at Kew, he said. You must be patient.
I am patient, or I think I am. But how long do I have to be patient for?
I know the situation is difficult, Dad said. I honestly can’t say how well I would do if I were in your position. But I was patient, and then something came along and you take the opportunity, and more opportunities will come from that. You’ll see.
I’m not sure about that anymore. Maybe art . . . I mean, maybe something other than art, maybe I should have done that instead. You know, all those classmates who went into useful, pragmatic disciplines? Those classmates are somewhere else.
Where are they?
Well, we never kept in touch, so I don’t know exactly. But that’s not the point. The point is . . . well, I can’t remember what the point is, but it doesn’t matter. Can we please, please stop talking about this?
Dad would gently pat me on the shoulder when I felt hopeless. Be patient, Penny, he would say to me. Something will come along. You’ll see.
Dad was the only one who called me Penny. I have not heard that name since he passed away.
I got the sense that he never knew how to react to my despondency. But there were times when he accepted my frustration, times when he said, I know, dear, how unfair the system is. None of us know what will happen. But no matter. You will find something.
What Dad had hoped would happen never happened, and the world became what it is. But I did receive the three-month research fellowship that brought me to Mornington Hall, and to Turner’s A View on the Seine.
I knew that the painter himself had stayed in the house for a period of time, when he was a young artist who had received patronage from the original owner of the estate. In an unfinished watercolor, Turner depicted the Library at Mornington, with its mahogany desks and shelves of leather-bound books. Another drawing shows bookcases and armchairs bathed in diagonal lines of sunlight. The Library underwent extensive renovations before I arrived, so the space I saw was no longer what it was in Turner’s days.
As I had feared, the work on this archive, the handling of these artifacts and images, means sliding slowly into memories. Or rather, I feel as if I’m standing inside a tank, and the memories are rising higher and higher until one day, they will tip over the edge and I will drown.
Book
Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Published in 2020 by Hatje Cantz, as a companion to the exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Elephant folio. Volume contains facsimiles of the sixty-three panels of Warburg’s monumental “image atlas,” composed of reproductions of paintings, sculptures, old photographs, books, newspapers, magazines, tapestries, playing cards, and postage stamps. In fair condition—except for a ripped copy of panel no. 77.
September 30
Today I cleaned an unconventional portrait of Aidan’s family. It was covered in dust and the paint was flaking off. The picture showed Mornington Hall as seen from the garden, with Aidan, Julian, and their parents looking toward the house, their backs to the viewer, their faces unseen.
Twenty-two years ago, while waiting for the result of my application for the Mornington fellowship, I developed a sort of obsession with the family in the portrait. I dove into a frenzy of fact-finding and image-collecting, though it is unclear to me now why I was intrigued by them in the first place.
At the time, one of the few connections I discovered between myself and the family was through Toby, a former classmate of mine at the Slade. When he was around twelve, he had attended the same school as Julian, though Julian was older. I contacted Toby, who divulged very little at first, except that he had known Julian well at one point. I pressed him for more details. It was not until after the acceptance letter for the fellowship arrived that I received Toby’s response, in which he related an incident that occurred during Julian’s final year at the school.
That spring, Toby explained, it rained relentlessly, so the students stayed in the school building more than usual. After classes, many of them would gather in the library. One day, someone took an object that belonged to Julian, and a confrontation ensued. It was something Julian made, Toby recalled, a little building made out of paper and wooden sticks. The other boy mocked him and tore it to bits.
“Before the tutors arrived,” Toby wrote in the email, “Julian jumped on the boy. He beat him with his bare hands. It was shocking. I called Julian’s name but he didn’t seem to hear me. He held the other boy down, and fed him punch after punch. Blood streamed out of the boy’s gums and nose. I stood there watching with the other students until the adults intercepted. The wooden floorboards of the library were stained with blood, I remember that very clearly. Julian never talked about that day. We went on like nothing happened. He transferred to another school the following year. I don’t know if that had anything to do with the incident. I never saw him again.”
After reading Toby’s email that day, I visited the Victoria and Albert Museum to look at the stone effigies in the Cast Courts. The museum also served as a memory palace at various points in my life. There was a time, when I was about six and I had an argument with Dad during one of our visits, I hid in the galleries for an hour before being discovered. Later, I fell in love in a room full of Raphaels, when Michael, a classmate at college, had kissed me. The ceramics gallery on the top floor was a sanctuary where I worked my way through the subsequent heartbreak. One corner of the museum offered a great view of the cityscape, and there I sat for the whole afternoon after I received the acceptance letter for graduate studies. In the Cast Courts, I found inspiration for the doctoral project. In the shadows of the truncated Trajan’s Column, among the statues and effigies, I grasped the importance of darkness in Turner’s works. Everyone was enthralled by the light in Turner, but I wanted to explore the shadows. Even in the brightest landscapes—like Norham Castle, Sunrise—there was chaos and darkness in which one might detect the artist’s wish to paint an entirely different sort of picture. The darkness of battles and empires; the dark forces of nature; the darkness that follows the blinding light at the center of the canvas. And the darkness of erotic desire, in the drawings that Ruskin hid in a folder intentionally mislabeled “Plants.”
That day, with Toby’s message lodged in my mind, I went to the Cast Courts and thought about Julian. In hindsight, Toby’s story should have been a kind of warning. But instead, it instilled in me an even greater curiosity about Julian that prompted me to accept the offer of the fellowship without pause. Julian intrigued me because he was a figure that lurked in the shadows of the house. I imagined that he harbored within him the same kind of darkness that lies in what I considered, at the time, to be Turner’s best works. And for that reason alone, I felt more drawn to him than to Aidan, whom I associated with light—with the bright and airy spaces he designed—and it was a long while before I understood the false appeal of that darkness. Sitting on a bench in the Cast Courts, I looked for a photo of Julian online, one I had already seen during an Internet search. Something in his expressionless face was kin to the stone bodies and faces I saw before me, the meticulously sculpted exterior that covered the bones—or the nothingness—that lay within. I found the photo chilling, but at the same time, it thrilled me, a thrill I had hitherto felt solely in relation to art.
It is the image of the effigies that I recall today in anticipation of seeing Julian again next year. But now, only the chill remains.
After visiting the Cast Courts that day, I wandered through the other rooms at the V&A. I saw a painting that is rooted in my mind, though I have forgotten its title and the name of the painter. All I remember are the shades of umber and the subject: a country house set in the middle of the woods. In the foreground, there was a mysterious circular patch of burgundy, perhaps a small pond. But when I first encountered the painting, I formed in my mind the image of a pool of blood on the floorboards of a library, seeping into the crevices and slowly staining the fibers of the wood.
In Mobility, Bunny, as aptly named as Jay Gatsby and Elle Woods, is the daughter of a public affairs officer in foreign service. “Silly but not stupid,” she splits her adolescence between boarding school and posts in Greece and Azerbaijan. Mostly, Bunny thinks of material possessions, teen soaps like Dawson’s Creek, thinness, and older white boys in boat shoes and Nantucket reds who, if not individually attractive, are “gorgeous in the aggregate.” Unambitious yet connected, she lands a position as an administrative assistant for an engineering company. Through her early twenties, she is surrounded by the “inelegant comfort of Costco millionaires” and men who have answers even when they don’t, and who deliver their thoughts in unbroken monologue. Soon enough, leadership is impressed by her potential, and Bunny is poached to join the tech-forward branch of Turnbridge Energy, a family-owned business engaging in exploration and production in the oil complex. Continued advancement for Bunny—her tiny piece of the pie—means graduating from Banana Republic to Louboutin, Tory Burch, Biologique Recherche, Goyard—a bag that Bunny learns to covet—and from Bunny to Elizabeth.
We watch Bunny evolve over decades, in bed with oil tycoons who speak not about political seasons but geologic time. Rarely does Bunny consider her own culpability in the destruction of the planet, even after her own family benefits from enhanced oil recovery of inherited land—and when she does, she consoles herself with same self-justified platitudes pushed by big oil, or takes comfort in the fact that she is blazing a trail for women in the industry or the illusion that one day the industry will pivot to clean energy. Americanness, in this book and this character, is defined as a refusal to interrogate what one has or what one wants, even in the face of a threatened existence.
Kiesling has a wonderful eye for glut and hypocrisy, as when the reader is confronted by eighteen rolls of paper towels in a Texan home, yet she is sympathetic towards Bunny, who like so many others is trapped by American consumerist values and the hegemony of the oil complex. Everyone does business with Halliburton here, Kiesling writes, everyone’s hands are black. We’re warned that by 2030, Mecca will be too hot for the hajj. We’re reminded that most petrostates, in the wake of colonialism, don’t have the resources and infrastructure to manage their own oil reserves. We’re forced to think about how most of what we wear comes from cotton grown in Central Asia, much of it processed through forced labor.
The perils and urgency of divesting from the carbon economy are undeniable and dire—yet we get the creeping sense that, with our self-justifications, our fast fashion and flights to Europe, our skin regimens and unsatisfied appetites, we have much more in common with Bunny than we once believed.
Annie Liontas: Mobility is a book about unintended consequences and wishful thinking. Tell us about Bunny. How is her blindness and privilege our own?
Lydia Kiesling: In Bunny’s world, there are very strong ideals about work. Ascension, upward mobility—you have to find the job that helps you climb the ladder. This was fundamental to the way that people I went to school with were brought up to think about the future. For women, even if you are coming from a position of privilege, you start to understand that the ladder doesn’t quite work as we’re meant to believe. A lot of people, when faced with that information, are not going to burn the ladder down or find a completely different structure that’s not a ladder. They’re just like, “No, I’m gonna stay on this ladder and cling to it as hard as I can.”
Bunny is doing everything she thinks she was supposed to at that moment in the book—she supports herself, she has a job—and she’s resentful of her mom for challenging her. She sees that her mom had a professional trajectory of her own but set it aside to support her father’s career and raise Bunny and her siblings. The traditional model was built on a man who has a wife who takes care of the home. And if that model goes away, as is the case for Bunny when her dad decides to leave her mom, it serves as a warning. Male approval is very important to Bunny, but Bunny also sees what happens when your material comfort and lifestyle are predicated on a man’s work, and she can’t see that her material and comfort and lifestyle are actually still predicated on a man’s work, in this case, the patriarchal structure of the workplace she joined.
AL: The novel launches after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when a lot of people are getting rich and the U.S. gets to decide who. One of the most powerful assertions of the book isn’t about the truth of global powers and players plundering countries like Azerbaijan, but the lies told about it. What are those lies? How are we still telling them?
LK: In that moment, America turned from the Cold War to the War on Terror. When Bunny is there in 1998, it’s just shifting over. The things that I always heard about communism and the Soviet Union was, “It didn’t work. And now look, everyone’s so poor, everyone’s miserable and trading fake Adidas sweatsuits for cigarettes.” Americans had an almost gleeful attitude toward places that were behind the iron curtain. It was really easy to joke and gloat about what life was like in places that were going through this very epic transformation and had just suffered a lot. Some of the stories from Azerbaijan particularly feel like they’re not real. The guy who owns Dooney and Burke handbags was trying to buy pieces of crappy infrastructure and sell them off. The lie was, This is going to be good, now people are going to have a better standard of living. But now we know the costs that come with that, and how that has not been true for many people.
A book I read recently that I love—a memoir by Lea Ypi called Free—recounts how Albania entered the rabid, neoliberal era. Ypi writes a scene about her mom hosting some people from an NGO. Her mom, like many women in Albania, suddenly had access to different clothes, but they weren’t sure what should be worn. She ends up wearing what actually turns out to be a teddy or a piece of lingerie, but which she bought as a dress to be like, Well, I’m supposed to wear shit like this and entertain these NGO people. And you imagine the NGO people go back home and are like, “You wouldn’t believe what they’re wearing in Albania.” I feel like that was very much an undercurrent of American perception of the Eastern Bloc and former Soviet Union and places that coming through those political transitions.
AL: It seems that nomenclature does a lot of work to create this kind of obfuscation in the oil complex. Oil companies use the word “green” in acts of blatant misdirection. Exxon’s myriad arms are named anything but Exxon, Pink Petro is Ally, Halliburton is a family-owned business. Elizabeth is Bunny is Elizabeth. What does this tell us about power, what can we possibly mean when we say “future casting” when the very future is in doubt?
LK: Googling all of these companies and looking at their websites, you really see greenwashing in action. You see how they change from one month to the next. You can go to Halliburton’s website, and it’s all about climate solutions and sustainability. The same people who created this problem are going to position themselves to buy up lithium mines or use the same kind of tactics in the energy transition, which is itself a euphemism. Shalanda Baker, who has a position in the Department of Energy, talks in Revolutionary Power about how if the fundamental structures are not dismantled, it will just be the same people benefitting, and the same people suffering from it. There are so many lies around like energy, and what makes it difficult is that they’re also true. It’s so easy to say, “A lot of people don’t have electricity.” Talking in those terms makes it so easy to shape a narrative, such as, “Well we need to do anything we can do to get those people electricity.” And that’s what oil companies do. And they barely even have to work that hard to sell that because it is very compelling to a lot of people to think in terms of standards of living and progress.
AL: Reading Mobility, one is perpetually aware of the people outside of this world—workers, immigrants, people in “sacrifice zones,” and those most vulnerable to unchecked climate change and the fossil fuel industry. How are you writing into this, even as you investigate these wealthy white profiteering spaces?
For women, even if you are coming from privilege, you start to understand that the ladder doesn’t quite work as we’re meant to believe.
LK: That was a big question of the book because ultimately, the real struggles are the ones that are not represented on the page. It’s active erasure, the way the book is constructed. I knew I was not going to be able to represent what daily life is like in Port Arthur, or swoop in to find a perspective I can necessarily inhabit. But I am very familiar with elite educational spaces, and white spaces, and justifications, and ideologies. I’ve been to a lot of weddings! I’ve also been very seduced at certain times in my life by those hierarchies and ideologies. It felt truer to me to represent that. I hope that readers who are also part of those spaces but have not disentangled themselves will think, “Oh yes, that sounds familiar.” Even thinking about how neighborhoods are constructed, such as the so-called golden triangle area of Texas and Southeast Texas and the Gulf. The consequences of oil logic is on the ground. You can see it so clearly when you’re driving through or when you’re looking at a map. Right across from the Motiva oil refinery, for instance, there’s a playground. The people who live in that town have higher rates of cancer. I wanted to put those things in the book for readers who are paying attention.
AL: I’m equally unnerved and fascinated at all we learn about the oil complex in these pages. In the gusher days, guys get paid to walk around with a stick called a “doodlebug.” When they found oil, men would rub it onto their cheeks. Stalin, himself, had been among the oil worker in Baku. How can we understand the history of our greed and dependency on oil in such mythologies?
LK: There’s a really fascinating human history with fossil fuels. In oil producing regions, oil was part of how people who lived there understood the space for thousands of years. And there’s something pretty amazing about that. There are also lots of ideas about meaningful work and national sovereignty and self-determination that are bound up with oil. The writer Abdulrahman Munif, who was stripped of Saudi citizenship for writing Cities of Salt, one of the great oil novels, had a PhD in petroleum economics. He wrote how oil was the greatest opportunity for Arab states but that it got squandered.
There are all these important, meaningful stories tied up with oil, but the overarching story is greed. The destruction, the obfuscation, the outright lies. We have wasted so much time because oil companies are actively working against people knowing the truth and still are doing that and still are working against people changing. That makes these noble stories about human relationships with this very important substance retroactively horrible. We read the news every day, and we see the temperatures and the people who are dying. That story can’t be romanticized knowing what we know now.
When I started reporting The Migrant Chef: The Life and Times of Lalo Garcia, back in 2016, I had a strong hunch that by chronicling the back of house at a fine dining restaurant, I might be able to observe, in microcosm, the broader social, political and cultural dynamics in Mexico today. A restaurant, as I learned over more than five years of immersive reporting, is indeed a stage, where narratives about class and culture are performed at every service. I ultimately focused my book on the propulsive story of Chef Eduardo “Lalo” García Gúzman, whose odyssey from migrant farmworker in the US fields to incarceration and deportation, to becoming one of the most celebrated chefs on the planet, maps the politics of the food and immigration systems that unite and divide the U.S. and Mexico. But my goal was never to approach writing about Lalo or his restaurant through a didactic formula, be it a policy or a dish on the menu. I wanted to get readers to care about following Lalo’s journey by virtue of his specific magnetism and insight—a chef who is navigating an elite stratosphere, but whose loyalty is to the essential worker—the migrant in the fields and the dishwasher behind the sink.
In the course of my research, I spent time in the kitchen with Lalo and his staff. I traveled from Mexico to Georgia to Dubai. I ate a lot of amazing food. And I also had the opportunity to read astounding books in a genre I hadn’t explored much before: food politics. Food, in its universality, offers a lens on virtually all of the critical issues that face humanity, from climate change to labor inequality to racism, but food also offers endless opportunities to seek out connection, investigate culture and the artistic process, and to write aesthetically lush prose that elicits sensual experiences. After reading these books, I found myself looking at my dinner plate differently, with new context, new frustrations—and hope. The books on this list offer a spectrum of approaches to writing on food, society, and identity. Whether they use the tools of journalism, academic research, or memoir, they’re all based in a deep appreciation of the role that food plays in shaping community.
More than any other book I encountered while reporting The Migrant Chef, I came back to Eating NAFTA over and over again, both for reference and the pleasure of reading Gálvez’s writing. This expansive, anthropological work analyzes the disastrous impact of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement on Mexico’s food, including the physical health and cultural heritage of Mexicans. It’s rare to encounter an academic text this engaging and creative, which uses the lens of food to go deep into both history, economics and contemporary life in Mexico. Gálvez is critical but, as she says in her introduction, always writes from a place of deep love for Mexico and its gastronomic genius.
In this work of immersion journalism, reporter Tracie McMillan embeds in a range of environments essential to understanding the inner workings of the American food system—toiling alongside migrants picking garlic in California’s Central Valley, working at a Walmart in Michigan and an Applebee’s in New York. The American Way of Eating came out in 2012, and the essential point that McMillan makes remains true a decade later: there might be ever-growing consciousness, even preciousness, about the pedigrees of the products that we put in our bodies, but there’s still virtually no concern for the conditions of the workers who harvest, prepare and serve that food.
In part two of his trilogy on food and identity, Michael Twitty offers an expansive, empathic vision of identity and shared history, as an African American Jew—a member of a varied community. Twitty is a gorgeous writer, and no matter how dense the research that went into the writing of these pages, his voice always comes through: clear, playful, assured and curious. As a fellow Jew, I marveled at Twitty’s ability to capture the qualities of Jewish food I’d always sensed but never full articulated, like this passage on cooking as time travel: “this penchant for Jewish food as a time machine makes the experience of Jewish food feel as though you’ve entered historical moments and captured them with your senses—even if you really haven’t.”
Journalist and Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano is one of our greatest culture writers, and in Taco USA his signature verve and unquenchable curiosity come together to reveal the fascinating history of Mexican food in the United States. Each chapter answers a question that I very much wanted Arellano to answer, from “How did salsa become America’s top-selling condiment?” to “Is the tortilla God’s favored method of communication?” Taco USA does more than map the history of food, it transforms our ability to comprehend the history of the United States: I’d visited San Antonio many times and seen the Alamo, but as Arellano describes the chili con carne vendors in surrounding plazas, and how city officials “eventually legislated them out of existence,” he summons a far more dynamic, living history. Arellano writes that he hopes readers come away hungry, not just to tuck into their next taco, but to learn more. He most definitely succeeds.
This deeply ambitious book endeavors to map the whole history of humanity’s relationship with food, from the hunter-gatherer, to early attempts at agriculture, all the way to today’s highly-processed, barely-recognizable “junk,”—and what might come next. This all-encompassing approach is unsurprising coming from Bittman, who is best known for his equally ambitious guide, How to Cook Everything, and his columns for The New York Times. Recently, a friend told me that, more than math or reading, she wants her young sons to learn how to grow food, essential for survival in a rapidly changing world. Animal, Vegetable, Junk would make for an essential companion to that effort, giving the next generation firm ground to stand upon as they seek to understand the roots of our dysfunction, as well as how it might be undone. Bittman never shies away from the dark side of this equation (suicidal is in the title, after all), but at heart he’s an optimist, who knows that to empower readers to correct the wrongs of the past, clear-eyed truth-telling is in order.
Mayukh Sen, the son of Bengali immigrants, took on this ambitious project to map the history of American cuisine through the stories of immigrant women. Food media likes celebrity, and part of Sen’s challenge was to seek out figures who had been marginalized, but who nonetheless profoundly influenced American food culture. Sen sets about this task with commitment and rigor, using a wide range of source material to disentangle the media’s representations of these women during their time from their true stories, trails blazed through a culture thick with misogyny and racism.
Food Journalist Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee is a masterwork; as an avid home cook and cookbook reader, it stands out on my shelf: beautiful in form, deeply researched, a critical contribution to the history of American food, and astounding in the cuisine it allows you to produce with Tipton-Martin’s guidance. Jubilee builds on Tipton-Martin’s work in The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks, which brings together 150 black cookbooks, showing an incredible range of both techniques and experience. In Jubilee, she makes those recipes visceral, “presenting and translating them for today’s kitchens,” while expanding on their history, meaning and legacy in short essays.
After his wife dies in a sudden car crash, Jimmy Laird numbs his pain for a year. He stays up all night, drinking and doing coke and paying for some kind of company with women. He’s not healing, but he is coping. He tries to stifle his grief, which is so much easier than actually feeling it. Understandable, except he is a therapist, and a father.
He knows better. He should be present for his daughter, not partying in his backyard while his teenager is in the house. Shrinking, an Apple TV show created by Bill Lawrence, the same person behind Ted Lasso, opens with one of these nights. Jimmy, played by Jason Segel, is drinking and doing drugs on the side of his backyard pool while two young women are swimming in their underwear. His neighbor Liz breaks up the party and asks, “Where’s Alice?”
Jimmy answers, “Oh, she’s asleep.”
He fumbles, and he betrays, and he is selfish, and—he tries.
Except the teenage daughters of single dads know when our dads have lost it. We aren’t asleep in the house while they’re partying in the backyard. They can’t keep anything from us.
I have watched countless movies and shows that include a dead mother. They are everywhere. Some of them care about the nuances of young grief, and some of them kill off the mother just to add generic trauma for their characters. Shrinking, though, is about the single dad that is left when a mom dies. It is about the parent who is still there, not the one who is gone. The trying-but-failing Jimmy is sometimes so recognizable to me I can’t watch. Jimmy wants to be a good dad more than he acts like one. He fumbles, and he betrays, and he is selfish, and—he tries.
When my mother died, I was in fourth grade and my brother was in eighth. Before our mom got sick, our parents divided their roles: she was with us, and he went to work. Some days he came home to have dinner with the family and went back to the office afterwards. During the year she spent undergoing cancer treatments that were never meant to save her, she tried to prepare him for what was coming. She taught him how to make some of our favorite dinners, including the roast chicken with the sauce we lapped up using slices of crusty French bread. I was my mother’s daughter, and then I was stuck with my dad, who forced me to play basketball and forgot to pick me up from school. He was his wife’s husband, and then he was stuck with two kids screaming in grief. No one wanted this version of our family. We all wished we weren’t stuck together like this. And he had lost too much to be there for us with the immediacy and fullness we needed.
Movie and TV single dads take many forms. Some are valiant in their efforts to be present for their daughters. They fight for them, even when it’s awkward, like when Alice Laird’s godmother Gaby (played by Jessica Williams) encourages Alice to tell Jimmy that she has had sex. Alice isn’t sure, but Gaby tells her she thinks Jimmy can be cool about it. “Please, let me be Cool Dad,” Jimmy begs Alice, promising that whatever she’s about to tell him, he can handle. He isn’t quite cool, but he gets there.
Some are like Marlin in Finding Nemo, who swims across the entire ocean to find his son. In cartoons especially, single dads are heroic. Others are like Danny Tanner in Full House, incredibly earnest and present and constant. And in many cases, the dads don’t matter at all—the mom dies and then the child is completely on their own. There is no dad. Absent fathers exist, too, and substance-abusing and violent dads exist, but they are one part of the story, and they aren’t the story I know. I know Jimmy.
In the first episode of Shrinking, we understand that Jimmy has been a mess for a full year. Now, though, he is going to turn it all around. He is tired of accepting what he cannot change. We watch him get so frustrated with his cognitive behavioral therapy clients that he decides to become a therapist vigilante. He tells one client that she has to leave her husband or he won’t be her therapist any longer. He gets attached to a young veteran with rage issues, Sean, and invites Sean to live in his guest house. He decides he is ready to be present for Alice again. The problem is, she isn’t ready for him.
Some afternoons, I came home from middle or high school and found my father alone in the house, gleefully playing Guitar Hero on our Wii or the harmonica I bought him for Father’s Day, taking each step down the hallway like a dance move. There was joy in the house, sometimes. But single fathers are unpredictable. Some days I came home to my father and brother screaming at each other and I hid under the stairs until I heard my brother slam his door above me. Often, my dad wasn’t home at all. He filled the fridge, handed me cash, and left. I didn’t know if he would be around, or what version of him I might find, so as I got older I practiced never expecting him. Largely, I took care of myself.
My junior year of high school, my dad moved from Marin to Southern California and I stayed behind. He had a struggling business in Palm Springs he needed to do something about. I convinced him it would ruin my chances at a top college to switch schools halfway through high school. I found a friend whose parents would let me stay with them for the year and packed up my room. My dad asked me to call him every day, which I sometimes did, and he came to town for major events like junior prom, but we spent the year apart. In some ways, my junior year was a blast. I was free, with no curfew and barely any adult supervision. Every night was a slumber party with my best friend. At the same time, I was miserable, lonely—terrified of my life being alternately in my control and out of it. I didn’t know if my dad was coming back. I looked into the process of emancipation, but it was too scary, too big.
As I got older, I practiced never expecting him. Largely, I took care of myself.
When he came back for my senior year and we lived together again, he tried to parent me. He gave me a curfew. He knocked on my door in the mornings and told me I would be late for school; when I left the house I went to Starbucks first. He took my car keys when he discovered an empty Smirnoff bottle, the evidence that I had thrown a party. But it all felt false. He had been gone. For a year he was physically in a different part of the state, but he had been emotionally checked out for much longer. I wasn’t ready for him to try to come back. My dad and Jimmy have this in common: they expected us, their teenage daughters, to patiently wait for them to parent us whenever they felt like it again.
My brother was older and already out of the house, technically an adult, and my last year of high school was in some ways our dad’s last chance. But I think my brother might have accepted my father’s parenting, even under these conditions. Maybe there is oldest daughter syndrome at play here, too: I always had to take care of everyone, I was always the adult, even as the younger sibling.
Jimmy comes back to parenting life in small steps. He makes Alice breakfast. He washes her soccer jersey, once he is told by Liz that the soccer season has started. Then Alice tells him, directly, to his face, that this isn’t enough. This is what Shrinking does for me. I can’t imagine telling my father that he wasn’t doing enough—I was so busy trying to be in charge of myself, planning my own route for getting to college and out of the house, and being understanding about how sad and preoccupied my father was, I had no ability—no language—to ask him for more. Alice says, “For a year you’ve been acting like it happened to you, but it happened to us.” My mom’s death happened to my dad, and to my brother, and to me. We went through it separately, but Shrinking shows me another version, an alternate reality to live out.
Maybe I wouldn’t have been left so alone if it seemed like I needed help in school.
Shrinking also knows something that my dad did not, or maybe that he just wasn’t able to accommodate: single dads can’t do it alone. Not if they want to do it well. Alice is surrounded by therapists and her neighbor, Liz, whose last son has just left for college. Alice is the perfect solution to Liz’s empty nest syndrome. One of the pleasures of Shrinking is that it knows it uses Liz as an aggressively maternal figure, so Liz regularly insists to the other adults that she is more than just a mom. She is cool, she promises. She has multiple tiny tattoos and a best friend who moved to Australia. But with Alice, she is such a Mom, because that’s what Alice needs.
When Jimmy is “back in the game,” as the show describes his efforts to actively parent his daughter, he attends a meeting with Alice’s guidance counselor, a man who earlier iced Jimmy’s face after he was punched at Alice’s soccer game. Jimmy is late to the meeting. By the time he arrives, Liz and the guidance counselor are already talking. Liz offers to leave the meeting, but as soon as she is out the door Jimmy can’t answer a question about Alice’s AP courses next year and he calls Liz back in. I thought about this scene for days.
My dad didn’t go to college, and my brother went to a large state school for one year before dropping out. I don’t remember my dad ever asking me what classes I wanted to take, or if I had done my homework, but probably because he didn’t have too. Maybe I wouldn’t have been left so alone if it seemed like I needed help in school. Maybe I did too well in school for anyone to notice that they should probably be checking on me.
There may have been women around who would have stepped in, like Liz. I know one of my dad’s girlfriends would have loved to be there for me, but unfortunately for her, she had been my mom’s friend, and my dad started dating her only six months after my mom died. I had to hate her. There were family friends who loved me. They stepped in when I was young, driving me to and from ballet when my dad couldn’t. But by the time I was a teenager, my loss wasn’t fresh. I watch Shrinking like a fantasy: what might have happened if I had had this many adults looking out for me? How might I have felt?
I was alone and trying so hard to figure out what kind of person to be.
There were also times while I watched Shrinking I had to look away from the screen. I couldn’t watch when Jimmy got so drunk at a party he was hosting that he threw up on the piano, and then slept with Gaby, who had been his wife’s best friend. I couldn’t watch a dad fuck up that badly. I also couldn’t stomach him sleeping with one of the women who was there for Alice when he wasn’t. Harder to watch, though, are the moments when three different non-relative adults fight to help Jimmy and to take care of Alice. I am so jealous I can hardly breathe.
Harrison Ford (who plays a character named Paul but I want to call him Harrison, or maybe Dad), makes Jimmy promise that his vigilante therapy will not harm Alice in any way. Jimmy nods but that isn’t enough for Harrison. “Promise!” he shouts, until Jimmy finally verbally promises. Of course, Jimmy breaks his promise again and again. He can’t help it. But Harrison is there for Alice in multiple ways. He sticks up for her with Jimmy, continuously pushing him to do right by Alice. (Paul’s own failings with his now-grown daughter are only part of his motivations.) He also meets with Alice regularly. They share snacks on a park bench and Alice makes fun of Harrison’s hat and he teaches her a technique he uses for his own processing: put on the saddest song you can and grieve hard and intentionally for exactly fifteen minutes a day. No more, no less.
I watched much of Shrinking while looking at my phone. That is how I watch most things these days. But Shrinking in particular, I couldn’t look at it directly. To watch too closely would be like looking full-faced into the sun of my teenage years. I have only recently been able to look back on my adolescence and feel sad for what I didn’t have. I powered through my loss, asking for extra credit and piling on extracurriculars and thinking that if my teachers liked me enough, I would be safe. But I got older and teachers were temporary, then indifferent. I rejected the guidance counselor sessions I was offered in middle school because I didn’t want to need them. Then the offers stopped. I was alone and trying so hard to figure out what kind of person to be. No one told me I could be sad, or that I could spend 15 minutes a day actually feeling my grief. I couldn’t watch all these adults surround and defend Alice, ask her questions, offer her support.
Jimmy is a father, but he is also a man so wrecked by his own grief that he loses himself. How could anyone be an excellent parent while dealing with one of the hardest losses, while trying to upright their lives, when everything around them has been reconfigured? Jimmy looked like an actual single dad to me. Not like the pristine versions I have seen so many times, who make little mistakes and ask forgiveness, but like mine. Big efforts, but even bigger mistakes. If Jimmy was the only adult around, Alice would have been on her own. Like I was.
Aurora Mattia’s debut novel The Fifth Wound is a fantastical journey through the formulation of one trans woman’s truth. Mattia’s own recapitulation as protagonist Aurora aka @silicone_angel bridges the gap between ancient Greece, Covid-era Brooklyn, and the rolling fields of Iowa searching to see herself and her beloveds clearly. Through a combination of memoir, mythology, criticism, and fantasy, Mattia attempts to capture the most ephemeral realities and absolute truths about life and love, transition and femininity through peaks of pain and pleasure—not by looking at the horizon beyond these passing sensations, but by traveling through them like a prism, using the transitional power of language to crystallize and shatter life’s most intimate moments.
The Fifth Wound follows Aurora from an island of singing sirens to the cold sterility of hospital rooms to the warmth of a lover’s arms as we see Mattia’s avatar construct and reconstruct her narrative in real-time. Over the course of three acts, she reveals not only the limitations of crafting a story as it’s being lived, but also the world’s inability to offer queer(ed) narratives the space to eventuate beyond the very forms that seek to restrict, destroy and co-opt them.
I spoke to Mattia over Zoom a few months after the book’s release to discuss creating and protecting our own narratives, the difference between the wounds we are given and those we choose, and how her work has been misinterpreted by critics and understood by exes.
Christ: At the beginning of the book, you bring up Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Kate Winslet’s character. Was the archetype of a manic pixie dream girl in your mind at all as you were crafting the character of Aurora?
Aurora Mattia: That movie had a big impact on me. I saw it when I was like 12 or 13. I took it a bit too much to heart—the idea that even if we try to erase each other, we will somehow be drawn together again, because something deeper than memory holds sway over love, that love is somehow subatomic. More simply, the idea of perpetually cycling through being together and breaking up over the course of a lifetime was impactful on my ideology of love as an adolescent and later played itself out in reality, in my 20s. My writing about the movie is partially a self-critique, an attempt to describe the ethics that I was operating from in my first few years of transition, a lot of which had to do with this sudden shift from being freakish to being very desirable, suddenly accessing this feminized power that came from desirability. I had this idea, not a conscious idea but lived-from idea, that I had suffered so long to make myself beautiful, therefore I could be mentally unstable, emotionally reckless, without taking responsibility for that. But the side effects of my mental instability accumulated over time and forced me to reframe my own narrative within the context of the narratives of the people I loved but who, at the same time, I was treating with carelessness and recklessness.
C: I got the idea that a lot of the disconnects between Aurora and Ezekiel come from the incongruence between one’s idea of their lover and the reality of their lover. Were there any characteristics individually or as a pair that you think made that dissonance especially difficult for Aurora and Ezekiel to cope with?
AM: Almost every review has referred to Ezekiel as a man, without reference to his queerness. It’s understandable to a degree, considering in the third chapter, Aurora says, “Put simply, we were both fairies…[But] he became a man and I became a woman.” Even though it appears so early in the book, reviews have tended to treat that as a decisive statement, when clearly it’s just one moment of my narrator perceiving, trying to understand, Ezekiel’s gender—attempting to understand her gender in relation to Ezekiel’s, because the question of their genders is so central to the question of their love; or, their uncertainties about femininity are so central to the manner in which they seek intimacy with one another. In that same third chapter, early in the book, Aurora says, “If I had decided to remain a fairy, I would have wanted to be like Ezekiel,” and in the very last chapter, Ezekiel says “When we have sex, I imagine that I’m you.” No review has referenced those scenes, which is interesting to me, and suggests a kind of reticence, a kind of tip-toeing around, or maybe even a refusal to acknowledge the instability of the manner in which these two characters relate to themselves and each other.
I had this idea that I had suffered so long to make myself beautiful, therefore I could be emotionally reckless without taking responsibility.
They first fell in love, years before the beginning of the book, as gay boys, and in the third and final section of the book, when they are pursuing, again, some kind of romantic intimacy; when Aurora does Ezekiel’s makeup and Ezekiel has a revelation about his own beauty—it’s clear that there’s much more to their relationship than ‘the love of a man and a woman,’ that to treat it as such is to deny the very substance—convolutions of shame and dream and desire, trauma and poetry and mirror-play—that drew Aurora and Ezekiel together in the first place.
Reviewers have described the final section as a “romance.” To me it’s no more or less a romance than the rest; if anything, it’s just the acute form of what preceded it. For her part, meeting Ezekiel again years after she transitioned, Aurora is trying to determine whether she can even access the ability to feel embodied around him anymore, both because so much of her manner of relating to Ezekiel is through mythmaking from the distance of their separation, and because when they first fell in love eight years before, their bodies were similar, and now they are not at all—her body now is entirely different, so the manner in which her body relates to his, and his to hers, will also be entirely different. Reading Ezekiel as a man and Aurora as a woman, rather than two queer people rotating through various realities, is a way of flattening them both; this flattening has caused the intention of the third section to be misread as a romance, because it’s really a way trying to figure out what these people can mean to each other, if that meaning can exist outside of the dream, if it can help them understand themselves without, somehow, destroying them both.
C: It’s interesting that coverage of the book has reduced that last section to heterosexual romance. Throughout the whole book, I always had the sense that Ezekiel wasn’t simply a fairy or a man. There was certainly more going on there. That’s teased through conversations and interactions with Aurora and that part that you mentioned was such a heartbreaking moment. The second time I was reading the book I didn’t want to get there because it unmoors everything that had come before it. What function does Autofiction provide for the central romance between Aurora and Ezekiel and also Aurora’s relationships with Velvet and Noel as well?
AM: I think part of my transition has been an attempt to make whole and restore a paradise that never existed. A way of trying to create what should have but never happened, and of trying to save myself from what did happen. But every time I try to restore my own past, some new calamity blows me back, and then I have to abandon one half-finished attempt at whole-making for another, more immediate one. I was not writing a transition narrative, by which I mean I wasn’t trying to narrativize a character going through a transition, or retrofit some perfected idea of my transition; I was trying make a transition-language, trying to write a book that constantly shapeshifts and transforms itself, trying to represent, by means of a mythological language, a kind of feminine shapeshift and reaching for beauty, by which I mean a reaching for communion. The way that seemed most efficient was to bind together the fantastical elements of my short stories with atoms of my own experience, moments of crisis and intensity, or put simply, of extreme embodiment, pain or pleasure or both. In his essay about the Angel of History, Walter Benjamin says that understanding the past is not about creating a narrative chain of events; it’s about what you see—what is illuminated, like a landscape in a lightning flash—when you experience a moment of crisis, that such a moment creates the opportunity for a sudden, brief and total clarity about who you are and how you arrived there, I mean some kind of truth about the past.
C: In the book’s last section, there’s a direct-to-camera address that I love where you talk about how “minimalism is a luxury reserved for people who can expect to be understood.” Was it important to you that the book is not an easy read and forces readers to work for the fruits of Aurora’s knowledge and experience?
I think part of my transition has been an attempt to make whole and restore a paradise that never existed.
AM: I made the first chapter the densest, because I didn’t want strangers with a desire to “understand,” as they like to say, “the trans experience,” to pick up and read it and know the secrets that lay within or whatever. The only people I want to finish the book are the ones who really want to read it, who feel compelled to keep reading it; the first chapter tests that, which isn’t great marketing, but was a purposefully self-protective design. The entire first section—the book is split into three sections, three waves, three angles of approaching the same problem—the first section is probably the hardest in terms of footwork; the second two have longer stretches of straight narrative. As I wrote the second section, the chapters about being assaulted during sex and subsequent medical violence, most of which takes place over the course of a single night, I felt very protective over it. Everything I had set up in the first section, my way of overcoming pain through mysticism and magic, the second section rebukes; the same mystical impulse that protects me in the first section fails to protect me in the second, because reality overwhelms me, I am outnumbered, and my halo of fantasy dims and is extinguished.
With the first and second sections of the book, I wanted to represent two experiences of violence that actually happened—the knifing and interrogation in the first, the assault and, as it were, “medical malpractice” of the second—and how I passed through them in very different ways. After the former, I received really good medical care and also painkillers; the violence was abridged. My consciousness was altered and softened, whereas with the second, the violence was extended and ramified; so much of that night was me screaming over and over again in a very flat and reiterative environment. I protected that night—the night I lived and the night I wrote—by making the first section of my book so dense. I didn’t want a so-called “general reader” to finish my book. I’ve never intended to have a large audience.
C: In the second instance of violence that you’re referencing in the book, spliced into that sequence, is an extremely tender moment of almost unbearable kindness between Aurora and this other trans girl. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about capturing that moment and that connection between those two characters. Do you see pain as like inextricable from bond between trans women?
AM: Even thinking about it, I get really emotional. What is striking to me about that moment, about that interval of oasis, was how I shared it with someone I didn’t particularly get along with. I had a roommate who was also a trans girl, and we hung out a lot, but there was also a lot of tension between us—as often happens between strangers who move in together. But in that moment, there was no need to translate what was going on. She immediately understood.
I had bottom surgery after nine months on hormones. My college insurance had a program for trans people, but very few students had attempted to use it for bottom surgery—not to mention that there were very few trans women at the school. So there was a lot of heavy lifting I had to do; I spent a lot of my senior year getting approval for surgery, because my insurance was going to run out when I graduated and I wasn’t sure if or when I would have coverage for a surgery like that in the future. At one point an administrator told me I was the first student to have bottom surgery on their insurance plan.
All of which is to say, I had that surgery really early. I took a leap of faith.
There isn’t much good information about it, and you can’t really trust surgeons and doctors anyway, so obviously, we—those trans women who seek these surgeries—do a lot of information-sharing with each other. My roommate had asked me a lot about it.
Which brings me to that moment. I had fulfilled a particular dream. The story was over. For years I was living my life with a pussy, but then, in the course of about twenty minutes on one particular night, a guy who I was sleeping with ripped it apart. Up until that moment, I had, it seemed, finished the hardest part, with regard to my pussy: getting one in the first place. I’ve heard trans women say, “once that’s done, it can’t be taken away.” I believed that, too, I think; and I think my roommate did, too. So it was shocking for both of us, when I stumbled out into the living room. For me, it was happening to my body. For her, she was watching the destruction of an idea, but an idea that was extremely precious to her—while my dream was destroyed, her own dream was, in a profound way, damaged. I think that broke her heart and mine at the same moment, so she was able to intercede on my behalf in a very visceral way. Her intercession was a big part of what got me through that night.
I don’t want to say pain is what brings trans girls together, but I think, in that particular case, both of us witnessing, together, the destruction of that dream, broke through all the ego trans girls can have with each other: wanting to be the prettier one, or wanting to know more about transition, the insecurity and infighting, the manic pixie second-puberty high-school-drama which we sometimes play out in our twenties. All of that immediately broke apart, and she was able to see what I needed exactly at that moment and create a halo of safety around me when I was extremely unsafe.
C: The book approaches wounds from different angles. There are the wounds we choose through surgeries, the wounds we choose through self-harm, and the wounds given to us by the violences of the world. What holds the most meaning or impact in the taxonomy of wounds that you construct throughout the book?
AM: They become bound up in each other, and they did in my own life, too. At that time, I was attempting, in my writing and my life, to use fantasy to save myself from reality.
For example, the way the Aurora-narrator writes about the knifing. It’s clear that, in an attempt to save herself from pain, she is projecting onto the person who knifed her a kind of mutual understanding, as if she hadn’t experienced violence but rather, care. This derangement of her own experience leads her back to self-harm, as if she can understand the knifing by taking a knife to herself. As if self-harm is a way of opening a portal, not only to the knifing, but to all the violence she has absorbed from others—as if opening that portal will teach her something about embodiment, because long before the knifing, it was violence—physical and emotional— that disembodied her in the first place, so if she can return to the scenes of her disembodiment, she can maybe reverse its course, can have her body back.
Self-harm is, in part, doing the world’s work for it. Aurora is a very paranoid character and is always worried about violence being done to her, but the person she’s received the most violence from is herself. That speaks to part of the reason she’s so paranoid, because she recognizes herself as a danger and she can never escape herself.
But her self-harm is not, in the end, limited to herself. It is implosive, but it is also explosive—it harms and traumatizes the people she loves. Self-harm is a microcosm of the interrelationship of trauma and responsibility; she is giving herself a wound because she is approaching the desire to die, and the only way to forestall death, she thinks, is to release the pain, to release the violence she has absorbed from others, through her wound. She sees herself as having no other options. But by giving herself a wound she defers that pain onto her partner Noel, who not only witnesses, first hand, her bleeding and screaming and drunkenness, but washes the blood out of her clothes and out of the floor, and helps her sew her wounds shut. Noel absorbs the violence that Aurora releases into their home; by harming herself, Aurora forces Noel to absorb that violence. She doesn’t give Noel a choice; she takes from Noel the ability to choose how to love her, forces Noel to love her in a way that terrifies them, that threatens and damages their own safety. Even for those who are far away, Aurora creates a sense of fear and uncertainty in the people she loves—the possibility of her self-harm, never far away, makes love itself feel unsafe, makes intimacy feel unsafe—a fear echoed by Ezekiel when he says, in their last conversation before he leaves, “Don’t die, Aurora. I need you there in the future.” It is impossible to care for others when I am destroying myself, because when I am destroying myself I am also destroying those who love me. For others, there is no choice, in the end, but to leave. Aurora and I both learned that lesson.
C: There’s another quote in the book where you kind of state your hope for the book directly. You say, “I’m writing this book of wounds of events outpacing meaning, and I hope it can help you survive.” Do you feel like you’ve succeeded in that goal?
AM: What matters most to me is what the people I love thought of it. Because to me it wasn’t just a book. It was a way of trying to learn to live and honor the people who have helped me survive.
In an era of environmental catastrophe, it’s easy to forget that we are the environment too. The world affected by climate change is not some distant place far away in the forest. It’s us. We are as much a part of the world as the trees, the birds, the ocean.
If we have any hope of recovering, we have to remember this essential connection. Instead of conceiving of “human” and “nature” as opposites, as the Western literary tradition would have it, we need to recall the link between ourselves and everything that is not us.
The books in this reading list reflect our essential connectedness, bringing together the human and the natural in ways that remind us they have always been the same thing. Whether it’s through lyric inventions, the voices of animals, or haikus for the plants in sidewalk cracks, these books embody the truth that humans have always been natural, and that saving ourselves is the same as saving the world.
It’s no coincidence, either, that the books in this list mix genres and often end up with a hybrid approach to writing. In my book You’re the Woods Too, nonfiction has to wear the clothes of fiction, poetry, and even drama in order to cross the gaps we have built in our relationship to nature. I couldn’t find a single language where, as the title puts it, “I was the woods too.” I had to built that language out of parts, so that flash fiction waltzes across the unsaid, moss poems traverse the boundary layer, and a theater filled wall-to-wall with plants is a home for the very real drama that unfolds. The books on this list engage in that same writerly struggle, finding in their innovative forms and structures ways to return the human to the natural.
Finally, you’ll notice that most of these books are published by small presses. Small presses have long been a vibrant home for writing that transforms and innovates, making a place where the binaries and gaps in literary history can be filled in and create a more complete picture. We are all working toward that better picture together: an existence where we’re not separate from the world that surrounds us but an essential part of it.
As Harryette Mullan asks in the introduction to her fleeting, visceral collection of tanka, “What is natural about being human?” She answers this question by paying a poet’s careful attention to the urban landscapes of Los Angeles, Venice, and Santa Monica, honoring each moment, no matter how man-made, as natural. Whether it’s two seagulls fighting over a hamburger bun, collard greens and aloe vera grown at home, or the discarded plastic bag (“urban tumbleweed”) that gives the collection its name, Mullan treats everyday objects with a sensitivity and gentleness that brings them into the realm of the natural world.
The second book in Tommy Pico’s Teebs tetralogy, Nature Poem dives headfirst into problematic understandings of the natural world, especially its romanticized association with Native Americans. “I can’t write a nature poem / bc it’s fodder for the noble savage / narrative. I wd slap a tree across the face, / I say to my audience,” Pico writes on the second page of the book. As he rejects the nature poem, though, he also reinvents it, naming a nature that is not separate from humans and a countryside that is not separate from the city. Pico’s is a queer pastoral that does not rely on binaries and instead arrives at a place of interconnection, taking apart colonial, white ideas that seek to draw boundaries between the natural and the human.
Danielle Vogel’s Edges & Fray is simultaneously a poetry collection, an art gallery featuring nests of her own making, and a creative manifesto. Comparing the act of creation to the work a bird does building a nest, Vogel makes space for non-linear creative processes, her sentences healing by turning backward and weaving through themselves, ever-surprising and ever-revealing. As she writes in her afterword, this book wants “To touch a sound. To hold the cellular structure of a sentence.” In weaving nests of sentences (and sentences of nests), Vogel returns the natural world to the act of communication.
This collaborative novel begins with a first-person narrator on a bike covered with seeds. The narrator feels themself melding with the seeds, trading subjectivity with the seeds, and soon even a squirrel enters the mix and the narrator’s perceptions. The novel turns to a meshing of consciousness and ultimately a meshing of being, in which the coexistence of humans, plants, and animals is no longer coexistence at all but a single, intertwined wholeness. “What is home if there are no walls?” the co-authors ask. The whole world is a home, they seem to say, and as humans we do not need to close ourselves off from it.
Janice Lee’s novel envisions a natural world that cannot be separated from the human-induced apocalypse that is overcoming it. While the main characters are human, the book also speaks in the voices of whales, birds, moss, a dog, a cat, a tree, and other beings, puncturing holes in our illusion that our lives can be separated from those of other beings. As the three main characters journey through grief, they also achieve a kind of arrival, living catastrophe instead of fleeing it and recognizing that our experience of disaster is as natural as the world being destroyed.
Although she is best known for her second book, Brading Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss is a profound journey into the lives of the subtle beings living at the boundary layer between land and sky. With her signature gentleness and close observation of the natural world, she places personal story alongside erudite descriptions of the biology and cultural history of moss in order to create a generous and engaging read. Moss and its human observers and moss have much to teach each other, and living at the level of moss can remind us of the earth we are always on and a part of.
Orchid Tierney’s looking at the Tiny is both small in its focus and is major in its resonances. Describing lichen as a “tiny” place, Tierney traces the poetry of Lew Welch and others in order to arrive at a sense of what it means to inhabit the world beyond the limitations of the self. Instead of prizing only depth, Tierney proposes a “surface” reading, experiencing the world laterally through connection and presence. As Tierney writes, “the lichens arrest the world from a deliberate final closure. instead, they are full of promise and rejuvenation.” In turn, we can take joy in smallness by remembering how widely we are surrounded by the world.
Petra Kuppers invokes an embodied landscape in this series of interconnected poems, cataloging dance performances as well as personal encounters with the natural world through the lens of queerness and disability. No detail is too large or small for Kuppers’ creative practice, which leaps from guided missiles to squirrels leaping through trees to the endocrine system in a single poem, bringing onstage “rose lavender bergamot,” “a wasp in my hand,” and “the Mars channels of my back” in one performance. There are no unnecessary distinctions in the nature Kuppers brings to life here. There is space for everything under the sun, including our complicated bodies and the knots and resonances we carry with us.
This bilingual edition of Carlos Cociña’s poetic sequence is published in a gorgeous, hand-assembled chapbook by Cardboard House Press, a small press committed to publishing Spanish-English bilingual editions. Thoughtfully translated by Ian Lockaby, Gardens/Jardines contains a world in which sharp angles and surreal imagery juxtapose beautifully with idyllic descriptions of nature, never setting one apart from the other. Every sentence combines the sights of water and gardens with the strange confines that birth them, cycling between a fundamentally human description of the world and an inescapably acculturated nature that glows in its tense, generous images of wind and leaves and shrubberies.
Travis Sharp’s collection of poems revolves around the nature of the “I” as the speaker of the poems leaps outside of their body and back in again. “I is a sexed interior decorator queering organs” while, at the same time, “I is a natural wander.” The self here cannot be purified or delimited but instead leaks at its boundaries, pouring into the surrounding world and also pulling nature into itself. “This endless circulation” is as exhausting as it is life-giving. The body is as surprising and dynamic as a forest.
Emji Spero’s Almost Any Shit Will Do is a beautifully designed book, its pages traced with lines and circles linking words that would not otherwise appear related. It also consists of working definitions, as in a dictionary, of “the movement (n.)” and “the individual (n.),” breaking down the distinction between the two and ultimately revealing the power in the collective. Basing its investigation off the biology of mycelia, the root system of mushrooms, Spero proposes a model for social change that is not only inspired by the natural environment but in harmony with it. The book shows us a way forward both through and with the “shit,” a way of growing the change we need out of the fertile ground we are already living with.
Jessica Johnson’s debut book of poems chronicles the subtle interactions of indoor and outdoor worlds through the lens of motherhood and domestic life. As the children in the poems “told the trees about their favorite shows,” the leaves fall in their own small autumn while the speaker pages through mental browser tabs. The simultaneity of this linked collection, in which forms of being mingle regardless of the walls of the home, testifies to a world in which even archetypal family life is subject to the larger living story. In this story, Johnson writes, you are not just you but “You your body in this place an artifact of history the whiskered creatures pacing your house.”
What even is time? I had a couple conversations this past year, some of them surrounding the publication of my non-chronologically structured novel We Do What We Do in the Dark, during which the concept of “queer time” came up, this idea that LGBTQ people experience time differently, almost four-dimensionally like Vonnegut aliens. We constantly look back to see evidence of our nascent selves, when queerness was less an identity than it was a feeling, and we constantly look forward to imagine a world finally ready to welcome us with open arms.
It’s hard to see the past clearly—so many of our childhoods are marked by denial instead of discovery—and even harder to see the future, especially for those of us who came of age in the shadow of AIDS and now find ourselves still very much in the throes of a pandemic that has disproportionately affected the most marginalized. Add to that the banning of our books, the rolling back of our civil rights, the daily threat of hate-fueled violence.
As Alex Marzano-Lesnevich writes in their brilliant essay on gender and futurity: the future is “The very thing we are all trying to hold onto, as we wait for it to arrive.” How difficult it is to imagine “the projected shape that future makes. The shadow (or light?) it casts over the present.”
Shadow and light, past and present and whatever comes next. These are the reconciliations that inform our stories. This is what art does. It allows us to see, concurrently, the past and the present and the future. It allows us to see, concurrently, the light and the dark. This is what queer art specifically does: it shows us that we have always been here and we always will be. Queer stories, like the ones listed below, do more than shine light on the shadows. They are the light in the shadows. They are living documents of our lives.
Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction and the inaugural publication of UNP’s queer-run Zero Street imprint, Zaid’s second novel—following 2018’s acclaimed Paper is White—is a taut techno-thriller about a single mother’s descent into the shadowy world of Big Data and her ascension into selfhood.
One of the foremost sexual wellness advocates and educators chronicles her coming of age as a capaciously curious queer woman and the powerful but all-too-brief bond she shared with her queer father.
From impeaching Joan Didion as the undisputed queen of California letters to describing a visit to an ex-girlfriend’s Midwestern family in the shadow of Matthew Shepherd’s death, from excoriating American Dirt to chronicling the abuse she experienced on her own book tour, the critic and memoirist delivers a profound collection of essays on the ways violence seeps into the lives of the marginalized. Gurba’s ability to deftly connect cultural and personal histories with heartbreaking poeticism and laugh-out-loud wit is often dazzling.
Despite a fear of air travel, Olive Murphy finds herself on a plane, traveling to run in a marathon honoring her brother. Murphy’s Law, of course, says that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and unfortunately things in the sky go awry: a passenger falls ill, and it’s up to Olive, a nurse, to help him. Her act of heroism goes viral, as does the “relationship” that develops between Olive and the plane’s pilot, Stella, who wants to milk their newfound social media fame to advance her career. A soaring, swoony fake-dating tale.
Billed as “Sweden’s answer to Normal People,” Hedman’s sublime debut follows three driftless souls who found themselves drifting irresistibly toward one another in youth but have now become estranged. In the present, one of them has moved to New York, but he’s plunged back into the past, forced to consider what was and what could have been, when the daughter of the other two arrives with questions about her parents.
Late last year, ten months after the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government passed a law banning open expressions of LGBTQ identity, which they deemed “propaganda.” The voices of queer Russians are necessary now more than ever, to be broadcast loud and proud, so it feels particularly special to have this moving and wonderfully witty work of autofiction about a lesbian poet traveling from Moscow to her hometown in Siberia to inter her mother’s ashes.
A big book full of small, meaningful moments, the latest collaboration between the Tamaki cousins (after Skim and This One Summer) portrays the coming-of-age of three Canadian college students spending spring break in New York City, yearning to return to youth and desperate to begin their lives anew.
A trans Before Sunset set in Copenhagen? Yes, please! Emmanuel’s joyful and achingly poignant debut follows Phoebe, an Irish doctoral student living a purposefully lonesome life in Denmark (her only companion is a dog named after Dolly Parton), who reconnects with her ex-girlfriend Grace over the course of one weekend. Every page bursts with wonder.
Wilsner is one of the hottest contemporary f/f romance writers right now, and the anticipation for their latest scorcher is at a fever pitch. In the impeccably named Cleat Cute, two American soccer stars—one a cagey veteran, the other a wide-eyed rookie—must deal with their chemistry both on and off the field. USWNT fans who shipped Kristie Mewis and Sam Kerr long before those two made it official: this one’s for you.
For nine months, Manno was embedded within the Midwest State University women’s basketball team, an elite and competitive DI program. Immersed in that insular yet high-stakes world, she observes firsthand how unyieldingly female athletes—particularly queer, Black, and/or masculine-presenting—are policed both within and without.
An intrepid advocate for the rights of intersex people and one of the stars of the Focus Features documentary Every Body, Weigel brings her dauntless and infectious energy to the page in this memoir-in-essays, an “invitation to dream beyond boxes.”
Newlyweds Eli and Elizabeth are a pair of Americans living in Bulgaria, their union one in which “love came secondary to the bureaucratic convenience that marriage provided.” Their relationship—to themselves and one another—is upended, however, when husband and wife seem to swap bodies. When Elizabeth-as-Eli disappears, Eli-as-Elizabeth searches not only for a spouse by a sense of self-understanding. The result is a little Kafkaesque, a little Hitchcockian, a little Freaky Friday, but McElroy makes this dizzying story their own.
Shirley Jackson Award winner Elizabeth Hand, a criminally underrated writer of atmospheric mysteries, received authorization from the Jackson estate to pen a return to Hill House. This spine-tingling story is less a sequel than a standalone tale, following a playwright who stumbles on the eerie Victorian mansion and decides to stay there—with her girlfriend and a troupe of actors—as inspiration to complete her latest project. Of course, she gets more than she bargained for, as the house (much like Hand’s novel) has a life of its own.
The game-changing author of We the Animals returns with his first novel in ten years, another inventive and beguiling book about memory and desire and what is said and unsaid—both by ourselves and by those who tell our stories.
Laconic, melancholic, and lovely, the latest from the author of Memorial and Lot follows Cam, returning home to Houston after the death of his lover, and TJ, Cam’s childhood friend whose family runs a local bakery. Despite the story’s heaviness, Washington’s craft makes it read so effortlessly.
The audacious feminist icon collects a decade’s worth of her most essential essays and columns—on everything from police brutality to the Fast and the Furious franchise, from Trump and Dylann Roof to Janelle Monae and Joyce Carol Oates. Word by powerful word, Gay builds both an always-truthful mirror reflecting the fractures of the past ten years and a window into a more equitable future.
Chin, a journalist and co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, serves up a tender and stirring chronicle of his coming of age in 1980s Detroit, particularly the melting pot of Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, a vinyl-seated site of solace and the locus of a richly diverse community.
“When you are someone who falls outside of categories,” Alabanza writes in their powerful treatise on being Black and trans nonbinary, “a lot of things are said to you. You often become a place to hold other people’s confusion.” Alabanza, a performer and theatermaker, brilliantly structures their book as a response to the many inane and insidious phrases people have uttered at them, misunderstandings now reclaimed and turned into occasions to better understand (and celebrate) themselves.
Wry, laconic, and swoony, Dolan’s first novel—2020’s Exciting Times—was an auspicious debut, a queer love triangle that captured acutely the ways desire and class intersect. Fans will be happy to know that there’s no sophomore slump in this follow-up, about a pair of about-to-be newlyweds and their complicated cast of wedding guests.
What begins as a searing cultural critique of the prevalence of sentimental, whitewashed television shows—This is Us, Parenthood, etc.—unfurls brilliantly into a soul-stirring reflection on personal and cultural grief and the palliative effects of plainness. Tongson exquisitely captures what it means for queer people in particular to find solace in the quotidian.
Critical Hits, edited by J. Robert Lennon and Carmen Maria Machado (Nov. 21)
Charlie Jane Anders on the anti-capitalist pleasures of portal fantasies, Alexander Chee on Ninja Gaiden Black and the anxieties of authenticity, nat steele on playing Halo as a trans woman and the double-edged sword (or energy sword as the case may be) of identifying with an armor-clad protagonist. This anthology edited by Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert Lennon presents a veritable arcade of essays on the cultural vitality of video games.
A shrewd and moving meditation on the many complexities of womanhood, Blakley-Cartwright’s first novel tells the story of two childhood best friends now in their twenties, Sadie and Alice, the latter of whom enters into a complicated fling with the former’s mother, a famous feminist and academic.
Gatekeeping girlboss insidiousness, climate injustice and ecological inequality, love in the time of perpetual apocalypse—Korn’s thrilling work of speculative fiction, about billionaire-funded bubbles designed to seal off select people from inhospitable living conditions, trains a big, queer black mirror on the sociopolitical iniquities of our time.
Don’t forget to check out the following titles, published January through August 2023!
How can we make room for love–love of another, love of self–in the midst of perpetual apocalypse? It’s a question many of us have been asking on the daily these past few years, and it’s a question Jen St. Jude posits in her full-hearted speculative debut. Avery is a college student whose feelings of loneliness and hopelessness are upended when the world learns an asteroid will destroy life on earth in exactly nine days. St. Jude is a gorgeous writer (and vital literary citizen!) and her depiction of finding light in the ever-present dark will resonate in our precarious present and throughout whatever tomorrows we have left.
Every year for the past three decades, a group of friends who met in college congregate at a house in Big Sur to hold faux-funerals for one another, celebrating and/or mourning life events and letting one another know how much they are loved while they’re all still alive–leave nothing left unsaid, is the unofficial motto. But this year is different: one of them, Jordan (whose husband is also named Jordan and so they are therefore ‘the Jordans’) has terminal cancer. Thing is, he’s not telling the rest of them. Rowley’s novels deftly oscillate between tear-jerker and knee-slapper, books that brim with all of life’s big and small emotions, and his latest is no exception. It might just be his best yet.
The Big Chill goes gay in Davis’s raunch-com about six queer Brooklynites spending the holidays at a Hudson farmhouse. Come for the sometimes-riotous relationship drama, stay for the myriad cultural in-jokes (Lea Delaria, Maggie Nelson, and Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Foxall get shoutouts).
Safe to say that we could all use the sweet and salty joy of a new Samantha Irby collection. In a book dedicated to Zoloft, Irby offers often-hilarious, sweatpants-clad missives about trying to find moments of peace in a belligerent world and why it’s perfectly okay to like things other people call basic.
A college freshman enters into a complicated relationship with an alluring older woman whose wife has just left her. Fischer’s dreamy debut portrays two people at wildly different stages of life who are nonetheless both stuck in that liminal space between youth and maturity.
Stuck in a rut, risk-averse Eleanor decides to embark upon a year of wildness: each month (but only on weekends, naturally), she has to do one thing far out of her comfort zone. What begins as a kind of dare issued by her closest friend and unrequited crush becomes a touching, if messy, path to self-enlightenment.
Brandon Taylor probably needs no introduction to readers of these pages, but here goes: with his Booker-nominated novel Real Life and his Story Prize-winning collection Filthy Animals, Taylor has proven himself an exacting portraitist of the inner lives of outsiders, of intimacy’s grandness. He returns with a polyphonic novel centered on a group of young Iowa City friends on the cusp of whatever comes next and how their relationships help and hamper them along the way. (Taylor is the former Senior Editor of Recommended Reading.)
In her work as a publicist, Possanza has championed many wonderful writers, and now we get to champion her and her incredible book, a work of history and memoir that crystalizes what so many queer women know: it’s impossible to write our own autobiographies without the biographies of those who came before us. Subtitled “A Memoir in Archives,” Possanza’s centuries-spanning document–which melds her own story with hidden, intimate histories of drag kings and olympians, artists and activists–is a manifesto of love: of erotic love and platonic love, of familial and communal love, and maybe most importantly, self-love.
Do I want them or do I want to be them? This is perhaps one of the most central existential questions queer people ask themselves on the daily. Betancourt, one of the best film/television critics around, probes this quintessential conundrum by examining what he has learned about masculinity through watching movies. (Betancourt is EL’s former film columnist. Take a look at his hilarious and smart work here)
To say the Academy Award-nominated actor’s memoir is hotly anticipated is an understatement. So too is calling it a Hollywood tell-all. Sure, there’s probably a good deal of behind-the-scenes movie-making gossip fodder, but Page is also a groundbreaking activist; his coming out was—and still is—an act of game-changing bravery. Having lit up the big and small screens, he’ll now be blazing bookshelves.
In their debut English-language collection of speculative and absurdist fiction, Pasaribu adeptly renders that quintessentially queer liminal space between joy and melancholy.
A horror dramedy drawn in the style of a 90s cartoon, Lubchansky’s graphic novel about a newly-out trans person invited to attend a bachelor party for their old college buddy satirizes crypto-bro idiocy while delivering a profound meditation on selfhood.
Fuentes’s sensuous first novel centers on an undocumented pastry chef in Manhattan whose already liminal existence is thrown into further uncertainty when he’s forced to return to Spain. Yet on the plane back to Madrid, he meets a college student flying home to visit his aristocratic family, and what follows is an exquisite story of love—for another, for oneself, for home.
In the midst of lockdown, journalist Krista Burton took stock of what she missed most about being out in the world: “the feeling of being in a packed, sweaty dyke bar, surrounded by queers so close they’re touching me.” And so she sets off on an epic pilgrimmage across the country to visit some of the only remaining lesbian bars in America. Part celebration and part elegy, Burton’s quest becomes even more significant when she invites her partner, a trans man, to join, stirring up necessary conversations about who is welcome where.
“I try to understand people but they make it hard,” says the lonely mountain lion that narrates this quiet yet forceful roar of a novel. They reside beneath the Hollywood sign, observing hikers, confused and compelled by people’s daily dramas. A book full of humanity that you can sink your teeth into.
Not only is Adler a vital supporter of queer literature, but she is also a gifted writer of utterly delightful queer romcoms. Here, she toys with the bisexual trope of “having to choose.” We follow Natalya Fox, forced to decide between spending the summer in New York City, where she’s nursing a serious crush on a redheaded punk girl, or Los Angeles, where she’ll meet a guy interning in the same office. In alternating chapters taking place in parallel realities, we see what could be. Yet rather than a story of desire halved, what unfolds is a story about a girl embracing the wholeness of who she is.
In this captivating mystery set in 1970s Texas, a young woman named Lou helps renovate an old mansion for her beloved neighbor and surrogate maternal figure, Miss Kate, hiding both her grief over her brother’s death in Vietnam and her own identity. When Miss Kate is murdered, her hopes for solace are shattered. Then Joanna, Lou’s former love and Miss Kate’s estranged daughter, returns to town, and myriad secrets begin to unravel.
Written with a bright-eyed wryness that belies the difficulties depicted within, Marshall’s memoir chronicles his coming to terms with being a gay man with cerebral palsy, the latter a diagnosis kept from him all his life.
At once meditative and exhilarating, Viren’s memoir—which combines a rumination on her revered high school teacher’s propensity for pushing conspiracy theories with an eye-popping account of false misconduct allegations leveled at her wife—is for the philosophy major gays, a cavernous allegory about truth and justice.
The straight-shooting heroine of this thrilling, not-at-all-straight western is a recently orphaned redheaded teenager whose fiery locks land her a job as a “sporting woman” at a bustling brothel. “Greener than a Texas springtime,” Bridget eventually takes to life at the Buffalo Queen Saloon, but her mettle is tested when she crosses paths with a female bounty hunter.
Patrick’s sultry, penetrating debut is about a chest-binding soft-butch Aussie who gets a job as a Matron at an elite British boarding school and becomes infatuated with the Headmaster’s wife. Much more than a trope-y sapphic fantasy, this first novel is a perceptive exploration of the pains and pleasures of being perceived.
A beautiful book about a brutal, world-shattering tragedy, Wolf’s memoir explores the personal and political fallout of the Pulse nightclub shooting from the point of view of those who survived it. An essential testament to the togetherness and resilience of the queer community.
A truly wonderful interviewer and essayist, Madievsky arrives with her luminous debut novel. Our narrator is a pliant high school graduate trying to free herself from the grip of her sister’s approval. Possible salvation comes when Sasha, a queer Jewish refugee from Moldova, announces herself as the narrator’s spiritual guide. At once atmospheric and visceral.
Akella’s debut novel is a captivating coming-of-age tale set in 1990s India, about a boy who discovers solace and purpose within a traveling street theater troupe. Enmeshing himself among these vibrant storytellers, performing the Hindu myths from his childhood, he finds both love and refuge from his troubled past.
“To survive, you live through it, but never look back.” That’s the motto Dylan, a survivor of sex trafficking, repeats as he navigates the aftermath of his traumatic past. Then a window opens: a law is passed inviting people like Dylan to sue their abusers. But what does justice even look like? Hertz’s haunting debut gazes unwaveringly into the darkness—and unexpected light—of memory.
The best love stories are the ones in which the characters’ perceptions of themselves and each other change in surprising ways. Bellies is a grand, affecting story of shifting identities and shifting intimacy, following Tom and Ming, a couple whose deep affection is tested when the latter announces her desire to transition.
The second release from Roxane Gay’s publishing imprint, Lyon’s swoonworthy romance between a struggling artist who inherits her aunt’s Harlem brownstone and an auction house appraiser is also a sumptuous story about the complicated costs of ambition.
“[B]etween the best days of life and the worst days of life, between what you thought your life would be and what it is, between two people, there is a vivid and strange expanse in the middle,” Thomas writes in his latest collection, a funny and soul-stirring series of dispatches from this “middle.” Following his bestseller Here For It, Thomas perfectly captures the preposterous purgatory of life—being a firsttime homeowner, returning to a place you promised yourself you wouldn’t step foot in again—particularly in the midst of the pandemic.
For many years now Pagonis’s activism as an advocate for the intersex community has been indispensable, helping shine a much-needed light on an identity that is so often misunderstood and ignored. Now they’re bringing that enlivening energy to the page with their luminous memoir about the fight for selfhood.
Shapland follows the National Book Award finalist My Autobiography of Carson McCullers with another blazing book about the permeability between personal history and the sociopolitical systems that bind us. Through the lens of her dermatological diagnosis of extremely sensitive skin, she investigates many significant questions of our current age—climate change, capitalism run amok, female autonomy—and our “utter physical enmeshment with every other being on the planet.”
If you’re mourning the cancellation of HBO’s Gentleman Jack (raises hand), Room author Emma Donoghue’s got you. Her entrancing latest centers on the forbidden teenage romance between Eliza Raine and Anne Lister, she of sapphic, suffer-no-fools fame. Donoghue is so good at rendering the intensity of first queer love.
Crewe, an editor at the London Review of Books, debuts with a stimulating, sensuous novel set in 1890s Britain and centered on two men, each in their own complex hetero-passing marriages who collaborate—through Zoom letters—on a chronicle of queer life that will challenge Victorian sexual mores.
Winslow’s incredible debut, In West Mills, a largehearted decades-spanning tale about the insularity and kinship of a close-knit community, was awarded The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. In this follow-up, Winslow returns to West Mills with a story exploring the reverberations of a shocking murder.
In the dark mirror of this inventive dystopia, we see an America in which a shame-obsessed carceral system attaches shadows to those they’ve deemed wrongdoers–chimerical reminders of their crimes that sometimes linger into the next generation. Crane’s story centers on a new mother, grieving the loss of her wife, whose daughter has been born with two shadows. What unfolds is a tale of a uniquely queer form of parenthood and resistance.
Mike Flanagan, eat your heart out: Rumfitt’s fantastic first novel queers contemporary haunted house horror with this ghastly tale of two friends who, in attempt to put spectres of the past and present to rest, return to the abandoned house in which they spent one terrifying, traumatic night.
A la Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Lambda finalist Schwartz’s first novel forms a triptych of women who refuse to be stifled by societal expectations of femininity. The story unfolds as a series of sensuous fragments that would make the titular Greek poet proud.
WithPretend I’m Dead and Vacuum in the Dark, Whiting Award-winner Jen Beagin swept onto the scene as a singularly sardonic sad-girl absurdist. Those two novels were about a housecleaner in New Mexico who takes suggestive photos in her clients’ abodes; for Big Swiss, Beagin brings her acerbic wit to the Hudson Valley. The story centers on Greta, a transcriptionist for a sex therapist dwelling in a dilapidated Dutch farmhouse who soon becomes obsessed with one of her employer’s newest clients (the titular Swiss, a European gynecologist who’s never had an orgasm). This is erotic cottagecore as only Jen Beagin can do it.
Theranos but make it gay. In this Ripley-esque romp, two men—occasional lovers—create a fake empire based entirely on their own charisma and an impossibly auspicious wellness product that promises bliss to those who use it.
Millner’s story-in-verse—trying to classify this wonderfully amorphous book about the fluidity of desire is entirely beside the point—centers on a woman who falls in love with another woman for the first time, a relationship that upends her ideas of intimacy and herself: “That lust to me was wanting to transgress/beside another. To be so totally compelled./To share a truth you have to lie to tell.”
In Kelly’s first novel, a New York bookbinder coming to terms with her genderqueer identity finds a love letter scribbled on a page torn from a midcentury lesbian pulp novel. What ensues is a dizzying, intimate mystery, an exploration of how we become engrossed in the stories of others in order to tell ones of ourselves.
One of the most difficult and painful experiences of growing up religious and queer is figuring out whether you can reconcile those two important facets of your life. Often, that reconciliation feels impossible. Yet Lamya H’s memoir about coming of age as a queer hijabi Muslim offers an inspiriting vision of a world in which queerness and the Quran are not only compatible but illuminative of one another.
In a recent New York Times feature on how to read one’s way through London, Booker-winning author Bernadine Evaristo lavished this praise upon Isabel Waidner: “Their explosive sensibility and style are as far removed from mediocre prose and middle-class manners as you can imagine.” And it’s true: Waidner’s refreshingly absurdist third novel, which won Britain’s Goldsmiths Prize, is a topsy-turvy journey across Camden Town from the point of view of a nonbinary migrant, a Kafkaesque adventure that encompasses bullfighters, footballers, time-traveling spaceships, and a high-drama trial.
A teen table-tennis prodigy attends a summer camp and discovers something sinister stalking the girls there. A trans woman living in an America sans men joins her friends on an excursion to an erotic VR theme park. Bakić second collection, following Mars, offers spectral, speculative tales of womanhood’s fluidity and ferality.
Melissa Febos on the musicality of orgasm. Kristen Arnett on the wild tenderness and tender wildness of yard work. Keyannah B. Nurse on polyamory as a powerful archive of history and pleasure. Torrey Peters on the fried tilapia that portended the end of her marriage. The essays in this voluptuous, multivarious volume comprise an essential compendium of female desire.
The inaugural release of Gillian Flynn Books, Scorched Grace centers on Sister Holiday, a chain-smoking Catholic school music teacher turned amateur sleuth. If you’re not sold by a punk rock nun solving mysteries then can your soul even be saved?
Autostraddle columnist Meg Jones Wall offers an all-levels guide to reading the tarot, a compendium of resources to help beginners and longtime practitioners alike conjure from the cards a deeper understanding of one’s inner and outer worlds.
The beastliness of grief is heartbreakingly rendered in Córdova’s folklore-inflected first novel, which follows a bereaved mother taking the lung of her recently deceased son and nurturing it back into the boy she lost. But death can never be totally thwarted, and the son that returns isn’t quite the same.
Mirabella’s debut novel—about a pair of once-close siblings and how the bruises of their youth swell into adulthood—is both bracing and a balm, his softly disarming sentences like cotton puffs that absorb the pain of deep cuts.
In sixteenth century France, a woman began to dance in the Strasbourg city square. What started as an individual’s mysterious paroxysm became a full-blown plague of supposedly religious mania. Hargrave, whose previous novel The Mercieswas a bewitching work of historical fiction, sets her tale of three women trying to break free of society’s bonds against the backdrop of this strange phenomenon.
Bollen is a modern master of the Highsmithian literary thriller. His previous book, A Beautiful Crime, was a Venice-set caper about lovers turned con men, a mystery that tapped into the Floating City’s labyrinthine nature. Here, he flies readers to Cairo to uncover a mystery about an American defense contractor who’d reportedly died by suicide and his increasingly suspicious sister working to understand what really happened.
Over the course of three novels and a story collection, Catherine Lacey has become one of our most innovative literary practitioners, a writer capable of bending gender and genre. Lacey’s fifth work of fiction is a widow’s chronicle of her late wife, an artist known as X who has remained an enigma to the world at large and perhaps most of all to the woman who loved her.
Stories about scammers permeate contemporary media partly because, for the outside observer, there’s a sense of superiority at being able to preemptively spot the red flags, to declare “This would never happen to me.” But the head and the heart are seldom in sync, especially for the lonely and vulnerable. Take recent widow Shelby and divorcé Gibson, two people who, unbeknownst to one another, have fallen for the same woman, Cammie, a swindler who might just be the match to the tinder of their lives.
Chronicles of Narnia meets The Handmaid’s Tale in this gorgeous allegorical epic. It’s set in a fantasy world in which men known as Commanders ravage and pillage the land and its people, their power coming from ancient black stones passed down to them by their ancestors. The destruction goes unchecked until one day, a young tomboyish girl discovers the secret to defeating the Commanders once and for all (and falls in love along the way).
A largehearted look at the importance of found family, Mensah’s first novel focuses on the lifesaving friendship between a cast-off son on the brink of self-harm and the easygoing new roommate whose affection becomes a balm. Small Joys dwells in the sometimes-fleeting moments of pleasure and happiness that stave off the iniquities of the world.
Shuggie Bain vibes abound in this tenderhearted tale by Karl Geary, whose previous book was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and France’s prestigious Prix Femina. It follows two misfit teens in 1980s Ireland whose love for one another offers solace from the sociopolitical strife of an Emerald Isle in the midst of growing pains.
The Everlasting, Smith’s previous novel, was a polyphonic, multi-century-spanning trip across Rome, and here she returns to the Eternal City for a story about two women hundreds of years apart who are nonetheless connected by the solace of botany, two lost souls cataloging plants in the Colosseum ruins in an attempt to mend their own broken hearts.
Little’s sensuous and snappy kunstlerroman about a young, struggling poet in South London is the first release from Get Lifted Books, a publishing imprint co-led by singer John Legend. When Elsie is evicted from her flat, she’s forced to move in with her former best friend, a situation both strained and one of potential salvation–a bulwark against the agonies of a bartending job and an affair with her boss.
Cypher’s vibrant debut centers on Betty, a Palestinian-American girl born with cobalt blue skin. In her adulthood, she discovers and tries to decipher journals kept by her aunt—the family matriarch and keeper of their lore—a complex woman whose story begins to color in pieces of Betty’s own.
Jane Wong’s memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City is a feast of a book. It’s about hunger—the hungers of the body, of addiction, of history. Brilliant, gutting, and funny, she writes with such range about growing up in her family’s Chinese restaurant in Atlantic City as their reach for the American Dream slips away.
Wong recounts not only what it was like for her immigrant parents to have had a restaurant, but also the importance of appetite, and the long painful shadows of family surviving and not surviving Mao Zedong’s Great Famine. Wong’s love of food, her father’s love of gambling, her mother’s unconditional support and love, and the abusive love of men are intricately woven together, offering a meditation about love itself.
I sat with Jane Wong over zoom to talk about finding nourishment amidst pain and rage, the incantatory power of poetry, and the intimidation tactics of toxic men.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras: You begin the memoir with eating dragonfruit and you end with eating mango. Your mother is in both of those scenes as well. I was moved by the connections you were making between the Great Famine and your ancestors experiencing hunger, and feeling voracious in the present, and the importance of, you know, eating more than the ex-boyfriends and having a larger-than-life appetite. So that eating and tending to your hunger seemed like radical acts and important in your lineage.
Jane Wong: I feel like it is radical. If anything, you know, I worry sometimes—there’s times in the book and also in real life in which life will get so busy and so hard, I will not nourish myself very well.
I’m so lucky to have a community that feeds me, which in a weird way, like you’re suggesting, I feel that I consume in order to take care of the ghosts. Parts of the memoir also speaks to what it means to finally get to a place where I can sustain myself too.
IRC: For some of us, the historical archive has been interrupted—either because of our “unimportance” to history, or because of war and migration. So then when people like us are writing memoir, we end up having to reach for these other versions of archive. There’s this great passage in your book where you’re making jook and describing the recipe. Since it was a recipe that’s passed down, that felt archival to me.
JW: I never thought about it in that way. That’s so thoughtful. A soupy archive! I love that. Obviously these foods are tied to our deep, deep, ghostly archival selves.
IRC: What I love about our conception of archive is that it allows for a communication with ancestors.
JW: Yes! One thing I was thinking about with the ghost archive has to do with this one section in the memoir where I made one of my poems into sculpture. I had pineapple cakes on the altar, which are archival, and the favorite snacks of my grandfather. Someone stole the pineapple cakes or they went missing and the security guards couldn’t figure out what happened. I absolutely loved that, because then, literally the ghosts took back the archive. I feel like the ghosts kind of want their stuff back, which is kind of funny, and it makes sense to me. It’s their stuff.
IRC: Yes! It’s a porous relationship. There’s a popular conception of the archive as static. It exists in the record and you read it and that’s it. But a ghost archive is a conversation, things are offered, retrieved, taken back.
JW: And it involves deep, deep listening. I’m sure you encountered this, too, but, it’s nearly impossible to interview family. It’s not the work of a journalist. It feels like archival work. It’s putting your ear against like, literally, the graveyard.
That was a big part in my own writing through the Great Leap Forward. It was honoring the fact that my family would not, cannot speak about it. It is too painful. I didn’t even try to ask them fully because, I knew it would be crossing a line that was not okay. So then you do deep listening and you listen closer to the stories told around you. It wasn’t until my grandfather was very, very ill, for example, that I found out that he was adopted and his father who adopted him committed suicide.
That happened a lot actually during that Great Leap Forward when families were gone. People would adopt and say, “You’re now my family, you exist, you’re alive.” So, again, no one told that story.
IRC: The other thing about writing into those silenced histories is that then your story starts to speak for the other silenced histories. I’ve met so many Colombians who are born in the U.S. who have said to me, “My parents don’t talk about the reason why we came or what happened, but your book gives me an answer.” It can be so powerful for everyone in the community to hear those stories because everyone else has been living in that silence as well.
In moments of rage, you have to care for yourself and you have to reach out to others to care for you.
JW: The question I get asked often is how did I talk to my grandparents about the famine. I guess the answer is I didn’t. What I usually tell writers and audience members is that what’s more important for me is taking care of my elders and giving them the peace they need.
IRC: And that’s the difference, isn’t it. Some memoirists have this idea of interviewing as extracting information or extracting story from someone and that is a very colonial perspective.
JW: It is. You’re totally right.
IRC: What our communities need is not extraction but listening, and as you’re saying respecting the silences people want to keep especially when they’re for their own survival. The caretaking of those silences is so important. Even writing the silence says so much about the weight of something that’s happened.
The stories you wove together felt like a collection of things that are nourishing and things that are exhaustions.
Because your family had a restaurant, there are the literal ways in which you’re finding nourishment, and then there’s the metaphorical nourishment of poetry. And there are the elements that I would categorize as being exhausting to the self, which in the memoir are problematic men, toxic masculinity, gambling addictions.
JW: Oh, yeah. There is a lot of rage in the book. In thinking about being an Asian American woman, I am not necessarily expected to be rageful, or to say anything, truly.
And rage alone is very different from being rageful in community, and what that can do in terms of nourishment and tangible change. I think about that a lot, and especially even just thinking about the relationship between me and my mother, which is so central to the book.
There’s a lot of humor in our relationship, as much as there is this kind of deep sense of sharing our exhaustion and talking about our exhaustion.
What’s really been powerful for me over the years is that when I finally shared with my mom what happened in terms of a really toxic, abusive relationship, she began to share about my father. That’s something that she really protected me from growing up. I have forgiven my father in terms of other aspects about who he is, such as the gambling and such as him not necessarily being in my life and missing out on our family. And I miss him. I really hope that he’s well and I think about him all the time. But when my mom started sharing more about him in terms of being a husband, that I had to work through. That was newer to me.
In writing memoir, you almost kind of have to have a reckoning in the process of writing the book, and tell the story like you actually are actively inside the living organism of writing this thing. That was surprising to me. I didn’t necessarily expect it. It was definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done so far.
IRC: There was this one part in the memoir where you mentioned writing a poem before leaving this abusive relationship, and how the poem was you in the future and how it emboldened you to leave. Is that a practice that you’ve always had, trying to see yourself into the future by writing?
In thinking about being an Asian American woman, I am not necessarily expected to be rageful, or to say anything, truly.
JW: Absolutely. I feel so small sometimes in terms of all these things that have happened to me, and I feel like poetry is sometimes the only space in which I have agency or a voice, quite literally; what it means to be a speaker in a poem. In many ways I do feel like it is my most powerful version of myself and I do tend to write in order to make something happen. I think that if there is any goal I have when I’m writing, it’s starting a poem not knowing where I’m going to be by the end. But usually by the end there is something incantatory, something that’s desired that I didn’t begin with.
Maybe it’s kind of like you already know the answer. You know what you need to do and you just have to express it and then then do it.
IRC: That sounds powerful, to write into a desire to do something for yourself. If the desire was not loud enough before, then writing it would give it volume. The moment that a desire has volume, then you’ve propelled yourself into it. I love how it’s conjuring something into being.
JW: For me, words were kind of one of the ways in which I feel like I can make change happen. Especially with the Bad One who’s in the memoir.
I really, really did need to write that poem, and a few others, in order to remind myself that I had agency and that I had a voice, and that these last two are actually something that a lot of these toxic men did not like about me.
That’s the other thing that I discovered and tried to unravel in the memoir, especially in the chapter called “The Object of Love”—I wanted to reckon with the fact that here was the one thing that gave me so much power and agency which is writing, and here where these very toxic exes of mine who really did not like the fact that I was a writer. That has always been, unfortunately, a pattern I’ve noticed.
IRC: I found the way that you were writing about abusive relationships and patterns to be masterful. I loved what you were saying about the term “daddy issues.” In the memoir you wrote about how being at the receiving end of all of these abusive behaviors has consequences, and how our term for those traumatic residues are “daddy issues,” which is a term that minimizes the harm a person has been subjected to, and minimizes the traumatic response to that harm.
JW: Yeah, and, you know, that term is so deeply gendered, how it’s often used. I write about it a little bit in that particular chapter: who gave this to me? Why did this happen? Why did this happen to me? Why was this toxicity placed upon me?
In writing this book, it was really difficult to wrestle with a lot of internalized racism too. I had that feeling in your stomach where you’re going down a rollercoaster and it’s half in the air. It’s just a little icky, and what to do about the white ex-boyfriends in particular. But I think that I had to go there, and if I didn’t, I was going to regret it.
I’m curious, too, about how audiences have reacted to your work. The memoir work is to say these are our stories, these are our lives. But also I always wonder, you know, what did white audiences expect going in? I’m curious about that in terms of the expectations.
IRC: That has been fascinating to see how different audiences react to the book. Early on, a white man told me that he was an EMT and that he knew exactly what I meant when I said that things get very strange when you get close to death, witness it, are surrounded by it. I wasn’t expecting that. Many people connect to the love in my family, and my relationship with my mother. I did have a white woman tell me that she loved the book and she only had one qualm, which is she wanted me to say my grandfather was a shaman and she didn’t want me to use the word curandero.
But one of the things that I wanted to say in terms of the way that you were writing about abusive relationships and surviving and getting out of those, is that I think that’s why the anger and the rage in the book felt so good to me as a reader. There was this magnificent energy that lives in the book and that is all about occupying an angry space, and honoring that emotion.
Poetry is sometimes the only space in which I have agency or a voice, quite literally.
JW: With those bad relationships, I always think to myself, you can’t make this stuff up. I’m like, “What in the world?” For example, my ex-fiancee sending me an invoice for the mattress.
IRC: You wrote that he had possibly slept with other people on the same mattress and the mattress was blood-stained. That was why he was sending you the invoice, but he couldn’t even prove that it was your blood.
JW: Yes! And so, again, when your system is so shocked by moments like that, when you actually receive an email like that, how do you not feel not just rage, but a deep sense of fear, too, because that’s obviously an intimidation tactic. And what can I do except attempt to nourish myself?
In moments of rage, you have to care for yourself and you have to reach out to others to care for you, and vice versa to care for them when they get whatever email that they get, which always unfortunately happens.
It’s this cycle of care that I’m really grateful for. In the book, my mom calls it fertilizer. And it does feel like that. It’s like I’m always trying to make some sort of elixir of care metaphorically, but also literally in terms of taking care of my plants, of which I have like 75.
The tulle of my grandmother’s dress
like a comet tail, a bouquet of algae
tonguing my feet. I track
the red sequins of her eyes
in the surf. Anything left
is mine to love: a spray of sand,
ropes of thunder. I hail
from a circle of grandmothers
racked by monsoons and orphaned
by metal. Their arms as warm and still
as the riptide. We dream
of lost time, the specter of a plane
after takeoff, tongues domesticated
into petals. I open my hands
to harbor. There’s the white wedding of foam,
the dusky pillows
of sea glass. Every sphere
begins as an infinity of circles. Every child
begins as an infinitive. My grandmother wailing
like a gulf
of sirens. Here we are: touched
by emergency, jettisoned
from empire. Under a sting of sky,
the supernova vaporizes
our one home. Crabs and starfish
respawning only as myths.
My grandmother cradles me
until our shapes
are atomized. Nothing
more loved than disaster.
Orange Saints
On Sunday my father takes my brother to the shooting
rang. The targets he ruptures are orange, unknown,
thumbprint small. When they stutter, I imagine the bullets
as comets fizzling out of an octave sky. Holes flexed
around the shapes of stillness, marked like tree rings. My father
shows him a photo of the muzzle flash, says: this is the sun
you'll inherit, as the rivers embrace oil spill, as the time capsules
decay to dirt. Know there exists an orange sun for every son. A grace
for every wildfire. Break a fever and burst it
orange, open. O, oath of bullets. Teach us how to plant our hearts like
flags on solid ground.
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