Two mathematicians but they are more friends than colleagues. The older of the two, Henry, teaches to graduate students in Tokyo while Liam, fifteen years his junior, works as a consultant for a private contractor in Madison. Liam makes fun of Henry because his name pentadecimally has more letters than his in correlation with the gap in their ages, but no one but them finds it funny. The two have been sending each other letters every month for the past eighteen years, on the days or weeks of the calendar marked with a prime number as another inside joke.
What did the triangle tell the circle? Henry asks Liam in his last letter before Christmas, postmarked on the twenty-third day of the month.
What? Liam asks in his reply.
You’re pointless, Henry writes back two weeks later.
They have a tradition where they send a pen nib back and forth as part of their snail mail correspondence, to be used for when someone important in their field passes away. The rule is that whoever is in possession of the nib on the day of the news should write a few words after the deceased and reserve a memorial spot in either The Times or The Tribune, the only two international papers distributed to where each lives. They’ve only made use of the nib six times in eighteen years, the last dedicated to Henry’s professor from his doctorate, who had lent him the nib in the first place. As the recipient of the nib, Henry wrote a numerically melodic eulogy for the man, showing his gratitude and appreciation in iambic pentameter. When he later tried to describe the experience to Liam, he used such quaint words as exultant and qualmish, the kind of feelings only the people past a certain age like him would feel.
In one of his more recent letters to Liam, Henry writes, What’s one word that starts with an E and ends with an E and only has one letter in between?
Liam replies: Envelope. He knows this thanks to the video his son shared on Twitter a few months back, which is also probably where Henry saw it.
Two months later, following their longest lapse in communication, Henry asks again in another letter: What’s one word that starts with an E and ends with an E and only has one letter in between?
Envelope, Liam writes at first but then, keeping in mind his friend’s declining health, replaces his paper with new stationery to ask him, What?
You’re pointless, Henry replies.
The next morning, before Liam can make it to the post office, he receives a phone call from Henry’s stepdaughter in Tokyo. Her father has passed away in his sleep.
“Toward the end, he started naming his friends after the months they died in,” she tells him. “So I guess you can start calling him August from now on.”
Today, it’s Liam’s turn to feel qualmish. He feels as if his past and present are drifting apart in front of his eyes like the continents that have separated them for all these years. As Henry used to complain, numbers defined an invariable order of things, dictating in an industrial precision what came before and what came after, unlike people; with people, he would say, it was all so random, the young going before the old, the big turning small. It pulls him from both edges like the tug-of-war that’s been happening inside him since losing his younger brother as a kid to the sea.
That morning, the nib in his possession, Liam’s mind cooks with possibilities. These days, the nib is chewed on its back end, showing all the wear and tear of its travels. Following the advice he gives to clients, he waits for the right moment, which happens on the seventh day of the month. It’s one of the sparkly ones, as Henry used to call them, a sensation he hasn’t felt in so long, most definitely not after he took up this stupid job. He sits at his desk looking out to the sea and goes through all 206 letters Henry has sent him over the years. He makes a list of all the jokes his friend made, both good and bad. He cuts parts from each joke and stitches them together with some others that have irregularly stretched out over two decades of long-distance friendship. He shuffles them as if they are variables of a formula whose outcome is yet unknown.
On the seventeenth day of the next month, the opening line of Henry’s memorial in The Times reads, What does the triangle say to a word that starts with an E and ends with an E and has one daughter in between?
On the same day, Henry’s memorial in The Tribune opens with: What does a heartbroken circle tell August?
Liam runs the memorials every week, each time with a newly pastiched joke. To his surprise, some people write back to him—and sometimes, thanks to the irony of fate, on prime number days. It’s not only colleagues who get in touch with him but also underappreciated kids, underpaid husbands, and undervoiced housewives from around the world. Sometimes, they confuse the jokes and accidentally generate new ones between their lines, which makes the outcome even more interesting for Liam.
We need new words, reads the letter of a high-school teacher from Leeds, where Liam’s mother was from.
An infinite amount of them, Liam writes back. Not unlike numbers if you ask me.
Months later, the day before Henry’s first anniversary, Liam pens a new joke to his old friend and slides the nib into the envelope. He writes Henry’s address in Tokyo on the flip side and tosses the letter in the mailbox, hoping one day it will be his turn again.
Banana Republic. No, not the clothing store. The term is more insidious than cotton slacks and button downs. In the 20th century, the phenomenon known as the “Banana Republic” originated from a white, American man’s imagination to describe a country with a monocrop economy, ruled by a small, powerful elite, and prone to political turmoil, easily overthrown governments, and above all, a habit of U.S. intervention. The banana—that delicious, golden fruit—started it all; the United Fruit Company—known today as Chiquita—bent entire nations to its will for produce and profits.
This reading list comes from those who survived banana plantations owned by the UFC, those who organized against it, who wrote with unflinching truth of its exploitative nature, squalid living conditions, and political meddling on local and national levels. The banana reigned supreme, and these authors sought to attack its influence, not with machetes like their countrymen, but with the pen. Their literary tradition, known as Social Realism, follows the lives of the lower classes and exposes the greater machinery that manipulates and subjugates their lives.
My debut novel Where There Was Fire deals a lot with bananas, more specifically, the American Fruit Company, a fictional amalgamation of United Fruit and the Standard Fruit Company (known today as Dole), and its use of an infamous pesticide by the name of Nemagon. While I’d visited banana plantations before to watch men throw bushels into piles and donkeys haul them to mills, the novels on this reading list provided me with an intimate, painful look into what really had happened on these same plantations decades before. What the United States sowed, and the sweet, toxic fruit indentured Latin Americans reaped.
Mamita Yunai by Carlos Luís Fallas
Carlos Luís Fallas (known affectionately as Calufa) is arguably Costa Rica’s most famous writer, and his 1941 novel Mamita Yunai Costa Rica’s greatest literary export. While any other day, Mamita is a term of endearment in Costa Rica, Mamita [United Fruit Company] is used ironically, and sets the tone for the novel’s hyper-realistic depiction of life on the UFC’s plantations—disease and squalor, salaries spent on services provided by the company, men smashed by falling trees, and chopped to bit by machetes. The protagonist, a peasant union activist, confronts firsthand the impossibility of escape from the hellish shade of banana trees.
Bananas and Men by Carmen Lyra
“I put ‘Bananas’ first,'” Carmen Lyra’s epigraph reads, “because on the banana plantations, the fruit comes first, or, in fact, it is of singular importance… Man is an entity that has none.”
Carmen Lyra was the cofounder of Costa Rica’s Communist party, and her 1931 short story collection, Bananas and Men, tackles a myriad of social nuances and consequences on the banana plantations. While this book inspired Calufa’s Mamita Yunai, Lyra’s feminist tales begin with a woman’s illegible name written on a black, wooden cross buried on a beach, sea eaten. Lyra’s narrative documents the injustices women faced on these plantations—exploitation, disease, rape, abuse—and courageously condemns the Company and machismo beyond its plantations’ borders.
Skillfully buried below the yellow butterflies, discovery of ice, and Remedios the Beauty ascending to heaven, is a searing reproach of the UFC, namely, the Colombian Banana Massacre of 1928. In the fantastical prose of One Hundred Years of Solitude, three thousand men, women and children, protesting the squalid working conditions on the Company’s banana plantations, arrive and organize in the town square to negotiate with a government official. What greets them is military gunfire from every angle, and all but one is left dead, their bodies piled onto trains and tossed into the sea. While exaggerated in the novel, the real-life version is not too far off, and no less horrifying.
Puerto Limón by Joaquín Guitérrez
In 1950, a renowned Costa Rican literary critic exclaimed that Puerto Limón was Costa Rica’s finest novel, even if most of its population had never even heard of it. Originally published in Chile, the novel follows a young high school graduate named Silvano who relocates to work on his uncle’s banana plantation in the countryside, amid rising labor tensions between the government, labor syndicates, the UFC, and independent landowners. What follows is a deeply human internal struggle within a young man who loves his uncle but empathizes with the workers fighting for sanitary working conditions. A cast of characters accompanies Silvano, and its climax is a breathtaking scene of his uncle and union busters careening their car into a river, finally setting Silvano free and sets his eyes on the sea.
Green Prison by Ramón Amaya Amador
Like the other Social Realist writers on this list, Ramón Amaya Amador lived and worked as a pesticide sprayer on banana plantations, but his writing deals with the Standard Fruit Company in Honduras. Prisión Verde takes place in 1940s Honduras, where a military dictator protects the exploitative fruit companies to gain their favor by destroying labor strikes and assassinating workers. After publication, Amaya Amador was forced to flee Honduras, and Prisión Verde was banned; reading it could land you in jail, and for many years, those who mentioned it would have to do so in a whisper.
Strong Wind by Miguel Ángel Asturias
Starting off Asturias’s Banana Trilogy is Vientos Fuertes, a literal whirlwind of a novel. Local banana producers are undercut, short changed, and blown off by the fictional company Tropical Fruit, Inc., simply because it can—as their only buyer, the Company toys with these Guatemalan farmers, just as it did in real life, dropping prices, and if angered, leaving their fruit to rot. Initially aided by a white American who is secretly a stock owner of Tropical Fruit, Inc., the farmers are saved by a Native ritual that summons a literal cyclone that rips Tropical Fruit, Inc. plantations from the map.
The Green Pope by Miguel Ángel Asturias
The sophomore installment of Asturias’s Banana Trilogy, El papa verde tackles the fruit companies from the inside, or rather, from the top. Its anti-hero, George Maker Thompson, is a ruthless money-maker dealing in bananas in Central America. With so much power given to him by greed and the fruit, he christens himself as the Green Pope. He wishes for the annexation of Guatemala by the United States, fends off rival fruit companies, and pulls out every dastardly deed in the book to become president of the Company. With such caricature of a protagonist and a melodramatic plot, the novel carries the tone of a biting political cartoon and the mastery of Asturias’s prose.
Los ojos de los enterrados leaves off right where The Green Pope stopped—George Maker Thompson is still a powerful plutocrat, though he’s dying from throat cancer. Tropical Fruit, Inc. has become a behemoth, manipulating governments, economies, and people with the sticky dexterity of an octopus’s tentacles. Two “good gringos” ally themselves with Native laborers to fight against the influence of Tropical Fruit and its Green Pope, who plans to section off a swath of Central America as a “green zone”, where American culture and the dollar reign supreme with the help of the almighty banana. Asturias’s final installment of the Banana Trilogy is a rewarding, volcanic rollercoaster ride.
In Alissa Hattman’s debut novel Sift, the world, at first, appears hostile to life, nearly uninhabitable. Skies darken with toxins and smoke. Food, especially produce, is scarce. Drinking water is limited, a result of rivers and other natural bodies that have been poisoned. Fires rage and a tenor of violence hums at the edges of the story.
From this bleak landscape comes a story that unfurls like a new frond: green, bright, and tender. In the opening pages, the narrator, yet unnamed, is picked up by a woman she describes as “the only person I’d met who had learned how to keep living.” As the two travel across a dying landscape in the hope of finding some tangible relief, they begin to better understand not only one another, but themselves, the world around them, and the larger web of history that they are a part of.
Hattman’s prose is lyric, brimming with the pleasing sounds of a poem, and the novel is told in a series of sharp, sparse vignettes that feature not only the human perspectives of the narrator and her newfound travel companion, The Driver, but also includes segments exclusively focused on pond snails, the western banded gecko, wild mustard, and more. Reading Sift encouraged me to think about what it means to listen to the narratives of flora, fauna, and other elements in our world, and just how possible it is to translate that into language; what it means to care for another being or entity, and the cost that sometimes comes with our attempts to care; and how to grieve while also holding on to hope. I had the opportunity to speak with Hattman about all of this, and more, via Zoom.
Jacqueline Alnes: Your book opens with a quote from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss, in which she writes: “From Tetraphis, I began to understand how to learn differently, to let the mosses tell their story, rather than wring it from them.”
I love the way that your book is a human story but also includes lyric sections that are focused on elements in the natural world. What does it look like when we let the environment speak to us rather than us imposing a story on it?
Alissa Hattman: With that epigraph, I was trying to be intentional in this process of gesturing toward the stories outside the human-driven story of the two main characters. I wanted to include more of the environmental elements within their own stories. It can be a hard thing to do because you don’t want to talk for the non-human other, but I approached it as a deep listening. I tried to remove any of the pronouns and any of this sense of subject or agency and see what could surface from that.
JA: In terms of that deep listening, this story seems to be so much about bearing witness: to environmental collapse, and to moments of joy—which aren’t very frequent in this story. You write, “Observing is one way to go on” and “I knew the act of writing would help it stay in my head.” There’s this recurring theme of wanting to remember. For you, does this book represent the importance of all of us bearing witness to what is currently going on in our world or the idea of putting that into language?
Storyteling helps us emotionally to engage with this very difficult topic of climate change or systemic racism.
AH: I do think this deep attention and witnessing can be a type of understanding, and then maybe also resistance in some cases. Paying attention to the environment, the long history of the land, another person’s grief, all of this is a type of repair, a type of listening that I think is very important. Grieving humanity or some of what we’ve lost, like species or the degradation of the land, is a larger witnessing. It can lead to action as well. If there is that type of listening that becomes more relational and becomes more understanding of a larger history, then I think it moves people to change and to act.
JA: It reminded me a little of when Trump was elected and people were keeping track of his tweets. It felt like something to do. It felt powerful at first but then, as it went on, it felt like an insurmountable wall of horrors. In your novel, there is this accumulation of grief—for humans, for air, for water, the internal landscapes of the characters. Did writing during a time of collective grief and unrest inform how you approached this subject?
AH: I started writing Sift at the beginning of the pandemic. It began with a deep fear of loss, which was something that was individual, this fear of losing loved ones, at first, but then it became so much larger. It became an anticipatory grief, of realizing how large and overwhelming it would get. There was so much happening alongside the pandemic. The pandemic is related to climate change. In Oregon, we had fires and then ice storms, increased air pollution, poverty, displacement, environmental racism, redlining, all these things were happening and coming to a head. The larger loss was an environmental grieving, grieving not only this moment but what came before as well.
In terms of what that means for Sift, I knew that I was going to write something that was going to encompass this heavy material, these traumatic moments. I wanted it to be in a way that felt the narrative was calm and safe as well, so there was a sense of yes, this is all happening, and we have community and connection, even if that connection is only one other person or even if that connection is with some aspect of the environment. It was originally just something I felt like I needed to write in this moment to go on but I was thinking about how to create a work that allows us to enter into that space that so many people feel overwhelmed by. I don’t know if it succeeds, but that was the plan when I started. I wanted to thread in love, community, friendship, and a certain amount of safety.
JA: While reading, I got this sense of interconnectedness, which is so beautiful but also means that when one thing starts to falter, everything does. It’s hard to reckon at any moment with how connected we are to the environment and other people.
AH: This quote from Hannah Arendt, “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it,” gets at this idea of being able to place a lot of these intersections together into story and some meaning will come of it. This is one of the great tools that we have as storytellers and novelists, to express a moment in some amount of clarity so that a number of people can take away intersections from that moment, something that will be meaningful to them. Storytelling is a place where repair can happen.
I think about holding some of those histories, social and environmental collapse, as being a rupture; holding and witnessing and discussing outside of the story is a type of repair. Not in a sense that it will fix everything, but that it emotionally helps us to engage with this very difficult topic of climate change or systemic racism. I think about how story is many-faceted in that way. Even though it might not change hearts and minds, there is a potential for something larger in that conversation in talking about literature or writing.
JA: In Sift, you write, “I did not care for you as I should have because I did not know, or I did not take the time to learn what caring for you meant…I am sorry for every casual or not-so-casual way I harmed you.” Care and harm seem like flipsides of each other in that none of us are perfect in our attempts to care for another person, being, or the space we are in; it’s an imperfect practice. Did you start to develop a semblance of what care might look like in our present world?
AH: The passage that you read is recognizing that there are things we will do that can hurt and can harm. There is no perfect way of caretaking. I’m not a parent, but I talk to people who are parents and they will say that one of the early lessons they have is that there is no perfect way of doing this. They are going to make mistakes and it’s going to be hard. There is going to be some harm, no matter what. I think about that in terms of any relationship, really. So you try to do what you can so you cause the least amount of harm or, if you do cause harm, to spend time repairing.
In this book, there is what’s held and what’s let go. The characters keep passing back these stones, these stories, back and forth. There are certain times when the other person can hold it and certain times when they can’t. It’s difficult to be able to recognize that and also communicate that, on the small and large level, too. When we talk about ecological grief, which is a term that’s been around since the 1940s, we are talking about the pain that is caused by environmental loss. In 2020, there was a survey that showed two-thirds of adults experience eco-anxiety. Allowing more of this discussion around some of the grief and the fears and the loss of environment is a step toward understanding, witnessing, and action and change.
In the same way we think about grief with individuals or about these different topics with our loved ones, I think about it as trying to hold some of it when you can and recognizing when it is not something you can hold or when it’s something you need to let go of. It would be so interesting to see more environmental grief groups or something like that in the world.
JA: The book highlights that there are these tangible forms of care, or attempts to pre-empt someone’s comfort through blankets or canned food, but then so much of care seems so intangible, which is maybe where some of the anxiety in regard to the environment comes from. I care, but I’m flailing. What can I physically, personally do about this thing that feels so far beyond the limits of my daily existence?
AH: That idea of tangibility and what can be done on a day-to-day basis is something I think about a lot in my life. In the book there’s this one scene where they come across a bag of garbage and I think it’s a very human problem where it’s like, what do we do with all this garbage? In the book, seeing garbage is a moment of hope: maybe there are other people. The characters have this conversation about what to do with it. One character wants to take it with them, but they have to travel light. The other character is being very practical and says no, somebody might come and it might be theirs. She thinks it might be someone else’s treasure. The narrator just takes one bottle from the garbage because she thinks it might be useful.
When I have felt joy in life, it’s because I have recognized my mortality or the mortality of others.
The thought process of going through recycling or being a conscious consumer is something that happens every day. There are these practical everyday things that you do not because you think about what it might mean long-term, but because this is what we do, right now, to care for each other. I think that it’s somehow trying to do the tangible but not being too overwhelmed by the intangible. You’re right that the anxiety comes from not knowing what to do. It’s going to be different for each person, but if it’s an emotional response, maybe it should be dealt with in an emotional way. Any time you’re having anxiety, there’s an underlying fear; can we get at that fear? Can we talk about some of that and learn how to be there for one another in the discussion rather than avoiding it and feeling like it’s too big or too much?
JA: There’s a thread of gender in the book. There’s this group of nameless men who keep coming back, and the brother has to go to war and that violence forever shapes him. There is also a strong theme of friendship between women. The ways that these expectations imposed on us in relation to gender shape who we are, what we are exposed to, and how we hold those traumas and carry them with us.
AH: I was absolutely thinking about the harms of patriarchy throughout this and what that looks like for men, women, and nonbinary people. I did want to look at how the harms of patriarchy show up in this particular world and I think it’s something that we see a little bit with the brother character and the harms of war. There are also moments where the past traumas with the narrator and these faceless men who are described only as “the men.” It’s meant to show the lack of individuality in moments of violence. They become this larger system, machine, something, that is taking away from identity in many ways. That violence becomes its own character.
JA: You obviously thought so much about language in this book. Some elements you just describe, others you leave vague, some you name. There’s always a tension, right, in how we name something? Naming something can be an act of colonization in the way they can be imposed, but a name is also a form of knowing, of intimacy.
AH:I know this comes up with a lot of writers around naming. In a number of Ursula LeGuin’s books, there are characters who have multiple names but there is one true name, and that is given by another character. I intentionally waited for the characters to name themselves in the drafting process and I realized I wanted there to be as much time to go by for the reader as time had gone by for me as the writer. The names encompassed other elements and were in harmony or concert with their environment. To me, that felt right. It felt like it represented collectivity.
The tension you’re talking about is an interesting one. I certainly don’t think I get around it in this book, even after the characters name each other. When they name each other, there is this familiarity and they see each other differently, but there’s that pinning down that happens with identity when there’s a name. I don’t know if it gets around that tension at all; it’s still quite there.
JA: Part of the book is about deep griefs, but there is this longing from the characters who want to get out of the darkness. What do you think the role of grief is in developing joy?
AH: I think that they are one in the same, in many ways. It’s a strange thing to say, but in my grieving process, it has always felt like an act of love to me, and an act of joy. And when I have felt joy in life, it’s because I have recognized my mortality or the mortality of others. It feels very much entwined.
In Sift, there are moments from the past where the narrator is talking about joy. There’s a moment in the field with music and there’s a moment at the grocery store, getting bread: small, small moments that didn’t feel like much, but now having lived through so much chaos and trauma, they hold a lot of medicine and joy. They are things that the narrator keeps calling on as a type of coping mechanism. I don’t know if I could write a grief narrative without including joy. Grieving is recognizing some of the joys of life.
JA: Do you feel like that’s part of your compulsion to write, especially in this current landscape we’re living in? You’re making something beautiful in a dark time.
AH: Yes. This is also the difficulty. I don’t want to aestheticize the environment or the horrors of the environment in a way that might ameliorate that horror. It’s a very tricky balance. My attempt is to be in the space of grief or of trauma or of a deep sense of loss or remembrance and witness of the degradation of the environment. I feel like as an artist, trying to create it in a way where people can still see it and hold it, but not be so beautiful that it distracts from the realities. It’s something that’s very hard to do and I don’t know if I’m successful at it, but to me it felt like the lyric of it, the music of the prose, was the beauty and that allowed me to do whatever else I feel like I needed to share with the content of the piece. My hope was that it would be a balance.
JA: It’s hard because you don’t want to go the other way, either. For me, if I read straight environmental horror it makes me feel like I can’t do anything.
AH: When I was working with the editors on writing the synopsis for this story, I kept bringing in the darkness and they were saying no, no, there’s lightness and joy. I was bringing in more of the grief aspect and they helped remind me, as you are reminding me, that there is a lot of joy mixed up with the grief.
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.”
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
