Aurora Mattia’s debut novel The Fifth Wound is a fantastical journey through the formulation of one trans woman’s truth. Mattia’s own recapitulation as protagonist Aurora aka @silicone_angel bridges the gap between ancient Greece, Covid-era Brooklyn, and the rolling fields of Iowa searching to see herself and her beloveds clearly. Through a combination of memoir, mythology, criticism, and fantasy, Mattia attempts to capture the most ephemeral realities and absolute truths about life and love, transition and femininity through peaks of pain and pleasure—not by looking at the horizon beyond these passing sensations, but by traveling through them like a prism, using the transitional power of language to crystallize and shatter life’s most intimate moments.
The Fifth Wound follows Aurora from an island of singing sirens to the cold sterility of hospital rooms to the warmth of a lover’s arms as we see Mattia’s avatar construct and reconstruct her narrative in real-time. Over the course of three acts, she reveals not only the limitations of crafting a story as it’s being lived, but also the world’s inability to offer queer(ed) narratives the space to eventuate beyond the very forms that seek to restrict, destroy and co-opt them.
I spoke to Mattia over Zoom a few months after the book’s release to discuss creating and protecting our own narratives, the difference between the wounds we are given and those we choose, and how her work has been misinterpreted by critics and understood by exes.
Christ: At the beginning of the book, you bring up Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Kate Winslet’s character. Was the archetype of a manic pixie dream girl in your mind at all as you were crafting the character of Aurora?
Aurora Mattia: That movie had a big impact on me. I saw it when I was like 12 or 13. I took it a bit too much to heart—the idea that even if we try to erase each other, we will somehow be drawn together again, because something deeper than memory holds sway over love, that love is somehow subatomic. More simply, the idea of perpetually cycling through being together and breaking up over the course of a lifetime was impactful on my ideology of love as an adolescent and later played itself out in reality, in my 20s. My writing about the movie is partially a self-critique, an attempt to describe the ethics that I was operating from in my first few years of transition, a lot of which had to do with this sudden shift from being freakish to being very desirable, suddenly accessing this feminized power that came from desirability. I had this idea, not a conscious idea but lived-from idea, that I had suffered so long to make myself beautiful, therefore I could be mentally unstable, emotionally reckless, without taking responsibility for that. But the side effects of my mental instability accumulated over time and forced me to reframe my own narrative within the context of the narratives of the people I loved but who, at the same time, I was treating with carelessness and recklessness.
C: I got the idea that a lot of the disconnects between Aurora and Ezekiel come from the incongruence between one’s idea of their lover and the reality of their lover. Were there any characteristics individually or as a pair that you think made that dissonance especially difficult for Aurora and Ezekiel to cope with?
AM: Almost every review has referred to Ezekiel as a man, without reference to his queerness. It’s understandable to a degree, considering in the third chapter, Aurora says, “Put simply, we were both fairies…[But] he became a man and I became a woman.” Even though it appears so early in the book, reviews have tended to treat that as a decisive statement, when clearly it’s just one moment of my narrator perceiving, trying to understand, Ezekiel’s gender—attempting to understand her gender in relation to Ezekiel’s, because the question of their genders is so central to the question of their love; or, their uncertainties about femininity are so central to the manner in which they seek intimacy with one another. In that same third chapter, early in the book, Aurora says, “If I had decided to remain a fairy, I would have wanted to be like Ezekiel,” and in the very last chapter, Ezekiel says “When we have sex, I imagine that I’m you.” No review has referenced those scenes, which is interesting to me, and suggests a kind of reticence, a kind of tip-toeing around, or maybe even a refusal to acknowledge the instability of the manner in which these two characters relate to themselves and each other.
I had this idea that I had suffered so long to make myself beautiful, therefore I could be emotionally reckless without taking responsibility.
They first fell in love, years before the beginning of the book, as gay boys, and in the third and final section of the book, when they are pursuing, again, some kind of romantic intimacy; when Aurora does Ezekiel’s makeup and Ezekiel has a revelation about his own beauty—it’s clear that there’s much more to their relationship than ‘the love of a man and a woman,’ that to treat it as such is to deny the very substance—convolutions of shame and dream and desire, trauma and poetry and mirror-play—that drew Aurora and Ezekiel together in the first place.
Reviewers have described the final section as a “romance.” To me it’s no more or less a romance than the rest; if anything, it’s just the acute form of what preceded it. For her part, meeting Ezekiel again years after she transitioned, Aurora is trying to determine whether she can even access the ability to feel embodied around him anymore, both because so much of her manner of relating to Ezekiel is through mythmaking from the distance of their separation, and because when they first fell in love eight years before, their bodies were similar, and now they are not at all—her body now is entirely different, so the manner in which her body relates to his, and his to hers, will also be entirely different. Reading Ezekiel as a man and Aurora as a woman, rather than two queer people rotating through various realities, is a way of flattening them both; this flattening has caused the intention of the third section to be misread as a romance, because it’s really a way trying to figure out what these people can mean to each other, if that meaning can exist outside of the dream, if it can help them understand themselves without, somehow, destroying them both.
C: It’s interesting that coverage of the book has reduced that last section to heterosexual romance. Throughout the whole book, I always had the sense that Ezekiel wasn’t simply a fairy or a man. There was certainly more going on there. That’s teased through conversations and interactions with Aurora and that part that you mentioned was such a heartbreaking moment. The second time I was reading the book I didn’t want to get there because it unmoors everything that had come before it. What function does Autofiction provide for the central romance between Aurora and Ezekiel and also Aurora’s relationships with Velvet and Noel as well?
AM: I think part of my transition has been an attempt to make whole and restore a paradise that never existed. A way of trying to create what should have but never happened, and of trying to save myself from what did happen. But every time I try to restore my own past, some new calamity blows me back, and then I have to abandon one half-finished attempt at whole-making for another, more immediate one. I was not writing a transition narrative, by which I mean I wasn’t trying to narrativize a character going through a transition, or retrofit some perfected idea of my transition; I was trying make a transition-language, trying to write a book that constantly shapeshifts and transforms itself, trying to represent, by means of a mythological language, a kind of feminine shapeshift and reaching for beauty, by which I mean a reaching for communion. The way that seemed most efficient was to bind together the fantastical elements of my short stories with atoms of my own experience, moments of crisis and intensity, or put simply, of extreme embodiment, pain or pleasure or both. In his essay about the Angel of History, Walter Benjamin says that understanding the past is not about creating a narrative chain of events; it’s about what you see—what is illuminated, like a landscape in a lightning flash—when you experience a moment of crisis, that such a moment creates the opportunity for a sudden, brief and total clarity about who you are and how you arrived there, I mean some kind of truth about the past.
C: In the book’s last section, there’s a direct-to-camera address that I love where you talk about how “minimalism is a luxury reserved for people who can expect to be understood.” Was it important to you that the book is not an easy read and forces readers to work for the fruits of Aurora’s knowledge and experience?
I think part of my transition has been an attempt to make whole and restore a paradise that never existed.
AM: I made the first chapter the densest, because I didn’t want strangers with a desire to “understand,” as they like to say, “the trans experience,” to pick up and read it and know the secrets that lay within or whatever. The only people I want to finish the book are the ones who really want to read it, who feel compelled to keep reading it; the first chapter tests that, which isn’t great marketing, but was a purposefully self-protective design. The entire first section—the book is split into three sections, three waves, three angles of approaching the same problem—the first section is probably the hardest in terms of footwork; the second two have longer stretches of straight narrative. As I wrote the second section, the chapters about being assaulted during sex and subsequent medical violence, most of which takes place over the course of a single night, I felt very protective over it. Everything I had set up in the first section, my way of overcoming pain through mysticism and magic, the second section rebukes; the same mystical impulse that protects me in the first section fails to protect me in the second, because reality overwhelms me, I am outnumbered, and my halo of fantasy dims and is extinguished.
With the first and second sections of the book, I wanted to represent two experiences of violence that actually happened—the knifing and interrogation in the first, the assault and, as it were, “medical malpractice” of the second—and how I passed through them in very different ways. After the former, I received really good medical care and also painkillers; the violence was abridged. My consciousness was altered and softened, whereas with the second, the violence was extended and ramified; so much of that night was me screaming over and over again in a very flat and reiterative environment. I protected that night—the night I lived and the night I wrote—by making the first section of my book so dense. I didn’t want a so-called “general reader” to finish my book. I’ve never intended to have a large audience.
C: In the second instance of violence that you’re referencing in the book, spliced into that sequence, is an extremely tender moment of almost unbearable kindness between Aurora and this other trans girl. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about capturing that moment and that connection between those two characters. Do you see pain as like inextricable from bond between trans women?
AM: Even thinking about it, I get really emotional. What is striking to me about that moment, about that interval of oasis, was how I shared it with someone I didn’t particularly get along with. I had a roommate who was also a trans girl, and we hung out a lot, but there was also a lot of tension between us—as often happens between strangers who move in together. But in that moment, there was no need to translate what was going on. She immediately understood.
I had bottom surgery after nine months on hormones. My college insurance had a program for trans people, but very few students had attempted to use it for bottom surgery—not to mention that there were very few trans women at the school. So there was a lot of heavy lifting I had to do; I spent a lot of my senior year getting approval for surgery, because my insurance was going to run out when I graduated and I wasn’t sure if or when I would have coverage for a surgery like that in the future. At one point an administrator told me I was the first student to have bottom surgery on their insurance plan.
All of which is to say, I had that surgery really early. I took a leap of faith.
There isn’t much good information about it, and you can’t really trust surgeons and doctors anyway, so obviously, we—those trans women who seek these surgeries—do a lot of information-sharing with each other. My roommate had asked me a lot about it.
Which brings me to that moment. I had fulfilled a particular dream. The story was over. For years I was living my life with a pussy, but then, in the course of about twenty minutes on one particular night, a guy who I was sleeping with ripped it apart. Up until that moment, I had, it seemed, finished the hardest part, with regard to my pussy: getting one in the first place. I’ve heard trans women say, “once that’s done, it can’t be taken away.” I believed that, too, I think; and I think my roommate did, too. So it was shocking for both of us, when I stumbled out into the living room. For me, it was happening to my body. For her, she was watching the destruction of an idea, but an idea that was extremely precious to her—while my dream was destroyed, her own dream was, in a profound way, damaged. I think that broke her heart and mine at the same moment, so she was able to intercede on my behalf in a very visceral way. Her intercession was a big part of what got me through that night.
I don’t want to say pain is what brings trans girls together, but I think, in that particular case, both of us witnessing, together, the destruction of that dream, broke through all the ego trans girls can have with each other: wanting to be the prettier one, or wanting to know more about transition, the insecurity and infighting, the manic pixie second-puberty high-school-drama which we sometimes play out in our twenties. All of that immediately broke apart, and she was able to see what I needed exactly at that moment and create a halo of safety around me when I was extremely unsafe.
C: The book approaches wounds from different angles. There are the wounds we choose through surgeries, the wounds we choose through self-harm, and the wounds given to us by the violences of the world. What holds the most meaning or impact in the taxonomy of wounds that you construct throughout the book?
AM: They become bound up in each other, and they did in my own life, too. At that time, I was attempting, in my writing and my life, to use fantasy to save myself from reality.
For example, the way the Aurora-narrator writes about the knifing. It’s clear that, in an attempt to save herself from pain, she is projecting onto the person who knifed her a kind of mutual understanding, as if she hadn’t experienced violence but rather, care. This derangement of her own experience leads her back to self-harm, as if she can understand the knifing by taking a knife to herself. As if self-harm is a way of opening a portal, not only to the knifing, but to all the violence she has absorbed from others—as if opening that portal will teach her something about embodiment, because long before the knifing, it was violence—physical and emotional— that disembodied her in the first place, so if she can return to the scenes of her disembodiment, she can maybe reverse its course, can have her body back.
Self-harm is, in part, doing the world’s work for it. Aurora is a very paranoid character and is always worried about violence being done to her, but the person she’s received the most violence from is herself. That speaks to part of the reason she’s so paranoid, because she recognizes herself as a danger and she can never escape herself.
But her self-harm is not, in the end, limited to herself. It is implosive, but it is also explosive—it harms and traumatizes the people she loves. Self-harm is a microcosm of the interrelationship of trauma and responsibility; she is giving herself a wound because she is approaching the desire to die, and the only way to forestall death, she thinks, is to release the pain, to release the violence she has absorbed from others, through her wound. She sees herself as having no other options. But by giving herself a wound she defers that pain onto her partner Noel, who not only witnesses, first hand, her bleeding and screaming and drunkenness, but washes the blood out of her clothes and out of the floor, and helps her sew her wounds shut. Noel absorbs the violence that Aurora releases into their home; by harming herself, Aurora forces Noel to absorb that violence. She doesn’t give Noel a choice; she takes from Noel the ability to choose how to love her, forces Noel to love her in a way that terrifies them, that threatens and damages their own safety. Even for those who are far away, Aurora creates a sense of fear and uncertainty in the people she loves—the possibility of her self-harm, never far away, makes love itself feel unsafe, makes intimacy feel unsafe—a fear echoed by Ezekiel when he says, in their last conversation before he leaves, “Don’t die, Aurora. I need you there in the future.” It is impossible to care for others when I am destroying myself, because when I am destroying myself I am also destroying those who love me. For others, there is no choice, in the end, but to leave. Aurora and I both learned that lesson.
C: There’s another quote in the book where you kind of state your hope for the book directly. You say, “I’m writing this book of wounds of events outpacing meaning, and I hope it can help you survive.” Do you feel like you’ve succeeded in that goal?
AM: What matters most to me is what the people I love thought of it. Because to me it wasn’t just a book. It was a way of trying to learn to live and honor the people who have helped me survive.
In an era of environmental catastrophe, it’s easy to forget that we are the environment too. The world affected by climate change is not some distant place far away in the forest. It’s us. We are as much a part of the world as the trees, the birds, the ocean.
If we have any hope of recovering, we have to remember this essential connection. Instead of conceiving of “human” and “nature” as opposites, as the Western literary tradition would have it, we need to recall the link between ourselves and everything that is not us.
The books in this reading list reflect our essential connectedness, bringing together the human and the natural in ways that remind us they have always been the same thing. Whether it’s through lyric inventions, the voices of animals, or haikus for the plants in sidewalk cracks, these books embody the truth that humans have always been natural, and that saving ourselves is the same as saving the world.
It’s no coincidence, either, that the books in this list mix genres and often end up with a hybrid approach to writing. In my book You’re the Woods Too, nonfiction has to wear the clothes of fiction, poetry, and even drama in order to cross the gaps we have built in our relationship to nature. I couldn’t find a single language where, as the title puts it, “I was the woods too.” I had to built that language out of parts, so that flash fiction waltzes across the unsaid, moss poems traverse the boundary layer, and a theater filled wall-to-wall with plants is a home for the very real drama that unfolds. The books on this list engage in that same writerly struggle, finding in their innovative forms and structures ways to return the human to the natural.
Finally, you’ll notice that most of these books are published by small presses. Small presses have long been a vibrant home for writing that transforms and innovates, making a place where the binaries and gaps in literary history can be filled in and create a more complete picture. We are all working toward that better picture together: an existence where we’re not separate from the world that surrounds us but an essential part of it.
As Harryette Mullan asks in the introduction to her fleeting, visceral collection of tanka, “What is natural about being human?” She answers this question by paying a poet’s careful attention to the urban landscapes of Los Angeles, Venice, and Santa Monica, honoring each moment, no matter how man-made, as natural. Whether it’s two seagulls fighting over a hamburger bun, collard greens and aloe vera grown at home, or the discarded plastic bag (“urban tumbleweed”) that gives the collection its name, Mullan treats everyday objects with a sensitivity and gentleness that brings them into the realm of the natural world.
The second book in Tommy Pico’s Teebs tetralogy, Nature Poem dives headfirst into problematic understandings of the natural world, especially its romanticized association with Native Americans. “I can’t write a nature poem / bc it’s fodder for the noble savage / narrative. I wd slap a tree across the face, / I say to my audience,” Pico writes on the second page of the book. As he rejects the nature poem, though, he also reinvents it, naming a nature that is not separate from humans and a countryside that is not separate from the city. Pico’s is a queer pastoral that does not rely on binaries and instead arrives at a place of interconnection, taking apart colonial, white ideas that seek to draw boundaries between the natural and the human.
Danielle Vogel’s Edges & Fray is simultaneously a poetry collection, an art gallery featuring nests of her own making, and a creative manifesto. Comparing the act of creation to the work a bird does building a nest, Vogel makes space for non-linear creative processes, her sentences healing by turning backward and weaving through themselves, ever-surprising and ever-revealing. As she writes in her afterword, this book wants “To touch a sound. To hold the cellular structure of a sentence.” In weaving nests of sentences (and sentences of nests), Vogel returns the natural world to the act of communication.
This collaborative novel begins with a first-person narrator on a bike covered with seeds. The narrator feels themself melding with the seeds, trading subjectivity with the seeds, and soon even a squirrel enters the mix and the narrator’s perceptions. The novel turns to a meshing of consciousness and ultimately a meshing of being, in which the coexistence of humans, plants, and animals is no longer coexistence at all but a single, intertwined wholeness. “What is home if there are no walls?” the co-authors ask. The whole world is a home, they seem to say, and as humans we do not need to close ourselves off from it.
Janice Lee’s novel envisions a natural world that cannot be separated from the human-induced apocalypse that is overcoming it. While the main characters are human, the book also speaks in the voices of whales, birds, moss, a dog, a cat, a tree, and other beings, puncturing holes in our illusion that our lives can be separated from those of other beings. As the three main characters journey through grief, they also achieve a kind of arrival, living catastrophe instead of fleeing it and recognizing that our experience of disaster is as natural as the world being destroyed.
Although she is best known for her second book, Brading Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss is a profound journey into the lives of the subtle beings living at the boundary layer between land and sky. With her signature gentleness and close observation of the natural world, she places personal story alongside erudite descriptions of the biology and cultural history of moss in order to create a generous and engaging read. Moss and its human observers and moss have much to teach each other, and living at the level of moss can remind us of the earth we are always on and a part of.
Orchid Tierney’s looking at the Tiny is both small in its focus and is major in its resonances. Describing lichen as a “tiny” place, Tierney traces the poetry of Lew Welch and others in order to arrive at a sense of what it means to inhabit the world beyond the limitations of the self. Instead of prizing only depth, Tierney proposes a “surface” reading, experiencing the world laterally through connection and presence. As Tierney writes, “the lichens arrest the world from a deliberate final closure. instead, they are full of promise and rejuvenation.” In turn, we can take joy in smallness by remembering how widely we are surrounded by the world.
Petra Kuppers invokes an embodied landscape in this series of interconnected poems, cataloging dance performances as well as personal encounters with the natural world through the lens of queerness and disability. No detail is too large or small for Kuppers’ creative practice, which leaps from guided missiles to squirrels leaping through trees to the endocrine system in a single poem, bringing onstage “rose lavender bergamot,” “a wasp in my hand,” and “the Mars channels of my back” in one performance. There are no unnecessary distinctions in the nature Kuppers brings to life here. There is space for everything under the sun, including our complicated bodies and the knots and resonances we carry with us.
This bilingual edition of Carlos Cociña’s poetic sequence is published in a gorgeous, hand-assembled chapbook by Cardboard House Press, a small press committed to publishing Spanish-English bilingual editions. Thoughtfully translated by Ian Lockaby, Gardens/Jardines contains a world in which sharp angles and surreal imagery juxtapose beautifully with idyllic descriptions of nature, never setting one apart from the other. Every sentence combines the sights of water and gardens with the strange confines that birth them, cycling between a fundamentally human description of the world and an inescapably acculturated nature that glows in its tense, generous images of wind and leaves and shrubberies.
Travis Sharp’s collection of poems revolves around the nature of the “I” as the speaker of the poems leaps outside of their body and back in again. “I is a sexed interior decorator queering organs” while, at the same time, “I is a natural wander.” The self here cannot be purified or delimited but instead leaks at its boundaries, pouring into the surrounding world and also pulling nature into itself. “This endless circulation” is as exhausting as it is life-giving. The body is as surprising and dynamic as a forest.
Emji Spero’s Almost Any Shit Will Do is a beautifully designed book, its pages traced with lines and circles linking words that would not otherwise appear related. It also consists of working definitions, as in a dictionary, of “the movement (n.)” and “the individual (n.),” breaking down the distinction between the two and ultimately revealing the power in the collective. Basing its investigation off the biology of mycelia, the root system of mushrooms, Spero proposes a model for social change that is not only inspired by the natural environment but in harmony with it. The book shows us a way forward both through and with the “shit,” a way of growing the change we need out of the fertile ground we are already living with.
Jessica Johnson’s debut book of poems chronicles the subtle interactions of indoor and outdoor worlds through the lens of motherhood and domestic life. As the children in the poems “told the trees about their favorite shows,” the leaves fall in their own small autumn while the speaker pages through mental browser tabs. The simultaneity of this linked collection, in which forms of being mingle regardless of the walls of the home, testifies to a world in which even archetypal family life is subject to the larger living story. In this story, Johnson writes, you are not just you but “You your body in this place an artifact of history the whiskered creatures pacing your house.”
What even is time? I had a couple conversations this past year, some of them surrounding the publication of my non-chronologically structured novel We Do What We Do in the Dark, during which the concept of “queer time” came up, this idea that LGBTQ people experience time differently, almost four-dimensionally like Vonnegut aliens. We constantly look back to see evidence of our nascent selves, when queerness was less an identity than it was a feeling, and we constantly look forward to imagine a world finally ready to welcome us with open arms.
It’s hard to see the past clearly—so many of our childhoods are marked by denial instead of discovery—and even harder to see the future, especially for those of us who came of age in the shadow of AIDS and now find ourselves still very much in the throes of a pandemic that has disproportionately affected the most marginalized. Add to that the banning of our books, the rolling back of our civil rights, the daily threat of hate-fueled violence.
As Alex Marzano-Lesnevich writes in their brilliant essay on gender and futurity: the future is “The very thing we are all trying to hold onto, as we wait for it to arrive.” How difficult it is to imagine “the projected shape that future makes. The shadow (or light?) it casts over the present.”
Shadow and light, past and present and whatever comes next. These are the reconciliations that inform our stories. This is what art does. It allows us to see, concurrently, the past and the present and the future. It allows us to see, concurrently, the light and the dark. This is what queer art specifically does: it shows us that we have always been here and we always will be. Queer stories, like the ones listed below, do more than shine light on the shadows. They are the light in the shadows. They are living documents of our lives.
Winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction and the inaugural publication of UNP’s queer-run Zero Street imprint, Zaid’s second novel—following 2018’s acclaimed Paper is White—is a taut techno-thriller about a single mother’s descent into the shadowy world of Big Data and her ascension into selfhood.
One of the foremost sexual wellness advocates and educators chronicles her coming of age as a capaciously curious queer woman and the powerful but all-too-brief bond she shared with her queer father.
From impeaching Joan Didion as the undisputed queen of California letters to describing a visit to an ex-girlfriend’s Midwestern family in the shadow of Matthew Shepherd’s death, from excoriating American Dirt to chronicling the abuse she experienced on her own book tour, the critic and memoirist delivers a profound collection of essays on the ways violence seeps into the lives of the marginalized. Gurba’s ability to deftly connect cultural and personal histories with heartbreaking poeticism and laugh-out-loud wit is often dazzling.
Despite a fear of air travel, Olive Murphy finds herself on a plane, traveling to run in a marathon honoring her brother. Murphy’s Law, of course, says that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and unfortunately things in the sky go awry: a passenger falls ill, and it’s up to Olive, a nurse, to help him. Her act of heroism goes viral, as does the “relationship” that develops between Olive and the plane’s pilot, Stella, who wants to milk their newfound social media fame to advance her career. A soaring, swoony fake-dating tale.
Billed as “Sweden’s answer to Normal People,” Hedman’s sublime debut follows three driftless souls who found themselves drifting irresistibly toward one another in youth but have now become estranged. In the present, one of them has moved to New York, but he’s plunged back into the past, forced to consider what was and what could have been, when the daughter of the other two arrives with questions about her parents.
Late last year, ten months after the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government passed a law banning open expressions of LGBTQ identity, which they deemed “propaganda.” The voices of queer Russians are necessary now more than ever, to be broadcast loud and proud, so it feels particularly special to have this moving and wonderfully witty work of autofiction about a lesbian poet traveling from Moscow to her hometown in Siberia to inter her mother’s ashes.
A big book full of small, meaningful moments, the latest collaboration between the Tamaki cousins (after Skim and This One Summer) portrays the coming-of-age of three Canadian college students spending spring break in New York City, yearning to return to youth and desperate to begin their lives anew.
A trans Before Sunset set in Copenhagen? Yes, please! Emmanuel’s joyful and achingly poignant debut follows Phoebe, an Irish doctoral student living a purposefully lonesome life in Denmark (her only companion is a dog named after Dolly Parton), who reconnects with her ex-girlfriend Grace over the course of one weekend. Every page bursts with wonder.
Wilsner is one of the hottest contemporary f/f romance writers right now, and the anticipation for their latest scorcher is at a fever pitch. In the impeccably named Cleat Cute, two American soccer stars—one a cagey veteran, the other a wide-eyed rookie—must deal with their chemistry both on and off the field. USWNT fans who shipped Kristie Mewis and Sam Kerr long before those two made it official: this one’s for you.
For nine months, Manno was embedded within the Midwest State University women’s basketball team, an elite and competitive DI program. Immersed in that insular yet high-stakes world, she observes firsthand how unyieldingly female athletes—particularly queer, Black, and/or masculine-presenting—are policed both within and without.
An intrepid advocate for the rights of intersex people and one of the stars of the Focus Features documentary Every Body, Weigel brings her dauntless and infectious energy to the page in this memoir-in-essays, an “invitation to dream beyond boxes.”
Newlyweds Eli and Elizabeth are a pair of Americans living in Bulgaria, their union one in which “love came secondary to the bureaucratic convenience that marriage provided.” Their relationship—to themselves and one another—is upended, however, when husband and wife seem to swap bodies. When Elizabeth-as-Eli disappears, Eli-as-Elizabeth searches not only for a spouse by a sense of self-understanding. The result is a little Kafkaesque, a little Hitchcockian, a little Freaky Friday, but McElroy makes this dizzying story their own.
Shirley Jackson Award winner Elizabeth Hand, a criminally underrated writer of atmospheric mysteries, received authorization from the Jackson estate to pen a return to Hill House. This spine-tingling story is less a sequel than a standalone tale, following a playwright who stumbles on the eerie Victorian mansion and decides to stay there—with her girlfriend and a troupe of actors—as inspiration to complete her latest project. Of course, she gets more than she bargained for, as the house (much like Hand’s novel) has a life of its own.
The game-changing author of We the Animals returns with his first novel in ten years, another inventive and beguiling book about memory and desire and what is said and unsaid—both by ourselves and by those who tell our stories.
Laconic, melancholic, and lovely, the latest from the author of Memorial and Lot follows Cam, returning home to Houston after the death of his lover, and TJ, Cam’s childhood friend whose family runs a local bakery. Despite the story’s heaviness, Washington’s craft makes it read so effortlessly.
The audacious feminist icon collects a decade’s worth of her most essential essays and columns—on everything from police brutality to the Fast and the Furious franchise, from Trump and Dylann Roof to Janelle Monae and Joyce Carol Oates. Word by powerful word, Gay builds both an always-truthful mirror reflecting the fractures of the past ten years and a window into a more equitable future.
Chin, a journalist and co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, serves up a tender and stirring chronicle of his coming of age in 1980s Detroit, particularly the melting pot of Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, a vinyl-seated site of solace and the locus of a richly diverse community.
“When you are someone who falls outside of categories,” Alabanza writes in their powerful treatise on being Black and trans nonbinary, “a lot of things are said to you. You often become a place to hold other people’s confusion.” Alabanza, a performer and theatermaker, brilliantly structures their book as a response to the many inane and insidious phrases people have uttered at them, misunderstandings now reclaimed and turned into occasions to better understand (and celebrate) themselves.
Wry, laconic, and swoony, Dolan’s first novel—2020’s Exciting Times—was an auspicious debut, a queer love triangle that captured acutely the ways desire and class intersect. Fans will be happy to know that there’s no sophomore slump in this follow-up, about a pair of about-to-be newlyweds and their complicated cast of wedding guests.
What begins as a searing cultural critique of the prevalence of sentimental, whitewashed television shows—This is Us, Parenthood, etc.—unfurls brilliantly into a soul-stirring reflection on personal and cultural grief and the palliative effects of plainness. Tongson exquisitely captures what it means for queer people in particular to find solace in the quotidian.
Critical Hits, edited by J. Robert Lennon and Carmen Maria Machado (Nov. 21)
Charlie Jane Anders on the anti-capitalist pleasures of portal fantasies, Alexander Chee on Ninja Gaiden Black and the anxieties of authenticity, nat steele on playing Halo as a trans woman and the double-edged sword (or energy sword as the case may be) of identifying with an armor-clad protagonist. This anthology edited by Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert Lennon presents a veritable arcade of essays on the cultural vitality of video games.
A shrewd and moving meditation on the many complexities of womanhood, Blakley-Cartwright’s first novel tells the story of two childhood best friends now in their twenties, Sadie and Alice, the latter of whom enters into a complicated fling with the former’s mother, a famous feminist and academic.
Gatekeeping girlboss insidiousness, climate injustice and ecological inequality, love in the time of perpetual apocalypse—Korn’s thrilling work of speculative fiction, about billionaire-funded bubbles designed to seal off select people from inhospitable living conditions, trains a big, queer black mirror on the sociopolitical iniquities of our time.
Don’t forget to check out the following titles, published January through August 2023!
How can we make room for love–love of another, love of self–in the midst of perpetual apocalypse? It’s a question many of us have been asking on the daily these past few years, and it’s a question Jen St. Jude posits in her full-hearted speculative debut. Avery is a college student whose feelings of loneliness and hopelessness are upended when the world learns an asteroid will destroy life on earth in exactly nine days. St. Jude is a gorgeous writer (and vital literary citizen!) and her depiction of finding light in the ever-present dark will resonate in our precarious present and throughout whatever tomorrows we have left.
Every year for the past three decades, a group of friends who met in college congregate at a house in Big Sur to hold faux-funerals for one another, celebrating and/or mourning life events and letting one another know how much they are loved while they’re all still alive–leave nothing left unsaid, is the unofficial motto. But this year is different: one of them, Jordan (whose husband is also named Jordan and so they are therefore ‘the Jordans’) has terminal cancer. Thing is, he’s not telling the rest of them. Rowley’s novels deftly oscillate between tear-jerker and knee-slapper, books that brim with all of life’s big and small emotions, and his latest is no exception. It might just be his best yet.
The Big Chill goes gay in Davis’s raunch-com about six queer Brooklynites spending the holidays at a Hudson farmhouse. Come for the sometimes-riotous relationship drama, stay for the myriad cultural in-jokes (Lea Delaria, Maggie Nelson, and Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Foxall get shoutouts).
Safe to say that we could all use the sweet and salty joy of a new Samantha Irby collection. In a book dedicated to Zoloft, Irby offers often-hilarious, sweatpants-clad missives about trying to find moments of peace in a belligerent world and why it’s perfectly okay to like things other people call basic.
A college freshman enters into a complicated relationship with an alluring older woman whose wife has just left her. Fischer’s dreamy debut portrays two people at wildly different stages of life who are nonetheless both stuck in that liminal space between youth and maturity.
Stuck in a rut, risk-averse Eleanor decides to embark upon a year of wildness: each month (but only on weekends, naturally), she has to do one thing far out of her comfort zone. What begins as a kind of dare issued by her closest friend and unrequited crush becomes a touching, if messy, path to self-enlightenment.
Brandon Taylor probably needs no introduction to readers of these pages, but here goes: with his Booker-nominated novel Real Life and his Story Prize-winning collection Filthy Animals, Taylor has proven himself an exacting portraitist of the inner lives of outsiders, of intimacy’s grandness. He returns with a polyphonic novel centered on a group of young Iowa City friends on the cusp of whatever comes next and how their relationships help and hamper them along the way. (Taylor is the former Senior Editor of Recommended Reading.)
In her work as a publicist, Possanza has championed many wonderful writers, and now we get to champion her and her incredible book, a work of history and memoir that crystalizes what so many queer women know: it’s impossible to write our own autobiographies without the biographies of those who came before us. Subtitled “A Memoir in Archives,” Possanza’s centuries-spanning document–which melds her own story with hidden, intimate histories of drag kings and olympians, artists and activists–is a manifesto of love: of erotic love and platonic love, of familial and communal love, and maybe most importantly, self-love.
Do I want them or do I want to be them? This is perhaps one of the most central existential questions queer people ask themselves on the daily. Betancourt, one of the best film/television critics around, probes this quintessential conundrum by examining what he has learned about masculinity through watching movies. (Betancourt is EL’s former film columnist. Take a look at his hilarious and smart work here)
To say the Academy Award-nominated actor’s memoir is hotly anticipated is an understatement. So too is calling it a Hollywood tell-all. Sure, there’s probably a good deal of behind-the-scenes movie-making gossip fodder, but Page is also a groundbreaking activist; his coming out was—and still is—an act of game-changing bravery. Having lit up the big and small screens, he’ll now be blazing bookshelves.
In their debut English-language collection of speculative and absurdist fiction, Pasaribu adeptly renders that quintessentially queer liminal space between joy and melancholy.
A horror dramedy drawn in the style of a 90s cartoon, Lubchansky’s graphic novel about a newly-out trans person invited to attend a bachelor party for their old college buddy satirizes crypto-bro idiocy while delivering a profound meditation on selfhood.
Fuentes’s sensuous first novel centers on an undocumented pastry chef in Manhattan whose already liminal existence is thrown into further uncertainty when he’s forced to return to Spain. Yet on the plane back to Madrid, he meets a college student flying home to visit his aristocratic family, and what follows is an exquisite story of love—for another, for oneself, for home.
In the midst of lockdown, journalist Krista Burton took stock of what she missed most about being out in the world: “the feeling of being in a packed, sweaty dyke bar, surrounded by queers so close they’re touching me.” And so she sets off on an epic pilgrimmage across the country to visit some of the only remaining lesbian bars in America. Part celebration and part elegy, Burton’s quest becomes even more significant when she invites her partner, a trans man, to join, stirring up necessary conversations about who is welcome where.
“I try to understand people but they make it hard,” says the lonely mountain lion that narrates this quiet yet forceful roar of a novel. They reside beneath the Hollywood sign, observing hikers, confused and compelled by people’s daily dramas. A book full of humanity that you can sink your teeth into.
Not only is Adler a vital supporter of queer literature, but she is also a gifted writer of utterly delightful queer romcoms. Here, she toys with the bisexual trope of “having to choose.” We follow Natalya Fox, forced to decide between spending the summer in New York City, where she’s nursing a serious crush on a redheaded punk girl, or Los Angeles, where she’ll meet a guy interning in the same office. In alternating chapters taking place in parallel realities, we see what could be. Yet rather than a story of desire halved, what unfolds is a story about a girl embracing the wholeness of who she is.
In this captivating mystery set in 1970s Texas, a young woman named Lou helps renovate an old mansion for her beloved neighbor and surrogate maternal figure, Miss Kate, hiding both her grief over her brother’s death in Vietnam and her own identity. When Miss Kate is murdered, her hopes for solace are shattered. Then Joanna, Lou’s former love and Miss Kate’s estranged daughter, returns to town, and myriad secrets begin to unravel.
Written with a bright-eyed wryness that belies the difficulties depicted within, Marshall’s memoir chronicles his coming to terms with being a gay man with cerebral palsy, the latter a diagnosis kept from him all his life.
At once meditative and exhilarating, Viren’s memoir—which combines a rumination on her revered high school teacher’s propensity for pushing conspiracy theories with an eye-popping account of false misconduct allegations leveled at her wife—is for the philosophy major gays, a cavernous allegory about truth and justice.
The straight-shooting heroine of this thrilling, not-at-all-straight western is a recently orphaned redheaded teenager whose fiery locks land her a job as a “sporting woman” at a bustling brothel. “Greener than a Texas springtime,” Bridget eventually takes to life at the Buffalo Queen Saloon, but her mettle is tested when she crosses paths with a female bounty hunter.
Patrick’s sultry, penetrating debut is about a chest-binding soft-butch Aussie who gets a job as a Matron at an elite British boarding school and becomes infatuated with the Headmaster’s wife. Much more than a trope-y sapphic fantasy, this first novel is a perceptive exploration of the pains and pleasures of being perceived.
A beautiful book about a brutal, world-shattering tragedy, Wolf’s memoir explores the personal and political fallout of the Pulse nightclub shooting from the point of view of those who survived it. An essential testament to the togetherness and resilience of the queer community.
A truly wonderful interviewer and essayist, Madievsky arrives with her luminous debut novel. Our narrator is a pliant high school graduate trying to free herself from the grip of her sister’s approval. Possible salvation comes when Sasha, a queer Jewish refugee from Moldova, announces herself as the narrator’s spiritual guide. At once atmospheric and visceral.
Akella’s debut novel is a captivating coming-of-age tale set in 1990s India, about a boy who discovers solace and purpose within a traveling street theater troupe. Enmeshing himself among these vibrant storytellers, performing the Hindu myths from his childhood, he finds both love and refuge from his troubled past.
“To survive, you live through it, but never look back.” That’s the motto Dylan, a survivor of sex trafficking, repeats as he navigates the aftermath of his traumatic past. Then a window opens: a law is passed inviting people like Dylan to sue their abusers. But what does justice even look like? Hertz’s haunting debut gazes unwaveringly into the darkness—and unexpected light—of memory.
The best love stories are the ones in which the characters’ perceptions of themselves and each other change in surprising ways. Bellies is a grand, affecting story of shifting identities and shifting intimacy, following Tom and Ming, a couple whose deep affection is tested when the latter announces her desire to transition.
The second release from Roxane Gay’s publishing imprint, Lyon’s swoonworthy romance between a struggling artist who inherits her aunt’s Harlem brownstone and an auction house appraiser is also a sumptuous story about the complicated costs of ambition.
“[B]etween the best days of life and the worst days of life, between what you thought your life would be and what it is, between two people, there is a vivid and strange expanse in the middle,” Thomas writes in his latest collection, a funny and soul-stirring series of dispatches from this “middle.” Following his bestseller Here For It, Thomas perfectly captures the preposterous purgatory of life—being a firsttime homeowner, returning to a place you promised yourself you wouldn’t step foot in again—particularly in the midst of the pandemic.
For many years now Pagonis’s activism as an advocate for the intersex community has been indispensable, helping shine a much-needed light on an identity that is so often misunderstood and ignored. Now they’re bringing that enlivening energy to the page with their luminous memoir about the fight for selfhood.
Shapland follows the National Book Award finalist My Autobiography of Carson McCullers with another blazing book about the permeability between personal history and the sociopolitical systems that bind us. Through the lens of her dermatological diagnosis of extremely sensitive skin, she investigates many significant questions of our current age—climate change, capitalism run amok, female autonomy—and our “utter physical enmeshment with every other being on the planet.”
If you’re mourning the cancellation of HBO’s Gentleman Jack (raises hand), Room author Emma Donoghue’s got you. Her entrancing latest centers on the forbidden teenage romance between Eliza Raine and Anne Lister, she of sapphic, suffer-no-fools fame. Donoghue is so good at rendering the intensity of first queer love.
Crewe, an editor at the London Review of Books, debuts with a stimulating, sensuous novel set in 1890s Britain and centered on two men, each in their own complex hetero-passing marriages who collaborate—through Zoom letters—on a chronicle of queer life that will challenge Victorian sexual mores.
Winslow’s incredible debut, In West Mills, a largehearted decades-spanning tale about the insularity and kinship of a close-knit community, was awarded The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. In this follow-up, Winslow returns to West Mills with a story exploring the reverberations of a shocking murder.
In the dark mirror of this inventive dystopia, we see an America in which a shame-obsessed carceral system attaches shadows to those they’ve deemed wrongdoers–chimerical reminders of their crimes that sometimes linger into the next generation. Crane’s story centers on a new mother, grieving the loss of her wife, whose daughter has been born with two shadows. What unfolds is a tale of a uniquely queer form of parenthood and resistance.
Mike Flanagan, eat your heart out: Rumfitt’s fantastic first novel queers contemporary haunted house horror with this ghastly tale of two friends who, in attempt to put spectres of the past and present to rest, return to the abandoned house in which they spent one terrifying, traumatic night.
A la Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Lambda finalist Schwartz’s first novel forms a triptych of women who refuse to be stifled by societal expectations of femininity. The story unfolds as a series of sensuous fragments that would make the titular Greek poet proud.
WithPretend I’m Dead and Vacuum in the Dark, Whiting Award-winner Jen Beagin swept onto the scene as a singularly sardonic sad-girl absurdist. Those two novels were about a housecleaner in New Mexico who takes suggestive photos in her clients’ abodes; for Big Swiss, Beagin brings her acerbic wit to the Hudson Valley. The story centers on Greta, a transcriptionist for a sex therapist dwelling in a dilapidated Dutch farmhouse who soon becomes obsessed with one of her employer’s newest clients (the titular Swiss, a European gynecologist who’s never had an orgasm). This is erotic cottagecore as only Jen Beagin can do it.
Theranos but make it gay. In this Ripley-esque romp, two men—occasional lovers—create a fake empire based entirely on their own charisma and an impossibly auspicious wellness product that promises bliss to those who use it.
Millner’s story-in-verse—trying to classify this wonderfully amorphous book about the fluidity of desire is entirely beside the point—centers on a woman who falls in love with another woman for the first time, a relationship that upends her ideas of intimacy and herself: “That lust to me was wanting to transgress/beside another. To be so totally compelled./To share a truth you have to lie to tell.”
In Kelly’s first novel, a New York bookbinder coming to terms with her genderqueer identity finds a love letter scribbled on a page torn from a midcentury lesbian pulp novel. What ensues is a dizzying, intimate mystery, an exploration of how we become engrossed in the stories of others in order to tell ones of ourselves.
One of the most difficult and painful experiences of growing up religious and queer is figuring out whether you can reconcile those two important facets of your life. Often, that reconciliation feels impossible. Yet Lamya H’s memoir about coming of age as a queer hijabi Muslim offers an inspiriting vision of a world in which queerness and the Quran are not only compatible but illuminative of one another.
In a recent New York Times feature on how to read one’s way through London, Booker-winning author Bernadine Evaristo lavished this praise upon Isabel Waidner: “Their explosive sensibility and style are as far removed from mediocre prose and middle-class manners as you can imagine.” And it’s true: Waidner’s refreshingly absurdist third novel, which won Britain’s Goldsmiths Prize, is a topsy-turvy journey across Camden Town from the point of view of a nonbinary migrant, a Kafkaesque adventure that encompasses bullfighters, footballers, time-traveling spaceships, and a high-drama trial.
A teen table-tennis prodigy attends a summer camp and discovers something sinister stalking the girls there. A trans woman living in an America sans men joins her friends on an excursion to an erotic VR theme park. Bakić second collection, following Mars, offers spectral, speculative tales of womanhood’s fluidity and ferality.
Melissa Febos on the musicality of orgasm. Kristen Arnett on the wild tenderness and tender wildness of yard work. Keyannah B. Nurse on polyamory as a powerful archive of history and pleasure. Torrey Peters on the fried tilapia that portended the end of her marriage. The essays in this voluptuous, multivarious volume comprise an essential compendium of female desire.
The inaugural release of Gillian Flynn Books, Scorched Grace centers on Sister Holiday, a chain-smoking Catholic school music teacher turned amateur sleuth. If you’re not sold by a punk rock nun solving mysteries then can your soul even be saved?
Autostraddle columnist Meg Jones Wall offers an all-levels guide to reading the tarot, a compendium of resources to help beginners and longtime practitioners alike conjure from the cards a deeper understanding of one’s inner and outer worlds.
The beastliness of grief is heartbreakingly rendered in Córdova’s folklore-inflected first novel, which follows a bereaved mother taking the lung of her recently deceased son and nurturing it back into the boy she lost. But death can never be totally thwarted, and the son that returns isn’t quite the same.
Mirabella’s debut novel—about a pair of once-close siblings and how the bruises of their youth swell into adulthood—is both bracing and a balm, his softly disarming sentences like cotton puffs that absorb the pain of deep cuts.
In sixteenth century France, a woman began to dance in the Strasbourg city square. What started as an individual’s mysterious paroxysm became a full-blown plague of supposedly religious mania. Hargrave, whose previous novel The Mercieswas a bewitching work of historical fiction, sets her tale of three women trying to break free of society’s bonds against the backdrop of this strange phenomenon.
Bollen is a modern master of the Highsmithian literary thriller. His previous book, A Beautiful Crime, was a Venice-set caper about lovers turned con men, a mystery that tapped into the Floating City’s labyrinthine nature. Here, he flies readers to Cairo to uncover a mystery about an American defense contractor who’d reportedly died by suicide and his increasingly suspicious sister working to understand what really happened.
Over the course of three novels and a story collection, Catherine Lacey has become one of our most innovative literary practitioners, a writer capable of bending gender and genre. Lacey’s fifth work of fiction is a widow’s chronicle of her late wife, an artist known as X who has remained an enigma to the world at large and perhaps most of all to the woman who loved her.
Stories about scammers permeate contemporary media partly because, for the outside observer, there’s a sense of superiority at being able to preemptively spot the red flags, to declare “This would never happen to me.” But the head and the heart are seldom in sync, especially for the lonely and vulnerable. Take recent widow Shelby and divorcé Gibson, two people who, unbeknownst to one another, have fallen for the same woman, Cammie, a swindler who might just be the match to the tinder of their lives.
Chronicles of Narnia meets The Handmaid’s Tale in this gorgeous allegorical epic. It’s set in a fantasy world in which men known as Commanders ravage and pillage the land and its people, their power coming from ancient black stones passed down to them by their ancestors. The destruction goes unchecked until one day, a young tomboyish girl discovers the secret to defeating the Commanders once and for all (and falls in love along the way).
A largehearted look at the importance of found family, Mensah’s first novel focuses on the lifesaving friendship between a cast-off son on the brink of self-harm and the easygoing new roommate whose affection becomes a balm. Small Joys dwells in the sometimes-fleeting moments of pleasure and happiness that stave off the iniquities of the world.
Shuggie Bain vibes abound in this tenderhearted tale by Karl Geary, whose previous book was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and France’s prestigious Prix Femina. It follows two misfit teens in 1980s Ireland whose love for one another offers solace from the sociopolitical strife of an Emerald Isle in the midst of growing pains.
The Everlasting, Smith’s previous novel, was a polyphonic, multi-century-spanning trip across Rome, and here she returns to the Eternal City for a story about two women hundreds of years apart who are nonetheless connected by the solace of botany, two lost souls cataloging plants in the Colosseum ruins in an attempt to mend their own broken hearts.
Little’s sensuous and snappy kunstlerroman about a young, struggling poet in South London is the first release from Get Lifted Books, a publishing imprint co-led by singer John Legend. When Elsie is evicted from her flat, she’s forced to move in with her former best friend, a situation both strained and one of potential salvation–a bulwark against the agonies of a bartending job and an affair with her boss.
Cypher’s vibrant debut centers on Betty, a Palestinian-American girl born with cobalt blue skin. In her adulthood, she discovers and tries to decipher journals kept by her aunt—the family matriarch and keeper of their lore—a complex woman whose story begins to color in pieces of Betty’s own.
Jane Wong’s memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City is a feast of a book. It’s about hunger—the hungers of the body, of addiction, of history. Brilliant, gutting, and funny, she writes with such range about growing up in her family’s Chinese restaurant in Atlantic City as their reach for the American Dream slips away.
Wong recounts not only what it was like for her immigrant parents to have had a restaurant, but also the importance of appetite, and the long painful shadows of family surviving and not surviving Mao Zedong’s Great Famine. Wong’s love of food, her father’s love of gambling, her mother’s unconditional support and love, and the abusive love of men are intricately woven together, offering a meditation about love itself.
I sat with Jane Wong over zoom to talk about finding nourishment amidst pain and rage, the incantatory power of poetry, and the intimidation tactics of toxic men.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras: You begin the memoir with eating dragonfruit and you end with eating mango. Your mother is in both of those scenes as well. I was moved by the connections you were making between the Great Famine and your ancestors experiencing hunger, and feeling voracious in the present, and the importance of, you know, eating more than the ex-boyfriends and having a larger-than-life appetite. So that eating and tending to your hunger seemed like radical acts and important in your lineage.
Jane Wong: I feel like it is radical. If anything, you know, I worry sometimes—there’s times in the book and also in real life in which life will get so busy and so hard, I will not nourish myself very well.
I’m so lucky to have a community that feeds me, which in a weird way, like you’re suggesting, I feel that I consume in order to take care of the ghosts. Parts of the memoir also speaks to what it means to finally get to a place where I can sustain myself too.
IRC: For some of us, the historical archive has been interrupted—either because of our “unimportance” to history, or because of war and migration. So then when people like us are writing memoir, we end up having to reach for these other versions of archive. There’s this great passage in your book where you’re making jook and describing the recipe. Since it was a recipe that’s passed down, that felt archival to me.
JW: I never thought about it in that way. That’s so thoughtful. A soupy archive! I love that. Obviously these foods are tied to our deep, deep, ghostly archival selves.
IRC: What I love about our conception of archive is that it allows for a communication with ancestors.
JW: Yes! One thing I was thinking about with the ghost archive has to do with this one section in the memoir where I made one of my poems into sculpture. I had pineapple cakes on the altar, which are archival, and the favorite snacks of my grandfather. Someone stole the pineapple cakes or they went missing and the security guards couldn’t figure out what happened. I absolutely loved that, because then, literally the ghosts took back the archive. I feel like the ghosts kind of want their stuff back, which is kind of funny, and it makes sense to me. It’s their stuff.
IRC: Yes! It’s a porous relationship. There’s a popular conception of the archive as static. It exists in the record and you read it and that’s it. But a ghost archive is a conversation, things are offered, retrieved, taken back.
JW: And it involves deep, deep listening. I’m sure you encountered this, too, but, it’s nearly impossible to interview family. It’s not the work of a journalist. It feels like archival work. It’s putting your ear against like, literally, the graveyard.
That was a big part in my own writing through the Great Leap Forward. It was honoring the fact that my family would not, cannot speak about it. It is too painful. I didn’t even try to ask them fully because, I knew it would be crossing a line that was not okay. So then you do deep listening and you listen closer to the stories told around you. It wasn’t until my grandfather was very, very ill, for example, that I found out that he was adopted and his father who adopted him committed suicide.
That happened a lot actually during that Great Leap Forward when families were gone. People would adopt and say, “You’re now my family, you exist, you’re alive.” So, again, no one told that story.
IRC: The other thing about writing into those silenced histories is that then your story starts to speak for the other silenced histories. I’ve met so many Colombians who are born in the U.S. who have said to me, “My parents don’t talk about the reason why we came or what happened, but your book gives me an answer.” It can be so powerful for everyone in the community to hear those stories because everyone else has been living in that silence as well.
In moments of rage, you have to care for yourself and you have to reach out to others to care for you.
JW: The question I get asked often is how did I talk to my grandparents about the famine. I guess the answer is I didn’t. What I usually tell writers and audience members is that what’s more important for me is taking care of my elders and giving them the peace they need.
IRC: And that’s the difference, isn’t it. Some memoirists have this idea of interviewing as extracting information or extracting story from someone and that is a very colonial perspective.
JW: It is. You’re totally right.
IRC: What our communities need is not extraction but listening, and as you’re saying respecting the silences people want to keep especially when they’re for their own survival. The caretaking of those silences is so important. Even writing the silence says so much about the weight of something that’s happened.
The stories you wove together felt like a collection of things that are nourishing and things that are exhaustions.
Because your family had a restaurant, there are the literal ways in which you’re finding nourishment, and then there’s the metaphorical nourishment of poetry. And there are the elements that I would categorize as being exhausting to the self, which in the memoir are problematic men, toxic masculinity, gambling addictions.
JW: Oh, yeah. There is a lot of rage in the book. In thinking about being an Asian American woman, I am not necessarily expected to be rageful, or to say anything, truly.
And rage alone is very different from being rageful in community, and what that can do in terms of nourishment and tangible change. I think about that a lot, and especially even just thinking about the relationship between me and my mother, which is so central to the book.
There’s a lot of humor in our relationship, as much as there is this kind of deep sense of sharing our exhaustion and talking about our exhaustion.
What’s really been powerful for me over the years is that when I finally shared with my mom what happened in terms of a really toxic, abusive relationship, she began to share about my father. That’s something that she really protected me from growing up. I have forgiven my father in terms of other aspects about who he is, such as the gambling and such as him not necessarily being in my life and missing out on our family. And I miss him. I really hope that he’s well and I think about him all the time. But when my mom started sharing more about him in terms of being a husband, that I had to work through. That was newer to me.
In writing memoir, you almost kind of have to have a reckoning in the process of writing the book, and tell the story like you actually are actively inside the living organism of writing this thing. That was surprising to me. I didn’t necessarily expect it. It was definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done so far.
IRC: There was this one part in the memoir where you mentioned writing a poem before leaving this abusive relationship, and how the poem was you in the future and how it emboldened you to leave. Is that a practice that you’ve always had, trying to see yourself into the future by writing?
In thinking about being an Asian American woman, I am not necessarily expected to be rageful, or to say anything, truly.
JW: Absolutely. I feel so small sometimes in terms of all these things that have happened to me, and I feel like poetry is sometimes the only space in which I have agency or a voice, quite literally; what it means to be a speaker in a poem. In many ways I do feel like it is my most powerful version of myself and I do tend to write in order to make something happen. I think that if there is any goal I have when I’m writing, it’s starting a poem not knowing where I’m going to be by the end. But usually by the end there is something incantatory, something that’s desired that I didn’t begin with.
Maybe it’s kind of like you already know the answer. You know what you need to do and you just have to express it and then then do it.
IRC: That sounds powerful, to write into a desire to do something for yourself. If the desire was not loud enough before, then writing it would give it volume. The moment that a desire has volume, then you’ve propelled yourself into it. I love how it’s conjuring something into being.
JW: For me, words were kind of one of the ways in which I feel like I can make change happen. Especially with the Bad One who’s in the memoir.
I really, really did need to write that poem, and a few others, in order to remind myself that I had agency and that I had a voice, and that these last two are actually something that a lot of these toxic men did not like about me.
That’s the other thing that I discovered and tried to unravel in the memoir, especially in the chapter called “The Object of Love”—I wanted to reckon with the fact that here was the one thing that gave me so much power and agency which is writing, and here where these very toxic exes of mine who really did not like the fact that I was a writer. That has always been, unfortunately, a pattern I’ve noticed.
IRC: I found the way that you were writing about abusive relationships and patterns to be masterful. I loved what you were saying about the term “daddy issues.” In the memoir you wrote about how being at the receiving end of all of these abusive behaviors has consequences, and how our term for those traumatic residues are “daddy issues,” which is a term that minimizes the harm a person has been subjected to, and minimizes the traumatic response to that harm.
JW: Yeah, and, you know, that term is so deeply gendered, how it’s often used. I write about it a little bit in that particular chapter: who gave this to me? Why did this happen? Why did this happen to me? Why was this toxicity placed upon me?
In writing this book, it was really difficult to wrestle with a lot of internalized racism too. I had that feeling in your stomach where you’re going down a rollercoaster and it’s half in the air. It’s just a little icky, and what to do about the white ex-boyfriends in particular. But I think that I had to go there, and if I didn’t, I was going to regret it.
I’m curious, too, about how audiences have reacted to your work. The memoir work is to say these are our stories, these are our lives. But also I always wonder, you know, what did white audiences expect going in? I’m curious about that in terms of the expectations.
IRC: That has been fascinating to see how different audiences react to the book. Early on, a white man told me that he was an EMT and that he knew exactly what I meant when I said that things get very strange when you get close to death, witness it, are surrounded by it. I wasn’t expecting that. Many people connect to the love in my family, and my relationship with my mother. I did have a white woman tell me that she loved the book and she only had one qualm, which is she wanted me to say my grandfather was a shaman and she didn’t want me to use the word curandero.
But one of the things that I wanted to say in terms of the way that you were writing about abusive relationships and surviving and getting out of those, is that I think that’s why the anger and the rage in the book felt so good to me as a reader. There was this magnificent energy that lives in the book and that is all about occupying an angry space, and honoring that emotion.
Poetry is sometimes the only space in which I have agency or a voice, quite literally.
JW: With those bad relationships, I always think to myself, you can’t make this stuff up. I’m like, “What in the world?” For example, my ex-fiancee sending me an invoice for the mattress.
IRC: You wrote that he had possibly slept with other people on the same mattress and the mattress was blood-stained. That was why he was sending you the invoice, but he couldn’t even prove that it was your blood.
JW: Yes! And so, again, when your system is so shocked by moments like that, when you actually receive an email like that, how do you not feel not just rage, but a deep sense of fear, too, because that’s obviously an intimidation tactic. And what can I do except attempt to nourish myself?
In moments of rage, you have to care for yourself and you have to reach out to others to care for you, and vice versa to care for them when they get whatever email that they get, which always unfortunately happens.
It’s this cycle of care that I’m really grateful for. In the book, my mom calls it fertilizer. And it does feel like that. It’s like I’m always trying to make some sort of elixir of care metaphorically, but also literally in terms of taking care of my plants, of which I have like 75.
The tulle of my grandmother’s dress
like a comet tail, a bouquet of algae
tonguing my feet. I track
the red sequins of her eyes
in the surf. Anything left
is mine to love: a spray of sand,
ropes of thunder. I hail
from a circle of grandmothers
racked by monsoons and orphaned
by metal. Their arms as warm and still
as the riptide. We dream
of lost time, the specter of a plane
after takeoff, tongues domesticated
into petals. I open my hands
to harbor. There’s the white wedding of foam,
the dusky pillows
of sea glass. Every sphere
begins as an infinity of circles. Every child
begins as an infinitive. My grandmother wailing
like a gulf
of sirens. Here we are: touched
by emergency, jettisoned
from empire. Under a sting of sky,
the supernova vaporizes
our one home. Crabs and starfish
respawning only as myths.
My grandmother cradles me
until our shapes
are atomized. Nothing
more loved than disaster.
Orange Saints
On Sunday my father takes my brother to the shooting
rang. The targets he ruptures are orange, unknown,
thumbprint small. When they stutter, I imagine the bullets
as comets fizzling out of an octave sky. Holes flexed
around the shapes of stillness, marked like tree rings. My father
shows him a photo of the muzzle flash, says: this is the sun
you'll inherit, as the rivers embrace oil spill, as the time capsules
decay to dirt. Know there exists an orange sun for every son. A grace
for every wildfire. Break a fever and burst it
orange, open. O, oath of bullets. Teach us how to plant our hearts like
flags on solid ground.
For thousands of years, women have been on the fringes of history and mythology. From “The Serpent Queen” Catherine De Medici, evil stepmother Kaikeyi in the Ramayana, and the seductive, church-destroying Anne Boleyn, the few women who have a place in our histories and mythologies are weak, bad, or evil. Recently though, many have started to interrogate and investigate the truth behind these stories, giving a new and modern perspective on the women we’ve been taught to hate.
My novel, Jezebel, is a feminist reimagining of one of these ancient stories, that of the reviled and misunderstood queen, Jezebel. A real historical figure whose name for thousands of years has been used as a slur, I looked for the truth behind the story of the harlot queen. I found a woman of crackling intelligence, power, and strength who fought against ancient faiths and prophets to protect her family, her throne, her name.
And I’m certainly not the first writer who has gone looking for the voices of misunderstood women in our most famous histories and mythologies. In fact, there’s been a recent spate of brilliant novels that give these forgotten and reviled women a voice again.
Kaikeyi is a tale of another infamous queen, that of Kaikeyi from the Ramayana. This story gives Kaikeyi a voice from the moment of her birth. The only daughter of a king who has banished her mother, she grows up hearing stories of the gods and their great power. After reading an ancient text her mother loved, she finds a measure of this power herself, a magic that allows her to tug on the bonds between people to sway and manipulate them as she wishes. She uses this power and her own fierce intelligence to give power and control to the woman of her court, but the gods don’t like the destinies they give being overthrown, and so Kaikeyi must struggle and fight for her own voice, her own path.
If there’s ever been a misunderstood woman, it’s Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter. And while this story isn’t a direct retelling of The Scarlet Letter, it is a tale about the genesis of that story, from the point of view of Isobel Gamble, who in this novel, is the inspiration for Hester. Isobel, a married woman who has recently immigrated from Scotland to the United States, has a mysterious gift (of seeing letters as colors, A being scarlet) and falls in love with Nathaniel Hawthorne. While she and Nathaniel are mixed up together, she learns how dangerous it is to be a married woman having an affair in Salem, just a few hundred years after the witch trials that have haunted the town ever since.
Madeline Miller gives Circe a ringing and powerful voice, in her retelling of this ancient goddess. Instead of a maniacal villain who turns men into pigs for nothing more than pleasure, in Miller’s story, Circe is a goddess with little power, banished to the island of Aeaea for daring to speak against her father, the sun god Helios. Circe learns pharmaka, a magic that gives her power equal to the other gods. This power, of course, draws the ire of gods and mortals alike, and Circe stands against them all to fight for what she loves. A stunning story about the emptiness of godhood, about the joy and horror of being a mortal, Circe turns an ancient story on its head in a resounding way.
This gorgeous and haunting story was rightfully shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 2020. Though we rarely see stories of women at war, in The Shadow King we see women front and center of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Orphaned Hirut, previously a servant, helps transform a peasant into a stand-in for the exiled king and goes to war, inspiring women around her to follow. Hirut guards the shadow king fiercely but soon becomes a prisoner and ends up tangled up with Ettore Navarre, a Jewish photographer for the Italian army. Hirut’s voice throughout the story is bold and gripping, as she fights for her country and for herself.
In this retelling of the ancient Greek story of the Trojan War, Natalie Haynes gives voices and new characterizations to the many women who were involved in the Trojan War, beginning with the muse Calliope, who is more than a little annoyed at being constantly begged for a story by Homer and decides to tell him the truth of the bloody war. We also learn about the despair of Clytemnestra after the murder of her daughter, and how she strategically plans to kill the man responsible (her husband). This story gives depth to so many voiceless women, including Penelope, whose increasingly bitter and sarcastic letters to Odysseus give the book a startling humor. This is a tender, rage-filled book that gives a voice to the misunderstood women at the heart of the Trojan War.
In The Witch’s Heart, we get a retelling of Norse mythology, a full and captivating portrait of Angrboda, a powerful and banished witch, feared by Odin, with the power to see the future. She eventually falls in love with the mysterious trickster Loki, has three children with him, and has to fight to keep them safe against their own destinies and against the will of the other gods.
I never really understood “Ma Ingalls” because in the “Little House” books she is nothing more than a distant and benign mother figure. Then I read Caroline and my whole perspective on this beloved character changed. While the story starts in a little in the big woods it doesn’t stay there, as Caroline journeys, pregnant, with two small daughters, following her husband to the prairie and the hope of a better life. In this novel, we begin to understand the backbreaking work that being a pioneer on the prairie required, not only of men, but women too, just as we learn the frightening beauty of a wolf howling outside your door. This story shows both the indignities and joys of being a woman in the 1870s and Caroline is a fierce and tender woman whose story is well worth reading.
We’ve had several excellent retellings of Medusa lately, and now we get one about her sisters, the gorgons who’ve inspired hatred and fear for centuries. In this story, we learn the truth behind Medusa but also the story of Stheno and Euryale, her sisters. A beautiful and mesmerizing novel of sisterhood, loyalty, and betrayal, this retelling moves past the tale we know and gives these reviled gorgons a voice beyond the monstrous.
In She Who Became the Sun, a queer historical fantasy about the rise of the first Ming Emperor, Parker-Chan takes readers to a brilliantly imagined 14th-century fantastical China, where a girl is given a destiny of nothing, while her brother, Zhu Chongba, is given a destiny of greatness. When her brother dies, the girl decides to take on her brother’s name and his destiny, training to become a monk, and eventually deciding to fight in the army against Mongol rule. A moving story of power and gender, and a woman who chooses to be so much more than nothing, She Who Became the Sun is a brilliant reimagining of history as we know it.
In The Palace of Flowers is based on a rare and real first-person account of Jamila, an enslaved Abyssinian woman in Iran in the 19th century, and brilliantly shows the hardships and struggle of being a woman and slave in this time. While the novel shows the reality of life at this time, it also hits on one of the most important themes in my own book; being remembered when one is a woman in a time that only values men. Jamila, realizing she won’t be remembered after she’s gone, sets about to change that in a deeply moving and beautiful account of a woman trying to find the freedom she’s always lacked.
The only non-fiction book on this list, Jess Zimmerman explores and analyzes famous female monsters, specifically from Greek mythology. Including Medusa, the Harpies, and the Furies, Zimmerman looks at these monsters and the reasons we hate them (too smart, too ugly, too much/little sexuality among others) and asks us to question our own assumptions about these misunderstood women and how we can turn traits we consider negative (ambition, hunger, ugliness) into strength.
Adrienne Brodeur’s novel Little Monstersfollows the Gardner family over the course of a summer on Cape Cod, the windswept peninsula—alternately wild and painstakingly tamed—where they have lived their entire lives. Abby Gardner is a painter on the verge of an exciting career opportunity. The tensions with her brother Ken, an aspiring politician who obsessively measures his sea-front property to track erosion, are played out via real estate. Ken technically owns Abby’s studio, which their mother left to him after she died in childbirth. The family’s patriarch, Adam, is a brilliant marine biologist living with bipolar disorder. When the novel opens, he is actively courting a manic episode because he believes it will lead to a breakthrough in his research into whale sounds.
Adrienne Brodeur demonstrated her ability to closely and compassionately observe the most complex family dynamics—even when they involve her—in her memoir Wild Game. Now she has turned that talent and attention to a family of her own invention, with captivating results.
Little Monsters is a deliciously simmering novel, with the same arch that summer brings: a slow build of excitement into a heated climax, and then cooling into an autumnal crescendo where the characters must look ahead to, and face, the next year of their lives.
I spoke to Brodeur at the Rough Draft Books Store in Kingston, New York, in front of a packed house.
Halimah Marcus: I want to start with your evolution as a writer, publishing a memoir first and then a novel. They’re both about family secrets. They’re also both set on Cape Cod. What more did you need to get out of this place, to write a whole second book set there?
Adrienne Brodeur: I feel like I could write a hundred books set on Cape Cod. I think it’s just the most provocative, beautiful landscape. It’s so rich in metaphor, but it’s also just an endlessly fascinating place to me. You have year-round people, and you have summer people, so there are issues of class. But really, in the end, the thing that I’m just so taken with is the natural beauty there. I feel a little bit like Pavlov’s dog as I go over that bridge: the brackish air, the gulls, the sounds. Every town on Cape Cod is so different. As you go out the arm, it gets more and more wild. And ultimately, there’s the fragility of the whole spit. We all know it’s not going to be here forever; it’s really just a gigantic sandbar.
HM: You’ve dealt with your own family secrets in your memoir, Wild Game. Now you get to make them up. In what ways was that liberating, and what were the unexpected challenges?
AB: The beauty of memoir is you do know the perspective it is being told from, and you know the story. It still takes a lot of skill to sculpt the narrative out of the book that is your life. I’m not saying it’s in any way easy, but it is a lot easier than fiction.
We all have trouble making decisions, and every single thing is up to you in a novel. Anything can happen. Someone can die, someone can get pregnant. It is overwhelming.
It also takes a lot longer to know your characters, because when you’re writing a memoir, you know all the characters already. With the novel, ironically, the only character who I really knew at the outset was Adam. I channeled Adam. I don’t know why a bipolar, 70-year-old crotchety man was the person who just came to me. The others were a lot harder for me. I had to write my way in, until I knew enough to be able to have a character make that offhand comment. It’s like an iceberg. You show the little tip that’s above, but you have to know everything—you have to know how they would respond in almost any situation. And for me, that didn’t really happen until I wrote about half or two thirds of the way through.
HM: Ken must have been one of the hardest characters to write, because he is a very difficult person. He embodies a lot of what we might consider toxic masculinity, in that he is so out of touch with his feelings that he acts out his hurt on other people. He’s very much an antagonist in the story, but we have to have sympathy for him. How did you approach that challenge?
AB: People react most strongly to Ken. But I actually feel incredible compassion for Ken, and maybe that’s just because I wrote him. He’s the most tortured character by far. He lost his mother at about three-and-a-half years old. Abby also lost her mother, but she was a few days old. The loss was really felt by Ken. There were stepmothers that came and went, which Ken experienced more than Abby. And because their father is unreliable at best, Ken really relied on his sister and loved her so much. So when Abby pulled away, because it was a suffocating relationship for her, he felt it deeply. Humans are like any other animal. We’re at our most aggressive when we’re wounded. He’s wounded and he cannot get out of his own way. He really wants to be another type of guy. And hopefully there’s some glimmer of hope that he might get somewhere. But time and again, you see him trying to make everything perfect, and he just can’t do it.
HM: One of the relationships that was most fascinating to me was between Abby and Jenny. Jenny is Ken’s wife, and Abby’s sister-in-law. They were also best friends in college, and are now trying to navigate this new role. How did marriage change their friendship?
AB: I didn’t know Jenny was going to have a point of view, and she’s actually the character who I feel like has the most that was left unsaid. She came in after I’d written most of a draft.
When I started writing this book, I had a question that was in the back of my head that I had to push aside in order to write: Why is this harder for women to have power, and why is it harder for women to find their voice? Why does that seem like a difficult thing? Both Abby and Jenny are trying to find their voices in different ways.
It still takes a lot of skill to sculpt the narrative out of the book that is your life.
This is too much information, but I’m going there. I have one recurring dream in my life. In this dream, I always have some really critical piece of information. Like, I want you to know that there is a fire behind you. I’m trying to let you know to get out of the house. But as soon as I open my mouth to say that, the volume goes up on the dance party that’s happening, or whatever happens, and my message of great importance can’t get out. This idea is something that informed their friendship. They’re both dealing with trying to find their voices as artists, as people, as women.
It’s a complicated friendship because their friendship came first. Then Jenny fell in love with Abby’s brother and they got married. Abby holds onto information about Ken that he’d prefer his wife not to know. Ken is wildly successful and handsome, but he was also a chubby teenager who was ridiculed and bullied. Abby is supposed to protect his past from Jenny. And Jenny was a wild child. They met in art school and she had a drug and alcohol problem—arguably still has an alcohol problem. There are these ways in which Abby is protecting both sides, which make it very hard to have an open friendship.
HM: Abby expresses herself and communicates with her family through her paintings. Over the course of the book, she is making this painting that she’s going to give to her father at his birthday party, to deliver a message. There’s a line about how her paintings reveal themselves like novels. Can you talk about how Abby relates to her art?
I don’t have an MFA. I’ve never studied creative writing. I just read a lot.
AB: When I was first conceiving of the book and I knew it was going to be about siblings, I remember having this thought that I should just go to the original sibling document, Cain and Abel, and that I’d find a lot of answers there. Well, for anyone here who’s read Cain and Abel, it’s like three sentences. There is nothing. But what I did get from that allegory, was the structure of the book. I discovered how these kids would express this rivalry: through giving gifts. The momentum of the novel moves towards this big 70th birthday, and the gifts reveal so much more about each of the characters than they do about the father.
Audience Question: How hard on yourself were you, as an editor for 20 years or fiction? When you were working on your first novel, was it easier for you because you’ve been through so many processes, or were you second guessing yourself a lot?
AB: Like every writer, sometimes you’re like, “This is genius.” Or, “I’m an idiot.” We’re all just going back and forth. I’m a slow writer. The common wisdom is you write a really crappy first draft to the end and then you go back and you edit it. But I have to have a solid scaffolding, and feel comfortable at the end of the first chapter that it can hold the next chapter and the next chapter.
I’m sure I got an incredible education as an editor because I did it for so long. I don’t have an MFA. I’ve never studied creative writing. I just read a lot. I mean, a lot, a lot, a lot. I’m also so grateful to my editors. I remember having some people really not wanting to be edited, and they let me know that they didn’t want to be edited. I’m like, “Oh yeah, help me!” Anyone who can actually make your work better seems like a great thing.
In a cold, cruel city indifferent to your fate, an acquaintance from your hometown can be a lifeline, as can the three guys you happen to bunk with. You feast on donkey burgers and rooftop views of the city. You watch your friends forced out of the city, then befriend others to take their place.
These are the days of distraction for the young men in Xu Zechen’s Beijing Sprawl. The stories are razor-sharp, exuberant, and heart-rending, conveying so much life squeezed into the characters’ cramped circumstances.
Living on the margins of Beijing, the young men dream about building cars, meeting their soulmates, forming rock bands. They come together, fall apart. Sometimes they prop up each other’s fantasies. Other times, they scheme to cheat one another out of beers or birds, perhaps taking their cue from the city about how nothing ever lasts.
I spoke to co-translators Eric Abrahamsen and Jeremy Tiang about transient but intense friendships, and being Beijing outsiders.
YZ Chin: The first-person narrator in this book is not what we usually encounter in contemporary Western fiction, where he’s not really a detached observer, like in Cusk, but he’s also not really directly influencing events. He’s something in between. Can you talk a bit more about that?
Eric Abrahamsen: I think this may come partially out of how the stories originated. Xu Zechen came to Beijing to go to school, and there were these other people who came from his hometown, people not so fortunate as him—basically people in situations similar to the characters’. He kept in touch with them over the years, and followed their stories. So there’s a sense where the author himself is an observer of these people. He didn’t live this exactly, but he was with these people. He knew them, he knew their stories. So when he comes to tell the stories I think it’s very natural to adopt a stance of being among them but also being an external observer.
YZC: I find the stories very funny but also very brutal. When you mix these two very different tones together, there’s a powerful and disconcerting effect. Did you translate a lot of slang?
Jeremy Tiang: There’s definitely the sense of a group of people who evolved their own language. I was very much following Eric’s lead, because this had to match the voice of Running Through Beijing. That has quite a slangy, zippy tone to it.
EA: I think it was not so much slang or specific vocabulary, but very much this tone of voice—ribbing, ribaldry, making fun of each other. It was really important to make it sound like this was a group of young, shiftless guys shooting the shit, basically.
YZC: I also really like how the stories paint a picture of the different ways people come to Beijing, and then leave, or have to leave Beijing. Many of the ways of leaving are tragic. There’s death, there’s serious injury…
EA: There’s giving up and going home. It’s such an emotionally important thing: going to Beijing, and then leaving Beijing again. It’s such a dramatic figure in the lives of all these people—the city, and what it represents. The possibilities it holds.
YZC: But even the ways of arriving in Beijing are so different. Muyu is sent there because his dad says “you have nothing better to do.” Seems like a relatively neutral way of going. But there are also tragic ways of arriving, like the person whose wife basically says “I’m divorcing you if you don’t go to Beijing and make something of yourself.” It’s fascinating to see how, despite arriving in different ways, whether with a lot of hope, out of despair, or seemingly neutral, they end up in the same cycles of drifting.
EA: Right. There’s something very hopeless about the whole thing. Even the people who come with big plans or big dreams, there’s something hopeless and almost passive about the gravitational force of the city. People get there and they just piao [drift] like Jeremy said. There’s a sense of being held in suspension, of floating. You’re there but you can’t get traction or footing, you’re just hovering over the city. There’s a lot of despair, I think, under the surface of the stories.
YZC: Despite that, people still come.
EA: Because there’s nothing else to do! It would be worse to not go. What a horrible situation. I think there’s a whole segment of China’s youth who just don’t have any good options. You can’t stay, you can’t go. If you go you’re not gonna have a job, but you can’t go back because that’s shameful. They’re economically and socially screwed. They don’t have any choice but to float around.
YZC: So Beijing becomes a goalpost in itself. But the goalpost moves. Like the character in “Wheels Keep Turning,” he has big dreams at first. Then it becomes: “I’m happy if I can build a car here.” Then: “I’m happy if I can keep looking at the car.” The goalpost keeps shifting further down.
Beijing is such a dramatic figure in the lives of all these people—the city, and what it represents. The possibilities it holds.
EA: Right, the dreams become more and more modest.
JT: There’s also the flip side of that. Despite the contempt that respectable society has for these people, they’re the ones who keep Beijing running. If they did all leave, the city would fall apart. There would be no one to do any of the actual work.
YZC: Is there an analogy to “domestic” migrant workers here?
EA: Internal migrants? Yeah. Though when I think of migrant workers, I think more often of laborers who have jobs and send money home. Whereas these guys are more like vagrants. They would like to have jobs and send money home, but they’re barely managing that.
JT: I don’t think it maps well onto the conception of the migrant as in the Western imagination. I’ve been using the Chinese description “jingpiao,” it means being adrift in the city, not having a place in it despite living and working there.
YZC: How did this co-translating project come about? How did it work?
EA: Because I didn’t want to do it alone. Whose idea was this collection?
JT: Well, you were translating the collection. But I had done one of the stories for Pathlight [magazine]. And one other story, I can’t remember why now. So at that point, a co-translation made the most sense. I think initially you were still going to do most of the stories, and then it evolved into more of a 50-50 situation. That was a better way to do it anyway.
YZC: This book is very much about outsiders. What is your relationship to Beijing? Do you also feel like Beijing outsiders? Was that a factor in translating these stories?
There’s a whole segment of China’s youth who just don’t have any good options… They’re economically and socially screwed. They don’t have any choice but to float around.
JT: I’ve never lived in Beijing, so in that sense whenever I am in Beijing I do feel like an outsider. I don’t know how anything works. I don’t know how to pay, so I’m the one trying to pay for things with cash, which makes you a pariah. I do see how, obviously from a relatively privileged position, how trying to get to Beijing, and trying to make it without the right hukou and connections would feel near impossible. So even though I’ve never led remotely anything like the life of the jingpiao, I get enough of a sense of it from just being there and seeing how hostile the city is. It’s like a city that actively hates its inhabitants.
EA: I lived there for 16 years, from 2001. And obviously as a foreigner I don’t fit into any of the domestic social categories. I wouldn’t call myself a jingpiao at all. I lived in the hutong, so I was sort of in the milieu Xu Zechen is writing about. His characters are selling pirated DVDs, I was buying pirated DVDs, you know? Ate the kao hong shu [roasted sweet potato] on the streets, lived in the crappy pingfang [single-story house]. It’s obviously completely different when you’re there by choice, not the life-and-death desperate grab for future that it was for these people. So it was really familiarity with the environment, the language, the speech of the Beijinger, that sort of thing. These stories felt super familiar to me. It was like: Ah, this is the city I know! What originally drove me to translate Xu Zechen was that writing, about the city that was right in front of me.
YZC: Can you explain a bit more about hutong, for those of us who might not be familiar?
EA: Geographically, historically, structurally, Beijing is just a very odd city. There’s the center of the city inside the Second Ring Road, which is the historical part of the city. That has the formerly nice, wealthy hutong neighborhoods, which are not so nice anymore. Then around that there’s a huge belt of horrible, faceless post-Communist Soviet-style apartment buildings (which are now nice apartment buildings). Farther out, there’s another belt of pingfang, crappy rundown houses that are not the historical ones. There’s a couple of little ex-villages around the city where you can find old houses, but for the most part it’s pretty dire, just recent construction that has the feeling of the hutong: small alleyways, courtyards with attached houses. Most things are single-story or two stories.
So if you are poor, your options are often either to live in the middle of the city, in some of the crappier hutong neighborhoods, or else way out in the pingfangs, where you’re far enough away that you can afford it.
The people in these stories are mostly living in the suburbs around the city. The nice thing about these neighborhoods is that they are very human-scaled. Whether you’re in the nice old neighborhoods in the middle of the city or on the outside, everything is one or two stories, there’s a lot of open horizontal space. Weird and terribly inefficient use of space. Right in the center of a massive international capital, there’s a lot of open space and short buildings. But if you live there, it actually feels very neighborhood-y. There’s just a small number of people. You know those people. You’re walking around, doing your business in full view of everybody else. It’s really cheek by jowl, but the density’s low enough that it really feels like a neighborhood. It’s a unique thing, I think it’s very rare for a city of that size to have an area of low population density right in the middle. But it’s rapidly getting gentrified. Inside the Second Ring Road, places are getting fixed up and reclaimed by the wealthy. They’ve driven out the poor residents. That’s a recurring theme. They don’t want those people there. They’re essential to the city, as Jeremy said, but they’re unsightly. A lot of urban policy is driven by what the leaders personally see when they walk out their doors, and what they find repulsive.
YZC: Going back to what you said about the sense of community—a lot of the characters who should feel despair have a lot of fun, they feel pretty good. They prop up each other’s dreams.
EA: Yeah, at least you know other people in the same boat. And at least you can get together, get drunk and complain. There’s whole neighborhoods of people who are not native Beijingers. You’re cheek by jowl with people from Guangxi, Sichuan, you can hear all kinds of dialects in the hutongs. Everybody’s come from somewhere else.
YZC: Maybe a side question—Eric, you just spoke at length about Beijing geography, and Jeremy, you wrote an introduction for Electric Literature providing background and context. Sometimes it seems translators take on the roles of historian, anthropologist, or just all-around expert for the works that you translate. Is that a role that you take on with relish?
Despite the contempt that respectable society has for these people, they’re the ones who keep Beijing running. If they did all leave, the city would fall apart.
JT: For me it’s part of the translation process. One of the things I find necessary is ensuring that the reader of the English has the same context the reader of the Chinese would. And a reader of the Chinese text would probably already have some sense of what it means to be in the outer ring of Beijing, to be in the suburbs. Some sense of Beijing itself. So for us translating outside of that, I think we can take for granted that the English language reader has some context for Beijing, but maybe less specificity. Then I consider how much of that can be conveyed by the translation itself, how much of it needs to be in a paratext or an introduction. For me it’s not a particular methodology. I will do whatever works. I look at each situation and find the best way to make sure the information is conveyed to the reader in as unobtrusive a way as possible so they can appreciate the stories in the way the author intended.
EA: For me, this has been my whole career for ten or fifteen years, such as it is. We started this group, Paper Republic, largely in order to introduce Chinese literature to publishers. We were trying to get hired as translators. As a translator you can have a double educational role. On the one hand you want a publisher to pick up a novel and let you translate it. In order to do that, you need them to understand what the thing is. You end up going to great lengths to explain what the novel is and why it’s worth you translating it. And then over time, the Paper Republic website turned towards general introduction of Chinese literature also for readers.
Then at a certain point it seemed less necessary—there were more voices, more outlets, more sources of information. In the mid-2000s it seemed very difficult to get any of this information out there. We would talk to editors and they would be like, “We know nothing about Chinese literature at all. We know about Mao’s Little Red Book?” You felt like you were just starting from zero. And that’s not the case anymore. It’s really nice to see. I’m happy not to play that role anymore. But we were still focused on the publishing industry. I was running publishing fellowships in Beijing up until I left in 2018, where we were inviting editors from around the world to come to China and learn about Chinese literature. I’ve probably spent more time explaining Chinese literature than I have translating it. But I’ve mostly focused on publishers.
YZC: Along those lines, earlier you mentioned there’s a real sense of distaste for jingpiao. What has the reception been for this book? Do you see a difference in reception toward Xu Zechen’s work in Chinese versus English?
EA: He let slip early on that he had gotten some pushback on Running Through Beijing for depictions of the illegal underworld—pirated DVDs, and so on. Obviously it wasn’t so bad that he was censored, but I think he missed out on some literary prizes that he might have been eligible for. There was recognition that this is good and important literature. The Chinese post-Soviet point of view on the arts is that they’re supposed to represent the lives of the common people. Well, this is it! This is the lives of the common people. But also it does make Beijing look like a mess. In terms of his relationship with the authorities, I think he had a bit of a rocky period there. But I think everyone recognizes that these are important, valuable stories not previously told about the people.
JT: I think there might also be more tolerance for mess in the Western world. The Chinese perception of these stories might be that they are straight-up critiques of the way Beijing treats these people, whereas at least some of the reception in English has been that this sounds like kind of fun and adventurous, even whilst acknowledging that the characters lead obviously really hard lives, rooted deep in the inequalities of society.
Women get lonely. Men do, too, but there’s something ineffably unique about female loneliness, which is more vulnerable and open to danger than the male version. Female bodies walk through the world as moving targets, rather than as weapons. Perhaps this is why writing on the loneliness of women has a particular haunted quality to it, and on the flip side, more urgency. The search for connection (romantic, platonic, or otherwise) has, for female bodies, higher stakes.
Loneliness and the search for connection are major drivers for the characters of Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go, my short story collection. The young women who weave in and out through my stories lurk watchfully: looking for allies, connection, a meeting of minds that will make them, finally, safe and seen. They are millennials, Internet surfers, queer and questioning, immigrants, the children of immigrants. They wander alone through perilous, defamiliarized urban landscapes.
As I wandered my own landscapes of alienation, loneliness, and fear, the books I turned to showed me the paths of other girls who had walked similar paths. And briefly, while reading them, I did feel less alone.
Jenny Zhang’s groundbreaking short story collection, primarily following Chinese American daughters in Queens, New York, is full of vulgarity, vomit, and wit. The girls and teenagers in the stories grapple with poverty and second languages, and inheritances from parents with failed dreams. They are often shipped off to Shanghai and come home to New York again. From the first piece we are handed painful self-awareness of feeling separate from others (“While I could still improve in either language, my parents could not, they were on a road to nowhere…it was up to me to shine and that scared me because I wanted to stay behind with them, I didn’t want to go any further than they could go.”) as well as brash disdain for others who might feel the same (“She was just a desperately lonely person who needed to be part of someone else’s world.”) Not far underneath the bravado is desperation—raw and unapologetic desperation to be seen, and to not be forgotten.
This slim and poignant novel follows b and Rang, both outcasts, frequently neglected by their parents, and bullied at school. Though they find support in one another, one accidental slip-up and the fragile connection between them is broken. I loved the hallucinatory, fragmentary prose and painfully-rendered interiority, which captures the scramble, mess, and incoherence of internal pain and a fierce longing to escape. It’s a harrowing and occasionally triggering book, but the slivers of hope feel genuine. The descriptions of the sea and of water throughout this short book are beguiling and convincing. Who among us hasn’t wanted to dissolve into something greater than ourselves?
In 14 glimmering, interconnected short stories—many of which feature the same divorced female narrator—the characters are often going on trips or moving to new places. In one story, the narrator travels from soup kitchen to soup kitchen in different cities, only to find they were “simply the same thing, one after another.”
Majka is excellent at conjuring miniatures, whether describing an exhibit with a display of life-size dolls made by a mentally ill artist, or eating clams and bread from tiny stoneware bowls; and also at rendering complicated, sad feelings that gently punch you in the gut. In my favorite story of the collection, “Saint Andrews Hotel,” a slightly magical realist tale about a boy who leaves an island for the mainland only for his home island to disappear, Majka writes, “I’m happy was the next thought…The unfamiliar recognition of joy, the discomfort in it, the panic. Will it leave me? How to make it not leave me? Thinking that if he pretended it wasn’t there, it wouldn’t leave.”
It’s definitely not healthy, but the two main characters in this tight novella are certainly looking for connection. The narrator, Red (for her hair), a university student in London in 1944 during the last year of WW2, studying something that requires laboratories and dissections, falls in love with Mara, a fellow classmate and a married woman. Originally published in 1962 and reissued in 2022, it’s a rare depiction of a queer relationship, and not a great model: Their affair is volatile, torrid and damaging – Red’s jealousy and anger, coupled with the flashes of her deep-rooted insecurities and self-awareness made me wince often – and vividly brought to life with the taut, stylish writing. I’m reminded of Louise Glück’s short poem, “Elms,” which begins “All day I tried to distinguish/need from desire” and ends, “[I] have understood it will make no forms but twisted forms.”
Speaking of queer longing, Last Words from Montmartre—a classic by Taiwanese lesbian iconoclast Qiu Miaojin, and discovered after her death from suicide—almost requires no introduction. These letters, written from Paris, Taipei, and Tokyo and addressed to various characters, describe in intense emotional interiority the love, longing, and betrayals between the unnamed narrator and relationships with two other women in her life. When I first read the book, its earnest intellectualism and the intensity and seriousness with which the narrator dissects her feelings felt young to me, and yet with hindsight I recognize it is a valuable record, and has an honesty that leaves a deep and lasting impression on the reader. When we are young our feelings are that intense, and not all of us survive them.
Katie Kitamura is an expert at subtle affect and building tension under a minimalist surface: sparse sentences, spare plot. Intimacies, following a woman who moves to The Hague to work as a court interpreter during a trial for a prominent war criminal, is laden with the knowledge of separation between self and others that so often creates alienation. This includes her relationship with Aidan, a married man with whom she begins an affair that she suspects can go nowhere. This narrator, however, is more accepting of this alienation than other protagonists on this list—and it is with this clinical detachment and self-awareness of the boundaries between which we can connect to others that the murky, sometimes sinister intimacies of this novel plays out.
In a slightly more uplifting vein, this enjoyable novel by Frances Cha follows four women connected only by the coincidence of their living in the same apartment building in Seoul. There’s Kyuri, a “room salon girl” who plays escort to wealthy guests and is riddled with debt to plastic surgery; her roommate, Miho, an art student who went to college in the States and is floundering with a hyperwealthy boyfriend far out of her socioeconomic strata; a pregnant housewife, Wonna; and Ara, a mute hairdresser with hidden trauma in her past. The women (or girls) are all desperate and grappling with shame in the patriarchal, capitalist systems keeping them bound. Still, by the end of the novel, Cha pulls off a hopeful ending, with the four girls banding together in a moving moment of support and self-determination.
Hands up, Ai Yazawa hive! Nana, a Japanese manga series from the early 2000s which influenced the wardrobes of an entire generation of Asian girlies, follows two 20-year old girls both named Nana who move to Tokyo. There’s the chain-smoking, dark-haired, heavily-mascaraed, husky-voiced Nana Osaki, a vocalist for a rock band who leaves behind a tragic past to pursue her music career in Tokyo. Then there’s Nana Komatsu, femme, kitten heels-wearing, naïve and loving and wildly romantic, who moved to the city to pursue a boyfriend. After a chance encounter, the two Nanas move in together, and what results—over 21 volumes of manga, and remakes in anime and live action films—is a bittersweet story of attachment wounds and self-destruction and bad choices with men, but also the deepest love and loyalty between these two women. Every day I pray the hiatus will end and Ai Yazawa will finish it. Also, if Nana and Nana aren’t in love then I don’t know what queer longing is.
In 1975, an ingénue art student (nicknamed Reno, because guess where she’s from?) with an interest in Land Art moves to New York, where she falls in with a group of rich visual artists and embarks on art projects of her own, including racing (and ultimately crashing) a motorcycle across the Bonneville Salt Flats to trace a line. Reno is kind of an Ur-type of a Cool Art Girl, with her encyclopedic knowledge, physical bravery, and seemingly unconscious ability to attract older, successful artist men who mentor her. Her life in New York is both grubby and glamorous beyond dreams, at least for people her age today. But that doesn’t stop the desires that bring Reno to New York or the loneliness and alienation which she describes after getting there—as well as her desire for incident, for encounter—from being compelling and hyper stylishly-written to boot.
“I thought all children had imaginary friends,” Dr. Ditmus said. Ida, upon being queried a moment earlier, had admitted that she had not had one when young.
“Do you mean all American children?” Ida asked. Her Chinese name was Xiangquan, but when she arrived in America seventeen years before, she had quickly discovered that the name was nearly impossible for English speakers. She had renamed herself, and had not faced the need to explain her decision until she had begun to work for Dr. Ditmus. Did she like the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, Dr. Ditmus had asked, and Ida, who had not heard of the fairy tale featuring an Ida, had replied no. Why Ida, Dr. Ditmus wanted to know, and Ida said she had only wanted a short name. There are other short names, Dr. Ditmus had pondered aloud, such as Jo or May or Ann. Ida had not been able to explain why she was not one of those other women, but she had learned since then that it was Dr. Ditmus’s scientist’s habit to ask questions until Ida admitted that she did not have an answer. These days she never acknowledged it right away; rather, she parried Dr. Ditmus’s questions with her own, and she could see that Dr. Ditmus enjoyed it as much as she did. A dead end arrived at too soon would be boring for them both.
“Not only American children. For instance, I believe Oscar Wilde wrote something featuring an imaginary friend,” Dr. Ditmus said.
Ida nodded. She had never read Wilde.
“So you’ve never had an imaginary friend?”
“No. I didn’t know you were supposed to have one,” Ida said and then added, “I had siblings.”
“Yes, I know, five. Did any of them have imaginary friends?”
“No.” You don’t know that, Ida could hear her own self-admonishing.
“How about your childhood friends? Did any one of them have imaginary friends?”
“No,” Ida said again. Though, how could she know what had been on their minds back then? She had not even known her own mind.
“You sound very certain,” Dr. Ditmus said. “They might’ve had one without telling you.”
“My friends and I shared everything.”
“Everything? Really?”
Ida knew from experience that saying “everything” was a misstep. Generalizations like that would never do for Dr. Ditmus. Ida might as well have said that all men were frogs or all women willow trees. “Did you have an imaginary friend when you were young, Dr. Ditmus?”
“Indeed I did. I had three.”
“Three! I thought you were supposed to have only one. Isn’t that the point?”
“There’s no set law regulating the number of a child’s imaginary friends,” Dr. Ditmus said. She raised her arms to allow Ida to wrap a bath towel around her torso and drape a hooded bathrobe over her. Dr. Ditmus was eighty-eight. Until three years before, she still had maintained her regular slot at the ice rink, between six thirty and seven thirty in the morning, seven days a week. The only concession she had made with the management was that she would not go onto the ice unaccompanied. She did not need a teacher or a coach—she had skated all her life—but she paid for an hour of lesson time every day. Of the three young people who had rotated for the early morning shift, Tony was her favorite. He was attuned to her body’s intentions, and skated along with one hand raised forward and the other hovering over the small of her back, never touching or giving her any uncalled-for assistance, his role that of the sepals to her blossom. The skating, however, had come to an end after she fell on the steps of the biology building on an autumn evening—the rain and the wet leaves and the fallen dusk had joined forces that day. She fractured her right hip, both knees, and her right wrist. It was about time, she could hear people who knew her agree among themselves. The fractured bones healed, but her body, which had functioned reliably until then, began to deteriorate, as though the imperfections, the malfunctions, the illnesses, having bided their time behind a starting gate, were now in full racing mode. She’d had to reduce her hours at her lab, then give it up altogether, and the two people working for her, along with the lab, were taken over by an entomologist forty years younger. It was a natural progression to the next step, a caretaker, and Dr. Ditmus had seen little point in resisting. She had a realistic view of how much she could do for herself, which parts of her life could no longer be kept private. She was lucky not to have lost the clarity of her mind—chances were, her body would fail first. She was lucky, too, to hire Ida, who had been recommended to her by Dr. Fassler’s widow and the daughters of the late Dr. Kinsey. At the tender age of sixty-three, Ida was enviably young to Dr. Ditmus.
Ida helped Dr. Ditmus settle into the high-backed armchair, then slathered lotion on her legs, pressing down firmly at a few pressure points that Dr. Ditmus had begun to know by their names: zu-san-li, fu-tu, yin-ling-quan, yang-ling-quan. In her previous life, Ida had trained as a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, which Dr. Ditmus had thought of as no better than quackery. But one night, when Dr. Ditmus was kept awake by an upset stomach, Ida had wasted no time in finding a few acu-points on her legs, which had produced instant relief. The things one learns even after a lifelong career in science, Dr. Ditmus had marveled.
“Tell me about your three friends,” Ida said.
“Well, there was Cottage Cheese. She had two pigtails, and she was quite plain. And her best friend, Tom Thumb- Thumb, who was in love with her. They lived with me. Then there was this bad boy, Georgie Porgie, who lived in the woods. You see, we had a bit of land around our house. Twenty acres. Georgie Porgie lived in the woods behind the pond. He came over sometimes, always causing havoc. I don’t think Cottage Cheese and Tom Thumb-Thumb liked Georgie Porgie that much. They were a young couple, quite domesticated.”
“Were you in love with Georgie Porgie?”
“Of course. Why else did I have Georgie Porgie when there were already two friends living with me?”
“Did you see him every day?”
“Not every day. He came over when he felt like it. He had a life out there. We didn’t get to know much about it.”
“Was he in love with you?”
“He never said so.”
“But he was?”
“It was understood to be the case. He ignored Cottage Cheese.”
“Did he like Tom Thumb-Thumb?”
“Of course not. That boy was like an appendix to Cottage Cheese.”
“How long did your love affair with Georgie Porgie last?”
“A year, maybe? He disappeared when I started kindergarten. But Cottage Cheese and Tom Thumb-Thumb stayed for a while. They had their plates at my table, and they shared a daybed in my nursery. When we went out, they sat next to each other, and I sat on the far side of the back seat. Daddy had a big car. A Buick.”
Ida was the oldest of six siblings. They had had one brick bed, which could accommodate the six children and their parents only when they all lay in the correct orientation. Poor Edwina—for that was Dr. Ditmus’s given name, even though Ida had never heard anyone use it. She thought of the little girl Edwina, the only child in a giant house surrounded by twenty acres, a little pea rattling in daddy’s big car. All that space, enough for a platoon of imaginary friends: some loneliness comes with a price tag.
“What did Georgie Porgie eat?” Ida asked.
“I never asked him. There were plenty of berries in the woods, I suppose.”
“What about protein?” Ida was helplessly curious when it came to what people ate, but she forgave herself: no one lives on air and dew. She had been eleven when the three- year famine began, and had kept a close watch over her two youngest brothers, for fear that someone would steal them. In a famine anything could happen. A neighbor, an old man who had been the only librarian in the whole county, had once quoted to Ida from a book written around 300 BC, saying that when no food could be found, the youngest children of families were exchanged, to be cooked and eaten by strangers. No parents could bear to do that to their own, the old man had explained.
“Protein? He must get it somewhere.”
“Like where? And what did he eat? Birds’ eggs, birds, frogs, snakes?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t know. That’s the beauty of imaginary friends. You don’t have to worry about their dietary or toilet needs.”
“Maybe he caught cicadas and roasted them for supper.”
“Very amusing,” Dr. Ditmus said. She had dedicated her professional life to the research of insect hormones, especially in cicadas. The house was filled with posters and models of cicadas of every description.
Ida wanted to point out that, from her experience, cicadas, katydids, even crickets would make good sources of protein, but she reminded herself that civilization sometimes called for tamed sensitivity. A few days earlier, Ida’s daughter had told her on the phone that she had read Charlotte’s Web to the twins, and they were both sobbing by the end of the book. Ida had not heard of the story and had asked Dr. Ditmus about it. It’s a famous children’s book, Dr. Ditmus explained, about a pig who escapes being slaughtered with the help of a spider. She then added, perhaps for fear of the wrong connection Ida might make, that a spider was not an insect. I’m not as ignorant as that, Ida had wanted to protest, but let it drop. She thought, with tender incredulity, of her granddaughters weeping. That, she thought, was civilization: tears shed for a fictional spider and a fictional pig, rather than for a child who nearly got slaughtered like a pig.
Late that night, Dr. Ditmus tried to remember how the conversation about the imaginary friends had begun. What a random topic, but her conversations these days tended to be unsystematic, which proved a challenge when she, as habit dictated, went over the day in her head before bedtime. She used to take pride in the clarity of her life, built as DNA and proteins: mappable, readable, predictable, and, of course, variable enough. But these days she couldn’t even call one moment or another moment a random mutation. When things happened without a discernible logic—more often in her head than in the real physical world, which was slowly closing its door to her—there had to be a new system built on the havoc. “Havoc,” hadn’t she used that word earlier today with Ida? Dr. Ditmus couldn’t decide, but if nothing was random in science, then nothing should be in life, either. If she started somewhere—anywhere—she was bound to arrive at another place.
That woodland outlaw, Georgie Porgie—she had not thought of him for ages; indeed had never done so after he exited her life. Where had his name come from? There were no uncles or cousins named George in the family. There was Miss Georgina, whose relationship to the family had never been clear to Edwina, but Miss Georgina had departed before the arrival of Georgie Porgie. Gone where, though—to Heaven, to the graveyard, or to a relative back east?
If Georgie Porgie was not named after Miss Georgina, how had she come up with his name? Tom Thumb-Thumb was not a mystery, unless she wanted to question the repetition—wouldn’t Tom Thumb be good enough? Cottage Cheese was beyond forgivable. Dr. Ditmus could wage a feminist war against her younger self for the poor girl’s bland, shapeless name. Diminishing, truly, and yet she remembered the contempt she had held toward Cottage Cheese, that fussy girl who had a paler complexion than Edwina’s, a voice thinner and whinier, and a habit of commenting on everything Edwina had been thinking about like an adult, though the words were accompanied by a girlish giggle: “I daresay,” or, “Heavens,” or, “If you say so, Edwina.”
Oh, what a disagreeable little girl to have invited into one’s life. What an impossible little boy Tom Thumb-Thumb had been, his chubby legs not strong enough to carry him away from Cottage Cheese, that bossy bore. What an idiot Edwina must have been, to have this pair of friends—whom she didn’t even like—to sit at her table, sleep in her bedroom, and ride in daddy’s big car to town, to the county fair, and even to the doctor’s office when Edwina’s tonsils were taken out. No doubt they had both peered into her wide-open mouth and exchanged words of horror between themselves.
It surprised Dr. Ditmus that the little girl Edwina had never thought of eloping with Georgie Porgie. Not even of going off to the woods to visit him for a few hours. Always sitting around with her two friends who were enraptured with each other—her love affair with Georgie Porgie seemed to be mostly long empty afternoons of waiting for him to appear. Well, perhaps she should feel rather grateful for that. With discipline, nothing was beyond endurable, and it was discipline that had stood her in good stead: she was known for her long and stellar career.
With discipline, nothing was beyond endurable.
A girl running wild with Georgie Porgie would have had an altogether different life. There might have been a marriage or more than one marriage; children, certainly; a house full of objects, not all of them entomological. When that life wound down, she might have ended up in a nursing home. Or perhaps she would still have someone like Ida to come in, taking care of her as someone’s widow, mother, and grandmother, but not as Dr. Ditmus. She would have albums of baby pictures to share with that carer, instead of random tales of three imaginary children. Dr. Ditmus was determined not to feel nostalgic for what she had not lived through. The events in that life were negatives that never got developed. No, they were film never used, fogged by time, long past the expiration date.
One’s way of living determines one’s way of dying. If she was proud of her life lived with discipline, purpose, and principle, there was no reason to allow doubt and regret to creep in. An old body like hers might have impaired immunity to illness and decay, but an old mind like hers should be able to boast precisely the opposite.
Ida settled on the sofa next to her bed and turned on her iPad. “Change your perception of life: treat it as a game,” read the Chinese subject line of the first of her unopened emails. What kind of game: on a chess board, at a bridge table, or a tug-of-war on the spring grass? She wished she could question her husband, the sender of such an inspiring message. Ida could not imagine a game that could engage a person throughout a long life. Anyone following that new practice would have to constantly ask: What game am I playing today? She deleted the email without opening it, and scrolled down to the next. A few photos from her daughter, of the twins making cookies. A brief message from her son, not saying much, but reporting that all was well with him and hoping the same for her. And then there were six more emails from her husband—not a surprise, as he, having returned to China permanently, spent much of his retirement reading through a long list of Chinese websites. Whatever he deemed important, or interesting, or thought- provoking, he would forward to Ida; nearly all were inspirational articles, the Chinese version of Chicken Soup for the Soul, though Ida preferred to think of them as spiritual opium for the disappointed. It was no surprise that such nonsense would proliferate on the internet, but it had taken her some time to accept that her husband was susceptible to it.
Ida’s husband had been a professor in the pathology department in a medical college in China, and in 1989 was a visiting scholar at a university in Illinois. When his visa expired, he had decided to stay, and eventually was able to get Ida and the two children to join him in America. He worked on the night shift at a warehouse; she did caretaking jobs for the very young, the very old, and the very ill. They had raised children who had won scholarships and prospered in America: Lulu with her own dental clinic in Milwaukee, Hao at a finance firm in Chicago. The same old story for many immigrants, so neither Ida nor her husband took undue pride in their accomplishment. A year ago, after doing the math multiple times, he had decided to retire and settle in China. Ida could have stopped him, but decided not to. She liked to imagine him back in his hometown, Professor Tan again to his friends and acquaintances. She promised to join him when one day she was tired of working.
That day would take years to arrive. Ida remembered the teaching from her youth: any job you end up doing, love it with a summerlike passion. The ruthless optimism in that slogan was one of Ida’s few lifelong beliefs. There was something hopeful about making money through toil, though Ida never shared this conviction with anyone. In America, people talked about “work-life balance,” but Ida was lucky that she never felt the need to search for such a balance: for her, life was work.
Before bedtime Ida walked around the house and made sure that the stove and the oven were off, no faucet was dripping, and the windows and doors were all secured. She even went down to the basement, to make sure that there was no water leak or suspicious droppings on the floor—she welcomed any opportunity to keep her body mobile.
The house was dark but for a few insect-shaped night-lights. The night-lights were among the gifts Dr. Ditmus had received over the years that had remained unopened until Ida’s arrival. She had got rid of the calendars, some more than a decade old, with too-vivid photographs of insects that made them look like aliens, though Ida suspected that anything, seen at such magnification, would possess the power to unsettle. Anyone who had peered into a baby’s mouth at an inflamed tonsil could attest to that, and Ida, long before her American life, had had her share of looking at things that could have, but had not, unsettled her. Ida had been trained in traditional Chinese medicine, and between the ages of twenty-four and forty, she had worked in rural Huaiyin, where she had been the only doctor for three villages. They had called her the barefoot doctor at first, but later she had simply become the Doctor. The only specialty she was not capable of performing was major surgery, for which she would dispatch her patients to the county hospital, but she had treated third-degree burns, amputated gangrenous limbs, and performed C-sections. She had saved plenty of lives, young and old, though she suspected that they would have survived in any case, with or without her. She had lost patients, too, for which she could blame only the rural conditions. If an earthquake leveled a town, a bricklayer would not go back to the collapsed buildings to identify which brick he had improperly laid, which wall he could have made stronger.
Dr. Ditmus had let Ida plug in the night-lights anywhere she wanted, though not in the guest bedroom downstairs, which had become Dr. Ditmus’s bedroom. Ida counted the ladybugs and dragonflies and katydids. Whoever had given Dr. Ditmus the night-lights must have not known her at all. Well, at least Ida could enjoy them; her appreciation, unknown to either giver or recipient, allowed her a pleasure akin to that of sniffing a rose or honeysuckle hanging over someone else’s fence.
Unopened presents made Ida feel closer to their givers. The year before, she had paid two dollars at a garage sale for an ice-cream maker in the shape of a soccer ball. “Brand-new, in the original packaging!” the sign had advertised. She had sent it to the twins for their birthday, and her daughter had called later, saying that the ice-cream maker was good enough for the four-year-olds, but there was really no need for the money. What money, Ida wondered; it took her some ingenious questioning to establish that the ice-cream maker, though indeed brand-new, had been opened once, and a hundred-dollar bill in a small unsigned envelope was tucked inside the ball. A two-dollar investment, with a hundred-dollar return. Ida would have relished the gain if not for her imagination that the ice-cream maker had been a present from another grandmother to her grandchildren. Perhaps that woman had wondered why the thank-you note to her had mentioned only the ice-cream maker, not the generosity it enclosed.
Giving presents was like loving people: a gamble, though this would not prevent Ida from doing either. In Ida’s mind, many things in life were gambles, but she sustained herself by two reliable, relatively risk-free activities: by working as much as she can, and by using her brain regularly to keep it sharp. Before she turned in, she recited a poem to herself—it was the last thing she did every night. The poems she had memorized back in her school days now served as the perfect lubricant for that machine in her head. That night she had chosen a poem written in the Han dynasty, which ended with a couplet that had kept Ida on her mental toes all her life: If one does not strive enough when young, / one is bound to feel the sadness in his old age.
“What do you think Georgie Porgie is like these days?” Ida asked Dr. Ditmus at breakfast. They each had a bowl of egg soufflé in front of them, minimally seasoned because Dr. Ditmus had an unimaginative palate. Other than that, Dr. Ditmus was the least demanding customer when it came to food. If Ida did not insist on variety, Dr. Ditmus would eat cereal and yogurt at every meal.
“Why, you’re still thinking about him,” Dr. Ditmus said. “Have you already forgotten him?”
“No, but I’m sure he’s as old as I am. Who knows. He may be dead by now.”
“Do imaginary friends die?”
The question, Dr. Ditmus thought, should rather be: Do imaginary friends live on when their creators discard them for the real world? Cliché-minded people would perhaps see those imaginary friends, poor abandoned children, as insects frozen in amber, but Dr. Ditmus wondered if they should more aptly be compared to extinct caddis flies or dragonflies, which one could only read about in textbooks. Or might those imaginary beings simply have moved on, their origin stories irrelevant in the end? Cottage Cheese, no doubt, would end up with a detailed obituary in the local press, with grandchildren and great-grandchildren too numerous to be named, her contribution to her family and community proudly cataloged. Tom Thumb-Thumb might have grown up to be a pillar of society, or a man in clown’s makeup, riding a unicycle at every fair, known to generations of townies. What might Georgie Porgie have become? Dr. Ditmus’s imagination, unfortunately, turned foggy in his case: the passion she had once felt for him did not give her any vision. All she could say was that she had once patiently waited for the boy, whose appearance could not be willed by her love. If he lived on, other girls and women might have also suffered from his absence. “Let’s stop concerning ourselves with nonexistent beings,” Dr. Ditmus said.
“You know, I remembered one childhood friend who might’ve had her own Cottage Cheese and Tom Thumb-Thumb,” Ida said. “She gave her hands names, and let them play with each other.”
“Interesting. What were the names?”
“Big Sea and Little Thistle. Her right hand was the boy, her left hand was the girl, and she always said they were brother and sister, but between you and me”—Ida lowered her voice; she was not a habitual gossip, but had learned all the manners of a good gossip from her years of caring for people with secrets—“I always thought they were too close to be brother and sister.”
“How close were the two hands?”
Ida intertwined and twisted her fingers, and then placed them on the table like a pair of dancers with coordinated steps. “That close.”
“Your friend, how old was she when she had Big Sea and Little Thistle?”
“Ten, eleven?” Ida wasn’t entirely certain of her age when her two hands, often looking foreign to herself, had had their own lives, which, in retrospect, had felt erotic, too indecent for a child’s mind.
“It could’ve been an incestuous relationship,” Dr. Ditmus said.
“Ho-ho-ho.” Ida was glad that she had fabricated a friend to take responsibility for her own hands, which had been overly affectionate toward each other.
“Where did you get that habit?” Dr. Ditmus asked. She had noticed that Ida would laugh like a department-store Santa when she found a conversation awkward or embarrassing.
“What habit?”
“Making that fake laughing sound.”
“It sounds better than ha-ha or hee-hee, don’t you think?”
“It’s better if you don’t make any of those sounds.”
“Lol,” Ida said. “That’s what my son would say.”
Ida’s nature, too consistently sunny, made Dr. Ditmus suspicious. Things were never as they appeared to be—such was her belief, in science and in life. “Have you always been this happy person?”
Things were never as they appeared to be—such was her belief, in science and in life.
“Happy?” Ida said. “I’ve never said I’m a happy person. But if you mean positive, optimistic, cheerful, yes, I suppose I have all those qualities.”
“Were your parents positive, optimistic, cheerful people?
And your siblings and your children?”
“Are you asking, are those qualities hereditary?” Ida said.
“One supposes they are, to some extent.”
“If you ask me, they are like your imaginary friends. If you decide Georgie Porgie is there, there he is. If I decide I have optimism, there I have it.”
Dr. Ditmus studied Ida, who gazed back with an unreadable candor, then clapped once and began to clear away the breakfast dishes. “Shall we plan to take our walk a little early today? The forecast says rain at eleven o’clock.”
Dr. Ditmus consented, though with some grudge against the weather. She liked to spend a few hours after breakfast reading research papers. The morning window, which allowed her mind a clarity closer to that experienced in her younger years, was narrowing, and unread science journals had been accumulating on her desk. But she did not grumble about this to Ida. It was not anyone’s fault that the weather was not always cooperative.
Dr. Ditmus missed the skating rink, its year-round artificial reliability. She missed being not this old.
A few steps away from the garden gate, Ida supporting Dr. Ditmus with one arm, they saw a youth walking toward them, an instrument case casually thrown over his shoulder, swinging a little with his bouncy steps. He looked like a peasant or a miner striding out of those propaganda posters from her childhood, Ida thought, a shovel or a pickax carried effortlessly, a toothy smile, a healthy complexion the alluring color of a ripe peach. Dr. Ditmus, planting her cane solidly on the sidewalk, studied the face underneath the floppy hair. He smiled as though the trees, the hedges, and the suburban houses were all his audience; what unrestrained and predictable confidence radiated from his entire being, what disappointment the world would be for him one day.
The youth stopped. His greeting, with a lyrical quality, was equally dramatic. Ida thought he must be one of those actors who rehearsed his lines while walking down the street; Dr. Ditmus returned his greeting with a nod.
He introduced himself as Luke, the visiting grandnephew of some neighbors. Dr. Ditmus had not heard of the names of his relatives; Ida missed their names altogether—they rolled off Luke’s tongue too fast. He drew a pad from his pocket. He explained that he was raising money to attend a music camp, and his goal was a thousand dollars. Ida accepted the proffered pad and squinted at it. She could see a few addresses and signatures, with ten or twenty-five dollars pledged.
“How old are you, Luke?” Dr. Ditmus asked.
“Nineteen.”
“How long have you played that?” Dr. Ditmus pointed to the case, which he’d set up right next to himself, a perfect sidekick. “What is it, a cello?”
“Yes, a cello. I’ve played for years.”
For years, Dr. Ditmus thought. A kid this young should not be allowed to use that phrase.
“Would you play something for us?” Ida asked. In Dr. Ditmus’s living room there was a baby grand piano, though she no longer played.
Luke grinned and opened the case. It was empty but for a few pages of loose sheet music. “I didn’t bring the cello. I expected to walk around all day, and I didn’t want to carry it with me.”
“So that people won’t steal your cello?” Ida asked. A few weeks earlier, her daughter had told Ida that the twins’ music teacher, who was a flautist, had left her flute on the New York subway when she was visiting a friend there. A man called the contact information affixed to the case and demanded a ransom for its return. How much, Ida asked, holding her breath for a preposterous sum, and Ida’s daughter said the man had asked for two hundred dollars. The flautist agreed to meet the man, and when he handed her the case, she quickly checked to make sure the flute was inside, and then took off running at top speed. Ida broke out laughing on the phone, full of admiration for the intrepid young woman.
Luke smiled, showing all his teeth like someone in a TV commercial. “No, ma’am. I just thought my cello should be spared trudging around with me all day.”
“And saving your energy by carrying a lighter load,”
Dr. Ditmus said. “How much money have you raised so far?”
“Let’s see . . . twenty, ten, ten, twenty-five, twenty- five . . . about a hundred and twenty now.”
“All from this morning?”
“Oh, no, I was in the Pretty Brook neighborhood yesterday.”
Dr. Ditmus calculated in her head. Luke brought out a stack of notecards from a pocket inside the cello case. “For anyone who donates a hundred dollars or more, I’ll provide a card with my autograph,” he said, handing one over to the two women. Ida took it. His full name, Luke Robson- Stancer, was embossed in gold at the top, surrounded by a few birdlike musical notes, fluttering in different directions. “One day I’ll be famous,” Lukesaid. “And my autograph will be worth some money.”
“Anyone who has made the investment so far?” Dr. Ditmus asked.
“I’ve had a couple backers,” Luke said and added that he had not included their names on the donation sheet, which she was examining closely.
The backers would be his parents, most probably, or his granduncle, Dr. Ditmus thought. “It may take you some time to raise a thousand dollars,” she said. “Why don’t you get a job?”
“A job? I’m a musician. That’s my job.”
“Do you make money with your music?”
“One day I will,” Luke said. “When I’m famous—”
Dr. Ditmus cut him off. “You’re not famous yet. There’re a couple of farms near here, if your granduncle hasn’t told you. They’re always looking for some extra help around this time. If you work there for a week or two, you can easily make enough money for your camp.”
“A farm?”
“Or mow some lawns. Move some furniture. There’re plenty of odd jobs you could do for a week or two. Wouldn’t that be better than walking around . . . begging?”
“He’s a musician,” Ida whispered to Dr. Ditmus. “He needs to take care of his hands.”
Dr. Ditmus shook her head. She could see Ida was taken by Luke, and she was embarrassed on Ida’s behalf.
“You don’t understand, ma’am,” Luke said. “This isn’t begging. I’m an artist. I’m asking people to invest in the future of art.”
His smile, with its mocking indolence, annoyed Dr. Ditmus.
In her younger years she had known that smile, from someone in her chemistry lab, where too many people seemed surprised that she, among the first cohort of girls allowed to go to the Ivy League university, would not major in one of those Romance languages or art history. In her long career, she had known men for whom science served as a stage for their egos, as music did for Luke. “I’m sorry, but we’re only taking a walk. We don’t carry a purse,” she said and indicated to Ida that they should resume their walk.
“I understand,” Luke said. “Where’s your house? I can stop by when you’re back from your walk. Say, in an hour?”
“Sixty-four Myrtle Lane,” Ida replied, pointing to the white cottage with the red door, before Dr. Ditmus could stop her.
The sky was heavy with clouds. The rain would arrive as forecast. Dr. Ditmus sat down in her study. Ida was making tea in the kitchen, and Dr. Ditmus suspected that she was also looking out the window at the front gate. The invitation, issued to Luke without Dr. Ditmus’s permission, nagged her, but she reminded herself that it was a small thing. Ida was a caring person, and allowance must be given that she might err on the side of credulity. Of Ida’s past Dr. Ditmus knew little, but once, Ida had let it slip that the first time she had taken care of a patient with a terminal illness, a Dr. Knight, she had become friends with the old man in his last few months, and Dr. Knight’s daughter, also a Dr. Knight, had not approved. What happened next, Ida had not elaborated. Her employment had been terminated the moment the coroner arrived, she said; she had not been invited to the funeral.
When Ida came in with the tea, Dr. Ditmus said, “That boy may not come. It’s going to rain soon.”
“It was wise of him not to carry his cello with him.”
“I don’t think you should give him money,” Dr. Ditmus said. “However, that’s only my opinion. You don’t have to listen to me.”
Ida knew that Dr. Ditmus disapproved of Luke because he was not toiling on a farm to support his art. But did it not require courage to walk from house to house, asking strangers for money? “If he stops by, I’ll make a donation,” Ida said.
“Don’t buy his autograph.”
“Would it be a bad investment?” Ida asked. She did not know if Luke was a good musician, but what if one day her granddaughters could boast about having the autograph of the cellist who had become the next Yo-Yo Ma? Yes, our grandmother met him long before he was famous, and she knew then that he would be a big deal—Ida imagined the girls telling people the story.
“Are you thinking of become one of his, what did he call them, backers?” Dr. Ditmus asked.
“A hundred dollars,” Ida said, with an ambiguity that could mean either only a hundred dollars or can you believe that, a hundred dollars!
“If you have the money to spare, I would recommend that you give it to me and I’ll donate it to a trustworthy charity on your behalf.”
“A trustworthy charity” was for people like Dr. Ditmus and Ida, who did not treat life as a game. But what if, Ida thought, she was in the mood for a game just for the day? A gamble for a lifelong nongambler—there was no law against that, was there? “You don’t like the boy, Dr. Ditmus.”
“He reminds me of Georgie Porgie.”
“Aha! That’s why you set your heart against him!”
“It was okay to fall for a boy like that when we were young. At this age, we’d better have discretion.”
“I’m not falling for him,” Ida said. “I don’t have a habit of falling for anyone, but don’t you think it’s a pretty thing to support someone who’ll be an artist one day?”
“You don’t know if he’s lying. For all we know, he may be walking around looking for an opportunity to break into a house or two.”
“Luke? No! He’s no burglar!”
“We don’t know. In any case, if you want to support someone, support people who are truly in need.”
Ida shook her head. It was different, but she could not find the right words to explain it to Dr. Ditmus. Years ago, after she had first arrived in America, she and her husband used to go to a nearby lake every weekend to fish. It had not been recreation for either of them; rather, it had been like a weekend job for which they punched in faithfully—the fish they caught was a vital source of protein for their family. You could always tell who was fishing for food: a Mexican family who befriended Ida and her husband, and sometimes when one or the other family was not lucky enough, they would share their catches; a single mother with a young son, who sat most of the times on top of her car, playing games on a handheld device that could occupy him all afternoon; a few quiet men, tension written on their faces. And then there were those who fished because it was their preferred way to spend the weekends; often they came in boats, looking relaxed because they did not have to worry about the protein in their diet. Once a man came over to examine the bucket next to Ida’s foot: white bass, crappies, catfish, carp. Had they heard of catch and release, he asked them, and then explained the beauty of the concept, and the humanity of the practice. Kill only the carp, he told them; the other fish—catch and release!
It was a beautiful concept, Ida thought now, as money could be a hopeful thing, civilization an idea akin to a dream. It was for those things that she and her husband had worked, she loving with resolution every job she’d taken, he finding his life purposeful, though disappointing. They had raised their children so that concept of catch and release, like fresh oysters and organic berries, could find its way into their lives, so that their grandchildren could weep for fictional animals, and had enough space if they wanted imaginary friends to live with them.
Do refrain from commenting further, Dr. Ditmus reminded herself when Ida returned to the kitchen. There, she might be keeping her watch for Luke, and later she might tell Dr. Ditmus that she’d written a check for twenty-five dollars to help the young cellist. Even if Ida gave him a hundred dollars for his autograph, Dr. Ditmus thought, she should not voice any disapproval. It was time for her to return to the unread papers, where species—older than she and Ida, and much older than that boy carrying an empty cello case—presented more than enough mysteries to be understood for her remaining days.
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